The Lost Garden (21 page)

Chapter Thirty-One

Aileen’s mother wrote to her from the mainland.

She was in the greenhouse with Biddy, John Joe and the children when she opened the thick white envelope. Her mother had spent money on expensive stationery. Was she already returning to her genteel roots?

Maurice had followed her across to the mainland and the two of them had got married. It was a small affair, ‘given the circumstances’. Anne’s sister and her husband had been witnesses, and there had been no celebration, as such. She and her new husband had taken a small house in Ballina and his first cousin had got him some work in the local flour mill. It was the Ballina connection that had first brought them together. They were very happy, Anne assured her, and she hoped that Aileen would come and visit them soon.

She enclosed a money order, which Aileen threw to one side, on top of the seed catalogues she had sent for from England. These were the only things she was interested in spending her money on.

‘P.S.,’ her mother wrote, ‘you are to have another brother or sister, as we are already expecting our first child.’

‘First child,’ said Aileen. ‘How could she have moved on so quickly?’ Aileen was still not used to the fact that her family
had all gone and now it seemed that her mother was rebuilding another one without her.

‘Humph. Pregnant
already
,’ Biddy said after Aileen silently passed her the letter.

‘I know,’ said Aileen. ‘They’ve only been married a matter of weeks.’

Biddy was about to say something, but John Joe gave her a mutinous look.

He had just told them that he was planning to leave for London the following week on business and was hoping Biddy and Aileen would look after the children for him.

Aileen did not know what business John Joe could possibly have in London, except perhaps making arrangements with his brother about the children, but as she was about to question him, Biddy butted in, reminding her that ‘a man’s business is nobody else’s business’, so Aileen left well alone.

It wasn’t just her mother’s situation that had changed; her own life seemed to be moving along too.

Biddy had moved in things from her own house so that the deserted gardener’s cottage in the abandoned garden was now fixed up as a full home. The older woman had insisted that Aileen sleep in a bed in the house ‘like a normal person’, although most mornings she went out and found her young charge already working through the dawn. However, while John Joe was in London, the two children would be able to sleep in the cottage with Biddy, and Aileen settled back into the idea that she’d spend her nights sleeping in the greenhouse again, alone with the plants, where she felt she most belonged.

So Biddy had moved from her home into the garden cottage, John Joe was going over to London, and her mother was settled in Ballina. Everyone around Aileen was moving themselves to different places. Aileen just wanted to stay where she was. She
had found a place where she felt happy and could not ever envisage leaving it. In any case, there was too much to be done yet. While her garden was well under way, it was not complete. She would move on when she felt the garden was fully created to her satisfaction, when it was finished. Although Aileen knew that, in truth, a garden was never finished. It just grew and died and came back to life in a never-ending cycle.

The day the women came to her garden, Aileen was in the thick of it.

She had woken that morning to find her vegetable patch all but disappeared. The lettuces looked like a plague of locusts had been at them.

‘Slugs,’ she said, ‘curse and damn you,’ as she saw that the grass all around was covered in their silvery trails. Of course, there was not a slug in sight. She came out sometimes at night to check and had picked the odd unwise slug who was feeding off the thin end of a rhubarb leaf, but she had never experienced anything like this before. At home, certainly, but not here. Being surrounded by a high wall on all sides meant that Aileen’s garden was never subject to the strong winds coming in off the Atlantic and appeared to remain a few degrees warmer than elsewhere on the island. ‘Creating a microclimate’ was how the
Ladies’ Companion
described the purpose of walled gardens like these.

It had been Carmel’s mother’s idea. Mary Kelly had wanted somewhere nice to plant out Mick’s and Michael’s pots and had heard that the young Doherty girl was spending a lot of her time down in the Englishman’s garden.

