Drowned Lives

48

The old woman looked from me to Leo Parker when he spoke. But I could still see no spark of recognition in her eyes. She had no idea who either of us was.

I tried to speak, but my mouth was dry. Why hadn’t it occurred to me that Mary might still be alive? It had been Rachel who pointed out that she’d be about the same age as Samuel. And here she was, alive and, well... not exactly kicking.

I could sense Leo’s eyes on me, watching for my reaction. I cursed him silently for putting me in this situation without any warning. But then I realised it was entirely my own fault. I recalled his first visit to my house. It was his stepmother he’d been most concerned about, not his father. He didn’t want to cause any further distress, he said. And he’d dismissed my remark that it was all in the past and couldn’t mean anything to us now. That’s where you’re wrong, I’m afraid. I could hear Leo speaking to me in that tone, as if I was stupid. And it was true — I had been very stupid.

Mary hadn’t spoken at all, and I realised she wasn’t going to. Despite the superficial directness of her stare, I could see there was no expression behind it, no emotion or thought. No understanding. I’d found the woman at the centre of the Buckleys’ story, yet she wasn’t really here at all. Those piercing eyes were gazing beyond us to something that had happened long, long ago.

‘She has good days and bad days,’ said Leo.

‘And this is a bad day, I gather.’

He shook his head. ‘Not the worst. At least she’s calm.’

‘Does she understand what we’re saying?’

‘Who can tell? She doesn’t let on if she does. The only way she ever communicates is through screaming and lashing out. It’s frustration, of course. So there’s probably some level of understanding, but she’s unable to express it.’

I was feeling very uncomfortable standing in this room that was so obviously hers. I knew I’d intruded into her world without permission. She met my eyes as I studied her face, looking for a family resemblance. Did she have my father’s mouth, the fleshy pout that I’d known so well? But no. Despite everything, I could see that she’d been a handsome woman. She still bore herself with a poise and dignity belied by her vacant gaze.

‘Hello, grandmother,’ I said slowly, as if the words were every bit as unfamiliar to me as the person herself.

I waited in vain for a response. I was craving the smallest acknowledgement from this old woman more than anything else I’d ever wanted in my life. But it didn’t come.

What was going on inside her head? Did Mary sometimes remember the three men in her life — her first husband George Buckley, who she’d betrayed while he was away fighting in the war, or his brother Samuel who tempted her into a fling, that impulsive flight to Ireland with the young Arthur in tow? Or was her real love her second husband, Matthew Parker? Had her dalliance with the Buckley brothers been a mistake, the impulsive actions of a passionate young woman?

Or was there something more to Mary Parker? Perhaps a deliberate cruelty that was unfathomable to me, but which might be the source of the old woman’s anguish on her really bad days. Mistakes could come back to haunt your conscience in the most painful ways, especially when it was far too late to put things right. Samuel had told me her actions were unforgivable.

Perhaps my grandmother had never forgiven herself. Yet I couldn’t ask her.

I wondered why Samuel hadn’t mentioned she was still alive. Didn’t he know himself? Or had it been one of his deceptions, a vital piece of information that he’d decided to keep to himself, a tidbit he hoped I would discover for myself. I felt as though I was following a path he’d ordained for me. Visiting Leo Parker today hadn’t been my choice, or fate, or coincidence, but something Samuel Longden had anticipated. For a man obsessed with the past, he’d seen the future very clearly.

Leo touched my arm. ‘We’d better leave her now, Chris. She gets tired very easily.’

‘Who looks after her?’

‘She has a nurse who comes in every day, and full-time carers. She’s very well looked after.’

I let him lead me out of the room and back into the open. It was only when I breathed in the fresh air that I realised the room had been thick with some kind of scent, an old-fashioned aroma redolent of lilac and jasmine. Stepping through that door had been like physically passing from the present into the past. The sense of relief at being back in my own time was overwhelming.

‘You can come and see Mary again, if you want to,’ said Leo. ‘But let me know. As I said, there are bad days.’

A few minutes later I was driving home up the A5 and through Lichfield in a daze, trying to digest the story that Parker had told me. The rain had become heavier, veiling the roads and traffic in a stream of water that ran across the Escort’s windscreen. And there was another, more painful, blurring in front of my eyes that the windscreen wipers could never touch.

Perhaps I was right about the diseased Buckley family tree, after all. It certainly looked unlucky. An ancestor disgraced and possibly murdered, another drowned in suspicious circumstances. A son ruined, two brothers forced permanently apart by betrayal and jealousy. One driven to suicide, the other to a renunciation of his Buckley blood. My father, emotionally scarred by his childhood upheavals. And myself, an ineffectual end product of one of those embittered branches.

