He wandered off to find the toilets while I was at the bar, and I was reminded that he was an old man in his eighties.
When he returned, he fumbled a pair of spectacles from a case deep in a pocket of his overcoat to read the menu. He waved away my tentative concern about prices with an impatient grunt and told me to have whatever I wanted. There seemed to be a constant gnawing in my stomach these days which was never satisfied. My body told me it was the pangs of hunger. So I chose a sirloin steak, hoping I wasn’t taking advantage of the old man. For himself, he ordered salmon, which reassured me.
Over a few sips of Guinness, Samuel stared at a portrait of Lichfield’s most famous son, Dr Samuel Johnson. Every corner of the city seemed to hold some personal meaning for the old man that I couldn’t fathom. Johnson inspired him to one of those baffling non sequiturs I was already coming to expect.
‘Did you know that, as a young man, Dr Johnson refused a request by his father to look after his book stall at Uttoxeter market?’ he said. ‘The guilt stayed with him for the rest of his life. The story is that Johnson stood bare-headed in the rain for several hours in the marketplace when he was quite an old man in his seventies. It was a penance, you see. It was the only way he could atone for his guilt. It’s one of the scenes depicted on his plinth.’
‘I’ve heard the story. You can’t live in Lichfield without having Dr Johnson thrust at you from all directions.’
I wondered if I should mention my own favourite Johnson quote, which goes: ‘I remember when all the decent people in Lichfield got drunk, and were not the worse thought of.’ It’s a slogan on the wall of the arts centre — except that whoever wrote it couldn’t spell ‘remember’.
‘But what has that got to do with my grandparents?’ I said.
He heaved a deep sigh with many years of practice in it. ‘Mary left your grandfather a long time ago. They only had six years of marriage, and for much of that time your grandfather was away in the war. He hardly knew her as a wife at all. Not that Mary was a worthy wife to him.’
It made me uncomfortable to hear the way he talked about her. It didn’t make any sense, since I’d never known her, whereas Samuel obviously had. Why should I feel defensive about her?
I’d met my grandparents on my mother’s side, the Claytons, but never my paternal grandparents. I was racking my mind to try to remember whether I’d been told that Granddad and Grandma Buckley had both died, or whether Mary just hadn’t been mentioned. As a child, I might have made the assumption that if one of them was dead, the other must be too. Why else would they have been so absent from my life?
‘Why?’ I said.
‘Because,’ said Samuel, ‘no woman should have done what Mary did.’
6
This was all too much. People split up every day, didn’t they? Even in my grandparents’ time, it can’t have been so unusual. But Samuel was making a big thing of it. I saw no reason why I should sit and listen to him condemn a grandmother I’d never known for something that must have happened decades ago.
His tendency to over-dramatise was starting to get on my nerves, as well as his cryptic evasiveness. He could have told me the facts straightaway, but he was trying to force me to ask questions, as if he thought he could capture my interest that way. I didn’t want to play his games.
And underneath it all, I thought I detected the bitterness of a man who’d been deceived in love himself. Presumably even Samuel Longden had been young once.
‘What about your own wife?’ I asked.
‘Oh, I married rather late in life. My wife, Alison, died ten years ago, in a car crash on the A38. She was travelling with my secretary, Karen Mills, when their vehicle hit an articulated lorry that had crossed the central reservation.’
Samuel smiled sadly at his tragic memory. I felt as though I ought to apologise for being so ignorant, for forcing him to explain it all and live through the pain again.
‘My parents didn’t tell me any of this,’ I said.
‘So I gather. I can’t really say it surprises me. None of your family came to Alison’s funeral. No Buckley had spoken to me for over forty years by then.’
‘You haven’t told me what caused the rift between you and my grandfather. Was it something very petty?’
‘Why do you say that?’ he asked sharply.
‘It often is, isn’t it? You know, a row over some trivial issue that escalates and gets out of hand, until neither side can see reason. It often seems to happen between close friends and within families. It’s almost as if people are just waiting to seize on something as an excuse for a row.’
‘Christopher,’ he said, with a shake of his head, ‘you talk as though you have a vast experience of family life.’
‘Ah, I see what you’re saying. You think I know nothing about families, right? How could I? But it’s my job to inquire into other people’s lives. And what I see depresses me immensely. The family is a vastly over-rated institution, in my view. Some of the situations that people create for themselves are beyond belief — and all in the name of family. Well, I’m glad to say that I haven’t experienced it personally.’
‘Was your relationship with your own parents good?’
‘Well... I think so.’
I looked away towards the city, where the cathedral spires towered over the medieval street pattern. They were inarguably solid and enduring, a symbol of the stability and permanence I’d once longed for.
‘I’d like to think it was too,’ said Samuel, though I could tell he didn’t believe me.
I realised he wanted more than anything to talk about my family. He wanted to know about them, to hear my memories, to find out what they’d been doing all those years since he’d last seen them. I realised, with a sinking of the heart, that most of all he wanted to hear they’d spoken of him sometimes, that they hadn’t just wiped him from their minds. And I knew I couldn’t give him what he wanted.
What he told me next confirmed my worst fears. It carried the sound of an obsession.
‘I suppose it might have been because I was cut off from them, but I developed an enthusiasm for researching your ancestors,’ he said. ‘There have been many Buckleys in the Lichfield area over the years. Most of them were tradesmen and business people in a small way. But they’ve suffered fluctuations in their fortunes. Rather erratic fluctuations.’
‘Like all families, I suppose. There are bad times and good times.’
‘Perhaps. But I don’t think so, not in this case. I don’t think the Buckleys were ever quite like other families.’
I looked at him, but his face was impassive. I realised there was no point in questioning him — it only seemed to send him off on a tangent. I would have to wait patiently for him to tell me more.
The food came, and we were silent while we ate. Samuel picked carefully at his salmon, slicing the pink flesh with slow, deliberate strokes of his knife. He had an air of single-minded absorption now that was slightly unnerving. For a while, I was the one who’d ceased to exist.
Then Samuel sat back and reached for his drink.
‘You may be interested to hear that your great-great-grandfather was once what they called a “number one” in Victorian times,’ he said.
The words meant nothing to me at first. Number one what? Did he mean that my ancestor was a leading figure in the area? A number one? The phrase had a familiar ring, though. I’d read it somewhere, and only recently. Samuel watched me while I put two and two together, and the phrase clicked into place.
‘You mean on the inland waterways? He worked on the canals. Am I right? A number one was a man who owned his own boat rather than working for the big carrying companies like Fellows, or Morton and Clayton.’