The Lost Garden (20 page)

Without fully thinking, Aileen reached out and touched Carmel’s arm as she sat directly in front of her. Carmel turned briefly as if knowing she should respond, but then looked through Aileen without a shred of curiosity or recognition. Her expression,
the way her shoulders were hunched with her arms hanging so carelessly from them, was cold and lifeless. Aileen felt slightly afraid of her as the girl turned round again, withering Aileen’s small smile to dust.

The Mass began and Aileen’s nerves started to fizz. She imagined the eyes of the congregation were all on her; they had surely noted that she had not been to Mass since her mother had disappeared. Did they all know about the man Maurice? Was the word on the island that her mother was a whore? Did they think she was the same and having untoward relations with John Joe? Was John Joe standing at the back, as he always did? If she ran now, would he follow her, and could they head off on the cart together and back to the safety of her garden? Aileen felt panic rise up in her, almost moving her limbs to flee. She looked down at the ten pots, peeping out from behind the Blessed Virgin’s feet. Ten pots. Ten men. She had this to do – this was what was intended for her. Then it would be over. Then she could disappear again.

Father Dooley went through the motions of an ordinary Mass; then, when it came time to read his sermon, he started to read out the names of the Cleggan dead: ‘We pray for Patrick Doherty, forty-seven . . .’ Before he could continue with her brothers’ names, Aileen came out from her pew, took a few steps down towards the pulpit, then walked over to the pots and carried the one bearing her father’s name and laid it on the front step of the altar. The priest was dumbfounded at this girl suddenly standing in front of him with an ordinary terracotta plant pot filled with what seemed to be grass. He paused while she laid the pot at his feet and then stood looking at it as he continued, ‘. . . his elder son, Patrick Junior, aged just . . .’ As he said her brother’s name, Aileen moved across and brought over the other pot and laid it beside the first. The priest looked out at the
congregation, who were, in themselves, starting to shuffle in discomfort with the peculiar interruption to the traditional memorial service. Was this the priest’s doing – this coming and going with pots? Father Dooley didn’t quite know what to do. He could not confront the girl – the last thing you wanted in Mass was a scene – so he just went with it, pausing while the girl laid down the second pot before continuing, ‘. . . twenty-two . . . and Martin Doherty, aged just nineteen . . .’ Sure enough Aileen Doherty went and collected a third pot and laid it down. He had it now. A pot for each dead man in her family. Goodness but this child was strange. He was certain that was that, but as he named the next person – ‘. . . Mick Kelly, foreman of the group, aged fifty . . .’ – the Doherty girl went over and chose another pot from her seemingly endless stash. With this the priest saw her walk across to Mick Kelly’s daughter, the one who had gone stone mad, who was sitting in the front row. The priest felt very uncomfortable, but nonetheless paused over Mick Kelly’s name; what else could he do? The whole congregation looked on, breathless as to what would happen next.

Aileen stood in front of Carmel and held the pot out for her to take. Carmel looked straight through her again. People started to shift in their seats, except for the grieving women and children. Each one of them had their eyes fixed on poor Carmel’s face. Aileen pushed the pot forward to touch Carmel’s chest, but the girl did not respond. So Aileen balanced the pot on the pew in front of her, then reached down and took both of Carmel’s cool, limp hands in the warmth of her own and arranged them in a cup round the pot of grass. With her own hand then she traced the letters that spelled out Mick Kelly’s name in her own, simple handwriting on the front of the pot in pencil. Carmel stroked the letters with the thumb of her left hand, then turned it towards her slightly and checked the lead mark on her skin.
She looked at Aileen, then her thumb and then the pot, and began to cry. As Carmel cried, her face came to life, as if she was waking from a terrible dream. Aileen put her arms around the other girl and walked her up to the altar, where she knelt holding the pot.

Aileen went and began to fetch the other pots and the priest followed her lead: ‘. . . and his son, Michael Kelly, aged twenty . . .’ Carmel’s mother was already there, reaching out to take the pot and then carrying it across and kneeling down next to her daughter. The other women followed, each taking a pot and kneeling at the feet of the priest, who managed to bumble his way through a wholly improvised blessing with holy water that convinced the impressed parishioners that this piece of religious theatre was intended all along.

The women went back to their seats, leaving the pots where they were, sitting squarely like ten squat soldiers in front of the altar.

