The Lost Garden (26 page)

Chapter Thirty-Eight

‘“Remote outpost”?’ Biddy exclaimed. ‘How dare they? The bloody English think they’re the centre of the universe! That’s why the world is in the state it’s in – the English thinking they should be in charge of everyone.’

Biddy harboured the belief that, along with every ill in the world, this war was entirely the fault of the English. Neither her fellow islanders nor the amused Frenchman bothered disabusing her of the notion.

‘Still,’ John Joe said, ‘isn’t it great all the same, Illaunmor making it into the great
Times of London
?’

‘Pfft!’ It was François’s turn for cynicism. ‘Not such a great paper when they clearly care nothing about accuracy! ‘World-class botanists in London’s Kew Gardens’! They make it sound like they verified the whole thing. They did not! They heard we found something and asked for information, which, purely as a matter of some politeness to fellow academics, I sent to them. Then they tell
The Times
that the whole thing was their discovery.
Then
. . .’ He was getting so worked up that Aileen tried to interrupt him, although she knew better than to try to placate him on his two Achilles heels – the irrational fear he had not yet earned the title ‘World’s Most Renowned Botanist’ before reaching thirty and, of course, common – or in this case garden
– male pride. He held his hand up to stop her interrupting and continued on his rant.

‘. . .“Frenchman,” they say! “
Frenchman
Dr François DuPont”, as if I am a Frenchman first and a botanist second – as if it is nothing. They say their “world-class botanists” are the most important. Well, let me tell you something about botany, the great
Times of London
. . .’

François went off into a rant that nobody understood, because, in his anger, his French accent took over until his English became more and more obtuse. It was almost amusing, except that Aileen knew about the worry that lay behind his babbling. As when the newspaper referred to his nationality, it highlighted to him the fact that while his countrymen were at war, he was here, in Ireland.

Aileen had come to grow fond of the Frenchman. Their love of plants and nature was undoubtedly unique. ‘Ah – can you hear the crickets?’ he would ask, and the two of them seemed like the only people to hear the precise chirruping sound. He taught her a huge amount about the plants she was tending and yet acknowledged her gardening and growing skills were greater than his own. The other women commented on how similar the two of them were: both given to long bouts of silence and eccentric outbursts. Aileen believed, from the way that he looked at her sometimes, across the room with a kind of quiet longing, that he might be falling in love with her. She was flattered by that; after all, François was an educated, handsome young man, a catch in many women’s eyes, yet Aileen did not feel disappointed that he had not tried to kiss her. He was still weighing up how to approach her, and for her part, Aileen kept his advances at bay. She liked him, a lot, but he did not touch the tender part of her heart in the way that Jimmy had. Where a look or a soft word from him might snap her across the room and into his
arms in an instant. Her feelings for François were those of kinship, respect, admiration and a cautious kind of love that was perhaps friendship, perhaps more. Only a kiss would give her the answer, and the fact that she was not anxious to kiss him was, perhaps, an answer in itself.

Sometimes, their working silence started to cloy and she felt he might lean in and approach her, so she would start asking him about himself. He talked about his family in France a lot, and the war. He had been confiding in her his worries about his sister, Vivette, fighting for the Resistance, saying that his brother was an idiot and could not look after her properly. ‘Vivette is reckless,’ he said, ‘like you.’

‘Do you not want to go back,’ Aileen asked him once, ‘and be with your parents?’

It was only after it had been said that Aileen understood how indiscreet it was of her to say such a thing and realized she had asked the question then to deflect attention away from her somewhat.

However, his answer hadn’t provided the distraction she had hoped for.

‘Of course I would like to go home to France,’ he said. ‘But I can’t. My work, my research is here in Ireland and now I have . . .’ He trailed off, but she knew what he wanted to say, even if he was afraid to say it.

At first Aileen was annoyed that François might use his feelings for her as an excuse for not going back to France, but at the same time she was secretly flattered for almost exactly the same reason. She must mean something to him – more, in any case, than she meant in this moment to Jimmy Walsh. Aileen had put aside her memories of him as best she could, but still in a hidden corner of her heart there was an ache for her first love.

