The Lost Garden (13 page)

Chapter Twenty

It was the first body that had washed up on Aghabeg Island in living memory.

This was all the more extraordinary considering that there was a war raging across Europe. Bodies floating in the sea close to Ireland’s shores from ships blown up along the coast, or even falling from the skies, were a common occurrence. The black, bloated bodies would be picked up by those working at sea and then carried ashore to be claimed or buried. If the gulls had got to them first, as was often the case, the fishermen would weigh down the remains with whatever rocks and metal they had come to carry on board for that very purpose and bury them at sea. That was how the harsh reality of the World War visited Ireland: in the sickening shock of finding a shattered soldier’s torso at the bottom of a day’s catch; in the cruel joke of an excited child running down to the beach only to discover that the large mammal beached there was wearing a soldier’s uniform.

Miraculously, in the three years since the war had started, the islanders of Aghabeg had never found one single body.

However, in this case, the fishermen had some idea of where the body had come from.

Some months ago, there had been an accident further up the
coast when a mine had exploded a small British Navy engineering vessel that had been sent to retrieve the deadly contraption after it had come loose from its position alongside other mines planted to protect the British coastline from German invasion. The accident had been observed and reported by Irish Coast Watching Service volunteer Dan Murphy. Dan was one of eighty men who sat in tiny concrete huts on the rocky precipices, far-flung tips and craggy edges of Ireland. From these lookout points they recorded the movements of German and British warships and submarines.

Since Germany had taken France in 1940, Ireland was strategically placed between the Nazi forces and Britain. Both sides knew it and the activity just outside Ireland’s three-mile neutrality zone had become intense. While the ordinary Irish people’s lives remained largely unaffected by the war, the men on its peripheries were watching armed submarines circling their bays and loaded aircraft flying ominously low over their heads. Desperate to get at one another, the Germans and British wandered in and out of Ireland’s neutral zone neither fully caring nor believing there was much the Irish could do to curtail them. Churchill hated the Irish anyway and believed they were in cahoots with the Germans. The Germans knew the Irish hated the English and harboured ambitions to use Ireland as a base to get to them. Ireland was stuck in the middle like the child of warring parents, and the only people who were fully aware of how close the war came to Ireland were those who worked the coastline, either as fishermen or as war volunteers.

On a clear day, Dan could see up to thirty miles out to sea from his small outpost on a cliff edge, and he just happened to have his telescope trained on the unidentified boat as the explosion occurred. He got an awful shock, and by the time the vast wave the explosion had caused crashed down on the rocky beach
beneath him, Dan already had the local Volunteer Force unit and adept local fishermen out looking for survivors.

The vessel that had blown up had been a small British Navy service boat with just a young naval officer and a bomb-disposal engineer on board. The explosion had obviously been a terrible accident, and Dan had felt that, as one of the Irish coastguards who had reported the mines as a problem, he was somewhat responsible. The engineer survived and was rescued clinging to the remnants of the boat. Dan and his men brought him ashore and started a two-day search to find the other missing man.

Naval engineer Anthony Irvine was relatively unharmed, except for the beginnings of hypothermia from the freezing Atlantic water, but he was very distraught and anxious to find his fellow officer, Jack Hart, whom he maintained was still alive. The two of them had escaped the explosion, he said; he had known that the mine was going to blow and had shouted as much to Jack. The pair of them had jumped ship and swum at the same time: there was no reason why he should be alive and not Jack. Of course, they had been thrown underwater by the explosion and covered in debris, but he was certain his colleague was still out there.

The nearest hospital had treated Irvine for shock, giving him a good dose of morphine to calm him down, then sewed and bandaged up a few small cuts so he was fit to travel home. However, the engineer refused to go back to England until his friend’s body was retrieved. He returned to the area and Dan Murphy took the young engineer back to stay in his home for a few days as they searched the coastline for his missing friend. After a week more, it was finally decided that Jack Hart’s body had been lost at sea and the brave Irvine returned, heartbroken, to England. Despite his being, in effect, an English soldier, Dan had liked the lad and admired his loyalty to his friend and his
persistence in trying to find his body. It turned out that Anthony had Irish blood in him on his mother’s side, and although his accent was English, he had an easy, Irish way about him. Armed with this fact, the Coast Watching Service volunteer sent special word out to all the fishermen working that coastline, and the islands around it, that any intact bodies washing up were to be reported to him.

