The Lost Garden (11 page)

‘Of course not,’ Aileen said.

‘People think it’s strange for a man to sew and cook and keep himself tidy,’ John Joe said, ‘but I think it is strange for a man to do otherwise.’

Aileen thought of her own father and brothers. They could barely butter their own bread. She remembered her father once joking that the first time he went to Scotland, he had to ask Anne how many spoons of sugar he took in his tea, so he could instruct the women who would be looking after him.

‘You might write it down,’ he had said, joking, ‘although there’ll surely not be a woman as grand and educated as you in the whole of Scotland. “You’ll have to fend for yourself, Doherty” – that’s what she said to me. Ah, but your mother can be a cruel woman when she wants,’ and he had winked. Paddy brought laughter and light-heartedness into the lives of his ‘two girls’. Her mother, serious and in her own way a bit of a snob, and Aileen, who was bookish, tended towards worrying. What would they do without him?

Aileen surprised herself by sharing all these thoughts with John Joe.

‘You’ll meet a man and get married yourself before too long,’ John Joe said.

‘I’ve met the man I want to marry already,’ she said, and liked how normal it sounded. Talking about love made her feel brighter, so she carried on, ‘A fisherman from Aghabeg. Jimmy Walsh?’

John Joe heard hope in her voice. There was some story here. He shook his head. ‘I’m more farmer than fisherman, Aileen – I know very few of the men from the other islands.’

Aileen seemed disappointed about that, but carried on talking about him, full of enthusiasm.

‘He’s a bit of an eejit, really, and not as handsome as . . . well, some lads, I suppose . . . but, well, we fell for each other anyway. He took me to the pictures and bought me sweets, except . . .’

She stopped and took a deep breath before starting again, determined to tell him about this young man who meant so much to her, to assure him of how special he was. ‘He’s very brave, though – his nickname was Invincible Jim.’ Then she laughed brightly and said, ‘Stupid really, but he really was fearless and . . . you know, he went into the barn while it was burning to try and save the others, and . . .’ She couldn’t go on.

John Joe paused, but he felt she needed to continue, so he asked, ‘He got hurt?’

John Joe thought that, judging by the way she was mixing up her words, this could be the first time Aileen had spoken of Jimmy since the fire. She bottled things up, this girl. And John Joe knew something about that. Bottling things up was necessary, but sometimes you had to let go.

‘Burned,’ she blurted out, then looked away. ‘Maybe dead . . .’

She whispered the last part so quietly that John Joe could barely hear the words, but he did. She didn’t say ‘alive’. Perhaps after what those women had been through, ‘life’ was too much
to hope for. ‘Not dead’ was the kind of halfway state grief puts you in for a while. He knew that from losing his own beloved mother.

After John Joe’s younger brother became widowed, he went to England, leaving his brother as the guardian of his two small children. Seven years had passed and he had still not returned for them; the children were ten and eight now. They wanted for nothing. John Joe had enough money and plenty of good land. He was a hard worker and looked after his brother’s bairns with the same tender care as if they had been his own. He felt paternal towards this Doherty child. Her father had been a good neighbour but had found John Joe strange – many men could not imagine a worse fate for a man than looking after small children and keeping a clean house for them, but John Joe was unapologetic in his ways. There was no point, he had long since decided, in being any other way.

‘He’ll be back maybe – certainly if he has any sense,’ he said, trying to lift her a little, ‘though by the sounds of him, this Jimmy Walsh lad hasn’t much of
that
!’

Aileen laughed, relieved that someone seemed to understand – that someone else knew Jimmy, even if it was only through her few words. But she was weeping too, so John Joe decided she had had enough high emotion for now and continued to chat away himself, sharing abundant details with her about his own life – how his brother was doing well in London in the building trade, although, he confided out of their earshot, he would be happier if he got in touch more often now that the children were getting bigger.

Aileen had never known John Joe to be so verbose before, but he seemed comfortable in her company and she joined in with him and soon they were chatting like old friends. Even so, John Joe continued to sense a deep sadness in her around this
Jimmy boy. There was a sense of loss that could be as great as the death of her father and brothers, although it seemed wrong to even think such a thing. He had never experienced it himself, but he knew that love lost was a hardship, especially for the young, and he vowed to say a novena to the Blessed Virgin that week asking her to send Jimmy Walsh back to claim Aileen.

With all their talk the journey passed quickly and they were soon arriving into the village.

‘Biddy!’

