The Lost Garden (10 page)

Chapter Seventeen

Aileen cried at the funeral. She cried until she thought she would run out of tears, then cried some more. She clutched at her mother’s arm as they both sobbed through the Mass, then walked behind the coffin, crying all the way to the graveyard and as they both threw a handful of earth down into the mass grave where all ten men were buried together. When they turned to leave the graveyard, her mother stumbled and then collapsed. As she doubled over from the physical pain of the grief hitting her, she let out such a wail that it resounded all around, bouncing off the stones of the graveyard walls and beyond – it seemed to be begging itself to be a loud enough noise to raise the dead themselves. Anne Doherty’s keening for her husband and sons captured the despair and desperation of all the grieving islanders and so the other women joined her in a unified cry. Together they sent a powerful howl of despair up to their God and for days afterwards the wind echoed it around the headlands and beaches and mountains of Illaunmor until it seemed that the women’s terrible grief had become a part of the landscape itself. The grey clouds seemed like puffs of poisonous smoke; the ordered waves of the summer sea threw themselves up at each other with the chaotic stirring of a fire, spewing rocks up onto the shoreline and crashing at each other in vast, angry explosions.
Cut bogland resembled shallow graves, and the purple heathery mounds of land between were like sleeping bodies waiting to be buried.

When Aileen and Anne got back to their cottage, their mutual weeping made things easier between them.

There had been a man in the house the day before, when Aileen had arrived home. Biddy dropped her at the door and when Aileen went inside, he was sitting at the kitchen table, although there was no tea in front of him. She had seen this man about the area before. He was neither young nor old, nor rough nor smart – he had jet-black hair and dark yet strangely piercing eyes, and was a visiting tradesman of some kind. Maurice Something, her mother had introduced him as – ‘He’s a friend of your father’s.’ She remembered then having seen him with her father once or twice outside the house. She could not recall what her father had said of him, even now with him standing in front of her. Aileen had never had any reason to take heed of this man before and she had no reason to now, except that he was in her house the day before her father’s and brothers’ funeral.

He had excused himself hastily and left through the back door, but after he had gone, Aileen and her mother had not embraced, as Aileen felt they should have done, but moved around each other somewhat awkwardly, making preparations for the next day’s funeral without mentioning the funeral itself. That night and early the next morning, Aileen could almost pretend that they weren’t getting ready to go to the church. She could almost believe that things were just as they had been at the end of every summer that had gone before, with the two women busying themselves about the house ready for the men’s return from Scotland.

It was perhaps this illusion that things were normal that
caused such a shock in both of them at the funeral itself, leading them both to let go in their despair as they had.

Meals still had to be cooked, chickens fed and fires built. Aileen returned to her tomato plants, which were thriving, and she planted enough lettuces to feed them in the coming months. The seeds that she had sown from the pods that she had found on the beach the day before she had left had started to come up in a line of sturdy little seedlings in the long tray. These seedlings had been the last things she had planted before leaving on the journey that had killed almost everyone she loved; they were still living while her father and brothers were not.

She watered the curious little plants daily but found that she had lost heart for the gardening that she had once so loved. It seemed wrong to be carefully tending things to life with the rawness of death so strongly about her.

Instead, while the weather was still fine, she threw herself into the hard outdoor labour of trimming back the grass in their field with a single scythe. Aileen drew comfort from the physical work. Down on her hands and knees hacking at the strong weeds with the curved blade reminded her of the work in Scotland. The exertion, the pull of the muscles in her arms kept her grounded in the moment; then the rhythm and the earthy smell of the wet grass and foliage carried her back to those happy days in the fields with Jimmy watching over her and working beside her. Then a blanket of dread would fall over her mood as she wondered if he was even alive or dead.

‘In the hospital,’ was all Biddy could tell her, ‘but very badly burned, Aileen. I couldn’t tell you if he’ll make it out of there is all I know.’

She knew too that she was unlikely to find out now. Aghabeg was a long way away and nobody wanted any news from there
after what had happened. Everyone on Illaunmor was keeping their heads down and leaving well alone.

