The Lost Garden (19 page)

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Biddy felt terrible, but she explained to Aileen that she had mislaid her father’s gardening book. However, by some divine providence John Joe found two that had once belonged to his mother hidden in a box with some of her precious things. The first was called
The Ladies’ Companion to the Flower Garden
, which John Joe saw was inscribed by the wife of the head gardener in the big house. She must have given it to his mother when they moved back to England. The inscription said, ‘Going to a flat in Orpington, so won’t need this anymore!’

Aileen had never heard of Orpington, but it was surely close to heaven itself because this book was a godsend.

While Aileen was skilled at growing simple vegetables,
The Ladies’ Companion
contained everything she could possibly want to know about growing any kind of plant. The typography was so tiny she had to hold the book right up to her face to read it, so much so that John Joe gave her his magnifying glass on permanent loan. Although it was a slim volume, it contained more information than she could possibly absorb in a lifetime. On its well-worn, yellowing pages were detailed, meticulously configured black-and-white drawings of every kind of garden structure, from square boxes for propagation to instructions to give ‘one’s gardener’ on how to build a wire trellis or a climbing
tower or a frame for a fledgling tree. These included three sideways diagrams detailing the working of ‘Greenhouses and Vinery’, illustrating the exact placement of the bricks and heating pipes as well as the machinations of their plumbing. Aileen got very excited because she recognized the buildings and imagined the glasshouse in her garden might have been built to this very specification from this very book.

The section on glasshouses contained details on how to propagate and force all sorts of strange and wonderful foods that Aileen had barely even heard of. She listed them: pineapples, peaches, cherries, oranges, avocados and grapes, which she felt certain she was already growing on the vine that had come to life. She determined that one day, when she could afford to buy seeds or plants, she would begin growing these exoticisms, but in the meantime she concentrated on the other volume that John Joe had given her.

The Observer’s Book of British Wild Flowers
was another revelation. Aileen had been looking at the names of flowers in her
Ladies’ Companion
but had been barely able to discern one from the other with all their unintelligible Latin names. They all sounded exactly the same and she had become overwhelmed with the mere idea of trying to select plants for her flower beds.
The Observer
featured only wild flowers, which could be found on any hillside or growing at will in any garden. With beautiful colour illustrations the artist had made even the common clover look like a beautiful flower. The pages detailed the English names, with the Latin equivalent underneath alongside pretty, clear pictures – some in colour and followed with short descriptions.

HAREBELL

Campanula rotundifolia

On heaths, hilly pastures and roadsides the harebell will be found in abundance.

That was the very plant she had asked Biddy to name for her. She recognized almost every flower in the book, even if she was not familiar with their names. Foxglove, toadflax, a fat, deadly lad called viper’s bugloss, pimpernel – the pretty flower that told you rain was coming by closing its leaves – wild strawberry, lady’s mantle, parsley, primrose . . . These were all plants that Aileen already knew, and many of them were growing in some measure in the garden itself, while those that weren’t could be found in abundance elsewhere on the island.

Aileen was decided. She would build a wild-flower garden, using only plants that she could take from cuttings or seeds herself, and save her money for exoticisms in the greenhouse.

Once the idea was set, she had John Joe driven demented driving around the island with her while she foraged in fields and at the side of the road for cuttings and rooted plants: iris, orchid, periwinkle and dozens of calor lily bulbs. She did not stop until she had found all the plants she wanted. When she felt she had enough to keep her busy, John Joe would deposit her back at the greenhouse. Here, she sorted and seeded, nursed and nurtured them into strong, healthy plants, ready to take up a place in their new, organized, elegant home, away from the wild fields where they were born, where they might be trampled by a sheep or eaten by cattle. Here, they would be kept safe, part of the cosseted destiny Aileen was creating for them. A higher calling of beauty than the one they had been born to.

Aileen kept both books permanently in her apron pocket, along with the magnifying glass, which she also used for studying the leaves on wild seedlings to help identify ones too small for the naked eye.

