The Lost Garden
Authors: Kate Kerrigan
PAN BOOKS
For Johnny Ferguson,
1963–2013
‘There are only two ways to live your life.
One is as though nothing is a miracle.
The other is as though everything is a miracle.’
—A
LBERT
E
INSTEIN
Contents
Prologue
Spring 1942
It was a quiet day at sea. Jimmy Walsh allowed the boat to float a little across the shallow bay and then called for his cousin Tom to anchor her there. On either side of them, wide purple mountains stretched up to the clear blue sky, and in front of them was a small beach whose narrow shoreline was hemmed with a glittering chain of sharp sunlight. Usually when the weather was glorious like this the sea itself could be unsettled, seeming to bounce with small, excited waves. Today, however, the sea was eerily still, like gliding on glass.
The boat, a Galway hooker, belonged to Jimmy’s cousin, and they were taking it for a spin round the coast. Tom didn’t know the islands like Jimmy did: the eager young fisherman had spent most of his nineteen years weaving in and out of these large rocks and small shorelines catching mackerel with his father. Yet even Jimmy did not recognize the white-rimmed beach ahead of them, or the imposing purple mountains either side of it. The speedy hooker had carried them further down the coast than he had ever been before and he wasn’t entirely certain of where they were. Mayo, in all probability, though the scattering of smaller islands they had just passed suggested they could be even
further south on the edges of Galway. In any case, this was as good a place as any to bob around while they put down the sails. They’d stop here for an hour and have some lunch before heading back up the coast to Aghabeg.
His mother had packed a hunk of bread and some smoked fish for them. She’d also filled two porter bottles with tea – although Jimmy smiled as he opened the basket and found that his father, Sean, had sneaked in two bottles of real porter as well.
The older man would have justified slipping the lads a beer by telling himself this was a celebration of sorts. His brother’s eldest son, Tom, had been living and working in Galway for the past five years and already had a third share in this fine commercial fishing vessel. A far cry from the small, shallow currachs that had served his family of fishermen well enough on the islands – a Galway hooker would put them into an entirely different league altogether. Sean Walsh and Tom’s father, Joe, were close to having raised enough money between them to buy in. A boat like this working the Donegal coastline could transform not only the lives of their own family, but of all four families on their small island.
Jimmy drained the last mouthful of the bitter black beer. Looking upwards, he thought that, despite the stillness, the sky looked uncertain today. A couple of dark clouds that seemed to threaten rain began to move towards the shoreline. Driven across by a gust of wind, they miraculously parted, allowing a shaft of sunshine to burn down onto the beach. He noticed something odd to one side of the strand, a strange movement – like a fire. It was too far away to see, but he was curious, so he picked up his telescope and adjusted it towards the beach. He trained the instrument past the small waves foaming along the shoreline, some rocks and a pecking gull until it reached the
confusing movement. The red mass was lost in a blast of sunlight and he screwed up his eyes to try and see what it was. Not flames – darker. A spray of seaweed stuck to something perhaps? As the clouds moved behind the mountain, the picture sharpened and revealed the frantic flickering of a girl’s long auburn hair blowing in the wind. A hand drew up and slid the snaking strands back from her pale young face.
Jimmy’s breath stopped. She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.
Chapter One
Aileen crumbled her final handful of good soil over the tomato plants. She had just finished planting them in the wide raised bed that her brother Martin had made for her that morning. She had asked him to put it to the side of their cottage that faced the mountain so that her vegetables might benefit from its shelter. Although it was spring, the sea wind that blew across from the west side of the island could still rear up: last year, she had lost a full bed of lettuces when a bruising spit of salt from a short summer storm had battered across them. She looked down at the fledgling seedlings, gently pulling her fingers up the feathered stalks. She held her hands to her face; she could already smell the fruit in these tiny fragile plants. Barely there, as slender as blades of grass, as flimsy as the red hairs on her head and yet already somewhere inside them these delicate plants she had grown from seed were making good on their promise to produce huge globes of heavy fruit.