Since François had come to her garden, Aileen’s life had changed and so, in some ways, had she herself.

Aileen had been delighted and not entirely surprised to discover that her strange grass was an entirely new species of plant. François had taken the whole thing very seriously indeed, and when his fellow academics at Kew had verified the plant’s status and
The Times of London
had sent somebody all the way out to the island to photograph them, Aileen had, despite herself, and to everyone else’s surprise, been quite thrilled. The paper had asked for her to travel to Dublin, but Aileen explained to François that she could not leave the garden. Being a man who was obsessed with his own work, he saw no reason why Aileen’s passion for hers should be interrupted when, if the paper wanted to photograph the plant, they could make their way across – as he had made his way here from Dublin. In any case, François hoped to interest the journalist in the magnificent display of wild flowers that Aileen had created and perhaps explain something of his own research to them during their trip. In the end, to nobody’s surprise but François’s, the young English reporter had no interest in botany and rushed straight back to his hotel with the photographer after asking the most cursory of questions. This foreign assignment was already peculiar enough given that there was a war on, without spending any more time in the company of this odd Frenchman, and there was plenty of black beer in the hotel bar before they left early the next morning for the ferry back.

François had left the island only once himself since the day he had set eyes on Aileen: to bring a sample up to Dublin and deliver a progress report to his fellow academics. By this time the thick stems that had appeared at the centre of each flower had simultaneously produced a bud. It was bulbous and grew to be the size of a large lotus bud in a matter of days. François
noted that it was less a tightly wrapped bundle of leaves that one might expect to flower, but rather pod-like in shape and clamped shut. Although nature would surely open it in time, the mere sight of the huge pod ignited such curiosity in him that there were times when he was tempted to prize it open and set about it with his tweezers and microscope. If it weren’t for Aileen and this ridiculous, romantic assumption that she, and her fellow superstitious islanders, had made that the plants were somehow connected to the spirits of their dead men, he might have done just that. Although such notions were an insult to science, the Frenchman had a higher level of empathy with the grieving women than he might have done in the past. After all, with his country at war, François was now under the constant shadow of receiving bad news from home. All the same, he thought it was a shame that an intelligent and talented person like Aileen should be so caught up in these silly ideas and notions about plants holding the spirits of people. It was the foundation of her Celtic island heritage, he knew that, but at the same time part of him wished she could share some of the more sophisticated ideas of his atheist academic background.

François spent four days in Dublin, then brought the plant back to Aileen and did not leave her side again. Being apart from this girl had brought about a kind of a sickness in him that François had not experienced before: a yearning in his stomach like his insides were being stretched and pulled. Then, when he saw her again, in the glasshouse, her fine white hands tucking soil in around the edges of some fledgling plant, the stretching stopped and all returned to normal and he felt like himself again.

François understood this feeling to be love, and while there were moments when he thought he might walk across and take her in his arms and kiss her – just like that – like a proper
Frenchman would do, there always seemed to be something to stop him. She would ask him a question, or it was suddenly lunchtime, or an interesting thing would have happened that she needed to show him.

He knew that Aileen’s heart had been broken before – Biddy had told him about some fool in Scotland – but that was in the past. François was here now, he had means, he was educated, and the mere fact he was French was certainly more than enough to render him more desirable than the most dashing of Irishmen.

When you loved somebody, especially somebody as innocent and beautiful as Aileen was, you asked them to marry you before anything else – and so that is what he did.

François did not fully think through whether Aileen loved him back or not. She had given him no indication one way or the other, in truth. However, he was, in the end, a pragmatist and supposed that would be made clear in her answer to his proposal, which he made, quite out of the blue, in front of Biddy and a few of the women after they had had their midday meal.

‘Well, Biddy, I must say,’ said Fatima Murphy, ‘I think this is the best bread I ever tasted.’

Mary Kelly studied her slice. ‘Have you some class of herb in there?’

