The Lost Garden (24 page)

John Joe left and Aileen took a deep breath, then exhaled in one, heavy sob. She would not cry, not now – not for what might have been when she had cried enough for the deaths and what had been already. As she sat gathering herself, her eye was caught by the line of barren pots she had left under the counter on the day the ten pots had first sprouted. She had left them there hoping that one might sprout up for Jimmy, not fully understanding that the plants had grown from the spirits of the dead men, although now she wondered if that was true. The strange plants were flourishing as the women healed themselves and as they tended the ground the plants grew in. It was the women’s love that was making the grasses grow – not the spirits of the dead men themselves. She knelt down and touched the dry soil in the dead pots. Jimmy was alive and happy living a new life far away. Her love was not enough to bring him back. Her love for him was not strong enough to breathe life into this dead soil.

She left the pots where they were in their dry corner of the greenhouse and resolved to leave the bit of her heart that loved Jimmy Walsh there with them until it too crumbled into dust.

Aileen had no other choice but to resign herself to life in her garden. Jimmy was gone to her now. Without him, there was no need for her ever to leave this place. In any case, she told herself, what need had she to see the outside world when the world was coming to see her?

She took another breath and allowed it to propel her out into
the sunlight towards the bed where the crazy magic plants were thriving. Aileen knelt down and drank in the smell of the warm earth until she felt safe again. Then reaching into her apron for a pair of scissors, she snipped off a cutting from one of her own plants, then wrapped it in a small piece of tissue. She would send it off in tomorrow’s post to the Botanic Gardens in Dublin and get a name for this mysterious grass that somehow seemed to be telling her the story of her life.

Chapter Thirty-Four

Dr François DuPont wiped the mist from the glasshouse window with his handkerchief and looked out on another dreary Dublin morning. In front of him was one of the ornate sweeping flower beds of the Botanic Gardens. The showy shape and colour of what was surely one of the most magnificent gardens in Europe did nothing for the young botanist. For him, the beauty was all in the detail. What could be seen under a microscope, the complex patterns of mites and plant cells was infinitely more interesting to him than a man-made flower bed. Science made a mockery of man’s attempts to create almost anything. It was an opinion that did not make him popular, but François cared nothing about his own popularity. He was much more interested in plants.

He moved away from the window and vaguely checked the growth of a hybrid orchid he had planted less than three days ago, finding it had already pushed through the soil of his carefully named and numbered tray. Professor DuPont tried to drum up a feeling of satisfaction at his own achievement in encouraging such rapid growth, but he could not.

DuPont had been here working in Dublin’s Botanic Gardens for almost six years. He had been offered a place at Kew in London, but had chosen Dublin because his mother was ‘Catholique’ and he preferred the temperament of the Irish people.
He had thought it would be fun. He had been wrong. Two things were playing on François’s mind that morning.

The first was the war back home – as it was every morning. When the possibility of his leaving Paris to research and catalogue the wild flowers of Ireland had first been mooted, the invasion of France by Germany was little more than a threat. Nobody ever imagined it would actually happen. Yet the unimaginable
did
happen. Paris was under the control of the Nazis and his parents were living under the rule of the German Army. It was the first thing François thought of when he woke every morning: his brother and sister were fighting in the French Resistance, while their middle sibling was here, in dreary, rain-soaked Dublin inspecting the new stem of an
Alstroemeria pulchra
with a pair of tweezers. He had tried to leave his position of visiting research librarian on a number of occasions, but each time he had been persuaded to stay. At just thirty, he was the youngest academic of his stature in Europe and he had an obligation to finish his research. The older botanists, many of them very eminent world-class scientists, argued, what was the point of going back to a war when there was such essential research work to be done into the healing properties of wild flowers occurring in nature? In isolating the healing compounds of plants in order to mimic them in conventional medicine – what could be more important than that?

In any case, his mother would not let him return under any circumstances. She said she would have him arrested at the dock herself if he as much as set foot off Irish soil. ‘It’s safe there.’ François could not make her understand that his own safety meant nothing to him as long as his country was at war. Although believing that did not negate the fact that his plant research
was
of enormous historical and international significance. There was little doubt, even to himself if he was honest, that Dr François
DuPont, with his horn-rimmed spectacles and his slight, bookish physique, was a far better academic than he would ever be a soldier.