As luck would have it, Aileen saw Biddy walking almost directly in front of the cart. She had thought about getting John Joe to take her to call in on her friend. He knew where she lived, having driven her back from her house the day they arrived. Biddy had been so kind and Aileen had not had the chance to thank her, and besides, she might have some news of Jimmy. Also, there was the germ of an idea forming that perhaps Biddy and John Joe might make a romance. They were around the same age, and, well, her father had always said John Joe Morely was badly in need of a wife.

‘Biddy! Biddy!’

The older woman walked straight past the cart, ignoring Aileen’s call.

‘Don’t waste your breath,’ he said. ‘That woman speaks to nobody these days.’

‘Nonsense – she didn’t hear me. Biddy!’ she called again.

Biddy turned her head and gave Aileen a withering look, then cocked her nose in the air and walked on.

Aileen took a sharp breath and John Joe, seeing her upset, put his hand on her arm.

‘Don’t let her upset you,’ he said. ‘She has gone very peculiar with all the talk.’

‘How do you mean?’ Aileen asked.

So John Joe told her. It seemed that as fore graipe for the bothy, Biddy was ‘responsible for building the fire that burned the place down and killed the men?’ He presented it more as a question than a statement, then added, ‘You’d know more about that than me, Aileen. Anyway, everyone on the island seems clear that it was her fault. She’s not even had the face to show herself at Sunday Mass since she got back – although I’ve seen her there on a weekday morning. Lord knows if it’s true – not that it would matter to people around here. Anyway, there’ll be an official inquiry before too long, so it’ll all come out then.’

Aileen said nothing, but as she stepped down from the cart, she wobbled on her feet so that John Joe had to catch her.

‘Are you all right?’ he said.

The flue had been her fault and now Biddy was taking the blame.

She did not know what she should say or do about that, so for this day at least she would say and do nothing. Things were already bad enough as they were.

Aileen Doherty found her feet, hooked her basket to her elbow and went in to collect the messages for her mammy.

Chapter Eighteen

As he was leaving the hospital, the nurses gave Jimmy a mask to cover the burned side of his face. It was not clinically necessary, but the doctor had said it would ‘help him adjust’ to the outside world. The crude prosthetic was the colour of real flesh with a smooth finish and sat just under the eye, where the lid dragged down, and then ran down and across the side of his face, creating a false cheek. His mother secured it with a strap running behind his ear and under the right side of his chin. Jimmy was sitting, dressed, on the edge of the hospital bed, waiting to leave. He could not stop the tears from pouring down his cheeks at the humiliation of having his mother attach this fake face.

‘You have made an excellent recovery,’ the doctor said, and his mother thanked him for all they had done for her son.

Jimmy pretended that the tears were simply his eyes watering, smiled and nodded to the surgeon who had removed the hot coal from his face and saved his life, if not his looks. He could not bring himself to thank the doctor verbally, because the truth was, he wished he had been left to die.

For the whole of the journey home Jimmy thought of little else except for how he could throw himself over the side of the ship or under the wheels of the train without causing his parents even more pain than he already had.

On the train from Dublin to Donegal Town, they were joined in their carriage by a mother and two children. As they sat down, the young boy asked, ‘What’s wrong with the man’s face?’ and the smaller child began to cry.

‘I’m sorry,’ said their mother, and Morag responded by recounting in detail the events of the past few weeks. Jimmy and his father stared resolutely out of the window as the two women discussed them. Morag Walsh was not a person who would normally tell her business to strangers, but the two men understood that she was simply relieved to have another woman to talk to about the ordeal. Her need to share was greater than their embarrassment, but nonetheless, in the recounting of his mother’s story Jimmy found himself retreating even further into himself. He closed his eyes and slept through much of the rest of the journey.

He and his mother stayed overnight in a boarding house in Donegal, while his father went to collect a boat to bring them back out to Aghabeg. Jimmy went straight to bed in the guest-house, barely looking at the fine meal put in front of them by the landlady. The next day, he boarded his father’s boat with no sense of excitement at the journey, staying in a hotel for the first time or travelling back home. He had fallen into a listless state, a pathetic invalid lethargy that his parents feared he might never come out of.

‘You’ll be back out in the boats with us soon surely,’ Jimmy’s father would say hopefully every morning, now they were back in Aghabeg. ‘You might come down to the steps with me this afternoon for a swim?’

Jimmy had not left the house or seen anyone for almost two weeks. Morag desperately tried to rouse him out of his torpor with food and care and, in the end, strong words.

‘There’s no sense in feeling sorry for yourself, Jimmy. You might not be as handsome as you were, but you’re alive.’

‘And sure he was never that great to begin with,’ his father joined in, joking, trying to lighten the load.

