Drowned Lives

44

I felt ridiculous having to obtain Caroline Longden’s phone number from Mrs Wentworth, but it was too late to put off doing anything purely because of pride or embarrassment. It was long past the time for prolonging family divisions and propping up the walls that had been built between us. It was time to be putting things right.

I was surprised to recognise the phone number as a local one. For some reason, I’d assumed that Caroline lived away from the area, and that this was the reason she was so seldom seen at Ash Lodge. But now it occurred to me there must be some other reason for her to stay away. No doubt she wanted to get on with her own life, even though that involved Simon Monks.

I managed to get hold of her on the third attempt. As expected, she was cool, and reluctant even to discuss a meeting. But eventually I persuaded her I might have some genuine information about her father’s death and the fire that destroyed Kestrel, and she agreed to meet me. She gave me her address, which turned out to be in Alrewas, an attractive village only a few miles north of the city and very close to Fradley Junction, where our first conversation had taken place.

‘Oh, and Caroline — you will be alone, will you?’

For all I knew, she might be living with Monks. Or she might feel she was safer with him alongside her when we met.

She’d obviously already considered the point. ‘If you really have information, I’ll have to discuss it with Simon. You realise that, don’t you?’

‘Yes, fine. It’s just that—’

‘Yes, I know.’ She sounded faintly amused. I didn’t like the idea of Caroline laughing about me with Monks, but I restrained a sarcastic jibe. ‘All right, I’ll be alone,’ she said.

Caroline lived in the end cottage of an attractive row of late-eighteenth-century properties, with a tiny front garden that was starting to produce spring flowers, crocuses competing with the snowdrops. Inside, the rooms were furnished very simply, almost sparsely, with an eye for the exact position of a bentwood chair or a rag rug.

While Caroline served coffee in a little sitting room with white-washed walls and a cast iron fireplace, I noticed a music stand and a cello case in one corner, and remembered that this was the girl who’d been so musically talented.

Caroline was smartly but casually dressed in a cashmere sweater and jeans, with her hair tied back in a yellow ribbon. Her manner seemed to say she wasn’t going to make too much effort for me, and that coffee was all I would get. There weren’t even any chocolate biscuits.

She sat in silence while I told her about the Parkers, though her eyebrows rose when I described a two-hundred-year-old feud as being at the heart of our problems. She sat sipping her coffee with one foot tucked underneath her, until I told her about Frank and repeated his story. Then she put her cup down and her coffee grew cold.

‘You’ve met this Leo Parker then?’ she asked at last, the first question she’d put since I arrived.

I told her about his visit to Stowe Pool Lane.

‘He was concerned about his family’s reputation,’ said Caroline cautiously. ‘His father and stepmother. And his stepmother was—?’

‘Mary. My grandmother. George’s first wife.’

‘I see. The old story. It was all before my time.’

‘But you must know what happened between George and Mary?’

‘No. Mum told me some things, but not about George and Mary. She was more interested in an affair that Dad had when he was younger.’

‘Really?’

‘It was some sort of romantic liaison that their families didn’t approve of. I don’t know the details, but apparently they ran off together. To Ireland, I think. They lived together for a few years, but they never married. I think Dad must have been very much in love with this woman — it was a tragedy in his life that he never got over. So Mum told me. It seemed to add to his attraction, as far as she was concerned. But Dad never talked about it. Not to me, anyway.’

‘So both brothers had heartbreak and betrayal in their lives. Mary left my grandfather and married Matthew Parker, her second cousin. She was already a Parker herself.’

‘And all this is evidence of your great feud, is it?’

‘I know it sounds incredible. But there are far too many Parkers involved with too many things that happened to the Buckleys. It’s no coincidence.’

‘If you say so, Chris.’

‘But tell me about Mary. What happened to her? When did she die?’

‘Chris, I don’t know. Dad never mentioned her.’

‘My God, this family,’ I said irritably. ‘There seems to have been an awful lot of things that were never mentioned.’

‘Perhaps there were a lot of things you never asked.’

‘Should I have to?’

I stood up and paced across the room, picking up a pile of musical scores, shuffling them, dropping them on the stand again. After discovering that I’d been kept in the dark for so long by my own parents, I thought that Great-Uncle Samuel had come along to throw a great shaft of light into the dusty corners of my family’s recent history. It was never what I wanted, but I hadn’t been given any choice, and I’d come to accept it. But now I was finding many things that even Samuel hadn’t told anyone.

