The Lost Garden (8 page)

Chapter Fifteen

Dublin guards carried each of the coffins off the ship, and the Illaunmor women followed in a sombre procession as the crowd parted to allow them to pass through a path no less than four people deep. The throng of bodies standing in silent respect in the harbour and beyond on the Dublin Quays created a blanket of people around the women, muffling the wind from the sea, surrounding them with humanity. To an observer, the goodwill of thousands of mourners should have overwhelmed the frail female bodies at the centre of the fray, but instead it seemed the other way round. The women linked themselves together, clutching each other’s forearms, their bare fingers white and tense like the claws of some dying bird, their young bodies stooped in the staggering gait of the grieving. Following the coffins of their men, they were oblivious to the crowd that surrounded them. The very blindness of their grief wielded them a strange power over the gathered mob. The intensity of the island women’s loss caused involuntary sobs and shouts from random mourners. The enormous sadness emanating from the tiny women seemed to fly over the crowd and snatch painful memories from them – the death of a husband, the loss of a child – sucking tears and buried grief like some vampiric demon.

Biddy held on to her girls, although she felt very flustered by
the huge crowds. She just wanted to get home; even in the best of circumstances she had no time for the ‘Irish’ and considered herself an Illaunmor islander in totality, with no connection to the mainland – if she could help it. While the mainland Irish claimed the rugged, romantic islanders as their own – celebrating their traditions and their ‘curious’ ways and folklore in their museums, art and literature – true islanders like Biddy considered themselves completely apart. Her address ended ‘Illaunmor Island’ – and she called the country over the bridge ‘Ireland’. She had always felt more comfortable in Scotland – ‘The Scots showed me more kindness and gave me more work than the Irish ever did’ – and thought it typical of the Dublin jackeens to turn up in their hordes to gawk at the ‘poor islanders’. People meant well – she knew that in her heart – but she also felt their ghoulish curiosity at witnessing the arrival of the ‘Illaunmor Ten’, as they had doubtless already been christened. She had seen half a dozen photographers at least, their cameras clicking and flashing in the silence like some demented child set loose during High Mass. This was a shocking carry-on altogether and Biddy couldn’t understand where all these people had come from and how the news of their loss had travelled so far so quickly. It felt intrusive to have all of these people here watching their grief, like it was some form of entertainment.

She took Aileen’s arm and guided her down the steps of the ship. Biddy and Aileen were the last in the procession behind the coffins. In front of them, Carmel swaggered, a bored expression on her face, still deluded in her belief that it was not her own dead she was following. Aileen was numb. While the young woman’s stride was firm and her face set in an expression that could almost be described as calm, Biddy understood that she had not begun to take in what had happened to her. Her already pale skin was as white as the collar of her dress beneath, and
the mist had stuck her red curls to the side of her cheeks, giving her an almost ghostly appearance that Biddy found hard to look upon. While the other women wept and comforted each other, Aileen remained apart, not just from them, but, Biddy sensed, from herself as well.

Biddy stayed with her because she was afraid the young woman might descend into the kind of madness where a person could be in so much pain they became estranged from themselves. This affliction had already befallen young Carmel. Although, Biddy knew that Aileen was a very different creature to the spoilt Kelly girl. Despite Aileen’s ethereal appearance and the silly romance with the brave young lad who had nearly got himself killed in the fire, Biddy took her to be peculiarly grounded. She was practical enough about the kitchen and a decent enough young cook, but it was when Aileen was tattie-hoking out in the fields that Biddy saw something else at play. Her hands moved with such speed, picking through the earth as if they were small burrowing animals, almost detached from the pale beauty they belonged to. In the twenty years she had been travelling to Scotland doing this work, Biddy had never seen anyone work with such an obvious affinity with the earth. Had Aileen been a young man working with that deftness and speed, she would have been lauded – carried home on the shoulders of the other men. However, because Aileen was a girl, Mick Kelly had made note of how well she worked but not afforded her any great fuss. Biddy knew that there was something different about this girl. Sometimes when she was bent working, she seemed to become invisible, to blend into the earth as if the land itself had gathered around her and made her a part of it.