As the Aghabeg fishermen stood around and looked down at the body, they were unified in their thoughts. It was good luck and the Blessed Virgin that had kept the horrors of war from their tiny coastline, and it was ill fortune and Jimmy Walsh that had brought it upon them now. Standing over the soaked mound of rotting flesh, they blessed themselves compulsively, partly to call Holy Mary down to them, but also to keep the poisonous luck of the deformed beast among them at bay.

Sean Walsh could hear his neighbours’ superstitious judgements on his son as clearly as if they had said them out loud, but he would not indulge them for a second. Neither would he walk away.

‘God rest his soul,’ Sean said, as he took off his coat and laid it over the head of the body. Out of respect, of course, but partly to hide the grotesque deterioration time and water had caused. No man should be seen in such a state.

The other men just stood and looked from the body to the Walsh men – mostly Sean, as they were somewhat afraid of Jimmy now. It was clear to them that the Walsh lad had brought this disaster to their shore – as certain as if he had killed the man himself – and they were weighing up how they should react to this affront.

Sean sensed their discontent and took immediate charge. It was the only thing to do in these circumstances: time for the men to reflect would only lead to trouble.

‘He must be the poor young engineer Dan Murphy sent word about. Jimmy, you go off now and bring me back a stack of turf and we’ll get a big fire lit straight away to let Frank in the lighthouse know that something is amiss. David, Eddie, the tide is with you, and if you head out to there now, you’ll be with him in an hour and he can get a message to Dan Murphy. It’s early yet – the Coast Watching Service could get a telegram over to England before the day is out and tell the poor boy’s family.’

Jimmy stood and began to march straight across the field in long, running strides. He seemed to act on his father’s instruction, but in reality Sean and the others knew he was simply going home to hide himself away again.

The men did as they were bid. Sean Walsh was a strong man and this was no time for a mutiny, and what else were they to do?

So as the men of his island went about getting a fire going in the highest point of the field and preparing the currach for the five-mile journey along coastal waters to the nearest lighthouse, Jimmy ran into his house, past his mother and into the bedroom.

Morag followed him in and started badgering him. ‘What’s going on? Why is there a fire lit in the field? Why are you back?’

Jimmy felt an enormous rage rise up in him. He wanted to be left alone. Why must his parents persist in trying to force him to live in a world he was not fit for?

He roared across at his mother, ‘Leave me alone, woman!’

Under normal circumstances, his mother would have roared back and perhaps even picked up the broom handle to wallop some manners into him.

On this occasion, she did not; she simply backed out of the room and closed the door.

Jimmy realized then that his face was so ugly, so deformed that he could even frighten his own mother.

He did not leave the house for several days after that, and Sean, disheartened by his thwarted attempt to bring his son back into the fishing fold, left him alone. Jimmy helped his mother about the house, dug out some onions and hung them out to dry, then began to fix up the drystone wall on the far side of their field – a boring, laborious jigsaw of a job that neither his father nor himself had had the inclination to do before, but Jimmy now found the repetitive work distracting and comforting.

Five days after they had found the body of the soldier, Jimmy saw his father come over the hill towards the drystone wall where he was working. He knew by the cut of his father’s walk, straight back and long, manly stride, that he had somebody with him. Jimmy groaned. It was pointless trying to hide; it must be the case that his father was bringing this person specifically to see him. His only escape would be across the neighbouring fields, which he did consider for a moment.

As they grew closer, Jimmy could see that the person following a respectful distance behind Sean was a man wearing smart clothes, a suit jacket and a shirt and tie. Jimmy was curious – he must be a foreigner, not from the island at all.

The sun moved behind them and Jimmy saw the shadow of his father wave at him, frantically, excitedly, holding him in his spot. Jimmy put down the rock he was fixing in place and wiped his hands down the front of his working trousers.

