Стивен Бут - Drowned Lives

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.’

‘Look, there could be a mistake in the records. It does happen sometimes. Or he might have been registered somewhere else, and just forgotten about it.’

‘Forgotten?’

‘His family could have been out of the area when they registered him.’

‘Is that possible?’

‘Yes, I’m sure.’

But I could see that she didn’t look convinced. ‘He told me he was born in Tamworth Street,’ I said.

‘Did he say that specifically?’

I paused, trying to think back to the old man’s words, while Rachel glared at me impatiently. But my brain was fuzzy. And anyway I didn’t want to think about it, not for a while.

‘Well, did he?’ she repeated.

‘I can’t remember,’ I said, slumping into my armchair.

‘Well, there you are. You can’t remember what you were told in the last few months. And yet you expect an old man to remember the details of something that happened eighty-three years ago.’

‘It’s different.’

She shuffled through her notebook with her head down, so that I couldn’t see her eyes. Her tenseness made me suspicious. Over the months, we’d become so close that I’d learned to read her thoughts as easily as she read mine.

‘Rachel,’ I said, ‘there’s something you’re not telling me.’

She nodded reluctantly. ‘I never thought you were right to trust that woman you called Laura Jenner. All that research she said she’d do... well, I went and did it myself.’

‘Did you?’

‘Yes. It was while I was visiting my sister. I never went to the matinee of Cats — I was at the Family Records Centre that day instead. I went over all the same ground that Laura Jenner said she’d covered. At first I thought she was a poor researcher, that she was missing too many things. But of course she was lying to you all along, Chris. Everything she did was intended to mislead. I’m sorry.’

‘It’s not your fault,’ I said feebly.

She was looking down at her notebook, and I still couldn’t see her eyes. I experienced the sort of awful feeling in my stomach that I’d only ever read about — a sinking, a plummeting, a dreadful wrench in the belly that foretold bad news. Her manner warned me that there was another revelation to come, just when I thought the whole business was over. And right now I was in no fit state for any more nasty surprises.