Sceptics would have simply called the girl a hard worker, but Biddy believed there was something more to Aileen than that. The devout Catholic knew that such magical people existed:
somewhere between sprites and saints. Their special talents marked them out and meant that they never felt that they truly belonged among ordinary humans. Biddy could see that the young girl was dependent on the men in her life: her father and brothers were the anchors that grounded her. Now that she had lost them in this sudden and terrible way, Biddy was afraid her young friend might become lost entirely, in her own mind at least. She was no parent, but the substantially built island spinster took it upon herself to be Aileen’s keeper, at least until she was delivered home safely into the arms of her mother.

She gripped Aileen’s hand, tucking it in under her own and holding it tightly in place.

Biddy thought they would never get to the train. As they walked through the parting crowds at their slow mourner’s pace, the grey drizzle starting to seep through their heavy wool clothes, she felt like shouting out to the guards to hurry them along before they were all soaked through. What was the point of dragging it out like this? The funeral proper wasn’t until the following day at least, and while they’d be trudging around for miles then, at least you knew there was an end to it. Goodness knows – were they going to be expected to walk like this all the way to the train station? Biddy felt like they were simply on parade. Once or twice Biddy looked down to check that she was still holding Aileen’s hand in her own. The girl was so fragile and moved so seamlessly beside her that it was almost as if she wasn’t there at all.

They walked at a snail’s pace out of the huge square of the harbour and started down the quays towards the train station. The further they walked, the more protective Biddy became of Aileen and all the other women, and the angrier she got at the Dubliners’ expectation that they make a show of their grief. Their tears weren’t going to dry up – not that day, or the day
after – or for many years after that, if, indeed, any of them ever got over it. So what was the sense in prolonging what was already an arduously long removal of remains with this circus of grief? What were the stupid Irish putting them through this for? They were island people. Let them get back to their island and bury their dead, and the rest of them could mind their own business!

As they reached Kingsbridge Station, Biddy saw there was an army of priests and bishops and important-looking dignitaries in suits and mayoral chains waiting for them in the grand forecourt. One or two of them, including their own parish priest, were raised up on a small podium with a lectern and a microphone on it.

‘Mother of Divine Jesus,’ she muttered under her breath. ‘Now they’re making theatre out of us.’

While the guards carrying the coffins walked into the station proper and formed a military line along the concourse, Biddy noticed that the girls at the front of their procession baulked at following them into the station.

Aside from their obvious terror at being confronted with such a formal grouping, after an hour’s solid walking and crying, the women were hungry and utterly exhausted.

Biddy had had enough. She broke away from the procession, and gently placing Aileen next to the other women, she made her way over to Illaunmor’s parish priest, Father Dooley. He was standing next to some class of a robed cleric – a bishop or a monsignor: it was hard to tell, as their official duty robes were somewhat more muted than their opulent High Mass garb – and looked incandescent with pride to be in such elevated company. Biddy took a deep breath. This was not going to be easy. Dooley was a pompous man and not local. Doubtless this was a great day for him, being the centre of attention with all
the clerical high-ups out in force, and Biddy was only afraid of what he might come up with if he was called upon to say a few words publicly, which by the cut of him, he looked like he had every intention of doing. Thankfully, his young curate, Father Smyth, was with him – a practical, open-faced local lad of no more than thirty and a distant cousin of Biddy’s. She approached him first. An expression of almost immeasurable sadness spread across his innocent features.

‘Ah, Biddy, I am so sorry – we all are. The whole island is in mourning.’

‘A word, Father,’ she said, as he took her hand in both of his in that way nice priests do.

‘The girls are exhausted and I can see there’s some class of an official ceremony planned here and . . .’