‘Study flowers – win prizes,’ his father’s words rang in his head when he finally managed to get him on the telephone after Paris had been taken. ‘Let your brother and sister play with their guns and you stay there and get on with your important work.’

His father made light, but in reality François knew his parents were terrified for his siblings, Vivette and Jerome. While nobody would argue that his work was more important than fighting a war, the best thing François could do from here was assure his parents that they would come out of this war with at least one child still alive.

The second thing that was bothering François was a long, slim leaf that was sitting on a sheet of white paper on the desk to his left. He had received the sample five days ago from a woman on one of the remote islands off the west coast – a place whose flora he had yet to investigate, at least partly because he had not thought its climate and landscape sufficiently dissimilar to the nearby mainland areas for them to warrant a visit. The Burren, with its unique limestone geology, was where all the rare stuff was, so he thought there was no point in moving further west. He was, it seemed, wrong about that. If there was one thing François DuPont hated, it was being wrong about his work.

He had spent two full days checking and rechecking the leaf against every book and periodical in their extensive library and had come up with nothing. What made it particularly frustrating was that this seemed to be such an ordinary plant. To the untrained eye, this looked like a common-or-garden blade of grass. But it wasn’t. Through the centre of the narrow leaf ran a thread of
gold, barely visible to the naked eye, but under his microscope the minuscule line shone with a clarity that suggested it was metal, which, when he tested it, he found it was. François was flabbergasted. While some plants did contain metallic elements, it was not in such a way that they could constitute an actual structure – like the adornment of a gold thread. Such an idea was preposterous. Yet here under his microscope was a plant that appeared to be doing just that.

More annoying yet was that this common gardener person, this woman who had sent him the leaf, seemed aware of the thread’s existence. She could see it, and as she said in her letter, ‘I have looked in all of my collection of books but cannot find a note of it anywhere. Also, I know this may appear strange, but sometimes it seems to glow like gold.’

She had checked in her book collection, and if she had seen the gold itself, she must have studied the leaf under a microscope. All of this could only mean one thing – that he had inadvertently come into contact with a plant enthusiast and there was nothing that upset the sensibilities of an academic botanist more than the semi-informed opinion of an amateur.

Nonetheless, baffled and curious and in the interest of science, Dr François DuPont had no choice but to journey out to the island of Illaunmor to find out more about this strange plant and the person who was no doubt going to try and ‘claim’ it as their own if he failed to identify it.

Irritated, he picked up the frustrating leaf from his desk, placed it into a tissue sample envelope and took it straight over to the director’s office, who, having listened to the young Frenchman’s rant, relieved him of all his lecturing and touring duties for the coming days so that he could investigate this strange anomaly.

By mid-morning the Westport train was pulling out of Kingsbridge Station and the eminent young botanist was gazing
out from his warm compartment at the autumn drizzle. It rained in France, but not like this. Not all the time, every season. People said it was good for the plants, but it didn’t make any difference. Plants would evolve and adapt to their surroundings. If only people could just understand that. François missed the sun; he missed the feel of it on his face, the way it bronzed and weathered his skin. The summer was gone now in any case. Dreary autumn in Ireland was well and truly under way and he was another year away from his family. He couldn’t think about that now, so he took his heavy encyclopedia out of his small knapsack – it was almost the only thing in there aside from a packed tent and a change of clothes – and began to check it against the leaf again.

It was late afternoon before he could get a car to take him from Westport Station to the far reaches of the island where this woman had stated her address to be. He supposed he should have written in advance of his coming, but then again, if she was a keen amateur botanist, he thought cynically, she would be thrilled to have alerted the attention of somebody from the Botanic Gardens, although he supposed she might think she knew better than him.

His fears were alerted further when he gave the swarthy taxi driver the woman’s name and address and he said, in a barely discernible brogue, ‘Isn’t that yer wan with the famous garden? I’m going there myself, as it happens.’

