‘What’s in there? Oh, old photos. I love old photos.’
And then it was too late. She would accept nothing less than that we should drag the suitcase down the ladder and set it out on the dining room table while we went through every one. I even left her to it for a while so I could feed Boswell and put the kettle on for a cup of tea.
While I was in the kitchen, I cursed myself for not locking the back door. Rachel had been a regular visitor to the house while my mother was alive, and later on had called on my father occasionally. Since I’d been on my own, she’d used every pretext to get back into the house. She knew every detail of my life.
‘Doesn’t your mother look lovely in her wedding dress,’ she said.
‘Does she?’
She was gazing with a fond wistfulness at my parents’ wedding photos. I thought my father looked ridiculous in his tight trousers, narrow tie and pointy-toed shoes, with his quiff sticking up from his forehead like an early Cliff Richard. It was 1963, there was still a Conservative government and the Beatles hadn’t yet had time to make an impact on fashions. If it had been a few years later, my father would have been sporting wide lapels, a fringe and a droopy moustache. I came along in 1965, when Harold Wilson was prime minister, American planes were starting to bomb Vietnam, and Rhodesia was declaring UDI.
In the photograph of the group outside St Chad’s church, my mother had a long, straight bob — but, apart from that, she could have been a bride from any era in that traditional white lace gown. As to whether she looked lovely, I was the wrong person to judge. She was just my mother.
‘There’s snow on the ground,’ said Rachel. ‘They must have got married in winter.’
‘February.’
‘Was that a bad winter?’
‘I wasn’t actually there, you know. I wasn’t even born. That was the way things were done in those days. Wedding first, babies later.’
She looked at me sideways. ‘Yes, but it’s the sort of detail you get to know, isn’t it?’
‘Not me.’
Yes, it had been a bad winter in 1962–63. The Minster Pool had frozen over and snow had turned Beacon Park into a vast Arctic waste, stranding the statue of Captain Smith of the Titanic in a snowfield that was normally the Museum Gardens. Birds had frozen to death in the trees, and villages had been cut off for days. My father once said it had reminded everyone of the winter of 1947, when Lichfield had relied on two horse-drawn snow ploughs to clear the streets.
But these weren’t only things I knew. They were family memories. They came with the remembered sound of my father’s voice. They were brought back by the sight and feel of the photographs, by the evocative but unidentifiable smell released from the musty depths of the suitcase.
‘And this must be you as a little boy.’
Rachel was thumbing through the photographs again, turning over pictures of me standing in the back garden at Stowe Pool Lane, wearing knee-length shorts and a short back and sides. Then there was me on a bike in my school uniform, with a satchel on my back. And there was another me, the older teenager in jeans and a Wolverhampton Wanderers shirt, growing sideboards and trying to look like my Wolves hero, Derek Dougan.
The photos were starting to make me feel uncomfortable. To me, the past was an unpleasant necessity, not something to rake over and dissect with that awful mixture of mockery and fascination. It was if I’d spread my dirty underwear on the table for her to paw through.
Now she was laughing. ‘I bet you were a real pain in the neck when you were that age.’
I said nothing while I drank my tea. She looked up at me, and mimed an exaggeratedly apologetic expression. ‘I’m sorry, Chris — you were looking for something, weren’t you? And I’m interfering as usual. Just tell me if I’m being a pain in the neck, and I’ll go.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘No, no. Come on, what was it you were looking for? A nice picture of your mum and dad, perhaps. Was that what you wanted? Something to frame on the sideboard?’
What I really wanted was to grab the big wedding day groups and scan the massed ranks of relatives for a face that resembled the old man I’d met one morning at Fosseway. And I wanted to pull open the folded, yellowing envelope that Rachel hadn’t noticed yet. I knew it contained a few older photographs, the tiny, square sepia-coloured ones that were the only surviving images of my grandparents on my father’s side.
My Grandfather Buckley had died when my father was a boy — that much I knew. I couldn’t even picture his face, and I desperately needed to search it for resemblances to the man who claimed to have been his brother, my Great-Uncle Samuel. There might even be evidence of the existence of Samuel himself. Could there possibly be a snap of George and Samuel together? There were photos in that envelope of people who’d never been identified to me, grim-faced men and women in old-fashioned, ill-fitting clothes who stared at the camera as if the lens might steal their souls.
Rachel must have been psychic, or perhaps she’d seen my eyes stray automatically towards the envelope.
‘Ah, what’s this?’
The next second, there they were, spilled in a casual muddle on the table. Faded images of unfamiliar faces. A spasm of pain took me unawares and made me catch my breath as I looked down at a picture of my father, aged about seven, uncomfortably turned out in his Sunday best for a parade of some kind. His hair was cropped at the sides, with a longer lock flopping onto his forehead. He looked scrubbed and starched and vaguely resentful in his baggy shorts, and his bare legs were scrawny and pitiful. One of his socks had started to slip and crumple on his shin. Trembling with an inexplicable emotion, I picked up the photograph and turned it over. On the back, in washed-out black ink, it said: ‘Arthur. Visit by Queen Elizabeth, 1946’.
The next snap showed my father again a few years later, a gawky boy in a white open-necked shirt, sitting with a group of adults. All the men were in ties and braces, the women in flowered dresses, enjoying the sunshine on an outing somewhere. ‘Whitsun 1949’ said the scrawl. There was a solitary portrait of my grandfather, George Buckley, from about the same period. He was standing proudly outside his back door in polished boots and a dark suit, solemn and upright, a pipe clenched in his teeth and not a hint of a smile. There was undoubtedly a look about his eyes and nose that reminded me of the old man who’d claimed to be his brother.
But I knew how easy it was to convince yourself of these resemblances. How often had I heard people cooing over a month-old baby, finding its father’s eyes, its mother’s hair. Once, I’d been horribly embarrassed after remarking to a couple I was interviewing that their son looked just like his father — only to be told that the child was adopted.
‘This George,’ said Rachel, reading the back of the photo. ‘He was a fine-looking man.’
‘My grandfather.’
‘Mmm.’
I knew she could sense my tension. She was far too sharp to miss the change in my mood.
‘Did you ever know him?’
‘No, he died a long time ago.’
‘And why is he on his own?’ she said. ‘Where’s your grandmother, I wonder?’
‘I don’t know.’
She was right. It did look a bit odd. It was the kind of photograph you’d expect to include a couple, a posed portrait of Grandma and Granddad for the family album. But there was no sign of Grandma. No portrait of Mary Buckley. I looked at the group photo, but there was no way to identify her among the other women.
‘Have you any other living relatives on that side of the family?’ asked Rachel.