‘This is Anthony Irvine.’

Jimmy held out his hand, and as he did, the man’s face came into view.

‘Good to meet you, Jimmy,’ he said. ‘I believe you are the man I have to thank for finding my friend Jack.’

His accent was English, and he was a good deal older than
Jimmy – thirty or more, anyway – but the most striking thing about him was the deep, mauve scar that ran down his face like a jagged railway track, pulling the corner of his right eye down towards his mouth and turning the edge of the lip up to meet it in a permanent smile.

‘Sean tells me you’ve been in the wars too?’

‘Well, a fire.’

‘Went in to save some chaps and got struck down yourself, from what I hear?’

‘They were dead already, so I needn’t have bothered.’

‘You can’t have known that,’ he said, ‘otherwise you’d have been a damn fool going in in the first place, wouldn’t you?’

Jimmy smiled despite himself. In less than a minute this man had cheered him up more than the doctors or his parents could ever hope to do. He understood.

‘Thing is, I just had the one chap with me and he’s dead too . . . Tried to save him but didn’t. Not a nice feeling, but then, no point in feeling bad about it, eh? Compared with them, we got off scot-free.’

Jimmy had a pang of guilt. There were days he envied the Cleggan dead.

‘Now, Sean,’ he said, clapping his father on the back, ‘I was promised tea. I heard there was a Scottish woman on this island makes the best soda bread west of the Shannon.’

‘That’s my Morag,’ said Sean. He was glowing with delight. It was as if he had manifested, through his own will, not just his legendary wife but this guest with his good humour and his brave hero-talk.

On the way back to the house, the two men gave Jimmy the news of what had happened in the days since the body had washed ashore. Jack’s body had been transported to the local undertaker for safekeeping. Anthony had been alerted and
travelled immediately from his home in London to take charge of formalities. The remains themselves were beyond identification, but like all naval officers, in the event of such a tragedy happening, Jack had a number of effects on his person, a ring and an unusual pendant, that Anthony was able to use to ID him, and which he took back with him as mementos for Jack’s infirm father, his only surviving relative, who was too sick to travel. Given that fact, Jack’s father had signed the body over into Anthony’s care and was content for his son to be buried at sea by the fishermen who had found him. And there would be a proper military service for him back in England too.

‘What about you?’ Sean said, as they reached the house. ‘That’s a nasty injury you must have got.’

Anthony stuck his thumb deep into his scar and drew down the length of it with such vigour Jimmy was afraid he might draw blood. ‘Oh, this. No, Sean, I got this a while ago. I’m a regular hero, me,’ and he gave them a conspiratorial wink that left both men unsure whether he was joking or not – but certain that there was some amusing story to be told!

Morag got into a terrible state when her two men arrived back with a guest. Not just a guest, but a stranger! Entertaining such a visitor would require enormous preparations for any island woman, let alone a house-proud Scot like Jimmy’s mother. She ran into the kitchen to put some bread on before Sean had the chance to introduce her properly to their guest, and came back a few minutes later having taken her apron off and patted down her hair. Jimmy also noticed that she was wearing some lipstick. ‘The Lipstick’ was rarely used but sat permanently on the windowsill above the sink in the back scullery in front of a small shard of mirror. As a child, Jimmy had always believed that the gold tube was a kind of magic talisman – like the miraculous medals he had pinned to his vest or the holy water font
by their back door. He was astonished when he discovered it contained a ‘pink crayon’ and coveted it for much of his childhood. For a moment he smiled to himself, remembering how he had once been such an innocent. He was a man of the world now and in the company of this English officer who called him a ‘fellow’ and wore the scars of his own bad luck with such pride Jimmy felt like even more of a man.

Morag served them all tea in the good willow-pattern china, and warm soda bread with butter and jam. Anthony stayed for the best part of the afternoon. He told them stories about his life in London, about his late Irish mother and about how ‘London is full of us Irish now – we’d be lost without you fellows coming over and doing the work us war chaps are leaving behind.’