The Lost Garden (28 page)

When his grip finally loosened, Aileen drew back and looked at him. Somewhat confused, she put her hand up to his face.

‘I heard you were badly burned,’ she said. ‘You look fine to me.’

For a terrible moment he thought she was being cruel, but then he looked into her eyes and could see from their soft humour that she was serious. She could not see his disfigurement, only the Jimmy she had known from before. So that when she touched his damaged cheek, Jimmy actually felt that his face had been restored: his skin was smooth, his eye fully sighted and his mouth plump with one side a perfect match for the other. Nobody else saw what Aileen saw: to the world, he was a severely disfigured young man with tragedy written across his face. In actual fact, Jimmy’s disfigurement was always there. Nonetheless when they saw each other again, in that moment, it was as if the fire had never happened, as if the intervening time and pain and life-changing events they had both experienced since first meeting one another had simply melted away. There was only the miracle of love: that was all that existed between them.

*

While the scent of the mysteriously opened flowers seemed to pass Aileen and Jimmy by, it precipitated a series of events for everyone else on the island.

When the perfume hit François, for the first time in his life the Frenchman found himself contemplating the nature of love. He could see from the way that Aileen fled across the bridge towards Jimmy that this was the thing they called love in action. His overriding thought was not that he had lost the woman he was about to marry, neither was it a curiosity about the overwhelming and unmistakably exotic floral scent that had all but knocked him to his knees. François found that his first thought when Aileen fled to Jimmy was of his country and how it had been lost to Germany – then for his family and how he wished only to be with them in France.

Aileen and he exchanged goodbyes, while the boy with the disfigured face stood behind her.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘I feel I have let you down.’

‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘I can see . . .’ and he trailed off because he was not entirely sure what he could see.

‘We’ll stay in touch,’ she said.

‘Ah yes,’ he agreed, ‘certainly,’ although in his heart he knew this would be the last time he would see the first girl he had learned to adore.

Epilogue: The Miracle

François returned to Dublin on the next train, resigned his position and returned to his homeland, where he fought with his siblings in the Resistance. Professor DuPont fought more bravely than was expected of him by everyone else. Aileen and François kept in contact by letters sent a few times a year. She was glad that he survived the war, and his entire family stayed intact too, which was a miracle. François did not return to Ireland after that, but took up a professorship at the Sorbonne and married a plain young Catholic girl called Marie. Marie adored him and bore him no less than six children. François, despite retaining a somewhat distant and analytical disposition, was a good husband and father.

Biddy remained in the gardener’s cottage, and the Cleggan women continued to work together on the garden. Together they ran the shop and cafe. The garden became a popular tourist attraction, especially Illaunmor gold, with its single mysterious, exotic pod that never opened since the day Jimmy Walsh came to claim his love on the bridge. Nonetheless, the story spread into legend and visitors came from all over Ireland hoping to be the lucky ones loving enough to make the plant open.

The mysterious flowers on Aileen’s ‘gold grass’ had closed again by the time they all returned to the garden that day and
looked just as Aileen had left them that morning. Some people said that the women had hallucinated that day, that grief had heightened the imaginations of the already superstitious islanders and made them think the plants had opened and sent a scent out that healed everything. Grief is powerful and it makes people do strange things, they said.

Aileen was as astonished as everyone else by the women’s claims, but in truth, the opening of the flowers, their provenance, their alleged scent meant little to her because now she had her beautiful Jimmy back and that was all that mattered.

However, whatever anybody said, Biddy
knew
that what she had experienced that day was a miracle, and the biggest miracle of all was how the miracles just kept coming.

The first was that she was exonerated from any wrongdoing in a court in Dublin over the Cleggan tragedy. There was a crack in the chimneybreast through which the smoke was seen to have escaped and the courts decided that it had been the landlord’s responsibility to ensure that the fireplace was either in proper working order or closed off. When the fireplace had been checked immediately after the accident, the flue had been recorded as open – as it should have been. Biddy vaguely remembered checking it after Aileen had left for the pictures that night, but in the fuss after the fire, she must have doubted her actions.

