Drowned Lives

55

A few days later I was in London to see the editor of a new magazine covering ‘green’ issues, trying to persuade him that my services would be valuable to him. It seemed as though I’d convinced him with my presentation, and I came away with a small clutch of commissions that would mean a few hundred pounds in my pocket. With the book selling well back home, things were starting to look up for my future career as a freelance writer and journalist.

I’d set off from Trent Valley Station that morning on the 7:59, the direct service via Tamworth Low Level and Nuneaton, taking an hour and forty-five minutes to Euston. I’d been intending to catch the 17:25 to get back to Lichfield, but there was another train later, and I had nothing to rush back for.

I don’t know what made me think about it just then. Maybe it was the idea of having something to celebrate at last that put anniversaries and birthdays in my mind. But it had been niggling at me for some time that I didn’t know Great-Uncle Samuel’s exact date of birth. Among all the mass of information we’d collected, it was one detail that seemed to be missing.

Of course, I’d entrusted the research into the registers to the woman I knew as Laura Jenner. But if she ever took the trouble to find out, the information had gone with her when she disappeared after visiting me at the hospital. Caroline Longden had been refusing to speak to me for some time. And only the years, not the dates, had been on Samuel’s headstone at Whittington.

But now I found I had time on my hands before catching the evening train back to Birmingham. So I took the tube across London to Islington, emerging at Angel, and asked the way to Myddelton Street, which turned out to be near Sadler’s Wells Theatre. The General Register Office was in a large building called the Family Records Centre. Since it was a Thursday, the centre was open until seven o’clock. More than enough time for what I wanted.

I found there were four huge red-bound volumes for births registered in 1916, which divided the year into four quarters. There was nothing for it but to start with the January to March volume and work my way through.

I tried to recall the events of that year. April had seen the Easter Rising in Dublin, Lloyd George became Prime Minister, and sixty thousand men had been killed on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. But that was about all I could bring to mind. They seemed to have so little personal significance compared to the birth of Samuel Buckley, the man who’d wreaked such havoc in my life.

I settled myself down and began to go through the names in the first volume. Would Samuel have been a winter baby or a summer one? There was no way of knowing, but at least I was looking for a fairly unusual name in Buckley. It wasn’t as if I was searching for one of the ubiquitous Parkers.

I passed from March to the June volume, and then to September. All too soon I’d reached December and the end of the four volumes for 1916. I frowned, sure that I couldn’t have missed the name Buckley. But I decided that my concentration must have wandered at the wrong moment, so I turned back and went through them again more slowly, making sure I read every name. There was no Samuel Buckley entered.

An assistant saw that I was getting frustrated and came over to help me. She suggested trying the years either side of 1916, as a mistake could easily be made. She asked me whether Samuel had been specific about his year of birth. And even if he had, she said, old people could sometimes get a little confused about their own age.

It sounded reasonable to me. A little reassured, I took the new volumes she gave me and went carefully through 1915. That was the year Alfred Buckley had joined the Army Ordnance Corps, the year the Lusitania was sunk by a German U-boat and tanks were invented. Then I went through 1917. The Russian Revolution.

Increasingly anxious, I tried 1914 and 1918. Nothing. After a couple of hours, I’d reached as far back as 1913, when George was born, and as far forward as 1919, when I found the birth of Mary Parker. Those five years in between were a yawning gap, with no Buckleys registered.

By now, the assistant had taken pity on me. Or maybe she was worried that I’d still be there at closing time, turning the pages madly with a desperate stare, like a man haunted by some obsession. She diplomatically suggested trying a year or two earlier still, before Alfred and Eliza had married. She refrained from pointing out that my Great-Uncle Samuel might have been a bastard.

But that was impossible. Samuel had been the younger son, and I’d already identified George’s birth, registered in 1913, two years after the wedding. I tried again. My notebook and pencil lay unused on the table, and my eyes were tired and beginning to water from the effort of staring at the lists of names for so long.

‘We’ll be closing quite soon,’ said the assistant, probably wondering whether she’d made a mistake in encouraging me to stay.

‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I’m nearly finished.’

I started again from the beginning, going through the lists a third time, refusing to believe what my eyes were telling me, still convinced I’d made some stupid mistake, a simple oversight. Laura had done this research, and she never mentioned such an omission. But then I remembered who Laura was. She’d lied to me all along, so what was one more untruth?

But no matter how many times I went through the index, there was no birth registered for Samuel Buckley. There was no birth registered for anyone by the name of Buckley, not after George in 1913. There had been no Samuel Buckley born in South Staffordshire in nearly a decade. There was nothing. The man I’d thought to be my great-uncle simply didn’t exist.