‘Feverfew,’ said Biddy. ‘I don’t know why but it peps me up.’

‘Well, it’s delicious – Carmel, be a good girl and hand me out another slice of it there.’

On top of this mundane talk Aileen smiled across at François, for no discernible reason, as she was wont to do, and he got a sudden burst of courage and blurted out, ‘Will you marry me, Aileen?’

Aileen laughed. François was in love with her – of that there was no doubt. That they had never kissed meant very little to her. She liked François, very much. She knew that other people
found him pedantic and thought his personality a little pompous, but despite that, she knew he had a sweet and thoughtful side. Perhaps the fact that she saw that in him was a kind of love. She had known true passion with Jimmy and she knew in her heart that she would never love like that again. He was her ‘first love’, as people called it, and although her heart believed that he was her only love, her head told her that François was a good man who loved her and that he would look after her, so she said, ‘Yes.’

He smiled so broadly and for so long that for a moment each of the women got a glimpse of the handsome charmer they imagined all French men should be.

‘Well, go and kiss her, then!’ Attracta Collins said, and then the women started clapping and chanting, ‘
Ceád míle Pógues! Ceád míle Pógues!
’

‘What does it mean?’ François said, smiling, his day’s work done in the proposal.

‘“A hundred thousand kisses”, you fool,’ said Biddy, poking him in the shoulder.

He came across and kissed Aileen. He drew her into his arms in a flourish, then bent her across and kissed her long and hard on the lips. It was a masterful kiss, and not without tenderness or feeling, and when he was done, the delighted Frenchman turned to accept the cheers of the other women, bowing slightly, as if he had just earned some great accolade. He was bursting with joy.

Aileen swallowed her disappointment. As he was kissing her, Aileen was only reminded that this was not how things were meant to be. In the confidence of François’s marriage proposal and her acceptance of it, she knew, for sure, forever, that Jimmy was lost to her now. He was never coming to claim her: he was gone and so was the certainty of knowing true love. The love
that you didn’t have to question, the love that was so certain from the start it felt as inevitable as breathing. Such love happened only once in a lifetime and Aileen knew she was lucky to have been given a second chance. François was no Jimmy, but nonetheless he had been sent into her life for a reason. A man who shared her interest in plants suddenly turning up in her hidden corner of the world was so unlikely there must have been some destiny at play. Perhaps her father and brothers were sending her a message of sorts. François had come here, after all, as a direct result of wanting to know more about ‘their’ plant.

Once Aileen agreed to marry François, things began to change very quickly. Within days François was talking about leaving and going back to Dublin. They would get married in the city, of course, a small church ceremony; he did not want any fuss. Aileen agreed insofar as she did not want any fuss either: she did not feel ready for a huge celebration after losing her family, but then, neither did she feel ready to leave the garden, let alone the island itself.

She told her fears to François, but he shrugged them off.

He told her that she was suffering from a mental condition called agoraphobia. ‘It’s a fear of open spaces,’ he said, and she explained that she was not simply afraid of ‘open spaces’ per se but of leaving her garden. When he asked why she was afraid of stepping outside the boundaries of her self-created world, Aileen could not express why but remained adamant that her fear was so great she could not leave. The young Frenchman sent away to Dublin for a book called
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
by the German psychiatrist Sigmund Freud. Aileen read the whole thing cover to cover and thoroughly enjoyed it. Regardless of the book’s contents, which explained considerably more about François’s obsessive behaviours and inability to relate warmly to people than it did her own fears, Aileen felt that
merely the act of reading itself was doing her some good. For the first time since she had discovered this garden, she found herself able to sit for an hour, sometimes more, absorbed in the book while the other women worked around her.

‘It’s good to see you sitting down,’ Biddy said. Privately she thought that perhaps this François character who was trying to take their lovely Aileen off the island and away from them all wasn’t such a bad character after all. Aileen seemed more content, more settled since his arrival, and both she and John Joe only wanted what was best for their young charge.