During the silence after the communion rite, while the priest and his servers were going through the ceremony of wiping the chalice and putting things back in place, the organist at the front of the church started playing. As she did, a shaft of sunlight burst through the stained-glass windows behind her, sending coloured shafts of light flickering wildly across the front of the altar over the plants. The pretty lights seemed to be dancing in time to the music. It looked, to some of the people in the church, like a miracle was occurring, but to others it was just the trickery of sunlight during a particularly moving Mass. However, when the light faded back to grey and the priest began his final prayer, Aileen and some of the women saw the grass glow a ghostly green. Privately, Aileen thought it seemed that, even from this distance, the grass had grown another half-inch since the service began.

Chapter Thirty

Aside from the discomfort in the London heat, Jimmy’s cheap hospital mask was also becoming discoloured and scruffy, but he had no idea where he might get a new one and in any case was reluctant to make investigations as his real aim was that he should be able to dispense with the mask altogether.

Archibald McIndoe, the doctor whom he had earmarked to restore his disfigured face, was in the newspapers every other day and Jimmy became convinced that he was the man to help him. From what he read, it seemed that the ground-breaking surgeon was doing great work on burn victims from all over the world in his hospital in a rather ugly-sounding place called East Grinstead. The men in his care called themselves the Guinea Pig Club and their courage in undergoing endless operations and the genius of the New Zealand consultant was a story that featured in the paper almost constantly, presumably because it gave people hope in the midst of war.

While he continued with his courier runs during the day, in the evenings he and Anthony had started to go ‘out and about’, as his boss and mentor called it.

‘You spend too much time mooning over this sweetheart of yours, Jimbo.’

‘You’d want to meet her, Anthony – she is something special. You’ll meet her one day. I’ll bring her over.’

‘Of course you will, and I’d
love
to meet her, but in the meantime we need to get you out and about, young chap – turn you into a man about town, eh?’

So, after eating their dinner early in Manzini’s, as had become their habit, Anthony started to take Jimmy out to a club in Piccadilly.

Often they would go over to the apartment first, then the girls, who were often only getting up at that time, would get all dressed up in satin dresses and roll their hair into fat curls like Hollywood film stars. Sometimes Jimmy wondered if those girls ever left the apartment at all. While he felt uncomfortable at their seemingly constant state of undress, he was getting used to it and was always careful to avert his eyes from them to spare their blushes, although most of the time he was aware it wasn’t them blushing but him.

Aside from Mandy and Lily, Anthony kept mostly male company.

The club he went to almost every night was called Percy’s. Although there was no name on the door and it was on a rather insalubrious, poorly lit backstreet, once you got in the door and down the steps into the basement room, the place was pure luxury. There were velvet booth seats and candles on every table. Everyone was so friendly and they all loved Anthony. It was a relaxed, happy place with everyone always on the best of form. The girls, even though they were in a roomful of men, seemed more at ease here than they did in their own home and that Jimmy took to be testament to the hospitality of Percy himself, whom they met on their first night in.

‘Who’s “the Face”?’

He asked it straight out, addressing Anthony but nodding at
Jimmy. Percy was dressed impeccably, in a tailored suit, as were all the men in his club.

He moved like a cat, which made Jimmy feel uncomfortable, although he was not sure why.

‘This,’ Anthony said with a flourish, ‘is my friend Jimmy from Ireland.’

‘I’d be careful making friends with this one, Paddy,’ Percy said straight off. ‘You don’t know
what
mischief he’ll have you getting up to . . .’

Anthony laughed and Jimmy laughed, but Percy didn’t. That was the way Percy carried on: always making jokes that other people found hilarious but never cracking any more than a small sardonic smile himself.

Jimmy decided, very quickly, that he liked Percy after all and before long had got into the swing of the way Anthony and his friends bantered back and forth with each other.

They called him ‘the Face’ and he didn’t mind. It was like he was one of the gang.

One night, Jimmy confided to the small group that he intended to go and get his face fixed and Percy said, ‘Oh, nobody minds a few scars these days, dear. There’s a war on, in case you hadn’t noticed.’

‘We hadn’t!’ one of the others said, and another shouted, ‘Thank goodness!’ and they all laughed again. Jimmy wondered if they were all veterans, like Anthony, but didn’t like to ask.