The sun was setting as they drew up to the front gate of the old, derelict house. As soon as they pulled in, François’s worst fears about some keen gardener looking to make a name for herself seemed confirmed. In the front courtyard of the house were brightly coloured traditional Irish horse carts filled with potted plants and a big ‘Garden Flowers for Sale’ sign in front of them.

The taxi pulled up, and after François had paid, the driver grabbed a dead chicken from under his seat, then followed him out of the car.

‘The wife told me to get some vegetables. They’ve all kinds of fruits out the back – you wouldn’t believe. She was selling grapes last week! I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes! Anyway, the wife is gone stone mad for the food here and I’m sent up every night to see what she has.’ He held up the chicken. ‘I’ll put the chicken in and they’ll give a bag of fruit and vegetables back. You’d want to see the size of the tomatoes coming out of there! The size of a cat’s head, some of them! Fair trade and they take money too if you’re interested.’

Even though it was late in the day, there were still plenty of people milling about. As François followed a woman in an apron through a door in the high stone wall, he entered the formal garden he was expecting. There was the rose-covered arbour, the miniature maze, the formally planted beds, a monkey puzzle with a marble seat, a fountain and all the usual bourgeois garden accoutrements rich people across the world used to create their own version of Versailles to try and impress.

However, the botanist heard it as soon as he walked in. The
thrum
of sap rising, the crinkle of things growing: the sound of science happening. He turned round and there it was: every wild flower he could possibly imagine in a huge flower bed, dancing alongside each other. The rare, the mundane, the ordinary and the beautiful all living impossibly, miraculously in equal measure, in harmony, in one place. There was a small patch of ground elder with a spray of pretty poppies pushing through it – undeterred. Dandelions were arranged in a solid lump of showy yellow as if somebody had actually planted the weed and not one of them had strayed onto the paths or other beds. Lilies and
cornflowers, daisies and ragwort and lady’s mantle in an ordered symphony existing in a controlled way, yet there was nothing contrived here, nothing unnatural. There was just every plant that was interesting to him here in one place. François dropped to his haunches to check the temperature and texture of the soil. As he did, the Frenchman felt a ray of glorious sunshine, a heated glow, hit the side of his face. When he turned and looked up, he saw there was a young woman standing over him. Her hair was a tumble of fiery red, and in her hands she appeared to be holding a pot of gold leaves.

Chapter Thirty-Five

The meeting with John Joe was a turning point, of sorts, for Jimmy. When he took off his mask and saw the look of horror on the man’s face, he finally realized that it was pointless dwelling on dreams.

Aileen was in his past; the love they had, the love he had felt for her was part of who he had been before the fire. Things were different now. He looked different and he felt different. Anthony introduced him to people as Invincible Jim, but Jimmy realized that it was simply a joke. He went along with Anthony’s hard-man humour, shrugging and laughing at his disfigurement so that people wouldn’t see he cared. If they knew he was hurt, then they might see the truth – that he had once thought himself invincible – and that would be the biggest joke of all.

Jimmy’s ambition in coming to London had been to restore himself and return to the man he had been. When he realized that surgery was not an option, part of him had still harboured a small notion that he might return to Ireland anyway to claim Aileen. He could not go home without some significant change in his appearance in any case: that would be a failure. He had come to London a penniless monster to make his fortune and fix his face. He could not stand before his parents again without having achieved those things. His parents aside, he still loved
Aileen, but he could not put himself in front of her looking as he did. He had thought of other options besides the surgery. Someone in Percy’s had told him about his father who had lost half his face in the First World War. There was an artist called Francis Wood who made the man an extraordinarily lifelike mask that was ‘so realistic you could barely tell he was wearing it’. ‘Oh, he’s long dead,’ the man had said unhelpfully when Jimmy had asked where the man worked, but Jimmy felt certain there must be another such person working in London who might help him.

However, his encounter with John Joe had quashed even his ambition for a modest fake solution. A mask was a mask – Aileen would know the man underneath. It was never going to happen. Jimmy was never going home.

This was where his life was now; this was who he was.

