The Lost Garden (17 page)

Chapter Twenty-Six

‘Ah, my friend!’

When Anthony opened the door, Jimmy felt an overwhelming sense of relief wash over him – he was in the right place!

Soho was indeed a strange place. With its short, narrow streets, it wasn’t nearly as confusing or intimidating as Camden Town, and there were so many distinctive landmarks you couldn’t get lost. It had the feel of a village, with little shops, but all different. There was a butcher’s right next to a shop selling ladies’ underclothes. Then a shop with strange meats hanging in the windows and another shop selling ladies’ underclothes, then a little cinema and a bakery with cakes in the window, then a fishmonger, a dress shop, a hair salon, a bookshop and then
another
shop selling ladies’ underclothes.

Anthony’s flat was above a shop that sold magazines and posters. Well, the window was all blacked out, and there was a big sign on the front of it that said, ‘Magazines and posters for sale.’ Jimmy looked in and was surprised to see no magazines or posters, just a man behind a counter who looked Asian and nodded at the door, saying, ‘Anthony is upstairs.’

It didn’t really matter, though; Jimmy was just delighted that Anthony remembered him. Jimmy was aware that he was smiling
too broadly, but he could not help himself. That was the kind of man Anthony was, the way he made people feel. Special.

‘Remember me? Jimmy?’ he said.

‘Of course I do, Jimbo! And how could I forget a face like that? How
are
you, old man?’

He ushered Jimmy in the door. The apartment was like nothing Jimmy had ever seen before. Well, perhaps once, in one of the two Hollywood movies he had been to see with his mother as a child.

The walls were covered in ornate flocked paper, and there was a cream carpet on the floor so thick that it would nearly cover your shoes. There were no hard chairs that he could see, just two settees that seemed too deep and soft and luxurious to do anything but sleep on. On each one was lounging a girl so beautiful and glamorous that Jimmy could barely look at them, but at the same time felt compelled to look from one to the other as if asserting to himself that they were really there. One had red hair like Aileen’s, but of a more vivid hue, pale white skin and red, red lips. The other had hair as black as coal and eyes that were a glossy chocolate colour – like a movie star. Both were wearing long silky dressing gowns and underneath them was – he could gather even from this distance – very little else.

‘Jimmy, this is Mandy,’ Anthony said, waving his hand across to the dark-haired girl, ‘and this is Lily.’ As he said her name, the redhead walked across to Jimmy and held out her hand.

‘Pleased to meet you,’ she said, before gently brushing her fingers across his damaged cheek. Jimmy felt a sudden thrill move across his whole body. His eyelids fluttered and he looked straight ahead at the wall. He had glimpsed that the girl was bare-breasted. Her small white breasts were peeping out from the edge of her gown, which was undone and gaping to the
waist. He hadn’t dared look any further down than that, because that would have finished him off altogether. It was clear that the girl was deliberately provoking him and Anthony was watching his face intently, as if looking for signs of desire. Obviously, this Lily was his friend’s girl – maybe even his wife – and was deliberately teasing him. He knew the English had a reputation for amorality, but this carry-on took the biscuit altogether. Jimmy smiled benignly at the wall behind the girl’s head, giving nothing away, although, truthfully, every inch of his body was burning up in trying to push his desire to one side. Jimmy panicked, not wanting to cause upset or awkwardness, and he coughed, which broke the appalling awkwardness of the moment.

‘Leave my friend alone now, Lily,’ Anthony said. ‘He’s not interested.’ Her seductive mood disappeared as suddenly and as shockingly as it had come on him and she wrapped her robe round her and left the room. ‘You too,’ he said, somewhat harshly, to Mandy, then, as if remembering they had a guest, said, ‘I want some time to talk to my good friend Jim here.’

Mandy grabbed an apple from a bowl on the table in front of her and sank her teeth into it. Then giving them both an ironic smile, she followed her friend.

‘So, what have you been up to?’