They drank alcohol but in moderation. A G&T was a favourite among the group, but unlike his bawdy countrymen in Camden Town, they didn’t put him under any pressure to join them. So Jimmy stuck to his coffee or lemonade. He listened to the jazz, and the girls taught him to dance a little.

In Percy’s, some of the men danced together, which Jimmy thought was a little strange. In fact, Percy’s was a strange place
overall in that it seemed sometimes that there were more men in this basement than he had seen anywhere in one place at one time. There were no girls, except for Mandy and Lily, to either distract or reject him, so he could converse with other men in peace.

In any case, Jimmy felt safe there, among his new friends. So much so that he took to calling in there on his own in the early evenings sometimes, if Anthony wasn’t free. Percy would give him coffee and a sandwich if he was hungry, and in return Jimmy would pick up a brush and sweep the place out for the evening shift or give the tables a wipe-down. Despite his sometimes harsh humour and the flourishing way he had of speaking, Jimmy trusted the proprietor. He sensed that he was kind and, in a strange way, Percy reminded him of his mother, Morag, because he was full of practical advice and homespun warnings.

Buoyed up with the sense of sophistication his new life was bringing, one early evening over coffee Jimmy confided in Percy that he intended to present himself at McIndoe’s East Grinstead clinic for treatment.

Percy sucked in his teeth with cautious scepticism.

‘Be careful, Paddy,’ he said. ‘All those war heroes and machismo? Plus it’s in the
Home Counties
. Men like us don’t do well outside London, dear . . .’

Jimmy wasn’t sure what Percy meant by ‘men like us’ and he was starting to feel strange about being called ‘dear’ all the time. However, he was glad that Percy saw him as one of them. They were, after all, men of the world and made up the small number of men left who, for their own reasons, were still here in London and not away fighting the Germans.

‘McIndoe helps men from all over the world, Percy. In any case, I have money.’

Percy said, ‘Hmm. I wonder about that, and besides, money
isn’t everything, Paddy dear.’ Then he wiped down the table, and gathering their cups deftly in one hand, he walked off towards the kitchen. Jimmy smiled after him, thinking really how strangely very much like his mother Percy was in both temperament and manner.

Jimmy had saved fifty pounds. A fortune. Almost every penny he had earned. Anthony surely was the most generous boss in the world. It would have taken him a year, maybe even two, to save such a sum working the buildings and paying rent to some grubby landlady. Jimmy also had an idea that McIndoe would not charge vast sums of money. After all, most of his patients were just ordinary soldiers. What qualified them for his revolutionary plastic surgery treatment was not their background but rather their need, and if there was one thing that Jimmy knew that he had, it was a great need of restorative surgery. You only had to look at his face to know that.

He took the London Underground to Victoria. He hoped they would give him some notice about an operation so that he could give Anthony a warning that he’d not be able to work for a while. However, if they wanted to take him in straight away on that day, he could hardly refuse.

From Victoria the train took about an hour and for that whole time every nerve in Jimmy’s body was fizzing with excitement. This was it. He could hardly believe he was so close to achieving what he had come here for.

The closer the train came, the more excited he got, and as they pulled into the station, he was in such a rush to get off that he tripped and accidentally knocked an old lady to one side and she dropped her bag.

‘I’m terribly sorry,’ he said, but he could see the fear in her eyes as she was faced with his masked face.

‘Let me help you with that,’ offered a man who had stopped to help them. Jimmy could see that he had been burned even more badly than himself. Half of his face seemed to be missing altogether, and he had a huge tube of skin, like a stuffed sausage, where his nose should have been that ran down under his shirt collar.

‘Ooh, thank you, Charles,’ said the old lady, as if she saw a face like his every day, and she gave Jimmy a withering look. ‘If you weren’t wearing that stupid mask, you’d be able to see,’ she said, as she walked off.

Jimmy remembered reading how McIndoe’s job was partly to rehabilitate his men back into society despite their disfigurements. Clearly, it was working.

‘Yes, the tube is a bit shocking,’ the man, Charles, said when he saw Jimmy gazing at it, open-mouthed. ‘Part of the treatment. It’s just a means to an end. At least, that’s what the maestro says, although it does look pretty wacky, I must admit. What about you? You must be in a shocking state altogether if you need to wear a mask? McIndoe doesn’t go in for them. “Hold your heads, men,” is what he says. “Let them see what you did for king and country – no sense in hiding yourself away.” What squad were you in?’