Perhaps it was not so bad after all, he decided. There were girls in London who would go with him looking the way he did. In fact, he knew now that there were girls in London who would go with
any
man if he had a few bob in his pocket. Mandy and Lily were those types of women. It had taken a while for it to sink in, but since his odd encounter with John Joe, Jimmy had opened himself up to seeing what was happening in the world around him. He knew everything now.

Even about Percy’s. The night after his encounter with John Joe, Anthony had insisted he come to Percy’s with him again and had introduced him to another man – a man from the north of England whose father was Irish.

‘You’ll get on,’ Anthony had said.

Jimmy was sick of meeting his boss’s friends. They kept wanting to take him off out for dinner, or to their hotels nearby for drinks instead of staying where they were. Jimmy had had a long day and was tired. He hadn’t eaten and said he wasn’t in
the mood for meeting new people, so Anthony gave him some Benzedrine. Without being told directly, Jimmy had gradually realized that, actually, Anthony wasn’t selling his clients proper medicine at all but was selling them phials of powder that would either wake them up – Benzedrine – or put them to sleep – morphine. Jimmy guessed he was breaking the law, but did not ask questions. He was working and earning money and that was good enough for him. It had to be good enough for him: he had no other choice. Besides, Anthony had been good to him: he was his friend. When he came back from East Grinstead that day, Jimmy had never felt so desperate in his life. He felt completely hollow inside, like somebody had scooped the bit of hope he had built up since the fire and cast it aside. Anthony had given him a phial of morphine and it had made him forget everything. He felt as happy and free as he had been as a small child swimming off the rocks in Aghabeg. Then he fell into a deep sleep. Jimmy had only taken the morphine once or twice since then and he preferred it to the other stuff. The Benzedrine wound him up like a clock spring and made him talk too much and grind his teeth. After taking it at night, Jimmy would be so exhausted at work the following day he would need to take some more just to keep himself going.

Anthony told him he could have as much of the Benzedrine ‘medicine’ as he liked, but the morphine was too expensive to waste. Jimmy was told that he must always ask his boss to administer it and never take it directly himself from the client’s supplies. Jimmy was shocked that Anthony would ever think he might steal from him in such a way, but then there had been a number of occasions when he had fallen asleep on the Tube and been tempted to open an envelope, although he could never be sure which powder he should be taking as the phials were unmarked and all looked the same.

On this particular evening, he had been talking, and talking, and talking at rather than to this man – paying very little attention to him beyond the fact that he was a few years older than himself, had a beard and seemed a little drunk.

Quite suddenly the man shouted over the music in a slurred drawl, ‘You talk too much,’ then leaned across the table, roughly grabbed Jimmy by the back of his head and pulled him across and tried to kiss him. Jimmy got a terrible fright and the beery buffoon’s tongue reached inside his mouth before he was able to land the drunkard a hard enough wallop to extricate himself from the man’s grip. The burly northerner stormed off, embarrassed more than angry, but while a few people looked over to see what had happened, Jimmy noticed that nobody seemed surprised at the extraordinary nature of the attack or rushed to help him.

Jimmy was shaken, his mask askew, and as he adjusted it, Percy came over and helped settle him. ‘There, there, now, sweetheart. I’ll get you some hot sweet tea.’ Jimmy knew, when he said that, that Percy was a homosexual man: a man who lay down with other men. The veil fell from his eyes immediately and Jimmy realized that he must have known all along but denied it because he enjoyed their company. Even though what they were doing was against the law, even though what they were doing was against God and was morally very, very wrong, Jimmy had not flinched from their unnaturally feminine company. Jimmy knew he was not like them, but at the same time he knew in his head, if not his heart, that it must be wrong of him to be here mixing with men like these. As Percy was fetching his tea and the other men were looking across to see if the fuss had died down, Jimmy noticed that Anthony was nowhere to be seen. Another veil fell as he realized now why he had been left with this man, why the man had tried to kiss him. Anthony
had set him up. Anthony must have told this man he would lay down with him. How many other men had he said this to? John Joe? No, John Joe was different; he had come to find him with a message from home. Jimmy was enraged and then almost as soon as the fear rose, it diminished again. He had no choice: there was no other kind of work he could do, no other life he could lead. He could not go home, and he could not stay in London without Anthony’s help. This situation he found himself in was entirely his own fault. He had been gullible and stupid, but, Jimmy told himself in that moment, he wasn’t going to be the innocent island boy anymore.