He nodded and patted her hand. ‘No need to explain,’ he said, and immediately set about gathering the women up and herding them onto the platform, past the waiting line of guards and coffins and onto the Mayo train before Father Dooley and his coterie of bishops and counsellors could object. As the young curate settled them into the carriage appointed to them, Biddy thanked him.

‘No problem,’ he smiled at her.

Biddy really appreciated his help because she knew that he would probably get into trouble with Father Dooley, the ambitious parish priest, who was doubtless plotting how he could use their public misfortune to gain advantage with the bishop. Biddy watched him leave the platform and then enter into an arm-waving conflab with Dooley before she retreated back to the carriage. Attracta and Noreen were asleep already, their heads on each other’s shoulders, and Claire was sharing out a bag of scones given to them by the Scottish women. Biddy looked around the carriage and noticed that her young charge was not there.

‘Where is Aileen?’

Attracta and Noreen woke from their slumber, and all four girls looked across at her, puzzled.

‘Oh,’ Carmel said, ‘she didn’t get on. I saw her, just now, walking down the platform.’

‘What way?’ Biddy asked. She could feel the panic rising in her.

‘That way,’ Carmel said, shrugging and pointing left towards the front of the train. ‘Is there any with jam? I can’t eat scones without jam . . .’

Biddy went straight back out to the corridor, leaped off the train and ran down the platform. Steam puffed at her skirts: the engines were starting. Let the train go without them; there would be another – as long as Aileen was all right.

Biddy saw her almost straight away, standing at the edge of the platform in front of the train. Her ankles were balancing at the edge of the deadly precipice, and the tips of her toes were dangling directly above it. She was holding her skirts and gazing down into the tracks like she was at the edge of a rock pool looking at crabs and thinking of dipping her toes in.

Biddy froze. ‘Aileen.’ She mouthed her name silently in terror. Any noise would surely send Aileen tumbling onto the tracks.

‘All aboard!’ a guard shouted behind her. Biddy flinched, but Aileen seemed to have heard nothing. She was lost to the world around her. Biddy moved forward towards the girl, keeping her eyes set firmly on her feet as if it was her gaze alone holding them on solid ground. More smoke belted out from beneath the train and there was a loud roar as the engines proper started up. Aileen turned round, a questioning look on her face as if suddenly remembering where she was. Biddy was afraid that she was about to lose her balance. She took two long strides, grabbed Aileen by the shoulders and pulled her away from the edge. The
girl did not object, or indeed even seem to notice Biddy was there, but allowed herself to be walked back up the platform, where an irritated guard hustled them both up onto the train.

The rest of the journey passed without incident. The women ate and slept, woke and ate some more. Every hour or so either Noreen, Claire or Attracta would break down and call out the name of their brother or father in a heartwrenching sob, then the other women would comfort her as best they could. Each knew there was much keening and wailing waiting for them back on the island, so they did what they could to preserve some energy for that. They distracted each other as much as they could with titbits of food and stories about towns they passed on their journey across the country, but each one of them had a rock of dread painted with their mother’s and siblings’ faces sitting in the pit of their stomachs.

Aileen remained detached from the group. Her eyes gazed out at the changing landscape, her pale face more distant than the sun. Biddy tucked Aileen’s hand into the crook of her own arm and then stroked Aileen’s hand for the duration of the journey. The girl was so still in her body it was as if she was dead herself. Biddy wondered if her spirit had deserted her and gone in search of her father and brothers.

At the station, there were no fond goodbyes among the girls. Each of them flew gratefully into the arms of their mothers as if they were glad, finally, to be free of each other’s company. Biddy held herself back from approaching the mothers. They were grateful, she knew, for the kindness she would have shown their daughters, and they would say thank you in their own time, but that time was not now. There was nothing for her to say to them.
I’m sorry for your loss
. It did not begin to cover the magnitude of their grief. She would wait until the funeral.

However, when she noted that Anne Doherty had not come
herself to get her daughter but that she was being collected by their neighbour John Joe Morely, even though Biddy lived on the side of the island nearest the bridge, she insisted on going with Aileen in the bachelor farmer’s cart.