Стивен Бут - Drowned Lives

‘So both brothers had heartbreak and betrayal in their lives. Mary left my grandfather and married Matthew Parker, her second cousin. She was already a Parker herself.’

‘And all this is evidence of your great feud, is it?’

‘I know it sounds incredible. But there are far too many Parkers involved with too many things that happened to the Buckleys. It’s no coincidence.’

‘If you say so, Chris.’

‘But tell me about Mary. What happened to her? When did she die?’

‘Chris, I don’t know. Dad never mentioned her.’

‘My God, this family,’ I said irritably. ‘There seems to have been an awful lot of things that were never mentioned.’

‘Perhaps there were a lot of things you never asked.’

‘Should I have to?’

I stood up and paced across the room, picking up a pile of musical scores, shuffling them, dropping them on the stand again. After discovering that I’d been kept in the dark for so long by my own parents, I thought that Great-Uncle Samuel had come along to throw a great shaft of light into the dusty corners of my family’s recent history. It was never what I wanted, but I hadn’t been given any choice, and I’d come to accept it. But now I was finding many things that even Samuel hadn’t told anyone.

‘I suppose you’ll have to ask Leo Parker,’ said Caroline doubtfully. ‘I don’t suppose she could still be alive?’

‘Surely not.’

‘Well, she’d be about the same age as Dad. And he could have lived a few years longer.’

I looked at her, and mentally kicked myself for my insensitivity. It had never occurred to me to think how she’d feel about me digging up the family history. I’d trampled over Caroline’s life enough. I didn’t want to make her resent me any more than she already did.

‘I could just leave it alone,’ I said.

‘Oh, you’ve got to know the facts now, haven’t you, Chris? You’re not going to be able to leave it at half a story.’

‘Is that what you feel too?’

‘I suppose it’s inevitable.’

She moved almost absently towards the corner of the room and sat down with her cello. She fingered the bow and stroked the curves of the instrument’s wooden sides. I wondered if I was interrupting her practice night, or whether contact with the cello helped her think.

‘Caroline, I don’t know how to explain this — but it’s been eating away at me that I never got the chance to apologise to your father. I know I let him down. This is the only way I can try to make it up to him.’

‘Yes, Dad would have been very disappointed in you, but not surprised,’ she said. ‘He came to you as a last resort, because he was terrified that you would reject him, that the past would have as huge a significance in your mind as it had in his. He would never have imagined that you could let him down so casually, because you couldn’t be bothered.’

I hung my head. ‘There’s nothing I can say to that.’

‘Dad was quite different, you know. All the time I knew him, he would never let anybody down. He carried enough guilt from what happened fifty years ago. It tortured him all his life and preyed on his mind every day. He could never have born it if he felt he’d let anyone down again. That’s what it is to have a conscience, Chris.’

‘Tell me about it,’ I said, with a spasm of irritation. I was willing to eat humble pie up to a point, but Caroline was piling it on too thick. ‘But it isn’t quite true to say Samuel would never let me down. He was the anonymous backer who invested in our dot-com start-up, wasn’t he?’

‘Who told you that?’

‘Nobody.’

‘It can only have been Mr Elsworth,’ she said grimly. ‘It’s totally unprofessional of him.’

‘I worked it out for myself, Caroline. It wasn’t all that difficult. Samuel put money in to help our business establish itself in the early stages. I suppose he must have seen my name in some of the promotion.’

‘He’d always kept an eye on you. He wanted to support you in some way, and that was his opportunity. Dad felt responsible for you.’

‘For me?’

‘For everyone,’ she said. ‘For everything. As far as you were concerned, he wanted to pull you out of the shadow of your father.’

‘I didn’t need Samuel to do that.’

‘Didn’t you, Chris? But you haven’t always been like this, so they tell me.’

‘Like what?’

‘So serious, so morose. You used to have friends, you were fun to be with. Isn’t that right? I find it hard to believe that now. Dad said you’d become a loner, though you don’t seem to like your own company. You certainly drink too much — I’ve seen that for myself. You’ve lost control of your life. And it all happened when your parents died. That’s what Dad told me.’

I scowled at her. I didn’t like being told such things. They were much too close to the truth. But just because you recognised that you’d sunk into a dark time in your life, it didn’t mean you could see the way to pull yourself out of it.

Suddenly, I saw more clearly the efforts people had been making on my behalf. Dan Hyde trying to enthuse me with an exciting new project, Andrew Hadfield encouraging me to join in with the canal volunteers, the HR manager who’d thought I might need help to cope with my redundancy. And, of course, Rachel persuading me to go to Gilbert and Sullivan performances, singing their songs all the way back in the car until I couldn’t get a jaunty tune out of my head. They’d all seen more in me than I had myself. People around me had never given up hope of getting the old Chris Buckley back. And Samuel had tried to do the same, in his own way.

I’d lowered my eyes in that moment of reflection, but then I looked up again.

‘But the book,’ I said. ‘Why did he want to pass the project on? He tried Frank first, then me. Did Samuel know he was in danger? Did he expect someone to try to kill him?’

Caroline shook her head. ‘No, it wasn’t that. He didn’t expect to last much longer, true. But he wasn’t afraid of a violent death. Dad was already dying. He was in the late stages of terminal prostate cancer, which had already spread into his bones and lymph nodes. Didn’t you notice how ill he looked?’

‘Of course.’

‘Yes, even you couldn’t have failed to see that. So the fact is, Samuel didn’t have long left to live. He knew that very well. And you were his last hope, Chris.’

By that time, I didn’t need Caroline Longden to lay any more guilt on me. I’d gone past that stage. There’s only so much blame anyone can take.

But had Great-Uncle Samuel really been so concerned about me? I frowned as I thought about what Caroline was telling me.

‘But then,’ I said, ‘your father pulled his backing from our start-up, just when we needed the money most. I’m facing bankruptcy now, did you know that? All because Samuel withdrew his funding. I can only think he did that because I told him I didn’t have time to help him with the book. He forced me into accepting the terms of his will. No doubt if he’d lived a bit longer he would have made me a similar proposition himself. He wanted to make absolutely sure that I needed the money so badly I couldn’t turn it down.’

Caroline looked suddenly uneasy. She drew her bow across the strings of her cello, releasing a couple of sharp, discordant notes.

‘It wasn’t Dad who withdrew the funding,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘He would never have done that. I wouldn’t want you to think that he would, whatever else you think. Once he’d decided to support something, he stuck to it. And you were family, after all. He would never have let you down like that.’

‘What then?’

‘It was me. As soon as we began to look at my father’s estate, I persuaded Mr Elsworth that, as joint executors, we could pull out of the deal.’