Jimmy ignored his question and just said, ‘Yes, I’m new.’ Then in his best English accent, ‘First time here, so looking for where to go.’

‘Matter of fact, I’m off there now. Only a short walk and the exercise will do us good, or so Archie says. So what’s your story? Air or ground? I got shot down over France. Broke a leg and had to crawl out with my hair on fire. Bloody hot. Don’t remember a thing till I woke up in the hospital.’

‘Me too,’ Jimmy said, although he was starting to feel uncomfortable with the war talk.

‘Bloody lucky to be alive, though, that’s what I say. All the other chaps say it as well, although not lost too many of my lads yet, but it’s still early days. Look at the last time – the Great War. Nasty business, although we’d have got out of it a lot quicker if it wasn’t for the bloody Irish kicking up all that fuss over there.’

Jimmy felt a bit sick. He nodded and tried to stop his heart from flying out of his chest.

‘Now the country is crawling with dirty sods building the roads, working the farms all over the place. Cleaning up, they are. Round them up, I say, or make them work for nothing. Like the blacks. What do you say, eh? Didn’t catch your name?’ Charles asked.

‘Percy,’ Jimmy said. ‘Percy Smith.’

It was the first thing that popped into his head, and enough, in any case, for Charles to continue to assume that he was ‘fellow RAF’. While the disfigured man ranted about ‘evil Germans’ and ‘bloody foreigners’, reserving a particular dislike of the ‘bloody Irish’, Jimmy’s dream moved further and further away from him. He invented a story in his head that he hoped might get him in there. He had been shot down over Germany and all his papers and ID had been lost. He had amnesia and could not remember anything that had happened before the fire. In which case, how did he know he was RAF? They would ask. They weren’t stupid, the English. There were some Irish soldiers fighting this war for them, but he wasn’t one of them. When they found out he was Irish, they’d look for even more paperwork. They’d find out he was just some simple lad who, through his own stupidity – rather than any act of bravery – had been caught out in a fire while tattie-hoking with his father in Scotland. He had been trying to impress a girl and it had backfired: he should have died. He deserved to have died. These men had been fighting to
save a country; they were heroes, and McIndoe helped war heroes. Not ordinary Paddies like him. Not for fifty pounds – not for anything.

By the time they reached the door of the hospital, Jimmy had ruled out all the stories and lies he had begun to concoct. He was humiliated enough with the mask and the stupid circumstances of his injuries and the simple fact of his being Irish in an Englishman’s country, avoiding an Englishman’s war.

As Charles opened the door for him, he said, ‘I’m just going to have a quick smoke and a walk on the grounds before I go in, gather my thoughts.’

Charles gave a small salute and said, ‘See you shortly, old chap.’

Then Jimmy walked quickly back to East Grinstead and took the train to Victoria.

Later that night, alone in his bedsit, Jimmy took off his mask and held a mirror to his face. This was who he was, this monstrous vision. Ugly, deformed, unlovable. McIndoe’s men would get better, and even if they didn’t, they would get sweethearts or keep wives they already had, because they were heroes.

He wasn’t a hero. Not to himself and certainly not to Aileen. He had tried to save Aileen’s father and brothers and he had failed. Now he looked like this and she would never, could never love him again.

Jimmy had thought that going to see the surgeon would make him better, but in actual fact it had made him worse, because not only could he now see what his future looked like, but the stupidity and pointless recklessness of a past that had led him to look like this was now laid out in front of him.

When Anthony called to take him to Percy’s, he found his young charge weeping.

‘What’s the matter, Jim?’ he asked, and while Jimmy explained, Anthony could only guess at the true level of his despair. He took out his keys, went over to his locked cabinet, took something out and locked it again.

‘What you need,’ he said, ‘is some of my medicine.’

‘But I’m not in pain,’ Jimmy said, though even as he said it, he realized that this was just a different sort of pain than the one he was used to.

‘Oh, but you are,’ Anthony said, and his voice was soft and warm and Jimmy knew that he was telling the truth, ‘and
this
,’ he said, holding out a phial of white powder, ‘will make it go away.’