Drowned Lives

47

The story began with Mary Parker. She’d been trained as a teacher, said Leo. Though she taught for a while at the girls’ grammar school, Lichfield Friary, she’d never really intended to make a career in education, being more interested in finding a well-off husband and living in comfort for the rest of her life.

Leo showed me a photograph of her that he’d brought from the study. She was posing with a class of teenage girls who were dressed in dark tunics and white blouses with wide collars. Mary was tall and elegant, with a narrow waist and thick waves of dark, burnished hair that fell round her ears. And there was that direct gaze I recalled so well, eyes that seemed to burn through the lens of the camera.

Mary had married my grandfather, George Buckley, in 1938. George had been a brilliant young corporate accountant and had just been made a partner in a Birmingham firm when Mary was introduced to him in Beacon Park after the annual Bower Queen parade. George had been smitten from the start, and proposed within a few months.

Mary must have been banking on a husband with a guaranteed high-flying career. Accountancy was a safe profession, and corporate accounting was where all the money was. This illusion survived for about twelve months, during which time Mary give birth to Arthur, my father. He was born in July 1939.

‘Less than two months before the start of the Second World War,’ said Leo.

We walked across a terrace and past some kind of annexe attached to the back of the house until we reached a concrete yard.

At the stables, Leo Parker paused in his story. A teenage girl in jodhpurs and a hacking jacket was leading an elegant hunter into a railed-off paddock on a long rein. She glanced only once at Parker, who nodded, then ignored her.

‘I know that Great-Uncle Samuel joined up,’ I said. ‘I suppose my grandfather did as well.’

‘Yes, but they went their separate ways. George was three years older, you know, and for a long time Samuel hero-worshipped him. But the two boys were very different. George had gone for a safe career, but Samuel was more adventurous. When they joined up, it was almost like a competition. They’d both been in the cadet corps at school, and they went straight into commissions. I’m explaining to you what my stepmother told me, of course.’

‘I understand.’

He told me that my grandfather had been recruited into the Pay Corps, which seemed a natural route for one of his talents and training, and would have meant a safe billet away from the Front. But Samuel had scorned such easy options and had surprised everybody by joining the Royal Navy. After a period of training in Devon, he’d become a junior officer on a minesweeper operating in the killing grounds of the North Atlantic supply routes. A few months later, my grandfather had obtained a new posting for himself. He’d transferred to the South Staffordshire Regiment, which was then serving in North Africa, resisting the Italian invasion of Egypt. By the summer of 1940, both the Buckley brothers were in the thick of the action.

For a while, life was as exciting at home as on the Front. German raids on Birmingham continued through to the spring of 1941, and reports came back of the mixed British fortunes in North Africa and the danger of German U-boats in the Atlantic. But by 1943, encumbered with a four-year-old son and frustrated by worsening shortages, Mary was getting bored.

It was difficult to imagine, at such a distance, that women could be envious of the excitement their menfolk were experiencing as they fought in the war. But for Mary, when Samuel was invalided home with shrapnel injuries to his leg, it was the best thing that had happened for four long years. Samuel was a lieutenant commander by then — he was never an actual captain, though he’d gained his own command. In his naval uniform, with his battle wound, he was a stirring and romantic figure on whom Mary’s attentions centred.

Whether there had been any attraction between them previously, Leo didn’t know. But the fact was that by 1945 Mary and Samuel had begun a passionate affair which was the scandal of the neighbourhood. To escape the gossip, they sailed to Ireland, where they stayed for twelve months.

So when George returned home at the end of the war, it was to find his house empty. The son he hadn’t seen for over three years wasn’t there to meet him. George’s wife had left him for his own younger brother.

‘“She left him in the cruellest way possible”,’ I said. ‘“But there was a worse betrayal than that... Much, much worse.”’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘It was something Samuel said to me when we first met. I didn’t understand what he meant at the time.’

He was watching the horse keenly as it trotted round the rail with the stable girl. To my eye, the animal seemed to move with a power and grace no human was capable of. Its sides began to gleam as it ran, and each time it passed close to me I could smell its sweat. I wondered if Leo Parker was considering buying it.

‘My stepmother might have betrayed George,’ he said. ‘But so did his brother. It’s not for me to say which was the worst.’

‘Samuel wasn’t in any doubt which was the worst. I think he was consumed by his own guilt.’

‘That could have been because of what happened later,’ said Leo.

He told me that George had come back from the war a major, having distinguished himself with the South Staffs in the Sicily landings, and later in Burma fighting the Japanese. But he’d also come back with a debilitating nervous condition caused by experiences in the Far East that he’d always refused to talk about. The double blow dealt to him by the treachery of his wife and brother had left him a broken man, and he put up no resistance to divorce proceedings.

My grandfather’s old firm had taken him back on in his pre-war job, out of loyalty to a returning hero. But George was no longer the capable young accountant who’d gone off to the war. His promise had died in the Burmese jungles. He was incapable of concentrating on any task, but refused to admit his deficiencies. For a while he’d succeeded in covering up his errors, until eventually he was found illegally transferring funds from a client’s account and falsifying the records. The firm had been regretfully obliged to dispense with his services, though it refrained from a criminal prosecution because of his exemplary war record.

