The Lost Garden (12 page)

Jimmy did not want the others to see how much the swim had taken out of him, but as he sat up, he looked out and saw something else bobbing towards the steps.

‘What’s that?’ Padraig Feeney said.

Jimmy stood up next to him and put his hands over his eyes to shield them from the sun. It was much smaller than a boat, but more substantial than a large piece of driftwood or a clump of seaweed. As it came closer, Jimmy could see it was rounded – like a buoy come loose perhaps – except they were usually brightly painted and this was a dark, muddy colour. He took a deep breath, ready to swim out again, even though he did not feel able, but whatever way the tide was travelling, it was almost upon them, so one of the men waded down the steps and threw out a rope with a piece of wood attached to the end which they used to catch unsecured currachs when Jimmy wasn’t at hand to save them.

The men followed him down as he dragged the mystery object up to the steps, but he let go of it as quick and turned away retching.

It was the bloated but intact remains of a dead man.

Chapter Nineteen

‘Can we go to the big house for our picnic, Uncle John Joe? Can we? Can we?’

‘I don’t know, now, children. Aileen might be anxious to get home to her mother.’

Aileen wasn’t particularly anxious to get home, but at the same time she had no particular desire to go on a picnic. After what John Joe had told her about Biddy being blamed for starting the fire, she had found herself barely able to concentrate on her mother’s grocery list. ‘A half-pound of raisins, please, in the bag . . . No, not in the bag.’ She had tried to put it out of her mind, but the truth kept creeping up on her, like a rat scratching in the corner of a room, distracting her, pulling her back for an honest look. The fire had been her fault. She had heard the flue close, but she had been in a hurry to get out and go to the pictures with Jimmy. As a result, everyone had perished – her father, her brothers . . .

‘Let’s go to the big house.’ She said it loudly and quickly, drowning out the voice in her head. ‘I’ve always wanted to see what it is like up there. Hurry along, now, John Joe – we’re hungry for our cake and sandwiches!’

Aileen looked around. The sun was out; it was dry. The blue of the sky made the green of the fields glow brighter, and the
form of the trees faded into ghostly spindles with the strong light behind them.

‘Count the sheep,’ she said to Ruari, ‘and, Mary, you count me the cows!’ If she kept looking, kept talking, she could keep herself distracted from the sick feeling that was opening inside her like the devil’s hand.

‘Tell us about the big house, John Joe. Tell me the story of what happened there – I’ve never heard it.’

John Joe thought this quiet young girl was being very talkative, but the day was good and stretched out ahead of them. There were worse situations a man could find himself in than in the company of three youngsters going on a picnic. Children didn’t judge a man. John Joe was not the marrying kind, but when his brother had been widowed young, he found he was happy to mind his niece and nephew while Frank went to London to work. People thought that children were women’s work – John Joe knew that – but he loved Ruari and Mary as his own and was not ashamed to show it. When Mary had taken her first Holy Communion the year before, Anne Doherty had offered to take the girl to Westport to find a dress, but John Joe had politely refused her offer and taken her himself. Not only that, he had altered the dress to suit the child’s height better and used the leftover fabric to make her a bonnet. He knew such behaviour awakened suspicions in people, as did his starched shirts and groomed appearance, but there was no one could tell him that those children were not as well cared for and in as clean and well ordered a house as any mother in Ireland could provide for them.

On two occasions islanders had conspired to take the children from him. Father Dooley, the parish priest, had offered Ruari a place with the Christian Brothers on the mainland, and the Sisters of Mercy had sent down two nuns to try to persuade
Mary up to a boarding school in Dublin that was attached to a commercial laundry. John Joe gave both sets of religious members high tea served on his mother’s china with starched linen napkins and homemade tea brack, then invited them to stay for the full family rosary – bell, book and candle – sparing no novenas. To drive home his point, John Joe had his charges polished, poised and ten minutes early for Mass every Sunday and had not missed one Holy Day of Obligation service since those children were put into his care. Even the Pope couldn’t find a reason to take those children from John Joe Morely because he prided himself on being a clean-living Christian. John Joe knew from his own experience as guardian of two more or less orphaned children that what young Aileen Doherty wanted more than anything was her father back. The least he could offer was his friendship and some entertainment to help distract her from her troubles.

