I was waiting anxiously for her to turn up the next photograph. But when I didn’t answer her question, she looked at me keenly, as if she could see right through me.
‘Well, have you?’ she said.
And then it all came out. Rachel was fascinated, and grew excited as she listened. Her response made me feel better. Being able to tell somebody about it, talking it through out loud, made the situation clearer in my mind. And once I’d told Rachel, there no longer seemed to be any doubt in my heart that the old man I’d met really was my Great-Uncle Samuel. It seemed right for the first time.
‘But that’s wonderful,’ she said. ‘A long-lost relative. It’s like a fairy story. But how sad that he died.’
‘Sad, yes.’
‘I’d have loved to have met him. Properly, I mean. I didn’t know who he was when he came that day.’
She put the photograph of my Grandfather Buckley aside, and I could see the next picture in the pile. It was almost the last one, and it showed two boys with similar serious expressions. One of them looked about twelve or thirteen, the other a few years younger. They were leaning against a heavy wooden beam, like the balance beam of a canal lock gate. They both wore stout boots and flannel trousers, their hands thrust deep into their pockets, and the older one had a flat cap at a jaunty angle. The caption read: George and Samuel, June 1925.
‘I researched my family tree a few years ago,’ said Rachel. ‘It was fascinating. There’s an amazing amount of information you can find, but you need to know where to look, or it can take forever. I joined the local family history society for a while. If you’re thinking of researching your tree, Chris, I wouldn’t mind helping — if you want.’
I remembered that Rachel had been a librarian. She’d gone back to her career after the divorce, but her part-time job at a branch library had disappeared in the cutbacks. At one time, as an Information Officer, I’d been responsible for justifying those cuts to the public. Now we were in the same boat. The knife that had made those cuts had turned on me.
But there was no way I could agree to what she was suggesting. The thought of my next-door neighbour burrowing through my family’s past repulsed me. I started to regret having told her anything. I wished I’d found the strength of will to keep my mouth shut and ask her to leave before it went so far. Suddenly, the whole exercise seemed pointless and self-obsessed, and it was Rachel’s fault for dragging me into it.
‘No, I won’t be doing anything like that, thanks,’ I said. ‘Look, the reason I’m going through this material — it’s not because of an interest in my family history, or out of loyalty to Samuel Longden. It’s not even because I feel guilty.’
‘I never said it was.’
‘The only reason I’m going to do anything at all is because I’m being paid for it. You see? I have to earn a living, and if that means raking through the lives of the long dead, then so be it.’
I began to gather the photographs together and stuff them back into their envelopes. I plucked the picture of George and Samuel from her fingers and tossed it in with the rest as if it was of no importance. Rachel looked a bit hurt.
‘Now,’ I said, ‘I’ve got other things to do. If you don’t mind...’
She got up, flushing slightly. ‘That’s okay. I’ve got to go out myself. I’ll be calling at Tesco’s, if you want anything fetching.’
‘No thanks. I’m doing my own shopping later. I usually go to Safeway.’
‘Fine. Fine.’
I got her as far as the front door before she tried again. There was a hint of desperation in her voice, a pleading note that made me grit my teeth. ‘You won’t be wanting me to help, then?’
‘I don’t think so.’ Then I cursed myself for not being definite. ‘No, I’m sure I won’t. Thanks all the same.’
Her shoulders sagged. ‘Well, you know where to find me, if you change your mind. I’m not exactly a million miles away.’
Finally, I got her out of the door and down the path with a few perfunctory words of farewell. I bundled the packets of photos together and shoved them into a drawer of the mahogany sideboard, stuffed well in among the place mats and spare fuses and God knows what else my parents had collected. One day I would really have to clear it all out. Perhaps I should look at the small ads in the Echo to find somebody who did house clearances. Let strangers shift the lot and do whatever they wanted with it. I could make a fresh start, clear the house of memories.
Boswell wandered into the room, right on cue. I thought of him as my parents’ cat, but in reality my father had never been able to stand him. Boswell had been restricted to the back garden and the kitchen, except when my mother let him sneak onto her chair while Dad was out. Now, the cat had full run of the house.
For the past three months, I’d known there was something deep and painful that my father had left in me, a splinter of memory festering under the skin, lodged in a place I couldn’t easily reach. It was the cause of the constant dull ache in my heart that sometimes flared into those jagged twinges of agony that hit me when I saw the photographs of him as a boy. It was a pain that I couldn’t cure until I’d erased him completely from my life.
16
It wasn’t unusual for me to take a walk on Sunday morning. Normally I took a route down Gaia Lane towards Beacon Street. There were lots of new houses here, discreetly set behind walls and hedges, some built of red brick that blended with the older properties. Speed humps controlled the traffic, and the pavements were narrow. Trees overhung the road, and grey squirrels scattered dead leaves on the sheltered drives. Sometimes I turned northwards to the corner of Curborough Road, which led out to the estates of Chadsmead and Nether Stowe, built to accommodate the population explosion that Lichfield had undergone in the 1960s and ’70s.
But in the middle section of Gaia Lane there were enclosed walks through to Cathedral Close and the playing fields. I had to pass some of the other Victorian semis. Their frontages were similar to Maybank, but none of them had a Russian vine like the one my mother had planted in the front garden, which now climbed over the roof and halfway up the chimney, clutching the fabric of the house ever more tightly in its spreading tendrils.
At Stowe Pool, sloping concrete sides ran down to the water, where the bank was occupied by a solitary angler. The sun was still low and glaring on the surface, and a stiff wind blew, swirling leaves around my feet.
The walk round the water prepared me for a visit to the graveyard. As the cold wind numbed my face and limbs, it also seemed to deaden my feelings, ready for the task of confronting my memories. The most recent section of the graveyard lay behind St Chad’s Church. There were rows of marble gravestones, black and grey, most of them with fresh flowers where the occupants were still remembered, but some with nothing but wilted stalks after only two or three years in the ground.
The sandstone facing of St Chad’s tower glowed almost pink this morning. As I passed the porch, a waft of polish reached me from the open door. I orientated myself towards a bright yellow skip that stood in a graveyard extension. The grass was neatly mown right up to the headstones, and I heard the sound of a strimmer from the opposite side of the graveyard. Some of the headstones were grouped together, with no visible graves. Space is at a premium in many graveyards these days. There isn’t room for too many dead people cluttering up our lives.
Although I hadn’t been to the graveyard for several months, I had no trouble finding the stone I wanted. It said: ‘In loving memory of’ on the top half, and the section below it was divided into two. My mother’s inscription was on one side — ‘a devoted wife and mother, Sheila Buckley, died August 1997 aged 60’. The other side had been left blank when she was buried. The design had been my father’s idea. But it hadn’t stayed blank for long, before his own name had filled it.