The Lost Garden (4 page)

Chapter Eight

The sky was drizzling, and the sea below them was flat and still. The whole world seemed shrouded in grey. Aileen’s journey into the wide world had barely begun, yet already she was torn. On the one hand, she was glad that Jimmy had been there to stand up for her and take her away from the cruel girls, but on the other, she was annoyed with him because perhaps he had made the situation worse.

Aileen was not a fool. She could see that Carmel was dead set against her and had turned the other women that way. This was exactly how her mother had warned her it would happen – which made the fact she had failed with the women even more upsetting for her.

‘You can keep her,’ Carmel had said.

Aileen didn’t want to be on deck with this strange boy, and she didn’t want to be downstairs with the women. She was thoroughly miserable and wanted to be back home with her mother, supping warm milk in their kitchen and waiting for the men: at least when she had felt sorry for herself on Illaunmor, she had known where she was.

Now, she wanted only to be in the company of her brothers and father, but they had made it clear that she had to make her own way. Her father had all but thrown her at this boy Jimmy,
and the women had been supposed to look after her as ‘the new girl’, but they had been so mean. Carmel was as spiteful as she had been at school. She had spread it around then that Aileen was cursed on account of her red hair. This whole thing had been a mistake – she wanted to go home. She blinked at the flat, grey sea and a tear rolled down her cheek.

‘What’s ailing you, my love?’

How was it possible for a man to elicit such feelings of warmth in her stomach and yet be so . . . annoying?!

‘What’s “ailing” me? Are you Shakespeare? Who talks like that?’

Jimmy had reached over to wipe the tear from her eye and she swatted his hand away like a fly.

‘Lay a hand on me and I swear I will send you flying!’

‘You’re upset,’ he said, pointlessly, infuriatingly.

‘Yes, I’m upset,’ she said, her words amplified by the empty deck and the expanse of sea, as if the whole wide world were supporting her in her annoyance. ‘Because you won’t leave me alone and you have spoilt my friendship with the other women. Everything was going perfectly fine before you came along.’

As she said it, Aileen thought that while it was not strictly true, Jimmy’s presence was complicating things. If he hadn’t turned up, the women would have had to have been nicer to her.

‘Go away, why don’t you?’

Although it was not her intention, Aileen saw that her words had hurt him as truly as if she had planted a slap on his face. His open-eyed upset infuriated her even more.

‘Oh, why don’t you just go away and leave me alone?’ she shouted at him.

He stood looking at her, hurt but incredulous also.

This Jimmy was a strange-looking boy, and despite that instant
attraction she had had towards him, she could not quite decide if he was handsome or not. He was not as obviously fine-looking as her brothers and father – certainly not as square-shouldered or broad. At just a little taller than herself, he was of slim build, although he was physically strong – she could sense that more than see it. His features were pointed in a way that was full of character but also somewhat devilish. He had large blue eyes that spangled with life and mischief, and were rimmed with long, dark lashes – like a girl. These were matched in character with a strong Roman nose and a broad mouth that seemed to take up his whole face when he smiled, which he did every time she gave him the slightest encouragement.

Jimmy was not the type of man she had always imagined she would fall in love with. Aileen was a fan of the brooding, troubled Heathcliff – dark and mysterious and strikingly handsome. Heathcliff never smiled, but was full of a bleak, unstoppable passion for his true love. Aileen had read
Wuthering Heights
a dozen times or more, imagining herself to be on the other end of such dark passions. Her rugged island was as similar to the Yorkshire Moors as one could imagine and the landscape had helped fuel a small fantasy. Aileen knew her hero was the figment of a writer’s imagination and that such a man probably did not exist in real life, and even if he did, he did not, in all likelihood, reside on Illaunmor. But Aileen had not yet known enough men to be entirely certain. The evidence so far pointed to Michael Kelly boasting of his Louth cousin, and while Jimmy’s dramatic opening of saving her life and his demonstrative singing on the quayside put him somewhat above Michael’s promise of a relation with a motorized tractor, they were both still a far cry from her Brontë idol.

‘Maybe I will go,’ he said, and turned – although he was
moving slowly enough for her to see he had very little intention of actually leaving her there.

The fool.

‘Go on,’ she said. ‘Off you go.’

He took a step forward towards the steep metal stairwell down to the cabins, then looked back at her with an expression of yearning that she found intolerably irritating.

She stared at him accusingly, then waved him on his way before abruptly turning her back on him and facing out to sea again.