Over the coming weeks Invincible Jim reinvented himself. He asked around Percy’s thespian friends and found that a friend who worked in the theatre knew somebody who worked at Madame Tussauds. This man came round to Jimmy’s bedsit and took a cast of his face, then sculpted him a thick rubber mask that was an excellent replica of his face. Jimmy was excited when he first placed the prosthetic over his damaged face, but quickly realized that without movement it was simply a more colourful version of the medical mask he had had before. The lifeless disguise seemed to match how Jimmy felt inside, and he found that if he kept the exposed part of his face inert and his expressive eye deadened, people on the Underground would look at him with puzzlement and fear rather than the pity he had become so used to. Jimmy found he preferred being feared than pitied.

He told Anthony, in no uncertain terms, that he was not a homosexual and if there were any more set-ups, he would have no hesitation in thrashing the living daylights out of him or one of his clients. Far from being upset by his threats, Anthony apologized for ‘misinterpreting’ his ‘sexual preferences’, gave him a pay rise and said that indeed if any of his clients stepped
out of line or refused to pay, Jimmy was welcome to thrash the living daylights out of them, although, frankly, the ruthless pimp believed that his lackey’s ominous new ‘look’ made it unlikely anyone would cross either of them ever again. Jimmy began to take Benzedrine daily. He found that it kept not just the physical tiredness at bay, but closed off the hollow where his heart had been so that he could forget it was there. Jimmy had no use for a heart anymore; it just made him sad and vulnerable, and there was no place for that in London, in his new life.

Thanks to the Benzedrine, he was able to work more or less round the clock, stopping only for one square meal a day. He spent some of his money on clothes from Anthony’s tailor in Jermyn Street and started to dress his thinning frame in pinstripes until he looked like a regular spiv. He bought Lily’s company; even though she said he could have it for free, he insisted, knowing that no woman could be expected to love a man like him without getting paid for it. The rest of his wages he sent home to his parents, even though his father had assured him they had no great need for the money. Sean’s letters always ended with ‘Your mother asks when you are coming home.’ Lily went with him to a photography studio in Piccadilly Circus and they had their picture taken. He wore his pinstripe three-piece suit, and she wore her respectable coat. With the new mask he looked, to all intents and purposes in the specially toned picture, as if there was nothing wrong with him at all. He sent it to his mother, saying, ‘I got me a girl, Ma, so I’m staying in London for a while,’ then waited for his mother’s response, congratulating him on his transformed appearance. It never came.

He slept every other night, stealing carefully siphoned shots of morphine from Anthony’s locked cabinet, but only when he felt he needed it. Jimmy slept best in the short burst of exhaustion after he had emptied himself into Lily.

The day he lost his virginity to the pretty redhead, there had been no seduction on either side and very few words. Knowing that this was something that had to be done, partly through a build-up of physical need and partly to help him forget Aileen, the young Irishman simply presented himself to Lily at the apartment one afternoon and they undressed and went through the motions. She was kind and effective and it was a relief to get it over and done with. When they had finished, Jimmy twisted his face into the white skin of her neck and buried himself in her auburn hair, recalling his true love, Aileen. He could no longer see her delicate, beautiful face when he closed his eyes, although as his deaf ear pressed against the other woman’s flesh, it replicated the thunder of the sea and he remembered the sight of her as a red flame on the beach. Lily let him lie there for an hour that afternoon and it was the happiest he had felt since he had arrived in London. His body wrapped in human embrace and the memory of Aileen playing on his mind, he began to remember how it felt to be loved. Then Lily gave him a little dig in the shoulder and said, ‘Best get up now – my next one is due in fifteen minutes.’ The pain of knowing she wasn’t Aileen and that he wasn’t ‘himself’ startled him. He shot up from the bed and got dressed, then straightened his mask and reminded himself who he was: Invincible Jim, Anthony Irvine’s Irish hard man.