On an island this size, watching other people coming and going passed for entertainment. The movements of John Joe’s cart and the visitors in and out of the gates of the big house
had been duly logged and had created a certain level of interest and speculation among the islanders. Smoke had been seen rising in the sky above it; ‘the witch’, as she had come to be known, Biddy had been seen going in one day by a neighbouring farmer and was never seen coming out again. John Joe was a respectable churchgoer and a good man, but surely there was something
just not right
about him. What kind of witchcraft or strange shenanigans could be going on in there? Since Aileen’s performance in the church curiosity levels had been raised even higher.

The memorial service had affected all of the mourning women deeply and each had taken their pot home with them. The women were generally at a loss as to what to do with these peculiar gifts, yet they held enough significance to not be simply tossed aside.

When Monica Flaherty suggested to Mary they go as a group to see Aileen, the women all agreed it was the right thing to do, not least because they were curious anyway to see what was going on behind those high stone walls. Nobody would walk up the drive of a house like that. Even with it being derelict and the proprietor long gone, it just would not seem right, so they met on the road behind the house and walked across Timmy Harrington’s field, which ran adjacent to the back garden wall, where Timmy showed them there was a door leading into the garden itself.

‘I’ve not been in there since I was a young lad stealing apples,’ he said, ‘although the fruit trees are all gone now, I’d say.’

The women didn’t announce themselves; they just walked in, the whole lot of them, through the back door of the garden in a line.

Aileen happened to be in the greenhouse and saw them look around briefly, then walk down the path towards her carrying their pots.

Aileen did not know what to do.

Especially when she saw Biddy coming out of her cottage to see what the noise was, and then retreat like a snail. As the old lady backed in, Aileen caught a look of blind terror on her face and started to panic herself. Why were they here? Had they come to chastise her, or were they on a witch hunt for Biddy? It was enough that there were unexpected, uninvited guests in her sanctuary.

Aileen stepped outside and met them at the door of the greenhouse. Claire Murphy spoke first: ‘We’ve come to thank you for the . . .,’ they had not quite decided what to call the strange pots, ‘. . . gifts and we were hoping you might find us a suitable place to . . .,’ again she faltered, unprepared for quite what she meant, ‘. . . put them?’

Aileen was relieved. As soon as she realized they wanted to plant the pots, the only thought in her mind was, Where? With the challenge of finding a place to put these special plants all other thoughts disappeared. Biddy, the fact that there was a gaggle of women in her garden, none of it mattered above where –
where
should she put these plants? Aileen all but snatched the pot from Claire Murphy’s hand and began walking around the garden holding it out from her chest at arm’s length. It was always like this. She might try to plan, to think things through, decide where this and that might go, but ultimately Aileen ended up just walking around holding the plant out and waiting for the ground to call out to her.

All Aileen could see were the scrappy gaps between plants and the empty corners and the patches that were bare of flowers, but the women following her were open-mouthed in amazement. The garden was the most extraordinary place any of them had ever seen. Roses clambering over their heads on a delicate trellis, banks of lavender, flower beds with a cacophony of pretty wild
flowers, a freshwater pond with white lilies floating across it, paths with tidy gravel that crunched underfoot and little, trimmed circular hedges that looked like they might be the measured borders of fairy houses. How long had Aileen been working on this garden? How was all this growth possible? They had been told this place was derelict, but it seemed as though it was in full bloom. She must have had help. There were still patches of exposed earth here and there, and some of the hedging was bare and twiggy, but overall it was a beautiful place. Nobody said a word while Aileen fussed about in front of them trying to find a spot for the unusual grasses, but the women, who believed they had witnessed an actual miracle in the church, could already feel that this was a magical place.

‘What about here?’

Aileen had not found anywhere in the flower garden where the plants would fit to her satisfaction and decided it was because the garden would not talk to her when there was this much company around. Even though the women were following respectfully behind her in a silent procession and there were spaces in her bed that she had been longing to fill, Aileen could get no sense of where these plants belonged. She decided to simply put them back in the greenhouse and wait until the women had gone before deciding what to do with them. She felt somewhat irritated then that she had gone to all this trouble in giving them away and now they were placing the responsibility for them on her again. However, as they crossed through back into the vegetable garden, Aileen saw that Carmel had run ahead and was standing at the edge of the decimated lettuce bed.