What an annoying man he was, and how much better off she would be without her ‘shadow’. In the very moment that she thought that, Aileen looked around her and suddenly felt afraid. Alone on the empty deck, with its cold metal hull, the vast expanse of water stretched ahead, and beyond it was a world full of strangers. A feeling of bleakness and emptiness washed over her.

She turned and shouted, ‘Jimmy,’ and he came bounding back up the stairs towards her.

‘We’ll wait until the boat takes off, anyway.’

His face filled up with a smile, and although she pushed it aside, she could not help feeling glad.

For the next twelve hours Jimmy did not leave her side – not once.

Shortly after he came back up the steps, the engines started and the two of them hung over the railing as the large boat ploughed through the water, creating vast troughs of white on either side.

‘I should like to be down there,’ said Jimmy. ‘There will be some action underwater surely.’

‘You’re an awful eejit – you know that?’ said Aileen. ‘You’d be killed stone dead if you were down there.’

‘Not me,’ he said. ‘I’m invincible.’

She could not help but smile, and when she did, he smiled too. With the wind in her hair and the cold spray from the water misting her face, Aileen knew her suitor was thinking how beautiful she was but was too afraid to say it in case she bit his head off and sent him away again. Despite herself, Aileen realized that she no longer cared so much about her troubles with the women because she had this boy by her side.

After a short while, the waves grew and the boat began to plunge and skip across the water, and with the engines directly below them, Aileen began to feel sick. She quickly moved and put her head over the side of the boat but swallowed back the bile for shame of being sick in front of Jimmy.

He put his arms around her and helped her back down the stairwell to find somewhere to settle herself in the cabin, but the place held no comfort. Every inch where you might sit down was already taken, and as they reached the bottom step, there was a man being sick into a bag. Aileen almost retched, but Jimmy kept his arms around her and led her gently through the cabin to another large door off the main corridor. He looked about before opening it quickly and sneaking them in. The cabin was large and comprised what Aileen could clearly see were cattle stalls, with the smell of hay and cow dung in the air. At the far end, a calf was in one of the stalls; the rest were empty.

‘On the way in, I saw a man bring in that little lad down there. All the cattle came over on the boat last night save this one wee lad who they squeezed on today. When I saw them drive him in, I knew the cattle cabin would be all but empty.’

He reached over to a pile of hay just inside the first stall and dragged out a bag.

‘How did you know the boat would be full?’

‘Did you see the crowds?’ he said. ‘Sure I’ve never been on a
boat before, but I could see from the amount waiting on the quay that it would be jammed. Anyway, my da worked in Scotland before he got married. He told me the boat journey was terrible back then and the only hope you had was to bed down on a bit of hay and sleep it off. I think he thought it’d be better now.’

He stood looking at her nervously as if he may have said or done something out of turn. Aileen was struck dumb with his ingenuity – his sheer cleverness. Jimmy shuffled from foot to foot and added, ‘The train across was fantastic – we couldn’t get over it. It had toilets and everything.’

The boat lurched forward and Aileen clutched at her stomach – Jimmy gave her a bucket quickly and left her alone while she brought up her meagre breakfast.

‘Will I go and get one of your brothers?’ Jimmy asked.

‘No,’ she said quickly. ‘They’ll only be mad at us sneaking off.’ In any case, she was happy with the company she had, although she could not help but add, ‘And anyway, they will kill you stone dead for annoying their sister.’ As punishment for her teasing, the boat lumbered forward, then sank back and Aileen got sick again.

When she was finished, she turned and saw that Jimmy had made her a mattress, fashioning a raised pillow out of the soft yellow straw and laying his own coat on top of it. Tired and sick, she took his hand and let him settle her, arranging her skirts over her woollen-stockinged legs and loosening the laces of her good boots to allow her more comfort. Then he closed the wooden gate of the stall and sat down on the hard floor to guard her while she slept.

The awareness that she was alone, in this place, with this boy filled her with an excitement that she dared not name.

Aileen felt so tired she could hardly speak, but still she asked him, ‘Are you not lying down yourself?’

‘No,’ he said.

She knew it would be the height of impropriety, but every inch of her wished he would lie down by her side close enough that she might feel his breath on her face and see what would happen next.

Chapter Nine

‘Jimmy?’

Jimmy felt himself jerk awake.

He was still sitting, his arms folded over his chest, and Aileen was calling him.

‘We’ve arrived.’

Damn – he must have dropped off. She was pushing his arm, waking him up, which was all wrong, because he should be the one waking her.

Jimmy had watched over Aileen for most of the journey. Although he knew it was foolish, Jimmy still feared that Aileen might flee him again – disappear as she had done on the beach.