John Joe travelled with Biddy to Dublin and stood by her in court for the day. He was a great friend, and that was
another
miracle, that she had a nice man in her life with whom she could be friends but who didn’t bother her looking for any of that ‘other nonsense’ that she had never had any interest in pursuing. Afterwards, they had celebrated with tea in Bewley’s on Westmoreland Street before collecting a friend of John Joe’s who had travelled over from London on the boat. A very nice man called Mr Neville who had written to say he would like to come
and spend his fortnight’s holiday on Illaunmor. His visit precipitated the greatest miracle of all in Biddy’s eyes. Mr Neville never went back home to London but ‘fell in love with the island’ and stayed right there in the house with John Joe. As a result, the three of them became the best of friends and Biddy found herself living out her years with not just the support of one nice man, which was more than any woman could ever hope for, but two good male friends flanking her in church each Sunday. God was surely good – they all agreed.

After the day they found each other again, Aileen and Jimmy never parted. They were married within the week, and the wedding breakfast was in her garden.

Even though autumn was under way, the garden seemed to have more colour and life in it than when it was in the heyday of voracious summer blooming. The hedges and pathways were a tapestry of red and gold, and on the ground was a carpet of soft, damp leaves. Aileen, Biddy and each of the ten women carried posies picked from the wild-flower beds and tied with silk ribbons by two of the younger girls.

John Joe went into overdrive transforming one of his late mother’s nightgowns into a magnificent dress for Aileen
and
he gave her away in church. ‘A man of many talents,’ all the women had agreed, wishing their own husbands could be as versatile and useful. Jimmy had his suit from London with him, but he chose instead to wear a plain brown wool jacket that had belonged to Aileen’s brother Martin. It had been John Joe’s idea and he had altered it so that it was a perfect fit.

Sean and Morag came from Aghabeg – both in a state of shock and delight that their son had returned. Although Morag was smarting that he had not returned sooner and to her house first, and that he was wearing a jacket not chosen by her, she
waded in with Biddy and John Joe and made sure her presence was felt.

Biddy had her work cut out cooking on the stove, even with all the women helping.

‘It’s like the loaves and the fishes,’ she exclaimed.

‘Except with sausages and soda cake,’ Morag added, as the two women flew around the place handing out food to the hordes of hungry guests.

The whole island came, at least partly to witness the miraculous flowers, which had closed again into their tight pods as suddenly as they had opened for the moment when Jimmy and Aileen had met on the bridge.

During the service Jimmy had a moment of wondering if this was really happening to him.

‘I do,’ Aileen said. ‘. . . In sickness and in health, till death us do part.’

He had been so certain, since the first day that he saw her on the beach. Now, after all that had happened, despite his disfigured face, she was certain too. Life was strange and unpredictable and he knew he was no longer invincible. Except in the eyes of the woman he loved, and, it seemed, that was all that mattered after all.

The autumn colours in her garden that day signalled to Aileen that her story there had come to an end. As the two of them drove off together in John Joe’s cart, she turned to wave and thought she saw, through the courtyard, the desolate, empty space the garden had been the day she first saw it.

As she looked back, for a moment she felt as if she was looking into her past and she knew it had been her lost hope that had built that garden. She had found her hope again and knew also that, while she would never forget the garden and the events that had led her there, there was no going back.

Aileen did not return to live or work in the garden after that. She had neither the desire nor the need to be there anymore. Whatever she had grown in her glasshouse, whatever journey she had taken, was now complete. Instead, she moved back into the home she grew up in with her new husband and began to restore the cottage, the garden there and her life. Aileen recovered a friendship of sorts with her mother, and when she met her new baby brother, she realized how much she wanted her own child, a new life with Jimmy.

Jimmy fished the shoreline along Illaunmor and returned to his strong, confident self. He dived straight and fearless off the rocks into the deep salt pools, and when he was underwater swimming, the shoals of mackerel flicking across his damaged skin, he felt fully alive again. His disfigured face became of less importance to him until it was of no importance at all; eventually he himself failed to see anything when he looked into the glass except for the determined shining blue of his own eyes that indicated to him that he was maybe not invincible, but as good and as strong as a man needed to be.

With the Cleggan compensation money, the young couple bought a fishing boat, and not long after that the children came: three of them in quick succession. Once a year Jimmy would go and collect his parents from Aghabeg and bring them back to his home on the ‘big island’.