Jimmy told Anthony about his experiences, coming over on the boat, losing his job as a navvy after one day. It was a short story, but Anthony listened as if it was the most fascinating tale he had ever heard.

‘I want to earn enough money to get my face fixed,’ Jimmy finished, ‘with that surgeon you were telling me about. That’s why I am here.’

Anthony said nothing about the surgeon but got up to make tea.

‘So you’ll need a job,’ he said. ‘I think I can help you with that.’

Jimmy’s job was as a courier. Part of Anthony’s business involved delivering packages to various individuals around different parts of London. Obviously, being a businessman, he was too busy to deliver the packages himself, and Jimmy, being a bright, intelligent, agile young man, was perfect for the job. Anthony assured him he was far better equipped to navigate the London Underground and ensure that these packages were delivered on time. The packages were generally small – never bigger than his coat pocket – and Anthony advised him to keep the parcels tucked away to avoid being the target of robbery. Jimmy asked what was in the packages, but Anthony said the envelopes contained items that were too delicate for the postal system and that the contents would be too complicated to explain. Jimmy thought that was a bit silly and was slightly put out that Anthony did not feel he was smart enough to be taken into his confidence, but then, as his new boss told him, he was ‘new to this game’ and only just off the boat from Ireland, so he didn’t push it. The important thing was that he had a job that paid him good money and that he enjoyed.

Anthony gave him a hardback book called
The A–Z of London
that had maps of every street in this vast city. It was to use simply as a guide to find the places he was going to, but Jimmy devoured its contents and within days had learned the relationship of hundreds of streets in Westminster, and the names and relationships of many of the suburbs: Hampstead, Richmond, Hendon, Finchley, Orpington, Willesden. He spent his days whizzing around in the dark anonymity of the Underground and then emerging into the daylight, where he would head briskly
for his destination, whose route he would have already worked out in a series of left and right turns. Occasionally, if he was going out into the wilds of the country – to, say, Chigwell or Dagenham – he would take a bus, but he found that there were few places on his list of deliveries that were not within less than an hour’s walk if you picked the right station. Once at his destination, he never engaged in conversation, just handed over the package to whoever answered the door – mostly men of the age, build and demeanour of returned soldiers. Jimmy would be gone before they had scarcely registered his presence, walking fast past the hundreds of faceless houses and shops that comprised this unimaginably huge place and down into the bowels of London, where he felt safe and invisible and in control of a destiny that, for that day, consisted of nothing more than getting from one place to another and back again.

Most evenings he sat in the small room that Anthony had rented to him above the shop and read his
A–Z
. There was an excellent working man’s cafe run by an Italian family directly across the road and Jimmy found that, between the travel expenses and generous courier salary that Anthony paid him, he could easily afford to start his day there with a full fried breakfast and end it with an excellent portion of ‘Marco Manzini’s famous fish and chips’. In terms of food and shelter, London gave Jimmy everything that he could ever have dreamed of and more. He ate like a king and had his own bed in his own room and there was no drunken navvy sticking his feet in his face as he slept. If he wanted company, he would seek out Anthony. He avoided going into Anthony’s flat as much as possible. He did not know what Anthony’s relationship was with the two girls and he did not ask. All he knew was that he felt uncomfortable in their company and Anthony, he knew, sensed his discomfort, so they
would wander around instead to a tiny, narrow Irish pub called the Tipperary on Fleet Street. Jimmy stayed true to his vow and drank lemonade, while Anthony rarely had more than one, or perhaps two, gin and tonics. He was a temperate man, Jimmy could see, and a good friend. Jimmy wrote to his father and told him as such.

Anthony is looking after me very well. He has left the army now and has gone into business for himself. He has sorted me out with my own digs in a place called Soho and I am working as a courier for his business, delivering packages all around London, which is as vast and as busy a place as you could possibly imagine. I am managing fine as I have a map, which is more of a book, truth be told, and is called The A–Z of London. Anthony says you need brains for the work I am doing and I am glad I came and found him and didn’t stay in Camden. In any case, this job pays better than being a navvy, so I’ll have the money saved for an operation on my face and be back home with you all again soon enough. The place in Camden Town was a hovel, so tell Padraig not to be sending any more lads over there from Donegal again – it’s pure bad.