In the meantime, Biddy also moved into the garden. She could not leave Aileen sleeping in the greenhouse by herself, but equally
she could see that the girl was not for moving. So Biddy put her bothy-management background to good use and made a home out of where they were. It still being summer, the first thing she built was an outdoor kitchen in the yard in front of the glasshouse. ‘Bring me bread, sausages and a few rashers of bacon,’ she said to John Joe on the first morning. By the time he came back with the children after school, Biddy had found an old pan and scrubbed it clean, and one of her makeshift brick stoves was built and fired up. That night, she rigged herself up a bed in the old gardener’s cottage, and by the end of that first week she had the place looking as if the house had never been unoccupied. She tried to persuade Aileen to join her, but the girl remained insistent on sleeping outdoors in the greenhouse. That being the case, Biddy made sure that at least she was comfortable. Poor John Joe had his horse run ragged between collecting blankets and kitchen accoutrements for Biddy, seeds and additional gardening things for Aileen and taking the children to and from school.

Aileen was a gifted gardener and her plants grew more quickly than one would have expected. Lettuces shot up; tomatoes seemed to flower and then fruit at a rate that was bordering on miraculous.

Aileen was excited about being at the stage where she could plant out the vegetables she had been propagating. As soon as small threads of roots had appeared at the base of her cuttings, she had to hold herself back from planting them straight away. Those early days with Biddy there to help her were exciting, and after a couple of weeks, things settled into a routine. Or rather, as much of a routine as Aileen could allow.

For the first while after Biddy stayed, Aileen enjoyed the luxury of being cooked for and the noise of somebody else being close by. Biddy brought her battery-operated radio up from the
house and they played music on it. With Biddy watching her, Aileen’s work took on a slower pace, and while she enjoyed sitting down to eat a hot meal and stopping throughout the day for tea, she was becoming more anxious as each day passed. She was concerned that the garden was not happening at the pace she hoped. She had planted as much as any one woman could possibly plant and yet the beds were still mostly bare, the pond was still empty of plants, and while the vegetables were growing well, it did not feel like it was . . . enough.

‘Sure what are you rushing around for, child?’ Biddy asked her. ‘Let nature take its course. What are you trying to achieve with all this worry?’

Aileen smiled and said nothing in reply, because there was nothing to say. Inside, though, she was burning with anxiety to get the garden . . . not finished, because she knew that in nature nothing is ever finished, but flourishing: alive.

She also knew that, as much as Biddy was a strong, hardworking woman, and that she herself had what they called green fingers, between them it would take a long time to get this place the way she had envisioned it could be.

Aileen needed that vision of her garden to come true. She felt that, somehow, her own future was utterly entwined in bringing the garden back to life.

On this day, Aileen got up very early to go out to the greenhouse. The night before, there had been a full moon and a high summer storm blowing. Biddy had lit a fire and cooked a stew and insisted that Aileen stay in the cottage with her and ‘leave the wretched plants alone for one night – sure what do you think will happen to them?’

She was starting to get on Aileen’s nerves already. Sleeping by the plants was important. Aileen didn’t know why, and certainly wouldn’t attempt to put words to it because it would surely
sound foolish, but nonetheless it was what she
did
and now Biddy was messing it all up for her.

It was not much past dawn and the ground outside was misting with dew and still bore the residue of last night’s relentless rain.

Aileen clicked open the greenhouse door and as soon as she stepped inside she sensed that something was different. She felt the pit of her stomach recede. Curse Biddy for keeping her away from her charges for the night. Something was up: she could hear a whispering, a conspiracy among the plants.

Then she saw it. Over in the corner: a flurry of green that had not been there the night before.

The pots with the Scottish soil that she had planted with the beach seeds had shot up – although, strangely, not all of them had grown. The ones that had come to life were all the same – sprouting tufts of soft, fine grass, green and vigorous. They had flourished overnight.

Sick with excitement, Aileen ran the palm of her hand across the grass and felt a tingling, as if life itself were emanating through its leaves. She counted the live pots and there were ten of them. Why? Why had ten pots grown and the others not? Aileen had an idea, stranger still than the tingling in her hands, stranger than any compulsion she had experienced to date – stranger than sleeping with plants or clearing an old, derelict garden. There were ten pots – one for each of the men who had died in the Cleggan fire.

That afternoon, Aileen put the ten live plants in a sunny, heated corner. She looked at the tall, slender leaves through her glass and checked these against her book. She could not find a match.

