The Lost Garden (23 page)

Jimmy looked at him intently, seeming to consider first if the offer was genuine, then the offer itself. Then his good eye filled with tears. He looked away, and when he looked back, there was a look of abject misery that John Joe had never seen before in his life. The boy reached up slowly and took off his mask.

‘Would she love me still,’ Jimmy said gently, ‘looking like this?’

John Joe instinctively turned his face slightly to one side; he could not hide his shocked disgust, and by the time he tried, it was too late.

‘She would surely,’ the older man said, but even knowing the sort of soft woman his young friend was, he did not sound convinced, even to himself.

‘I thought not,’ Jimmy said.

He clipped his mask back on, then stood up and shook John Joe’s hand like a gentleman.

‘Thank you for trying to find me,’ he said, ‘and remember me to Aileen.’

As he walked across the bar, John Joe thought of chasing after him and trying to persuade him further, but he could not be certain Aileen would thank him. In the end, she and this
young man had their own destinies of love to fulfil – just as he had his, and there was no way of knowing what they would be.

Although John Joe knew that, for certain, his was not going to be found in Percy’s club that night.

Chapter Thirty-Three

At first the grass in the ten pots had never bloomed beyond the golden balls of feathery foliage she had carried to the church. Even when planted out, they had grown to a certain size, then stopped. This was all the more peculiar because every plant they shared a bed with seemed to grow at an extraordinary rate – almost out of Aileen’s control. The vegetables in the plot where Carmel had chosen to initially plant them had gone altogether berserk. Lettuce seeds were reaching a full head in the blink of an eye, tomatoes were crawling out onto the paths overnight, and brassicas like broccoli and cauliflower were blossoming to the size of a human head.

The seeds that Aileen had ordered from her London catalogues were thriving and already she had trays of exotic plants and flowers peeking through that she was hopeful would be ready for planting out the following year, if she could keep the glasshouse pipes warm throughout the winter. The grapevines that she had first discovered were already more than earning their keep. In addition to watering and feeding them, Aileen had set up a complicated arrangement of mirrored glass around the place to reflect as much sunlight as possible back onto them. Nurtured with her kind and determined hand, the vines had rewarded her by bearing fruit in an abundance that surprised
and delighted everyone. So much so that she was wrapping bundles of them in tissue paper and boxing them once, sometimes twice a week to send to Findlaters food merchants in Dublin.

The women came to the garden every day now. The ten of them who formed the core group had found that working on Aileen’s garden was a way of not just supporting one another but creating something beautiful. As their garden grew, the women grew closer to each other. They seldom discussed what had happened in Cleggan, each understanding the boundaries of their pain better than outsiders could. Despite the length of their journey back to Ireland, and the Masses and the memorials to each of their dead, the women still felt the burden of their loss as an immediate shock. They were united in their grief. It seemed also that the more time they spent together in Aileen’s garden, tilling the same soil and bringing things to life, the closer they felt to one another. This was evident mostly as a synergy among them as they worked in silent meditation, a choreographed intimacy. Aside from the beauty of the garden itself, it was this obvious phenomenon of female bonding that visitors to the garden found most fascinating. The women knelt in the vegetable patch pressing soft undulations in the black, crumbling soil, passing tools and seedlings to each other wordlessly; as one woman discarded messy weeds at the edge of a flower bed, another would pass by with a wheelbarrow and clear them without invitation. They moved around the different parts of the garden doing what needed to be done – watering, feeding, weeding, planting, trimming, tending – with no rota or discussion needed. Each knew there was some greater instinct at play, but nobody questioned it. If it was magic, the spirit of their dead moving through them, well, then to speak of such a thing out loud might break the spell. Otherwise they were simply keeping
themselves occupied so that they had no time to think of their troubles or losses. They were escaping to a different world where there was work to be done, but where the air fluttered and hummed with the sound of bees and butterflies, and smelt of lilac and roses.

There were tears sometimes, but the jagged, disbelieving anger of the young and the endless, wailing keening from the older women eased as the garden became more fruitful and abundant.

After the women planted the grass and started working in the garden, they noticed a strange thing happening: it seemed that as they got better in themselves, the plants started to change.

Even though autumn was approaching, the weather in the garden was always a few degrees warmer and that bit more clement than outside it, as the high, thick walls protected it from the worst of the winds and island chills. As a result, things seemed to keep growing with the same voracity as in high summer.

