Стивен Бут - Drowned Lives

‘This is my territory,’ said Frank. ‘Sally says the plants attract flies. Not to mention spiders. But it’s all part of nature, isn’t it?’

‘I gather I’m keeping you from the shopping.’

He laughed. ‘Don’t worry about that. She’d much rather do it without me. She just likes to make a point.’

‘Well, thanks for giving me your time.’

‘Well, we’re almost relatives, aren’t we? In a way.’

‘I suppose so.’

He smiled at my hesitation. ‘But who’d want any more of those?’

‘You’re Alison Longden’s son from a previous marriage. Am I right?’

‘That’s it. I was ten when Mum and Dad got divorced. I didn’t much like the thought that mum had another baby and it wasn’t my real sister. I felt jealous, I suppose. You know what teenagers are like.’

He stroked the leaves of a big pelargonium with pink flowers that he’d just finished watering. He was looking at it as he might have done at a favourite pet. I didn’t suppose there was a cat or a dog in the house. Too much mess.

‘After a while, we lost touch,’ he said. ‘I decided I was going to live my own life, as you do at that age. Then there was the accident.’

‘The car crash.’

‘It was a tragedy. She was a good woman. Everyone liked her. Old Samuel was devastated.’

Frank replaced his watering can under a tap and dusted his hands.

‘It was Samuel I wanted to talk to you about really, Frank,’ I said.

‘Yes. You must have a lot of questions.’

‘Could we go into the house? It’s a bit too warm in here for me.’

‘Sally says so too. Actually, I thought we might go for a walk. Down by the reservoir. We can get a breath of fresh air.’

‘Whatever you like.’

We turned the corner from Cop Nook Lane into a road that came down past the football ground. From here, the heath stretched to the reservoir, with narrow footpaths skirting the edge of the water and winding up and down sandy slopes that were thick with clumps of gorse.

‘This is a peaceful sort of place,’ I said.

‘At times,’ said Frank. ‘But you wouldn’t want to come here at weekends in the summer. It’s full of kids taking drugs and having sex, and God knows what. You can’t move without tripping over them in every hollow.’

The wind stirred the empty husks of seed pods on the branches of the gorse, causing a dry rattling sound all around us. The noise made me feel uneasy. It was like the rustle of surreptitious movements in the undergrowth, or a hundred snakes slithering over pebbles.

‘No one here now, though,’ said Frank. ‘They don’t bother coming when it’s cold.’

Across an inlet I could see small yachts pulled up onto the shore, their masts folded down onto their decks. In the summer the water would be thick with boats, and the light railway would be running on the opposite bank, while crowds flocked to the amusement park at the southern end of the reservoir. The Anglesey branch of the Wyrley and Essington Canal still linked Chasewater to Ogley Junction. That short branch had once been the feeder to provide water from the reservoir to the Ogley and Huddlesford. Unlike the Ogley, the feeder was still there, and it was in water too.

‘But you don’t mind the weather, Frank?’ I said.

‘I think it’s bracing. It clears your mind. That helps you think.’

‘Helps you remember too, perhaps?’

‘Oh, I don’t need any help doing that.’

There was a great scar in the earth between the reservoir and the town, and to the north I could see the remains of a vast tip from an abandoned quarry. The line of an old mineral railway could still be followed, where its embankment had once taken it right across the reservoir. The walls and chimneys of the trading estate rose behind us, and the constant buzz of distant traffic reminded me of the proximity of the main Cannock Road. Despite the expanse of heath, nature was a relative stranger here. We were surrounded by the ineradicable signs of industry. The rattling of the gorse was no more than a pitiful gesture of defiance.

‘Shall I start with my first questions?’ I asked, when Frank had been silent for a while.

He seemed to wake from his thoughts and plucked a twig full of seed pods from a branch. Still he didn’t meet my eye.

‘I said I knew there must be a lot of questions you wanted to ask. But I must warn you, I might not have the answers to give you.’

‘At least let’s try, now we’re here.’

‘If there’s anything I can tell you that will help.’

‘You know about the rift in my family, don’t you?’

‘Yes, I picked up on it in my early teens. I suppose I must have heard people talking about it. I can’t remember now if it was my mum or my dad. It certainly wasn’t Samuel. He never spoke about his family at all. There were none of them at the wedding, though of course it was only a register office affair. That alone was enough to cause people to talk.’

‘He was calling himself Longden already by then.’

‘Oh yes. I never knew him as a Buckley at all. In fact, it was Caroline who told me, when we went to see her after Samuel died. It was a bit of a surprise. But then Samuel had always been a surprising man.’

‘You must have learned something about his past?’

‘There were some things he talked about. What particularly did you want to know?’

‘Anything, Frank, anything. Remember I didn’t even know of his existence until a couple of weeks ago.’

He pursed his lips and rested his back against a tree. ‘Strange that. A bit hard to believe.’

‘I find it difficult to believe myself. But it’s true. His history is almost a complete blank to me. I know he made a lot of money in the brewery business.’

‘That’s right. He inherited a brewery in Lichfield from some old chap he worked for. Business picked up again after the war. Then he sold out to one of the big Burton breweries in the late 1960s, when things were really booming. He made a packet, by all accounts.’

‘He would still only have been in his fifties then,’ I said.

‘I reckon he kept himself busy using his money to make more. Some people have that knack, don’t they? Not me, though.’

‘What do you mean? Investments?’

‘He certainly talked about the stock market as if he knew what he was doing. But he had other interests as well.’

‘The inland waterways, for example.’

Frank sniffed. ‘I never understood what he saw in that myself. But yes, he bought himself a boat, didn’t he? A narrowboat.’

‘Yes, Kestrel .’

‘I know those things don’t come cheap.’

‘Yes, I’ve seen it. I’d guess maybe seventy or eighty thousand quid’s worth.’

His eyebrows shot up in amazement. ‘Really? That much? It’s almost what my bungalow is worth.’

‘He must have been serious about it.’

Frank nodded sourly. ‘Somebody as wealthy as that — well, money doesn’t mean to them what it does to us. They spend those sort of amounts on a whim.’

‘But this wasn’t a whim of Samuel’s. Not from what the vicar said at his funeral service. And all those boaters who went...’

‘No, you’re right. He was keen. I think he spent less time with the boat after he married my mother. She took his attention for a while, and then Caroline came along.’

‘Alison meant a lot to him, Frank.’

He pulled himself away from the tree and began to walk again, following the curving path. ‘I know she did. It destroyed him when Mum was killed in the crash. But at least he had Caroline. She was seventeen when Mum died.’

‘A difficult age. Especially for an old man to deal with.’

‘He was seventy-three when it happened. You’d have thought it might have finished him off. But Caroline became the centre of his life. Her and Kestrel anyway. He took her on the boat with him all over the place.’