‘Well, there could be an explanation,’ said Rachel that night. She’d found me unshaved, with a bottle of beer in my hand and several empties on the floor by the armchair. There was a great heap of papers scattered around, where I’d thrown them in a rage. It seemed as though I’d wasted months of my life.

‘Yes, of course there’s an explanation,’ I said. ‘I’ve been conned again. What a bloody simpleton I am. They’ve had me for a complete fool, the whole lot of them. And all because I didn’t bother to check properly. Christ.’

‘Look, there could be a mistake in the records. It does happen sometimes. Or he might have been registered somewhere else, and just forgotten about it.’

‘Forgotten?’

‘His family could have been out of the area when they registered him.’

‘Is that possible?’

‘Yes, I’m sure.’

But I could see that she didn’t look convinced. ‘He told me he was born in Tamworth Street,’ I said.

‘Did he say that specifically?’

I paused, trying to think back to the old man’s words, while Rachel glared at me impatiently. But my brain was fuzzy. And anyway I didn’t want to think about it, not for a while.

‘Well, did he?’ she repeated.

‘I can’t remember,’ I said, slumping into my armchair.

‘Well, there you are. You can’t remember what you were told in the last few months. And yet you expect an old man to remember the details of something that happened eighty-three years ago.’

‘It’s different.’

She shuffled through her notebook with her head down, so that I couldn’t see her eyes. Her tenseness made me suspicious. Over the months, we’d become so close that I’d learned to read her thoughts as easily as she read mine.

‘Rachel,’ I said, ‘there’s something you’re not telling me.’

She nodded reluctantly. ‘I never thought you were right to trust that woman you called Laura Jenner. All that research she said she’d do... well, I went and did it myself.’

‘Did you?’

‘Yes. It was while I was visiting my sister. I never went to the matinee of Cats — I was at the Family Records Centre that day instead. I went over all the same ground that Laura Jenner said she’d covered. At first I thought she was a poor researcher, that she was missing too many things. But of course she was lying to you all along, Chris. Everything she did was intended to mislead. I’m sorry.’

‘It’s not your fault,’ I said feebly.

She was looking down at her notebook, and I still couldn’t see her eyes. I experienced the sort of awful feeling in my stomach that I’d only ever read about — a sinking, a plummeting, a dreadful wrench in the belly that foretold bad news. Her manner warned me that there was another revelation to come, just when I thought the whole business was over. And right now I was in no fit state for any more nasty surprises.

‘Get it over with, Rachel, please.’

‘All right. Yes, I checked the indexes myself a long time ago and found there was no Samuel Buckley entered. I went through the actual registers, and there was still no Samuel. I looked hard, Chris. I really looked very hard, in every conceivable place. But the fact is, there’s no record for the birth of anyone called Samuel Buckley. There’s no doubt your great-grandparents only ever registered the birth of one child, and that was your grandfather, George.’

She looked up at me then, watching my face for a reaction. But I was beyond reacting now. I’d already been to the bottom of this pit, and concluded that the whole awful business had been for nothing.

‘It would have been easy at that stage to give up and decide Samuel Buckley didn’t exist,’ she said, ‘that the man claiming to be your great-uncle was a fake. But why should he do something like that? And who was he? It didn’t make sense. I thought there had to be another answer.’

‘And so you made sense of it, did you? You found an answer where I couldn’t?’

She flushed and turned back to her notebook. ‘I found the answer here in Lichfield, in the County Records Office. In the records of the Thomas Ella Trust, in fact.’

‘Hold on. Thomas Ella?’

‘Yes, the Reverend Thomas Ella.’

‘The canal proprietor?’

‘The same man.’

‘Samuel wrote more about him than any of the other proprietors,’ I said. ‘He described him as a visionary, who was almost single-handedly responsible for getting the Ogley and Huddlesford Canal scheme under way. He was a prominent personality, the headmaster of a local school.’

‘He also said that Ella was “a real gentleman and scholar”, generous, public spirited, a conscientious teacher and a good father,’ Rachel added.

‘Yes, all that and plenty more.’ I could see the appropriate page of the manuscript in front of my eyes as I spoke. ‘The Reverend Thomas Ella took snuff, gambled at cards and enjoyed brandy and wine. He bought silver buckles for his shoes and had silk handkerchiefs. He raised pigs. He was secretary of a circulating library and took an active interest in local politics. Oh, and his first wife had died, but he married again and had five children. It’s all imprinted on my memory after the book. Samuel made him sound like a hero.’