‘I suppose you’ll have to ask Leo Parker,’ said Caroline doubtfully. ‘I don’t suppose she could still be alive?’

‘Surely not.’

‘Well, she’d be about the same age as Dad. And he could have lived a few years longer.’

I looked at her, and mentally kicked myself for my insensitivity. It had never occurred to me to think how she’d feel about me digging up the family history. I’d trampled over Caroline’s life enough. I didn’t want to make her resent me any more than she already did.

‘I could just leave it alone,’ I said.

‘Oh, you’ve got to know the facts now, haven’t you, Chris? You’re not going to be able to leave it at half a story.’

‘Is that what you feel too?’

‘I suppose it’s inevitable.’

She moved almost absently towards the corner of the room and sat down with her cello. She fingered the bow and stroked the curves of the instrument’s wooden sides. I wondered if I was interrupting her practice night, or whether contact with the cello helped her think.

‘Caroline, I don’t know how to explain this — but it’s been eating away at me that I never got the chance to apologise to your father. I know I let him down. This is the only way I can try to make it up to him.’

‘Yes, Dad would have been very disappointed in you, but not surprised,’ she said. ‘He came to you as a last resort, because he was terrified that you would reject him, that the past would have as huge a significance in your mind as it had in his. He would never have imagined that you could let him down so casually, because you couldn’t be bothered.’

I hung my head. ‘There’s nothing I can say to that.’

‘Dad was quite different, you know. All the time I knew him, he would never let anybody down. He carried enough guilt from what happened fifty years ago. It tortured him all his life and preyed on his mind every day. He could never have born it if he felt he’d let anyone down again. That’s what it is to have a conscience, Chris.’

‘Tell me about it,’ I said, with a spasm of irritation. I was willing to eat humble pie up to a point, but Caroline was piling it on too thick. ‘But it isn’t quite true to say Samuel would never let me down. He was the anonymous backer who invested in our dot-com start-up, wasn’t he?’

‘Who told you that?’

‘Nobody.’

‘It can only have been Mr Elsworth,’ she said grimly. ‘It’s totally unprofessional of him.’

‘I worked it out for myself, Caroline. It wasn’t all that difficult. Samuel put money in to help our business establish itself in the early stages. I suppose he must have seen my name in some of the promotion.’

‘He’d always kept an eye on you. He wanted to support you in some way, and that was his opportunity. Dad felt responsible for you.’

‘For me?’

‘For everyone,’ she said. ‘For everything. As far as you were concerned, he wanted to pull you out of the shadow of your father.’

‘I didn’t need Samuel to do that.’

‘Didn’t you, Chris? But you haven’t always been like this, so they tell me.’

‘Like what?’

‘So serious, so morose. You used to have friends, you were fun to be with. Isn’t that right? I find it hard to believe that now. Dad said you’d become a loner, though you don’t seem to like your own company. You certainly drink too much — I’ve seen that for myself. You’ve lost control of your life. And it all happened when your parents died. That’s what Dad told me.’

I scowled at her. I didn’t like being told such things. They were much too close to the truth. But just because you recognised that you’d sunk into a dark time in your life, it didn’t mean you could see the way to pull yourself out of it.

Suddenly, I saw more clearly the efforts people had been making on my behalf. Dan Hyde trying to enthuse me with an exciting new project, Andrew Hadfield encouraging me to join in with the canal volunteers, the HR manager who’d thought I might need help to cope with my redundancy. And, of course, Rachel persuading me to go to Gilbert and Sullivan performances, singing their songs all the way back in the car until I couldn’t get a jaunty tune out of my head. They’d all seen more in me than I had myself. People around me had never given up hope of getting the old Chris Buckley back. And Samuel had tried to do the same, in his own way.

I’d lowered my eyes in that moment of reflection, but then I looked up again.

‘But the book,’ I said. ‘Why did he want to pass the project on? He tried Frank first, then me. Did Samuel know he was in danger? Did he expect someone to try to kill him?’

Caroline shook her head. ‘No, it wasn’t that. He didn’t expect to last much longer, true. But he wasn’t afraid of a violent death. Dad was already dying. He was in the late stages of terminal prostate cancer, which had already spread into his bones and lymph nodes. Didn’t you notice how ill he looked?’

‘Of course.’

‘Yes, even you couldn’t have failed to see that. So the fact is, Samuel didn’t have long left to live. He knew that very well. And you were his last hope, Chris.’