The two of them were trying to appear brave, but while their hearts were breaking for Jimmy, they were also only too aware that he was alive, unlike the other poor souls from Illaunmor. Morag herself was also conscious that their son’s face was a constant reminder to her husband of his part in the fire. Deadly smoke alone had killed the others, and if Sean had not opened the doors when he had and ignited the explosion, Jimmy would have come out with no more than a blackened face and a sad demeanour.

However, their problems with Jimmy were compounded by other worries. Hospital bills in Scotland still had to be paid. Sean’s pride, and shame that he and his son had both survived when all the other men had died, meant he had refused to accept any ‘charity’ from the Scottish firemen and then had given all of their tattie-hoking earnings to the Illaunmor Island Widows and Family Fund. The Walshes had spent all of their meagre savings getting back from Scotland and in hospital fees so far.

Sean was already back out at sea with his fellow Aghabeg fishermen catching and selling fish, but the transition back to work on the island had not been easy. Sean and his strong son had, after all, abandoned their colleagues to raise money for a ‘big boat’. Now Sean was back and looking to take his share of what was turning into a difficult ‘dry’ season. The Aghabeg men were not begrudgers – they looked out for their own, and there was a deep loyalty in them – but they were superstitious and there had been talk of Jimmy’s face turning monstrous, though none of them had actually seen him since his return. In addition, there was talk of the Walshes’ misfortune having been
caused by the boy fraternizing and falling in love, no less, with a red-haired girl. Nothing happened without a reason and for such bad luck to have befallen them on their money-making foray, there must be strange forces at work, and who knew what those strange forces might do next? Young Jimmy had always been seen by the community of fishermen as an extraordinary young man with ‘special powers’ for luck and good fortune. A talisman, he had defied the sea with his swimming skills, and there was always a good haul when he went out with them. Perhaps his powers were turning against them now – and he had brought a bad sea back with him from Scotland.

Pragmatic Sean would not dignify their nonsense by openly defending his son. The only way to stop the speculation was for Jimmy to get back to work. Sean needed Jimmy with him, not just to man their own currach and make him less physically dependent on the others, but to gain back the confidence of their neighbours that all was well on Aghabeg. Secrecy bred doubt, and doubt was a dangerous thing on a small island. This hiding away in the house was making things worse – for everyone. Jimmy needed to be back at the centre of island life to return things to the way they were before. Not just for his own sake, but to show the other islanders that, despite his injuries, he was the same as always.

Except that Jimmy was not the same.

Jimmy was no longer himself. Not in any part. One look in the mirror reminded him instantly of that. The right side of his face was as it had been before; the left was where the explosion had hit. The centre of his face had been burned off by the flying hot coal so that the rim underneath his eye was pulled down, the cheek was scooped out and that side of his mouth had no lips but descended into a hollow. Face on, he was unrecognizable, because while one side was fine, it contrasted with
the horror of the left side, which drew the eye across to its deformity. When he turned to the left and looked at his profile, his face was as it had always been, but there was no comfort in that either, because Jimmy knew, deep inside him, that he was not the same young man as he had been before. He was not the handsome, fearless young rascal Aileen had fallen in love with – that was certain. She would doubtless recoil if she saw him and he knew there was no way he could go and find her now for that reason.

The extreme pain had taken its toll on him and Jimmy felt weakened by it. Jimmy had thought he knew what pain was. He had swum underwater until he thought his lungs would explode, he had brushed his skin on coral and watched it bleed out into the water, every inch of him had been stung by jelly-fish, and where grown men would have cried, Invincible Jim had laughed it off.

The burns from the bothy had broken him. Even now, with the pain long gone, sleeping in the comfort of his own bed in the kitchen with the soft woollen blankets on his skin, he would look across at the embers glowing in his mother’s grate and his limbs would start to ache and he would suddenly cry out with just the memory of how he had felt lying in that hospital bed.

His mother would come to him and put his head in her lap, as she had done when he was a small boy, and stroked his forehead to soothe him back to sleep. He would close his eyes and pretend, for her sake, to be comforted, but always, always as he found himself falling into an agitated sleep, he would feel nothing more than that he was simply entering a different, quieter corner of the familiar endless black pit of despair. There was nothing inside him anymore. Where he had always felt full – ‘full of life’, people had said of him – now he felt empty. The fire had burned his skin, but in truth, Jimmy felt as if it had
burned him from the inside out. His body was nothing more than a shell. The words he spoke, the food he ate and passing thoughts of weather, warmth, his parents’ wishes – they were just ashes fluttering about within.

On his fourteenth day of self-incarceration in the house, Jimmy woke to find his mother standing over him holding out a bucket of steaming water.