P.S. Tell Mammy that I am eating well because I know how she worries. I have found a cheap place to eat with an Italian man and woman.

Sean wrote back himself, but his letter was brief because he was not a ‘great man for the pen’.

W
E ARE ALL FINE HERE
. T
HE LORD WILL PROTECT YOU FROM THE BOMBS
. W
HAT KIND OF BUSINESS IS HE IN
? F
IND OUT
WHAT IS IN THEM PACKAGES
. D
ON
’
T BE EATING FOREIGN FOOD – IT WILL DAMAGE YOUR BOWELS.

R
EGARDS
.

P.S. T
ELL
A
NTHONY WE APPRISCHATE SAID THANKS FOR LOOKING AFTER YOU.

Writing was his mother’s forte, so Jimmy knew Morag was still annoyed with him when she didn’t write herself. He also knew that the content of the letter was hers entirely.

‘What is in the packages?’ Jimmy asked Anthony one night as they were settling into a booth in Manzini’s.

‘Those bloody girls are driving me stone mad, to be honest with you, Jimbo. They’re pretty, but they never bloody eat. Cook a dinner? Sometimes I wish I’d hooked up with a proper woman – like gorgeous Juliana here,’ he said to the proprietress, a substantial woman in her late fifties, who had come to take their order. Anthony grabbed her around the waist and pulled her to him jokingly.

‘Heeey, you – hans off my missis,’ Marco called from behind the counter.

‘You’re a lucky man, Marco. You better watch out, though – she’s some firecracker. Two lasagnes. Ever had it, Jim? Delicious. Trust me – you’ll love it. I’ve had every dish cooked by this woman and I’ve never been disappointed yet,’ and he gave the middle-aged lady such a slap on the bottom he thought it would surely draw her husband from behind the counter, but instead he roared with laughter and his wife toddled off rubbing her rump with a big smile on her face. Everybody loved Anthony.

‘I wouldn’t ask, only that . . . in case something happens, if I drop or lose one or if somebody stops and asks?’

Suddenly he had his boss’s attention.

‘Has anyone asked? Have you lost one?’

‘No, no,’ he reassured him. ‘I would just like to know, that’s all.’

Jimmy held Anthony’s eye. His mother had asked him to find out what was in the packages and that was what he was going to do. He would not allow Morag to cast a shadow over his new life. He had been right to come here; he would get his face fixed and go home and show her, then go and get . . . He did not even dare think of Aileen. Not yet . . . not here . . . not until . . .

‘Can I trust you, Jim?’

Jimmy did not reply. Anthony looked out of the window and then seemed to make up his mind.

‘The thing is, Jim, I
am
going to trust you. I am going to tell you the truth. The truth about my war.’

There were tears in his eyes as Anthony told Jimmy the most extraordinary story he had ever heard.

Jimmy heard about bombs and deaths and terrible, terrible tragedies. He heard about injuries incurred falling from planes, and limbs torn to shreds from clambering through forests, and muscles seized from hiding in ditches. He heard about sweethearts abandoned in villages in France, and crawling for days without food and water, and about how it felt to hold the head of a dying friend in your lap. But there was something about the way Anthony told the story that Jimmy didn’t believe. He could almost hear the Scottish snap of his mother’s voice saying, ‘What a load of cock and bull.’

‘. . . and so, Jimmy,’ Anthony finished, his face full of anguish, ‘in answer to your question, those packages contain medicine. Medicine, my friend, to soothe the body and, yes, the spirits of those poor souls who, like me, fought for this country and lost.’