He watched her sleeping, her white skin almost glowing in the faint daylight coming through the cabin window, the soft lids of her large eyes as smooth as pebbles – translucent and flickering with thoughts he did not dare imagine.

Every now and again her pink mouth opened and closed as if she were speaking in her dreams. He would wonder then if she was dreaming of him, then hurt himself by dismissing the notion as foolish and premature. He longed to touch her, to place his hands gently on her cheeks and touch the soft plumpness of her mouth with his fingers – to dare to kiss her. To even be thinking such a thing was wrong, but Jimmy could not help
himself. What else was a man like himself to think about the woman he loved? However, Jimmy knew that any impropriety would surely chase her away and that he must wait. So as Aileen slept, Jimmy sat with his hands locked firmly under his armpits, lest tiredness should lead them to wander without reason. He thought how lucky a man he was to have found his own true love and how he should prove himself by staying awake and watching over her. When his body became so tired he could not even stand and he feared the swell of the boat might simply cause him to fall down next to her, Jimmy would take a deep breath, summon the gods to help him and glower at his true love’s face, willing her to wake up and distract him. When she did, Jimmy would then cheerfully feed her from the bag of bread and cold bottled tea that his mother had packed for him, gratefully remembering her last words to him on the sea steps at Aghabeg.

‘Do not touch the food in this bag until you are at sea, because you’ll think the journey is all but over, but let me tell you, it will have only just begun.’

In the twenty-odd years she had been married to Sean Walsh, Morag had never been back to Scotland, the place of her birth.

‘What would I want to go back there for?’ she snapped at Jimmy when he once asked her if she ever had the yen to return. ‘Haven’t I everything I need here and more besides?’

Jimmy had been reared by his parents – his mother in particular – to believe that he had everything he could ever need and he knew that to be true. His family had health, good land, a decent boat and kind neighbours – more than any man deserved. The new boat was a wild ambition, but Jimmy was a dreamer and God had big plans for him. Hadn’t He sent him this redhaired nymph to take as a wife? He knew that this trip to Scotland with his father heralded the beginning of his own
independent life. Not one away from the island – there was no need to leave Aghabeg or his family and friends. He had no desire to go and live in England or America, like so many of the people from the mainland had to do. People who did not have the gift of his father in divining where the good fish could be found, whose land was all bog or all rock and not the balance of turf and grass that allowed his family to both farm and heat their home all year round. His father had earmarked him land for his own home and had half the materials salvaged and saved in a shed out the back to build it.

Now he had found the woman he wanted to share all this good fortune with, although they would adventure together first. While Aileen was asleep, Jimmy planned them the longest honeymoon travelling the world together in the new Galway hooker: Liverpool, Paris, New York maybe. Aileen on the bow of the boat in a long green velvet coat, her hair being pushed back in soft wisps from her face, looking over her shoulder at him, smiling broadly as he steered them into some exotic port. After they had had their fill of rich food and spices, and handled monkeys and ridden elephants, and seen all that they could see, they would return to his island and live out their days in a low white house with the thickest thatch in all of Ireland – fishing and farming and making babies by the dozen.

Although, for the time being, he decided to keep his plans to himself. He simply watched as Aileen nibbled silently but gratefully on the dry bread before lying back down and allowing him to cover her again in his coat. They barely spoke a word to each other the whole trip, but Jimmy felt a closeness in their silence – as if they had been together forever and there was nothing now left to say.

‘We’d better get a move on,’ she said, ‘or they might sail back to Ireland with us still on board.’

As Aileen laced her boots, Jimmy felt a little sadness that his tenure as her guard and keeper was over. She was excited to be here, in Scotland, which was understandable, except that he was mostly just excited to be with her. He had no inkling of how Aileen felt about him, but he knew he was not going to blow it by bearing down on her with unwanted attention. There was too much at stake. Aileen was everything, and if he felt this much, she must feel something too. If she didn’t, he prayed she would. He had thought he felt a flicker once or twice, but it was too much to hope for. He would wait; like catching a trout in a moving stream, he would hold steady and watch, then when the right moment came, swoop in and scoop her up into his arms.

Mick had secured a place for Sean and Jimmy with the eighteen-strong crew and the six families plus Biddy got on a train in Glasgow for the final four-hour leg of their journey to their first farm, where they would be working for the next six weeks.

As they were getting on the train, Jimmy saw Aileen’s brother Martin stamp up the platform towards them, his thick shoulders ploughing a path through the crowd of other passengers.