Meanwhile, Mary and Samuel returned from Ireland, along with Mary’s son, my father. Their affair was over almost as soon as it had begun, but not out of choice as far as Samuel was concerned. Mary had decided to move on, renewing a liaison with her second cousin, Matthew Parker, who ran an engineering company with three big factories in Birmingham and the Black Country. Within six months, they were married. And Samuel no longer felt worthy to be a Buckley — he’d gone to his solicitors, Elsworth and Clarke, and obtained a notarised certificate taking the surname Longden.

Because there was one last thing, a final straw that had led my Great-Uncle Samuel to change his name. In February 1948, his brother George had blown his brains out with his old service revolver.

Leo Parker left me for several moments to digest the information while he spoke to the stable girl. I didn’t doubt for a moment the accuracy of what he’d told me. It filled in a huge blank so precisely that it had to be true. It was what my parents had concealed from me for so long. This was why I’d never known of the existence of my disgraced Great-Uncle Samuel.

The horse was led back towards the stable, snorting and steaming.

‘He looks fit enough now,’ said Leo complacently.

‘My father...?’ I said, not sure what question I wanted to ask of the many that crowded into my mind.

‘Oh yes, your father. My stepmother kept Arthur with her throughout, both when she was living with Samuel in Ireland, and later when she married my father. Who can say how much he understood of what was going on? He would have been ten years old when Matthew and Mary married, so he must have known some of it. I understand that sort of upheaval and uncertainty can affect a child quite deeply in later life.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m sorry that I didn’t have more contact with him later on,’ said Leo. Then he shrugged. ‘But you know how it is. You drift apart. Inevitably, in our case. He was six years older than me, and he never wanted a little brother.’

In Leo Parker’s paddock, it was raining again. Leo was beginning to look at his watch and stir restlessly.

‘Chris, I know all this must be a shock. But unless there is anything else you want to ask—’

There were, of course, a million questions. The one that popped to the forefront of my mind was one that had been niggling me ever since Leo Parker had first raised the subject.

‘A week ago you told me you thought Samuel blamed your family for the death of his son in that car crash.’

‘That was one of his fantasies, yes.’

‘But do you realise how old Alison was by then?’

‘Oh, over fifty, I suppose.’ He smiled without humour. ‘I did say it was a fantasy. Perhaps you knew Samuel for too short a time to realise how he’d lost touch with reality. He was obsessed with having a son. It consumed him to the end, I think.’

The stable girl came past, struggling with a wheelbarrow heaped with soiled straw. Leo snapped the strap of his watch and slid it back and forth on his wrist, a sign that the conversation was over. He turned and walked towards the house, and I was forced to follow. In his waxed jacket, his back looked solid and self-assured. But as we re-entered his study, I felt obliged to make one last, feeble attempt to puncture his complacency.

‘I suppose you’re proud of what Mary Parker did to the Buckley brothers,’ I said, when we got back into his study.

‘I don’t have to justify what she did. I think I’m safe in saying that family has always meant more to me than it seems to have meant to you. And that is my justification.’

A framed photograph stood on his desk, and he turned it towards me. It showed Leo Parker himself with a handsome, fair-haired woman and two fair children, laughing at the camera in front of a mellow brick wall planted with espalier pears. Leo’s arms were held protectively around the shoulders of a boy of about eleven, while a girl a few years older stood arm in arm with her mother. The perfect happy family.

My eye was caught by a second photograph. It showed a woman whose face I’d seen before, a face I couldn’t help but remember. She’d been with Leo Parker and Lindley Simpson at the link road protest meeting in Boley Park.

Leo noticed the direction of my gaze. ‘My sister Eleanor,’ he said.

‘It must be nice to have a close family.’

I could hardly believe I’d uttered those words. The thought would never have occurred to me a few days ago. But this glimpse of Leo Parker’s life had stirred some unaccountable worm of envy.

He gazed at me for what seemed like an eternity, glanced once more at his watch, then stood up.

I thought he was getting rid of me, but instead he said: ‘Come and meet one more relative.’

‘What?’

‘Follow me.’

So I followed Leo Parker as he led me towards the annexe at the back of his property. As we entered, I noticed the handrails on the walls, the ramps instead of steps. Which relative of his was I about to meet?

Parker knocked on a door. ‘It’s Leo,’ he called.

He didn’t wait for an answer, but walked into a sitting room that struck a jarringly old-fashioned note out of keeping with the rest of the house. My eyes took a moment to adjust to the gloom. The curtains were drawn, as if the occupant couldn’t cope with too much daylight.

‘Here she is,’ said Leo.

Then he raised his voice. ‘Christopher Buckley has come to see you.’

I saw an old lady sitting upright in an armchair. She turned her head slowly towards me. A second later, I was transfixed by her unnervingly piercing stare. But there was no recognition in her eyes, only a blankness that suggested a total lack of comprehension.

Leo Parker ushered me forward with a hand on my shoulder.

‘This is Mary,’ he said. ‘This is your grandmother.’