‘I think this would be a good place.’

It occurred to Aileen that these were the first words Carmel had spoken to her since the Cleggan fire and, probably, certainly, the only civil ones ever.

Aileen went and placed the pot down on the earth and nodded for the other women to do the same. Once all the pots were arranged at intervals along the beds, the women knelt and, pushing aside the earth with their bare hands, planted out the grassy pots. As they tipped out the rooted bulbs, each one of the women felt a shiver run through them, like a current of life coming from the plant.

‘Would you look at that,’ Monica, Noreen Flaherty’s mother, said, standing up after her planting.

All of the women looked across to the gardener’s cottage, where Biddy was standing at the doorway, wiping her hands on her apron, although to Aileen it looked more like she was nervously wringing her hands. The women saw her stern features set in a look of defiance, but Aileen recognized immediately that this was an act of courage: to face her detractors.

Aileen’s own three pots were sitting outside on a bench near the greenhouse. She picked up one of them, then walked across to Biddy and gave it to her, putting her hands on her arm so the other women could see they were friends and signalling the nervous Biddy to follow her lead. Then she walked back and picked up the remaining two pots and the two women got down on their knees in the black earth and planted them out. As they finished, Biddy closed her eyes and grabbed Aileen’s hand; then holding her down in her kneeling position, she took a pair of rosary beads out of her apron pocket with her other hand.

‘Hail, Holy Queen . . .’ she began and said a decade of the rosary, while the other women, now standing at the sides of the bed, joined in.

The whole time they were praying, the older woman held Aileen’s hand in a tight grip so that she knew that this was an
act of contrition: Biddy and Aileen begging the Virgin Mary’s forgiveness for setting the fire badly that night – prostrating themselves at the feet of the women whose loved ones had perished due to their fecklessness.

As the women prayed, their tears fell and watered the ground.

When the decade was over, Biddy lit a fire outside and cooked sausages and bread and tea for them all, as she had done in the bothy in Scotland, asking that each woman sit as she served them.

When the meal was over, it seemed that, without a word having been said, her penance was complete.

The women stayed on that afternoon and insisted on working in the garden with Aileen, watering and planting and weeding and potting.

‘You’ve moss on the lawn,’ Nuala Collins said to Aileen. ‘That means your ground’s too wet – it needs draining.’ She took Aileen over to the wall of the flower garden. ‘Those trenches there are called culverts,’ she said. ‘They’re blocked with weeds and leaves, look – they need clearing or your ground will be pure sod and you’ll never grow a thing.’

The following day, she returned with all of the women again, each carrying a shovel.

They set about digging around the edges of the walls, clearing out the drainage channels that had become blocked, making the earth claggy and damp and overrunning the grand lawns with moss.

The next day, they brought their brushes and scrubbed down the flagstones and the outside of the greenhouse.

The next day, they whitewashed the gardener’s cottage and replanted the vegetable garden with new seedlings.

The more work the women did, the more work they found.
With the women’s labour, the whole garden sprang to life in a way that Aileen knew it would never have done with her alone. From being reluctant about their company, she started to thrive on being surrounded by others, and the more she thrived, the more her garden grew.

It grew and grew at a rate that was, by anyone’s standards, unusual.

Underneath the arbour was a permanent carpet of plump pink rose petals that never seemed to wither or wilt into a mush, but renewed itself daily so it remained fresh and satin-like underfoot. The grass lost its mossy patches and became vigorous and a soft, solid green, but the wild-flower beds were the most beautiful of all: a symphony of colour and movement, they attracted swarms of brightly painted butterflies that shimmered above them constantly in moving clouds of crimson and blue. The garden was peaceful, but if you closed your eyes and listened, the noise was almost deafening: the buzz of bees and hum of hoverflies competing with the twittering of small birds, loudly objecting to the human presence from their safe perches high up in the trees.