Jimmy did not ask what type of medicine it was and why Anthony was administering it instead of a doctor, or indeed why
he was delivering it in uniform brown parcels. He was getting paid, his life was just fine, and he was on the road to his own recovery. Jimmy did not ask any more questions after that. He did not want to know.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

On their way back, Aileen asked John Joe to stop by her parents’ cottage, where she went straight across to the raised bed and pulled out the half-dozen tomato plants, squeezing their roots into tight balls of soil to protect them, and called John Joe over to help her carry them to the cart. As an afterthought, she looked at the tray of beach seeds that she had all but forgotten about, and seeing that they were still pushing through the shallow tray, she brought them with her too.

When they got back to John Joe’s house that morning, Aileen did not settle for one moment. She went straight into the house and changed into her working apron and old working boots, then gathered a number of small tools from the shed and was waiting in the cart with the children by the time John Joe came out to take them to school.

There was no question that John Joe had to take Aileen straight back to the garden. Neither of them even felt the need to properly discuss the matter; it was an unspoken understanding.

John Joe left Aileen at the garden and she continued with her work, scything back the weeds, discovering small stone boundary walls for flower beds. Although it was nothing she could explain, she felt relieved to be there. In this garden she felt safe, as if the boundaries of her very life could be contained happily within
its walls. All she had to do was to work, sow, grow and everything outside of that – the shock of death, the grief, the drama of her mother leaving – became suspended by some mysterious decree of nature by sheer fact of her being there. She could not work on restoring this garden and be sad. The earth would not allow it.

Aileen found and began to restore an old grass-cutter; she uncovered an aged lawn-roller from behind a shed. There was so much work to be done she forgot to eat the sandwich that John Joe had packed so that it was still where she had left it on the glasshouse sill when he returned with the children after school. John Joe must have known she would not come back with them that night because when she said, ‘I am staying the night here. I don’t want to leave,’ he went straight to the cart and took out an old horsehair mattress and a pile of blankets – along with a small stove and kettle. Even as Aileen had said the words ‘I am staying the night here’ she knew they sounded strange and yet they felt right.

‘I don’t know what you are at,’ John Joe said, ‘but if you are going to do this, you may as well be comfortable and you may as well do it right.’

Visibly excited that she had his blessing without having to explain herself, which she would have felt entirely unable to do, Aileen gave John Joe a list of things she needed him to bring to her the next day. Some oil for the grass-cutter, some tools to sharpen the scythe, a hammer, nails and a sharp saw – the one here had fallen apart with rust – horse manure, although on second thoughts the horse manure could wait, she said. The ground would have to be prepared properly before she fertilized it and in just saying that she began to hop from foot to foot, anxious that she was wasting time, that John Joe and the children should leave now and let her get back to her garden.

This
was
her garden. Aileen felt that and in the following days she was absorbed so thoroughly in its restoration that she lost all sense of time, space or herself. She rose with the light and slept when it was dark or when exhaustion enveloped her, whichever came first. She cleared and she dug. She waded into the stagnant pond and pulled out armfuls of weeds and sludge, and threw them in a pile with the comfrey she had gathered to make compost. Only then did she think she should have stripped off before going in, and she cursed the time she had to waste rinsing out her muddy clothes. She went back into the pond naked and waded across the slimy stones and dug through the congealed banks looking for plants worth saving. She dressed again when she felt the chill reaching her bones and heard the clip of John Joe’s horse and cart on the cobbles in the yard, cursing him for causing this interruption in her work. Only for the diligent farmer coming twice a day with the children and forcing her to eat, Aileen might have collapsed and died in the mud and the plants and flowers grown up around her. If she had not been so intent on her work, Aileen might have entertained such an idea as romantic and let it happen out of her love for this peculiar patch of land.