The first plant to break through was Carmel’s.

The women had taken to going together to Mass on a Sunday morning. They gathered at the gates of the gardener’s cottage with two horses and two carts, including John Joe’s, who had come back after just under two weeks away. Aileen found that she could leave the confines of the garden in this way; flanked and surrounded by the other women, she felt safe, as if she were taking her garden with her. She was careful always to stay at the centre of the group as they filed into the church and sat in the middle of the pew between John Joe and Biddy. She did not pray but simply watched the light from the windows play across the altar and allowed herself to fall into a kind of trance.

Of all the women, Aileen could see that Carmel had blossomed the most. Her spoilt nature had been tamed somewhat since the death of her father and brother, but she was as outspoken as ever. So when Kevin Kerrigan approached her after Mass one
morning and asked if she would step out with him, she snapped back, ‘And me still grieving? Whatever would make you ask such a cold-hearted thing?’ then turned away, although all the women could see that her face was beaming with such joy, her eyes glittering with pride and pleasure, it was as if her veins had been injected with the elixir of life itself.

The following morning, back in the garden, Carmel called Aileen over to her plant. Growing through the centre of the grass was a thick stem, half an inch deep and a good two inches tall already. It was clear then that this was not grass at all but merely the leaves of an exotic flower.

Everyone gathered round to look at what had happened to Carmel’s plant, but over the coming days all of the grasses grew flower stems. There was nothing so unusual in that except that the women could attribute their growth to each other’s well-being. The better the women felt in themselves, the healthier and stronger the plants became.

Biddy fed everyone. Every morning when the women trooped through the back gate past the door of the gardener’s cottage, Biddy would remember why she was here. Her part in these women’s pain was certain: it had been her carelessness in not checking Aileen’s fire that had led to the deaths of their men, ten of them, each and every one. The damage was done. Feeling sorry for herself would achieve nothing, so she would close her eyes and pray and ask God to guide her in a way of making good on her terrible act. Every morning He sent her the same message: cook for them.

So Biddy cooked. She cooked as if her life depended on it. Each day’s recipes were carefully planned. Like most of the island women, given the distance and cost of doctors, Biddy knew about the healing properties of herbs. However, she had never thought about using them in her cooking before. Feeding
tattie-hokers had always involved heartiness before health – bread, meat and potatoes were the staple foods – and time had always been a factor too. Working in the fields, she never had more than an hour to prepare food for twenty people. Now, Biddy rose at dawn and began to plan and prepare their meals for the day. Using fresh produce from the garden, she infused every meal with healing herbs – even cakes. She added finely chopped dandelion leaves to salads to aid digestion and clear their bodies of impurities; plenty of garlic and onions in every stew to keep the blood thin and fight infections; rosemary in her soda cakes for concentration and memory to keep the women alert; lavender jelly to calm their moods and spirits; and nettles as a base for her soups, to help breathing – so they could better experience the life they were creating all around them.

Aileen and the women had been hopeful that they could feed themselves on the fruits of their labour, but within weeks it seemed that their ambitions were vastly underrated.

News spread of their endeavours and now they were feeding half the island. Biddy ran the garden shop, bartering food for food with farmers and taking money from the wealthier people who were coming over from the mainland in cars from as far away as Westport to buy their weekly fruit and vegetables. Many of them arrived hungry, so with some of the money the women clubbed together and bought some items from a house-sale dealer – twenty wooden kitchen chairs, five small tables of various heights and purposes, and two full tea services – and opened an outdoor cafe of sorts. Biddy cooked on her open fire and visitors to the garden lapped up her hearty bothy food – hot home-cured sausages on slices of thick crumbly brown bread served with piping-hot sweet tea boiled and made in her very own enormous black kettle.

As it became known that Findlaters in Dublin were buying
grapes grown in Ireland, customer curiosity led the reputation of Aileen’s garden to travel right across the country. Already a somewhat popular holiday location, Illaunmor had had a boom summer as news of Aileen’s magnificent garden filtered through to gardening enthusiasts, amateur botanists and curious holiday-makers keen to come and look at how these grieving island women had carved such beauty out of their, by now well-documented, pain.