My Great-Uncle Samuel, it seemed, had been unhinged by his fixation with the past. The man they called the Captain had been all at sea by the end of his life. His brain had silted up and his keel was holed. From the grave he was doing his best to send me the same way, to undermine the mental certainties of the very last of the Buckleys.

I could understand the guilt that Samuel had been devoured by when my grandfather had killed himself. The bigger the breach with someone, the harder it is to cope when they die. And Samuel had been partly responsible for driving his brother to his death, it couldn’t be denied. George’s experiences in the war may have begun the rot, but the great betrayal by the two people he’d trusted most in the world must have kicked the skids out from under a damaged psyche, pushed his reason beyond the limits where normal life became impossible.

Who knew what he had been thinking when he took the money from his clients’ accounts to cover his accounting errors? Had he seriously believed he’d never be caught? Or had he just not cared? Did he, in fact, hope that he’d be found out, bringing an end to a situation that he was powerless to control? With clinical depression, the mind loses all sense of proportion, and small problems can seem immense beyond all coping. George had reached a stage where nothing gave him enough reason to carry on living in the face of betrayal, despair and ruin.

And then there was Mary, the woman right at the heart of everything.

I phoned Laura to reassure myself that she was coming to Lichfield the next day, and to report on my meeting with Leo Parker.

‘And she’s actually still alive?’ she said, her voice rising to an incredulous pitch, the way mine must have sounded when I stood in that room at Leo Parker’s house. ‘It must have been a shock after all these years.’

‘You can say that again.’

‘And so the story is that Mary left your grandfather for his brother while he was away fighting in the war?’

‘So it seems,’ I said. ‘While he was lying injured in a field hospital in Burma, she got bored and decided to find somebody else. That was a fine hero’s welcome for him when he came home, wasn’t it? To find his faithless wife had left him, taking his six-year-old son with her — a son he hadn’t seen for three years, who he must have dreamed about night after night while he was fighting his way towards Singapore. It wasn’t the war that killed my grandfather, it was Mary Parker. The Germans and Japanese damaged him, but Mary destroyed him. That was why he killed himself.’

If I was expecting sympathy from Laura, I didn’t get it. Perhaps it was the distancing effect of the phone that made her sound detached. I felt sure it would have been better if I could have been there with her, to get comfort from her presence.

‘But what about Samuel?’ she asked.

‘Samuel became rich, but he was an old man riddled with guilt, who wanted to atone for it before he died. Now he’s atoning to the tune of fifty thousand pounds. He thinks he can carry out his penance through me,’ I said. ‘This is blood money.’

‘Yes, I suppose that’s true.’

‘And now he’s made me feel the guilt.’

‘Why, Chris?’

I stared out of the window at the houses in Stowe Pool Lane.

‘Because my pride makes me want to turn it down. But I can’t afford to. The fact is — I need his blood money.’

And later I had to explain the same thing over again to Rachel.

‘What’s the matter?’ she asked as soon as she set eyes on me. ‘What happened?’

She stared at me as I pulled off my coat and shoes, and collapsed into a chair.

‘I’ve just met Mary,’ I said.

‘Mary...?’

‘Yes, that Mary,’ I said. ‘You were right, she’s still alive. Well, physically at least.’

‘Do you mean she has dementia?’ she said, when I described her.

I realised I hadn’t asked Leo Parker what Mary was suffering from.

‘Yes, I think so. She doesn’t seem to be able to communicate or recognise anyone. She’s living in Hints with her stepson, Leo Parker.’

‘That’s why he was worried about protecting her reputation, then. Not just an interest in the past, but a concern for the living.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘You don’t sound convinced, Chris.’

‘I don’t know. There’s still something not quite right.’

When Rachel heard the story Leo Parker had told me, she was appalled at the thought of the misery that had been caused, and all the grief that had been stored up for future generations.

‘It’s amazing the things that people will do to themselves,’ she said thoughtfully.

It was an aspect that hadn’t occurred to me. ‘Yes, you’re right. Samuel brought everything on himself.’

Rachel looked at me for a moment. ‘That wasn’t quite what I meant.’

But I was following my own train of thought. ‘Samuel’s problem was that he caused trouble for everyone around him as well.’

‘Yes, Samuel,’ she said. ‘It’s an odd thing, this business about him thinking he had a son who was killed in that car crash. An unborn son.’

‘Oh that. I can’t believe that Samuel ever said it.’

‘You think Leo Parker was lying? But you believed everything else he told you, Chris.’

‘Yes. He’s a clever man, of course. I think he slipped a big lie in among a series of appalling truths, in the hope that I’d accept it without question.’

‘But why?’