Aileen measured time by the activity she had completed. She did not set goals or stop to consider her achievements – she simply moved on to the next area that needed clearing, the next bush that needed cutting, the next bed that needed digging, the next trellis that needed repairing. And gradually the garden was cleared. There was nothing to stand back and admire. The flower beds were scrappy, with huge gaps where the weeds had been; the pond was a puddle of plain brown mud; the vegetable boxes had no vegetables in them whatsoever; but the garden was now ready for the business of gardening. She had the blank canvas of a garden structure ready for planting and Aileen was excited.
All the time that she had been clearing, Aileen had been taking cuttings from healthy plants, rescuing seedlings and struggling plants from the undergrowth and sifting through patches of soil looking for bulbs and seeds that she could bring on. All of these things she cultivated and cared for in the glasshouse, potting and planting the seeds directly into the shallow trays on the table and everything else into pots.

She put her tomato plants into a long trench and planted the seedlings from the beach pods into the fifteen pots she had sprinkled with the Scottish ash. There was no reason for this except that she had a silly feeling of sentiment around them as they were the first pots she had planted here.

She had got the hothouse steam system working, and although the weather was still warm, she nonetheless filled the shallow pipes and put the stove on once a day. She stuffed it with scraps of wood and debris from her garden-clearing – stuff that could not be composted. Aileen had put all of the weeds in a concreted corner of the backyard and said a silly curse over them – ‘Sally rod beat, sally rod beat, bear down cross and bear down stone’ – to kill them off and make sure they did not re-root. She had been saying this curse over uprooted weeds for years and it rarely worked, but here it did.

Aileen was in the greenhouse assessing the health of her various plants and making early decisions about what she should put where when she heard the clatter of John Joe coming through the wall door. He was talking, so he had somebody with him. Surely the children could not be finished school yet? What the hell was he doing here so early? She turned her back to the door, foolishly imagining that he might go away of his own volition if she pretended not to see him – or rather, hoped that if he saw how absorbed she was, he might wander off and leave her alone with her plants for a bit longer.

But he did not.

‘Look who I have with me!’

Aileen turned round and saw John Joe, who, while he was smiling, had a look of transparent nervousness on his face that was almost comical. Standing squarely beside him, her unsmiling face shadowed with an uncertainty as to why she was there at all, was Biddy. The two of them were standing in front of the door and virtually took up the width of the glasshouse, otherwise Aileen might have fled.

‘John Joe says you’ve not been eating – you have him worried out of his mind.’

Aileen might have told the pair of them to go to hell, except that John Joe was shuffling, and while Biddy’s words were tough, there was a shake in her voice.

Aileen felt pressure build up inside her. This was what she didn’t want. This was, she realized in this terrible moment, what she had been avoiding: the truth.

‘It was me,’ she said suddenly. ‘I cleaned the fireplace and the flue came down and I knew it, but I left it because I wanted to go to the pictures. I killed all those men.’

She blurted it out and – there – it was said. Biddy could do what she liked now. The old woman could shout at her, beat her and call the police. John Joe could banish her from his home; she might spend the rest of her days languishing in prison or, perhaps, probably she’d be hanged. Whatever the case, although she could not say she felt better, it was a relief to speak out.

Biddy’s complexion reddened and she walked across to Aileen and slapped her squarely across the face. Shocked, Aileen put her hand up to her stinging cheek. The old lady packed some punch – she thought her head might come clean off.

John Joe moved forward and muttered, ‘Here now . . .’ like he was afraid himself.

‘Do not ever,
ever
– do you hear me, Aileen Doherty? – say anything like that again. Do you hear me?’

Aileen didn’t understand.

‘But it was me, Biddy. It was—’

‘It was
not
.
I
was in charge. The fire is the fore graipe’s responsibility. The blame rests firmly at my door.’ Then she grabbed Aileen by both her forearms, squeezed them together and said, ‘Promise me now that you will never breathe words like that about yourself in your own mind and never,
ever
to another living soul.’

Aileen started to cry. She could not help herself.

‘But you’re taking the blame for everything, Biddy . . .’

Biddy’s voice hardened again. ‘That is the proper order, child. The Lord is good that He spared us our lives; any carrying the blame of others is a small penance to endure. The shame I carry in my heart is my crucifixion surely, but it is
my
cross, Aileen, not yours. Now,’ she said suddenly, ‘we’ll have no more about that,’ and turning to John Joe, finished, ‘I thought you said you had food in that bag, man? Well, get it out before we half starve.’