Aileen’s contact with the world increased as her garden grew. There was the everyday hubbub of dealing with plant and vegetable customers, and Biddy’s cooking attracted crowds of buyers and hungry gawkers. People bought from them, but many just came to experience the extraordinary beauty of the place. When the skies above Illaunmor were grey, the colours of the wild-flower beds seemed to glow even brighter, and the drizzling rain never dampened the silky rose-petal carpet. People said the garden was miraculous, that it was impossible that such things could be happening in Ireland, at this time of year. Some whispered that Aileen must be a witch of some kind. Others said it was God giving these grieving women a helping hand with clement weather and good soil.

Aileen found that now she was not expected to leave the garden, she could easily deal with the grocers who came from as far as Dublin to inspect and buy her produce. As the garden grew more like Paradise, and her confidence grew alongside its beauty, so did her reluctance to leave. Her fear of the world became so severe that she found herself nervous about stepping outside the walls of the garden itself. As far as the top of the drive to the big house felt like a separate universe to her. Aileen’s world was inside the tall stone boundaries, and ‘outside’ was the courtyard that led to the front of the house. Beyond that was a wider world that, for no reason she could decipher, had
begun to feel foreign and dangerous to her. It was like stepping off the edge of the world itself and into the black unknown. Her only trek each week was to the church, but that felt safe when she was surrounded by the other women. The cottage she grew up in and John Joe’s house, places where she had previously felt secure, had become as terrifying as the bottomless expanse of water that lay beyond them. Her ultimate fear was the sea and the idea of having to cross it. Where once she had stood on the beach and looked across the water dreaming of what joy and adventure lay on the other side, she now felt the ocean was a path to pain. Across the water was Scotland, the place that had killed her father and brothers; across the water was the mainland, where her mother had disappeared to and left her here alone.

When she was inland, in her garden, Aileen didn’t need to worry about such things. She could be herself and she felt like there was no reason for her to ever venture beyond the walls.

The only question Aileen ever had about leaving her garden was the possibility of seeing Jimmy again.

When John Joe returned from London, her question was answered.

‘I bumped into a friend of yours,’ he told her. He said it casually, but she noticed he had waited until the end of the day, when the glasshouse was cleared of people and they were unlikely to be interrupted, before telling her. Aileen did not have any friends in London, none that she knew of, although there were one or two seed suppliers there to whom she had been writing. ‘Jimmy Walsh . . .’

The knees went from under her. She leaned back on the vine for support and reached up her hand, grabbing a branch to steady herself.

John Joe tried to keep his voice even, but he could see she
was shaken and immediately regretted having said anything at all.

‘. . . from Aghabeg.’

He went over and led her to a bench to sit down.

Aileen stayed silent for a moment and John Joe was not sure if that was a good or a bad thing, so he just talked. They met in a pub, he lied, in Camden Town. There were a lot of Irish there, he said, and they were introduced by a fellow Irishman. It was some coincidence, he continued. Aileen still said nothing, just looked at the ground in front of her. Listening intently. She was shocked, he could see that, so he just said, ‘Nice lad,’ and when she realized he wasn’t going to continue beyond that, she put her hand on his arm and asked, ‘How is he?’

Aileen herself hoped she had said it lightly so that John Joe would not know that it was the most important question she had ever asked of anyone, that his answer could change everything for her.

‘Oh, he seems in fine form. Working . . . doing well . . . you know?’

‘I heard he was injured in the fire?’

‘Oh yes, well, he got burned all right. His face . . . well, it’s terrible to tell the truth. Disfigured . . . but he wears a mask . . .’ The well-meaning bachelor got flustered then, not wanting to sound bad against the lad. ‘Although, he has a good job, well-paid work he gave me to believe, lots of friends.’ That sounded perhaps like the lad was careless. ‘Seems to be settling down nicely . . .’

In any case, he could see that what he was saying wasn’t helping his young friend and he was right. Once Aileen realized that he was not going to say what she wanted to hear – ‘Jimmy still loves you. He is coming back for you’ – all other news of Jimmy were slaps of rejection.

John Joe was only tying himself up in knots, so he finished up: ‘He said to say he was asking after you.’

Even to his own ears it sounded like pathetically small comfort.

To Aileen it was the end. Jimmy had a new life in London, without her. The final flicker of hope from her past had been stamped underfoot and extinguished like a discarded cigarette.