‘And with good reason, I think.’

I watched Rachel carefully. ‘Go on.’

‘There was another thing Samuel wrote about Thomas Ella. Do you remember the death of his son, who lived for only three weeks?’

‘Ella baptised him at a private service, but he died ten days later. Yes, of course I remember. But what has that got to do with anything?’

‘Something came from Thomas Ella’s desolation at the loss of his son. Ella wasn’t just a clergyman, a headmaster, and all the rest. He also founded charities. One of them was a charity for orphans. It was called the Thomas Ella Trust. It survived into the 1930s, then fell into disuse. Until then it had been very active.’

‘Doing what?’

‘Well, bear in mind that the Adoption of Children Act didn’t come in until 1926. That was the act that made adoptions legal in England and Wales. Before that, they had to be arranged privately via the Poor Law Union, or through certain charities. Charities like the Thomas Ella Trust.’

I let my head fall back onto the chair. I felt exhausted, drained of all energy. It seemed to have run out of me in floods since I nearly got myself killed for the second time at Fosseway Wharf.

‘So Samuel was adopted,’ I said. ‘After all that, Samuel was adopted.’

Rachel nodded eagerly, glad to get it over with. ‘You see, Chris, that was why family was so important to him. He was so grateful to have been taken in as one of their own that he put his heart and soul into being part of the family.’

‘Yes, all right. I can see that.’

‘But when he ran off with Mary, he betrayed it all. Of course, the Buckleys never forgave him. But Samuel accepted that as a right and natural outcome of his actions. He understood that George and his family didn’t want to know him any more. The worst thing by far was that Samuel never, ever forgave himself. Right until the end.’

She was right, of course. ‘He was carrying a huge burden of guilt,’ I said. ‘“There was a far worse betrayal”. Those were his words. He’d been trying to put it right ever since. It’s funny, really, that in the end he had to rely on another generation to finish the job for him.’

For a moment I saw myself as Samuel must have seen me — the next in a long line of ordinary human beings who happened to carry the same genes as William and Josiah Buckley. I was just an average man with many weaknesses, to whom he had to pass on the baton. And yet he’d trusted me not to drop it. He’d been sure I would carry out my part. Because I was one of the family. I was a Buckley.

Rachel closed her notebook and came to sit next to me on the sofa, her face full of concern.

‘That’s it, Chris. There’s no more.’

‘It’s enough. More than enough.’

‘I’m sorry. But it’s best to know the truth, isn’t? There have been enough secrets and lies.’

‘You’re right, Rachel. Thank you.’

Even after all these months, I hadn’t escaped the images that haunted my thoughts. At night I still saw the old horse emerging from the fog under the bridge, hauling the boat that had brought William Buckley to Fosseway Wharf for that fatal meeting. I still saw the figure in the darkness, waiting to crush his skull with a boat hook and conceal his body in a heap of abandoned lime. And I saw that terrible oily swirling in the water behind the lock gate as Josiah Buckley’s wife Hannah watched her husband’s battered face float to the surface.

And, of course, I would never be able to rid myself of the image of that old man left to die in the road at Castle Dyke, his body broken by the cold, unyielding steel of a car that had come out of the night. Death was in the unreachable corners of my mind, and it would never be removed.

But as Rachel and I sat in silence together, I found my thoughts were no longer whirling in that pit of despair. Daylight had entered at last, and a little flicker of hope was spreading through my life. In the end, it had been Rachel who brought me that release — she’d been the only one who stood by me all along, in spite of everything that I’d done. And now I found that I felt no uneasiness about our companionship, no defensive urge to drive her away.

‘So Samuel wasn’t a Buckley at all,’ she said. ‘Now, that’s what I call a con.’

I realised that Rachel was sitting very close to me, her hand on my arm. She was completely at ease and comfortable with me on the old sofa in the untidy Victorian semi, with the carriage clock and the worn rug and the cabinet full of Wedgwood figurines. For the first time, it occurred to me that I didn’t have to be the last of the Buckleys, after all. But there had to be a clear understanding between us on one thing.

‘Not a Buckley?’ I opened my copy of The Three Keys and looked at the picture of Samuel on the inside of the dust jacket. Surely she could see the determined set of Samuel’s jaw, as well as the pain in his eyes? She must be able to understand that he was a man who’d sacrificed himself so that future members of his family could live in peace? So that we could live in peace.

‘No, you’re wrong there, Rachel,’ I said. ‘As far as I’m concerned, Great-Uncle Samuel was the finest Buckley of them all.’