They ate, and for the first time Aileen felt her anxiety at getting back to her work ease up. They chatted about this and that, Biddy and John Joe flirting back and forth like they were old friends.

‘I saw this one wandering down the road as I was coming out of Mass this morning,’ John Joe started, ‘and I said to myself, There’s a woman who knows how to wear a hat.’

Biddy blushed. ‘You are some charmer, John Joe Morely – and truth be told? You always were.’

Aileen quizzed them and they told her they had known each other as youngsters. Aileen teased them about romance and they both got a bit cross, but not in a bad way.

John Joe looked seriously offended and Biddy got a bit giddy.
Aileen found the pair of them so amusing that she was almost sorry when John Joe got up to leave.

Biddy stayed and Aileen heard her say something to John Joe at the door along the lines of ‘Don’t worry – I’ll look after her.’

They had been plotting, but surprising herself, Aileen was glad when Biddy turned to her and said, ‘Now, let’s have a look and see what needs to be done.’

As Aileen walked Biddy around the garden, through the cleared paths of the flower beds, the naked pond, the hedged but empty ornamental maze, the scrubbed but dry fountain and finally the black crumbly soil of the vegetable patch – rich with manure and waiting for its first planting – the older woman held her hand to her mouth to keep herself from letting out small sobs of shocked amazement.

‘How long did it take you?’ she asked, letting the words out through a gap in her hands, then closing them off again to prepare herself for the answer, ‘to get it ready like this?’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Aileen, shaking her head, genuinely confused, ‘just . . .’ and she trailed off. If she tried hard, she might have thought back and counted off the number of times John Joe had been out, but even then she could not remember.

Biddy knew it had been a week. John Joe had told her as much, when he was relaying his fears about the young woman’s health and his own inability to keep up with his work on the farm and look after her at this distance. That aside, he was concerned about this obsession of hers and asked Biddy if she might come and take a look – calm her down a bit perhaps. Seeing the work she had done in just a few days, on her own, Biddy now understood his concern. Everybody knew that this garden had been derelict for decades. This young woman had taken on the job of clearing an overgrown jungle, but aside from the insanity of her motivation was the fact that she had succeeded.
What kind of powerful force was at work when a slip of a girl like this could complete such a gargantuan task single-handed, in such a short space of time? Biddy remembered the tattie-hoking and the speed with which Aileen had worked. Even so, this work here required physical strength as well as dexterity and determination.

Biddy followed Aileen around as she relayed her plans to her friend with great enthusiasm and, the older woman observed, the added manic tone of the religious zealot.

‘I want those big blue flowers there, the bell-shaped ones – I don’t know what they are called . . .’

‘Delphiniums?’

‘I want them there,’ Aileen said, sweeping her hand across a wide bank. ‘And in front of them the little – what are they called? – like different colours, white and purple and blue and—’

‘Pansies?’

‘No,
no
. I know what
pansies
are. Smaller than that but like tiny bells . . .’

‘Campanula?’

Aileen looked at her blankly, then carried on. ‘Maybe.
Anyway
, I want them coming down over the stones and covering the path across here, and then I want the roses to start here –’ she pointed down to the beginning of the arbour ‘– and then climb up all over here in like a big . . .’

Biddy had taken her hand away from her mouth and it was slack open, punctuating an expression of total incredulity. Aileen trailed off, aware that perhaps she was overestimating her gardening knowledge.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I know I don’t know the names of everything, but . . .’

Quite suddenly Aileen felt a dark cloud descend over her as
surely as if it had been a real cloud raining a dark mist down onto her head. That word ‘but’ – and it was a very big ‘but’. She couldn’t do this. Bring this garden to life? Plant it all, with what? She didn’t even know the names of the flowers, for goodness’ sake. Her, restore a stately Englishman’s garden? What on earth had she been thinking? What on earth was she—