So as they drove, the neat older man told Aileen the story of the big house. It had been built in 1860 as a ten-bedroom holiday retreat by Richard Blake, a retired English industrialist who had allegedly had his arthritis cured by the seawaters off White Strand Beach. He lived there for a number of years by himself, as his first wife had died. He provided employment for many of the islanders as house staff and gardeners. ‘Including my own mother,’ John Joe said proudly, ‘who was his housekeeper. Now there was a woman who could bake.’ Richard Blake was popular locally, good-humoured and generous, but as a rich man, it was not long before he found himself a second, much younger wife on whom to spend his money. His new wife had no interest in living on a remote Irish island, so she moved him back to London.

‘He wrote to my mother and told her to pack up the house for him and send everything back to England. He paid her well
for it, and as compensation for losing her job, he gave her some silver and much of his table and bed linen. Most of his tea crockery was stamped with the initials of his first wife, so his new wife didn’t want it. My mother sold the silver and rented out and laundered the linens to boarding houses on the Strand. She was a smart woman, my mother. A lady . . .’ He paused and his eyes filled with a small light as he remembered her. Aileen wondered at John Joe admiring his mother so much. She didn’t admire Anne in that way and felt briefly guilty that she was a bad daughter . . .

‘So it was because of an Englishman that my father was able to build up his farm stock and provide us with such a fine two-storey house.’

Aileen cheered at the telling of the story as she realized that relaying this back to her mother would be as much entertainment as the best daughter in the world could give her.

The house fell to rack and ruin, John Joe continued, and although a few of the former staff dropped in on the empty building from time to time to try and keep it secure from the many raids and robberies perpetrated on it over the years, it had remained empty. The Republicans, believing it was owned by a rich English ‘imperialist’, set fire to the house during the Irish Civil War and now only the shell remained. Richard Blake was presumed dead and no heirs had come to claim it.

‘I heard it was an unlucky place,’ Aileen said.

‘It was lucky for me and my family,’ John Joe said, ‘and I can’t speak for anyone outside of that. People have a bleak way of looking at the world sometimes, Aileen,’ he said, turning the carthorse up a tree-lined boreen where the foliage was so old and overgrown that it created a dark blanket above their heads, ‘especially around here.’

His words and perhaps the sudden darkness of the overgrown
avenue sent a shiver through Aileen. Mary saw this and pulled the woollen blanket from her shoulder and placed it over the older girl’s legs. Aileen had to push back tears at the small act of kindness; if only these people knew what she was really like, what she had done.

As they reached the top of the avenue, the trees separated and the ground cleared. In front of them was a grand, grey stone house. The windows were empty of glass, and the huge front doorway was edged with blackened scraps of burned wood. It seemed like an eerie place for a picnic; the house looked like death itself.

John Joe pulled the cart up to the front and began to unload the picnic things, while the two children leaped out. Ruari ran through an archway in the stone wall to the left of the house. Mary grabbed Aileen’s hand and they followed Ruari through a courtyard to a heavy wooden door. Ruari jumped, too short to reach the handle, and Aileen laughed and teased the small boy as she pulled on the cold brass circle.

When they stepped through to the other side, Aileen stood for a moment, paralysed with astonishment. It was the most beautiful garden she had ever seen. While there were no flowers bar the white trumpet flowers of deadly bindweed crawling across walls and hedges, and the scruffy yellow of the dandelions and ragwort that had conquered the lawns and flower beds, the bones of what this garden had once been were perfect. They stood at the front of a path that was lined either side with no less than a dozen stone-edged flower beds. In front of them, set into the ground in its own circle of pebbles, was a three-tiered fountain. She looked around frantically, trying to take it all in: glimpses of statues hidden in overgrown hedging, large stone pots with decorative scalloped edges big enough to grow potatoes in, and beyond them again, a huge tree with what looked
like a marble seat at its base – although it was so grown over with nettles it was barely visible.

Aileen could not put into words why she felt so overwhelmed by the sight of this ruined patch of stone and weeds. Except that when she closed her eyes to blink against the sun, the garden in its glory days, or rather, as she imagined it might have been, appeared in front of her. A bank of swaying poppies and fennel to her left, leaning into an arch of sweet pink clambering roses; neat boxed hedgerows arranged into a small, perfect maze to her right; the fountain spraying diamond sparkles in the sunlight; and on the marble seat under the large tree was an embroidered cushion and a copy of
Wuthering Heights
. When she opened her eyes again, she could clearly see that every inch of the flower beds and path were covered in ferocious weeds, the fountain was long since dry, and it had been so long since this garden had been tended that one could hardly call it a garden at all. Even so, the image was so strong that it endured in lifting her spirits.

‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ Mary said.

Aileen didn’t reply. Perhaps Mary could see what she saw when she closed her eyes.

‘Don’t be annoying Aileen, now,’ John Joe said. ‘We’ll set up in the usual spot,’ and he walked towards the tree.

Aileen and the children helped clear away the seat, and they ate and drank in hungry silence. Aileen had barely finished her last slice of Madeira cake when Mary grabbed her arm and dragged her along on another adventure.

‘Come and see the greenhouse.’

At a far corner of the garden was another door, which led to what was, in effect, a walled field. To the left of them as they came through was a large glasshouse built up against the old wall, with a long, slanting roof. At first, it was hard even to
make out that there was a building there at all because it was so packed inside with foliage that it just seemed to be a solid green clump.

As they came closer, Aileen could see it had been taken over, on the inside if not the outside, with bindweed. Mary could barely get the door open. She was frustrated.

‘It’s usually empty,’ she said. ‘I don’t know where these white flowers came from. They weren’t here the last time and now they’re everywhere. They’re horrible!’

It was hot and damp inside the greenhouse. Small wonder the bindweed has taken off in here, Aileen thought. Bindweed was a pernicious plant, voracious and snivelling in the way it wound its way round everything. It wasn’t strong enough to strangle plants but would shade and compete with them for light, and the weight of an infestation could break the underlying plants. However, it was weak and flimsy to the touch.

‘It’s nothing – look,’ Aileen said to Mary, grabbing a handful of the noxious weed by the door and tugging it, only to find that its leaves were entwined in a shallow terracotta tray on the nearby window ledge, causing it to come crashing towards them. The girls laughed and started to pull at the bindweed all around them, throwing the heart-shaped leaves and their curled, spindly stems in a pile on the ground. Then Aileen noticed the weeds were tugging at something more substantial. She called for Mary to calm her frantic pulling in case she damaged what was underneath, and carefully moving aside the laced string of the bindweed, she revealed the thick trunk of a strangled vine underneath it.

The wood was pure grey.

‘It’s dead,’ Mary said, and Aileen found herself blanching at the reference.

‘Not necessarily,’ she replied, and carefully freed the upper part of the vine from the suffocation of its creeping attacker.
Once she had started, Aileen felt herself moving down towards the ground to clear all around this dying plant. She knew it wasn’t dead; she could hear it calling to her – the faint murmur of sap beneath its dry, grey stem. There was the pulse of a vein running through it – she could feel that.

At its root, she found a single ragwort weed that was sucking the moisture from its roots. Aileen looked at the ugly little yellow flowers and thought, You may have conquered the dry earth, little weed, but you’re a pasture weed – you don’t belong in here and you know it.

Ragwort weeds were loud bully boys; their muscular roots punched out anything and everything that got in their way. They were not as sly and pervasive as bindweed, Aileen knew, but if you didn’t show them who was boss, they’d throw their weight about and take over nonetheless. Since she was a small child of six tending to her vegetable garden at home, Aileen could barely pass a ragwort and not dig it up. Without thinking, she picked up a rusted fork that had been abandoned on the ground and began to scoop earth from the roots of the tenacious weed. As she did so, she noticed something: a small shoot at the very base of the grey trunk. Tiny and thin, but unmistakably green and firm to the touch, with barely the beginnings of a leaf at the end of it.

‘It’s alive,’ she said, almost shouting with excitement and calling Mary over. ‘I wonder what it is.’

John Joe had followed them in and, coming over to see what that fuss was about, looked down vaguely and, disinterested, shook his head.

‘It’s too hot here,’ he said. ‘We’ll maybe stop at the lake on the way back. I’ll load the cart . . .’

‘Can you leave me that bottle of water, John Joe? I’ll be out in a minute.’

Aileen sliced the fork through the ground quickly and pulled up the hefty ragwort weed, fingering the soil left behind to check for any residual roots.

Then she carefully placed some of the fresh soil at the roots of the vine and soaked the ground around it with the full bottle of water.

Aileen carried the uprooted weeds, including the bindweed, out of the greenhouse so they could not re-root, although there seemed little point, as three-quarters of the building were still given over to a jungle of weeds. Closing the door of the strange hot building behind her, she looked across at the single branch of freed vine and said a small prayer that its frail bud would survive until the day when she might come back to this strange place, whenever,
if
ever, that might be.