So she watered the plants and waited. In the following days
she noticed no peculiar growth. The grass may have sprouted suddenly overnight, but it did not continue to grow at the same rate. She measured the plants before she went to bed and then tried sleeping in the cottage with Biddy again. She had a sneaking suspicion that her presence at night might have been inhibiting their growth. The next day, the plants were exactly the same. As she was emptying the pots that had not grown, she found herself vigorously checking the roots and realized that she was searching for one more to show signs of life. Ten men had died, but what about Jimmy? Was there not a plant growing for him? If not, what did that mean?

Aileen tried to put her silly notions aside and carry on with her work, but the strange phenomenon was nagging at her, as if there was something she should do, although she could not say what that might be.

The answer came when John Joe told her that there was a service being held for the Cleggan women the following Sunday.

‘I don’t know that Biddy will want to come,’ he said, ‘given the way things are.’

Biddy, for all her huffing and puffing about being ‘imprisoned’ in the garden, had been less and less keen to leave it. She had not attended any Sunday Mass since she got here, and John Joe had not forced the issue. He himself could feel the tension rising on the island about ‘who was responsible’ for the fire. There had been talk of an inquiry being held. Experts coming down from Dublin – it was a terrible business.

‘She’ll get her comeuppance yet
.’

‘
Not shown her face around here for a while in any case
.’

‘
Proper order – she has no place in God’s house
.’

John Joe did not know if Biddy knew the full extent of the bad feeling towards her, but while she was telling herself she was staying in the garden to mind Aileen, in reality it was a
relief to be hidden away from the whispering accusations and the cold faces.

Biddy was nervous when she heard about the service and said she would stay behind and prepare a nice dinner for them all. John Joe would come back with the children and they would have a meal together and say a decade of the rosary themselves for the dead men.

‘The Lord knows where I am,’ she said, ‘and that is good enough for me. Let Him strike me down at any time if that’s His will.’

It was such an awful thing to say, Aileen thought. God had given her a second chance and He would do the same for Biddy – she was sure of it.

Aileen got dressed in the tidiest clothes she had to hand – a navy wool dress and her good boots. In case she was in any doubt as to what to wear, John Joe had taken the precaution of altering an old coat of his mother’s for her. Sewing snazzy black beaded buttons across the collar, he really was ‘the giddy limit’, as Biddy said.

While John Joe and Biddy were occupied with one another, Aileen quickly loaded the ten grassy pots in the back of John Joe’s cart and covered them in a blanket. She did not want her guardians to know what she had planned, because they might try and put a stop to it, although she was doing nothing wrong.

They arrived early at the church, as she had known they would. Aileen let John Joe get out first, and while he was talking to Father Dooley, the priest, and the gathering congregation, she quietly and quickly transferred the ten pots from the cart to the back door of the church. The women would be seated in the front two pews, as was the traditional seating arrangement for the bereaved, and she had half hidden the ten pots underneath the statue of Our Lady next to the altar, where they were
concealed by a large floral arrangement. The church was already set, the candles were lit, and there would be nobody in to move them before the service began. Aileen sat at the outer edge of the second pew back and waited for the other women to come in.

They filed in and Aileen stood to let them sit and watched each one carefully, assessing who belonged to each of the deceased men. Claire Murphy came in first with her mother, Fatima, and three younger siblings. They had lost Claire’s twin brother, Iggy. Then Attracta Collins came in. Like Aileen, she had lost a father and two brothers; she had her mother, Nuala Collins, with her, another woman, who might have been her mother’s sister, and two children, doubtless siblings. Behind them was Noreen Flaherty. She was with her long-time widowed mother, Monica, and they were both feeling bereft after losing James, who had been the man of the house. Last in was Carmel Kelly. Aileen almost did not recognize her. She looked older. She had never been an especially pretty girl; nonetheless the defiant light had disappeared from her eyes and she seemed lifeless. She did not acknowledge Aileen as she walked past her to the front pew with her mother and two younger siblings. It was not a deliberate affront, as Aileen might have expected from their past relationship. Carmel, she sensed, more than any of the others, having held off her grief for the journey home, had now lost herself entirely to it. Last time Aileen encountered Carmel, she was half mad, dancing around behaving like nothing had happened. Now, in her deadened demeanour, she had lost her very soul to the truth of her grief.