‘Don’t you see? He wanted me to be convinced that Samuel had become mentally unbalanced since the crash. Let’s face it, there is plenty of evidence pointing that way if you choose to see it in that light. Leo wanted to be sure that I did see it. No doubt he’d like everybody to see it that way.’

‘Ah,’ said Rachel. ‘So that the will could be challenged.’

‘Exactly. On the grounds that Samuel was no longer of sound mind when he made it.’

‘Caroline Longden seems to have been trying hard to give you that impression too. And she’s the one who stands to gain, isn’t she? Not Leo.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s what I’d call a very interesting alliance.’

Back at my desk, I remembered the package Mrs Wentworth had brought. What could Godfrey Wheeldon have been sending to Samuel? Could it be more letters? But if so, why hadn’t he mentioned them?

I ripped open the package and unwrapped the newspaper inside. At first, I almost laughed at what I found. But then I felt more like crying. It was a set of cigarette cards depicting famous cricketers from the 1920s, the ones that Godfrey had told us Samuel was interested in. The cards were a gift from one old man to another. And both of them were dead before the gift had been received.

I looked at the cards for a while before I put them away. Then I decided to go through my photos again. The shots of the visit to the Fosseway site by Lindley Simpson and Leo Parker were now added to the earlier ones. Leo could be seen talking to the MP, to the chairman of the restoration trust, to Andrew Hadfield and some of the other members. He was recognisable mostly by the set of his shoulders, as he seemed to have managed to keep his back to the camera throughout. But Frank must have seen him clearly from the banking above the wharf to recognise him as the man who’d been asking questions at the bowls club.

I had got a blow-up done of one of the earlier pictures of Fosseway. It was the one that showed Samuel looking towards me across the restored lock, but in the enlargement only Samuel’s face and the shoulders of his black coat were visible. I stared at my great-uncle’s photograph in bafflement, the questions colliding with each other as they rushed into my mind. Captured by the lens, Samuel’s weary face was gaunt with sorrow and guilt, and etched with a bitterness that had lasted, undimmed, for over fifty years. As I looked at him, I tried to picture him as a handsome young man, who’d been so tempted by desire for his own brother’s wife that he’d committed a desperate act.

I stuck the picture on the corkboard over my desk, along with the square black and white print of George and Samuel as boys.

There was also another good photograph of Samuel at Fosseway, but more in the distance. He was pictured across the lock, on the far side of a black gulf. There was a pleading expression in his eyes, as if he were still appealing to me from the grave.

Then I noticed an even earlier shot from that same day. The yellow dumper truck was in the foreground, backing up to the spoil tip near the tailgates. I’d taken the picture because of the contrast between the yellow of the dumper and the black of the damp earth, as well as the sense of movement and the serious expressions on the faces of the workers. But in the background of the photograph was Samuel.

I hadn’t noticed him when I was taking the picture, because I’d been focusing on the activity around the lock. But there he was, and he’d evidently just arrived at the site, because he was standing with his back to the open door of a car, leaning slightly forward as if caught in the very act of getting out. The car was a light green saloon, but I couldn’t tell the make. Surely Samuel hadn’t arrived in a car — he didn’t even have one. But then I realised it was the passenger door he was getting out of. Someone had brought him to Fosseway that morning.

I went into the sitting room and rummaged through the drawers of the sideboard. Somewhere among the old postcards and spare fuses and bits of string I knew there was a magnifying glass. I couldn’t remember it ever having been used for anything, but it was one of those bits of clutter that my parents had refused to throw away. After a few minutes of tossing things aside, I finally found it and took it to the front room.

The magnifying glass was enough to increase the clarity of the bit of the car that I could see past Samuel. I could make out the grille, and a distinctive badge. Then I knew the car was a Mercedes. A lime-green Mercedes. I’d ridden in that car myself, after Samuel’s funeral. It was Laura Jenner’s car.

I dropped the photo, engulfed by a cold, sick feeling of apprehension. So Laura had been the one who brought Samuel to the Fosseway site that morning, when he’d first sought me out. Samuel had never mentioned it. More to the point, Laura had never mentioned it either. She’d deceived me all along about knowing Samuel. What else had she lied to me about?

My heart felt like a stone as I contemplated the awful truth. Laura had known about the entire thing. She’d led me on to feed her with information, to keep her up to date with everything I found out. And she’d been clever enough to let me think it was all my own idea.

Another thought struck me. Caroline hadn’t been the only one who knew where to find Godfrey Wheeldon. I’d actually taken Laura with me when I went to see him. Had my desire to spend a day with Laura been a mistake that proved fatal for that lonely old man?

So who was Laura Jenner? That was the big question. But I already knew the answer with devastating clarity. She could only be a Parker.