That is what Aileen should have been doing. She knew she had no place dreaming of romance after all that had happened, but still she could not help herself; she wanted to draw some comfort, some light at least from the memory of love to help her forget.

However, as soon as she tried to call Jimmy’s face into her mind’s eye, all she got were the faces of her father and brothers. She would see them with their eyes closed, their mouths slack and a thread of black smoke creeping out of them, quickly thickening and swallowing their images up in a black cloud of death and she would feel a sickness washing over her. There seemed to be no way of thinking about Jimmy without thinking about her father and brothers. When she thought about her father and Paddy Junior and Martin, a pain as heavy as lead fixed itself in her chest and could only be moved by weeping it out – drop by painful drop. Hour after hour, day after day, she wept for the men, fighting back the pain with the scythe and waving it away as if the grief itself was as thick and lush as the foliage. She kneaded her grief through the soil. As she worked, she recalled a memory from the night before she left for Scotland. She wanted to bring her favourite apron with her, but her father shot down her pleas. As she went upstairs, she heard Anne make a case for the apron. Her mother had sewn a scapular into it, so she was more concerned her daughter bring it as a talisman to keep her safe rather than as a work garment, but her father said, ‘You can’t send her over to Scotland with a rag like that, Anne, and I hope you’ve packed her a decent dress so the other girls won’t be laughing at her on a Sunday?’

‘A decent dress?’ her mother started. ‘It was far from dresses good, bad or indifferent you were reared, Paddy Doherty,’ and
before too long they were tearing strips off each other. It was always the same fight – Anne Flannery from Ballina was a snob who thought she was too good for him because her father ‘worked in a shop’, Paddy said. His wife retorted that her father had ‘been
manager
of the biggest draper’s in all of Mayo’ and that she was too good for him didn’t half cover the truth of it. Any fool could clearly see all she had sacrificed to live on this ‘godforsaken slab of boggy rock’, as she called it. They always fought the night before he went away, but in the morning Aileen would go down and find them wrapped around each other under a sheepskin on the settle bed by the fire. Her mother’s face was peaceful as she lay sleeping in her father’s heavy naked arms, her legs curled up under her, while Paddy slept with one foot on the floor to steady them both from falling off the narrow seat. Their marriage had been neither arranged nor approved. Anne and Paddy had fallen in love and married despite the ways of their time, and their determination to be together had put the affections of their own families in jeopardy. So in spite of all their fighting, the couple would continue to love each other always for the privilege of the sacrifices they had made to be together.

When Aileen came in from the field and back into the kitchen, Anne would often be sitting at the table with her head in her hands, her shoulders convulsing with grief. Anne had truly fallen apart, and whatever sorrow and discomfort Aileen felt, it was clear to her that the loss had hit her mother harder still. Aileen would put her arms around her mother and comfort her in a way that she could not comfort herself.

‘You’re all I have left,’ Anne said one day, gripping on to her skirts as she wept into her young daughter’s chest, although to Aileen, her mother’s assertion was more of an accusation than a comfort.

After a while, Aileen decided that the easiest thing was to think about nothing except for the job directly at hand and to manage her mother along the same lines. So daughter became mother. Each morning Aileen pulled her mother from her bed, dressed her and instructed her on her work about the house, while Aileen worked outside. Most of the time she was in the field, but she also whitewashed the walls of their cottage – an attempt to freshen up their house of grief. She only came into the house for meals and to check on her mother’s progress. Sometimes she would find her mother sitting down at the table weeping, her hands and face covered in flour, or kneeling at the grate, the brush and pans lying idle in her shaking hands. Then Aileen would bring her mother outside, give her a paintbrush and work alongside her, talking all the time of this and that and of nothing in particular.