As they drew past the beach, Jimmy would take his children up to the front of the boat and say, ‘Can you see your mammy?’

Then there she was just as he remembered from the first time: Aileen, her long red hair flickering like a fire on the beach.

And all he would feel was the miracle of loving her.

Author’s Note

This book was inspired by a tragedy that happened in Kirkintilloch, Scotland, in 1937, when ten Achill Island tattie-hokers were tragically killed in a bothy fire. The story was so moving that I found myself researching it further and it became the inspiration for what went on to become
The Lost Garden
.

Out of the greatest respect to the families and descendants of the Kirkintilloch Ten and the people of Achill, I have taken great pains to ensure that this book is entirely a work of fiction – set at a different time and with no reference whatsoever to the actual people involved. Therefore any similarity to any characters alive or dead is entirely coincidental.

What I hope I have captured, in the broadest sense possible, is something of the resilience, humour, generosity, intelligence and unique beauty inherent in the people who live and have lived on the islands off the west coast of Ireland.

The men who died in the bothy fire included three sets of brothers: John McLoughlin (twenty-three) and Martin McLoughlin (sixteen) from Saula; Thomas Kilbane (sixteen) and Patrick Kilbane (fourteen) of the Points, Achill Sound; and John Mangan (seventeen), Thomas Mangan (fifteen) and Michael
Mangan (thirteen) from Pollagh. The other victims were Thomas Cattigan (nineteen), Achill Sound, Owen Kilbane (sixteen), Shraheens, and Patrick McNeela (fifteen), also of Shraheens.

May their souls rest in peace.

Glossary

Alp
– a big, lumbering idiot

Amadaun
– an idiot

Boreen
– a narrow, frequently unpaved, rural road in Ireland

Boxty
– a traditional Irish potato pancake most popular in Mayo, Sligo and Donegal

Currach
– a type of Irish boat with a wooden frame covered by animal skin

Fore graipe
– a person in charge of the welfare of the tattie-hokers, including their nourishment and the upkeep of their lodgings

Geansaí
– a sweater

Jackeen
– derogatory term for a Dubliner

Month’s mind
– a requiem Mass celebrated one month after a person’s death

Pampooties
– shoes made of rawhide, commonly made and worn in the Aran Islands, Ireland

Praties
– potatoes

Sandspit
– a point of sandy deposit built up into a landform that projects into a body of water

Scut
– cheeky lad

Shoal
– a sandy elevation at the bottom of a body of water, constituting a hazard to navigation

Skite
– a large quantity

Tea brack
– a traditional Irish tea loaf

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Joe Lavelle and his beautiful Dughort Campsite in Achill for his hospitality and to fellow writer Grainne Dargatz for her help in sourcing Brian Coughlan’s excellent document/book
Achill Island tattie-hokers in Scotland and the Kirkintilloch Tragedy, 1937
.

Thanks also to Killala friends and neighbours Jimmy Gallagher and Marie Sweeney for their insights into island life.

My friend Aideen Ryan, gifted gardener, botanist and Irish heritage buff, was a constant source of inspiration, ideas and refreshments! Thank you, Aideen.

Thanks to my wonderful editors, Natasha Harding and Trish Jackson, and all at UK Pan Macmillan: Katie James and the talented PR and marketing teams, publicists, cover designers and proofreaders, who always put so much effort into my books – thanks to you all.

Agents Marianne Gunn O’Connor, Pat Lynch and Vicki Satlow for their constant input and support.

Alan, Enda, Diane, Anne-Marie and all the staff at Dillon McCarron Accountants, Ballina, for their patience and kindness towards me as their office squatter.

My wonderful mother, Moira, for her ear and her encouragement as always.

Niall, my other half, for his endless support, and his mother, Renee, for all her practical help.

The staff and board of the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Annamakerrig, and the Heinrich Boll Cottage for providing wonderful places in which to write.

Lastly to Danielle Kerins, my incredible assistant and all-round Girl Friday – for research, proofreading, editing, hand-holding, promoting, administering and overall support the likes of which has never been known before. I feel very fortunate to have ‘discovered’ you and your input made a real difference to this novel: it is as much your book as it is mine.