Meeting my grandmother had changed my perspective too. The Buckleys and Parkers no longer seemed like two rival families locked in conflict over the generations. As Leo himself had said, we weren’t just related, but inextricably entangled. I’d even been back to his house in Hints to visit Mary again, and had taken her some flowers for her room, hoping for a flicker of recognition, desperate to draw back the curtains and let in the sunlight.
And I knew that a continuation of the feud wasn’t what Samuel had wanted. He’d given me the power to stop it. That was exactly what his letter said. Two hundred years were enough. Instead of a weapon to be used, he’d bequeathed to me a deterrent that would ensure peace. All I had to do was reconcile myself to keeping quiet about the dealings of Leo Parker and Lindley Simpson, and the true motives of Andrew Hadfield. It was a sacrifice. But it was nothing compared to the sacrifice that Samuel had made himself.
And he hadn’t just given me this power, had he? He’d given me the choice to use it, or not. Was this what it had all been about? Great-Uncle Samuel had forced me to grow up, to take responsibility and make my own decisions. Caroline said he’d been keeping an eye on me. And perhaps he was still watching over me now.
‘No, they won’t go to the newspapers,’ I said. ‘I think a safe deposit box in a bank somewhere would be the answer. And a carefully drawn will. No doubt Mr Elsworth could help me with that.’
‘So that’s it, then?’ asked Rachel.
‘Yes, that’s it,’ I said. ‘It’s all over.’
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.’