They had few visitors in that time immediately after the funeral. Though he was very ambitious, Father Dooley, the parish priest, was at heart a good man, but the women found small comfort in the religious medals and platitudes he offered them. Then there was an official from the mainland who had been appointed to distribute a sum of money that had been raised by the kind people of Cleggan. The female official came in a car, refused tea and, standing at their door, said she had simply come to establish if Anne would like the money given as cash or put straight into a bank account. It was, she said, a considerable sum of money – £200 in total. It would have taken Paddy ten years to earn such an amount. The woman informed them that her bank branch in Westport would be happy to arrange all of the paperwork for them, but Anne asked her to come back with the money in cash at her earliest convenience.

‘I did not like the look of that woman,’ she said to Aileen
when she was gone. ‘Very high and mighty. And that suit she was wearing was meant to be expensive, but it wasn’t – I could tell clearly from the cut of it. I know her type, looking down her nose at us island people. Does she not think we have the wherewithal to put the money in the bank ourselves?’

Aileen said nothing but was glad that her mother had seemed to have got a bit of her fight back.

John Joe had called on them once or twice over the weeks and had brought them their messages from the island shop. However, on this day Aileen had planned to go to the store with him, on a bit of an outing. She was nervous about leaving her mother behind, but at the same time was anxious for a change of scenery. Locked up in the house with only each other for company, she was worried that perhaps the two of them were going slightly mad; they certainly needed a break from one another. So Aileen was surprised when, in the morning, Anne got herself up, washed and dressed, and pushed the list into Aileen’s hand with the same bossy assertion she had done in the ‘ordinary’ times before any of this had happened.

‘You make sure that Clarke woman gives you the full pound of butter, mind – she’s a thief, so check the scales yourself. Oh, and I want the raisins that are sealed in a bag, not the ones in the basin behind the counter. They are more expensive, but the last batch they gave me was pure dry.’

The sun was shining and the bright colours of John Joe’s cart were glowing as he came up the drive. He had brought the kids with him, ‘for the spin’. Ruari was a lively raven-haired eight-year-old, and his sister, Mary, was ten. A plump child, she was wearing a very old-fashioned white lace bonnet, something like one would expect to see in an old cowboy film.

‘I like your hat,’ Aileen said, and John Joe got down to open the back of the cart.

‘It’s from my first Holy Communion outfit,’ she said, bursting with pride. ‘John Joe made it for me.’

Aileen just managed to suppress a giggle and quickly looked across at her mother, who was smiling. Her heart filled to bursting to see her happy – even if it was just for an instant.

‘And a very fine hat it is too, Mary.’ Then Anne added, ‘Your uncle is a talented seamstress.’

John Joe’s face burned bright red as he pretended not to hear the exchange and held out his hand to help Aileen up onto the back of the cart.

‘I’ll have her back to you by suppertime, Anne.’

‘We’re having a picnic,’ Ruari shouted down. ‘Uncle made a special cake!’

‘And sandwiches,’ said Mary, ‘with the crusts cut off of them!’

‘And he said we could buy some sweets in the shop.’

‘And some fancy biscuits – Uncle John Joe likes the ones with the pink icing!’

‘Indeed?’ said Anne, and she looked across at Aileen, who thought she might explode altogether.

John Joe closed his eyes in mortification and paused before stepping up to the driver’s seat.

‘If it stays dry, I told them we’d go down to the big house,’ he said, ‘for a picnic.’

‘Well, have a great day,’ Anne said.

As they trundled down the drive, Aileen looked back and saw her mother standing at the gate, still smiling at their neighbour’s peculiarly feminine ways. She remembered it was only the two of them now and felt the tears welling up in her. She waved and in return Anne blew her a kiss – and with it her sadness blew away too.

*

As John Joe whipped the horse along the bog roads and eventually onto the main road to Illaunmor village, Aileen remembered that the last time she went along this road her father and brothers were with her. The children sat silently, as they had been taught to do when there were adults present, but Aileen did not want silence, so she chatted to them. She took Mary’s hat and admired the stitching.

‘Our father died young, and my mother was a seamstress,’ John Joe confided in Aileen when she said it was a genuinely good job. ‘She taught me to use her machine. There is no shame in it.’