‘You are going out in the boat with your father today and I will not hear a word from you otherwise,’ she said, thrusting a bar of carbolic soap into his limp hand. ‘Now get out the back and wash some of that pity off yourself, then come in for your breakfast.’

Jimmy wanted to complain, but he could see that Morag had had enough and that there would be no fighting with her.

He may have been a grown man, but his mother was the type who would take the strap to a person if she was sufficiently roused – it wouldn’t matter a damn if they were woman, child, animal or a full-grown hairy man. His father had taught him that it was generally prudent to do his mother’s bidding, but there were also times when it was imperative, and this was one of those times.

Jimmy stripped and went out the door, then lathered up the carbolic and spread it along his limbs. The disinfectant smell stung his nostrils, bringing his senses alive, and as he rinsed off the soap with the warm water, he could feel a small bite to the air, making the skin around his scars tingle. He looked around him at the world as if waking from a deep sleep. It was a clear day, the sky a solid blue; the sea was a straight line of sparkling diamonds on the horizon beyond the fields. He felt nothing as strong as happiness, but he had a good feeling that he was home, that he was where he belonged. The gravel felt sharp under the soft skin of his unused feet, and as he looked down and saw
the water trickle across them and turn the stones from grey to a dozen shades of brown, he thought perhaps it was time for him to get back to the water after all.

He walked a few steps towards his mother’s small flower garden and, without thinking, bent to smell a mature rose. It had such a rich, feminine scent it reminded him immediately of Aileen and the stab he got propelled him quickly back to the house. He was determined that he would hold on to the small thread of sanity his mother had handed him and, for this day at least, put his lost lover to the back of his mind.

Jimmy dressed and headed down to the boats with his father. His mother gave him a box of sandwiches and a bottle of tea. Walking across their fields, Jimmy felt strong. Not as strong as he had before the fire, but nonetheless he could feel his muscles tighten and strain against the effort of movement and it felt good. His father took the bag of food from him so that Jimmy could swing his arms to help steady his legs and pick up speed. He stumbled once or twice on the rough ground until he eventually stopped, bent down and took off the boots his mother had put on him, leaving them where they were to pick up on the way back. As his feet found the soft cushions of moss on the round rocks and the bounce of the heathery bogs underfoot, Jimmy found his Aghabeg feet again, and for the first time since he had woken up in that hospital bed, he was really, truly grateful to be alive.

As they came into sight of the boats, Sean’s stride grew steadier and the swing of his arms more narrow and masculine. His manly demeanour invited Jimmy to walk in line with him, and as the two men came to the edge of the field where the rock steps led down to the jetty, the faces of the half-dozen fishermen came into view. They were openly staring at Jimmy. Three of the men crossed themselves, and one fell to his knees in prayer.
Jimmy felt sick and wanted to turn back, but Sean grabbed the arm of his jacket and pulled him along until they had reached their audience.

‘Are you counting the stones, John?’ Sean said to the kneeling man. ‘I never took you for a mathematician.’

John coughed and stood up, but the expressions on all the men’s faces were a mixture of incredulous horror and fear. Behind them, the water was as flat and still as a mirror; the small boats bobbed so gently they were like old women swaying in their seats to a ballad.

Jimmy wanted to cry out and run, but before he could, Sean turned to him and said, ‘What are you waiting for, boy? Swim out and catch that currach before we lose it to the sea altogether.’

Padraig Feeney had been freeing his family currach when the others called him to look at Jimmy Walsh coming over the field. In his horror, the simple young man had dropped one end of the rope and his father’s boat was now drifting gently out into the open sea.

‘Mother of God, she’s gone,’ he wailed, and his father, John, let out a mighty roar and gave him a wallop over the head.

All faces turned to the water as Jimmy dived in fully clothed and went after the boat.

As soon as his body hit the water, Jimmy felt as if he had never been to Scotland, never been away from the sea. His arms and legs ploughed through the water with such speed, such ferocity that he truly felt as if the water itself had infused him with some magical power. He caught the side of the boat easily and, using every bit of strength he had in him, paddled it to the steps.

When he arrived back, Sean and John Feeney leaned down and pulled him out, while Padraig and another grabbed the errant
boat and tied it up. The rest of them were smiling down at Jimmy, cheering and clapping.

‘Invincible Jim! He’s back all right!’ somebody said.

Jimmy was so exhausted from his efforts that he lay on the jetty with his eyes closed and breathed slowly, trying to catch his breath. Without the cold water on his skin, all he wanted to do now was sleep – as if a lifetime of energy had been used up in one short exertion.