‘If you’ve touched my sister, I’ll—’

Paddy Junior pulled him back and said firmly, ‘We were worried about you, Aileen, when we didn’t see you at all on the boat.’

‘I was fine.’

Martin nodded at Jimmy.

‘Oh, for goodness’ sake – he’s harmless,’ said Aileen, exasperated.

‘All the same,’ her father said, appearing behind them, ‘I think you should travel this part of the journey with us now. I’ve a carriage saved.’

Aileen grabbed her brother’s hand and hopped up on the train without looking back. Jimmy was hurt that she seemed so eager
to escape him, but also knew that such a small disappointment would not be enough to deter him.

Jimmy settled in an end corridor and spent the journey smoking and playing cards with some of the Illaunmor men. After all, he needed to get to know them if he was going to marry Aileen. Jimmy was a keen hand at poker and won the promise of a full shilling from Michael Kelly, who – as it turned out – was also the brother of one of the girls Aileen had been having problems with on the boat. Carmel Kelly was sniffing around behind him and Jimmy thought she was giving him something of a measured eye. With that in mind, he let the big fool off the money to ingratiate himself with what he could see was an important family on that island. There was still a way to go on that front with Aileen’s family. Her father, Paddy, liked him all right, but Aileen’s brothers were by no means impressed that he had spirited their sister away for the whole journey, and although he did not like the way she referred to him as ‘harmless’, Jimmy told himself she had said it purely to placate them, which it had, but all the same he did not like being described as such. He would certainly never do her any harm, but Aileen had not yet seen the fearless and intrepid side to him, and besides that, Jimmy had always considered himself to be something of a fine-looking young man. He was by far the best-looking man on Aghabeg, although he had to admit the competition was not as fierce as it might have been elsewhere. With a population of under a hundred, many of the families were related, and everyone having known each other all their lives, it was a challenge to judge if one person was as good-looking as the next. Jimmy was not as broad or as tall as Aileen’s brothers, nor did he have as calm and rugged a face as the Kelly men did, but he was as powerful, surely, as any man you could name. His arms were strong from swimming and he could beat the very best of them
in an arm-wrestle. Added to that, he had ‘an elegant Roman profile’. His own mother had christened it such and there was not a biddy on the island who didn’t agree with her – they couldn’t all be wrong!

Throughout the train journey Jimmy made sure to walk over and back past Aileen’s carriage to ensure she was still there. Once or twice he accidentally caught Martin’s eye and smiled at him, but Aileen’s brother shook his head back in disbelief. Jimmy reassured himself it was better to incur her family’s amusement and pity than their protective anger. That way, they would be more inclined towards him marrying their sister.

After four hours and what seemed to Jimmy like an eternity, they pulled into Kiltirnagh Station. Jimmy looked around anxiously for Aileen, but he could not see her – or her family. For a terrible moment he thought she had disappeared – spirited away from him again as punishment for having taken his eyes off her. Sean jostled him onto one of two open carts that were waiting to transport the Irish tattie-hokers off to their farms.

Sean sat himself down next to his son as a dozen more men and women clambered up and took their places on the sack-covered floor.

‘I haven’t a clue where it is they are taking us, son, but I’ll tell you this one thing – I’ll be glad to get my feet in under any sort of a table, and I’m praying to the Lord Jesus himself that there’ll be some sort of a hot meal at the end of it, and curse your mother to hell for not packing more grub for us on the boat. Jesus, but whatever they’re made of out on that Illaunmor Island, well, they can live off very little surely. I swear not one of them ate a scrap the whole journey. They were full of sausages, Paddy said, but, by God, twenty-four hours on a fry alone? I’ll tell you what they’re hardy.’

Jimmy looked anxiously around, fixing his stare on people
getting onto the cart behind theirs. If Aileen wasn’t there, he’d have to go back. He’d have to jump back on the train and find her. If she wasn’t there, he would stow away on the boat and get himself back to Dublin, then catch the train up to Galway and steal the hooker from his cousin and retrace the journey they made that day when they took that view of what he now knew was Illaunmor and the island where the ethereal beauty who was the woman he loved lived.

He was about to stand up and take his leave by hopping over the side of the cart when he saw her.

The shock of auburn hair was visible behind the shoulder of one of her brothers, and as he craned his neck to check it really was Aileen and not some heathery mirage, he saw her white face come into view. Her green eyes glistened like emeralds as the light caught them and they searched the crowd – looking for something.

When he met her anxious stare and noticed it soften into the slightest smile, Jimmy lost his breath as he realized that she had been looking for him.