‘Would you look at them tomatoes,’ her father would say, slicing through them with his own sharp knife at the teatime table. ‘Is there another man on this earth whose daughter could produce the likes of that for the table?’
Aileen was glad when she made her father happy, and she enjoyed seeing her mother cook her vegetables and her brothers
tucking noisily into platefuls of her spuds, but what Aileen enjoyed most about gardening was simply watching things come to life.
The summers were so long with her father and brothers away in Scotland picking potatoes to earn enough money to see them through the long winter on this rocky outpost off the Irish coast. With Aileen and her mother left at home in their remote cottage without their men, growing vegetables and flowers gave Aileen something to do when her monthly supply of books from the mobile library ran out.
It also gave her somewhere to go when she needed to escape her mother’s moods. Anne Doherty was often sad when the men were away, and when her mother grew mournful, Aileen felt a shadow fall over her very soul. Then if something went wrong, like Anne broke a cup or cut her finger while peeling an onion, she would often shout out, ‘Why must your father go away like this? I need him here!’ and Aileen would go outside for a while until her mother’s temper had passed. Sometimes she would pick a bunch of clambering hedgerow roses and put them in a jar on the kitchen windowsill, knowing that their scent would bring some sweetness back into their home.
The bed her brother Martin had built was too wide and too deep for the tomatoes and he had thrown in lumps of terrible stony clay. Aileen had done her best to crumble some life into the heavy soil, breaking it up with sand, but she was still worried for her tiny strips of green. Their roots would be overwhelmed, she thought as she poked the translucent threads into the hard, sandy soil. Their hold on life was too tenuous; they needed something to help them along. Something strong and sturdy to hold them in place and fill them with the nourishment they needed to survive.
Seaweed.
Aileen called out to her parents and ran down to the beach, ten minutes at a fast run across the fields and bog towards the back of the dunes. She came to the narrow path between the two highest dunes and paused for a minute, as she always did, to close her eyes. She liked to relish the moment when the sea became visible, opening up in front of her, filling her nose with the scent of possibility. The sea was Aileen’s window on the world; beyond it was where her life was waiting for her. She opened her eyes, drank in the view, then walked through the white, powdery sand towards the rocks at the shoreline. It was a still day, so the seaweed would be easy to harvest from the shallow rock pools at the water’s edge.
Every day Aileen walked down to this beach and stood here gazing out across the vast Atlantic, thinking about the day when she might leave the island. Would she learn to drive a car? Travel to America? Work in a factory? She would surely fall in love like the heroines of the books she read. Who would be the man of her dreams then? Would he be an angry Englishman like Heathcliff or a distinguished American writer like Ernest Hemingway?
As she idly dreamed of her future, Aileen gathered armfuls of the rubbery brown kelp into a pile on the sand. Then, as she leaned down to tie them into a bundle to carry home on her back, she noticed a pile of seed pods sitting on the stone next to them. They were peculiar-looking things, long and brown, the length and width of her thumb and like nothing she had seen before. As she popped them in her pocket, she had the strangest feeling that she was being watched. Aileen stood up to look around, but as she did, she felt a gust of wind flicker across her hair and so she closed her eyes and threw back her head, shaking the hair from her face and allowing the air to catch every strand.
‘Aileen? Aileen! Come back! What till you hear . . .’
It was her brother Martin.
He would be leaving for Scotland with her father and Paddy Junior any day now and she would not see them for three long months; what was she doing down here on the beach mooching and dreaming when she should be relishing every last minute of her time with them?
She ran towards Martin, but he kept his stout, sturdy legs one pace ahead of her, laughing and refusing to tell her what the ‘news’ was. When they reached the cottage, her father, Paddy, and eldest brother, Paddy Junior, were standing with their arms crossed over their broad chests, looking at her, smiling.
‘Come out, Anne.’ Her father turned his head slightly on its thick, solid neck and called for her mother.
Anne came out, wiping her hands on her apron and not looking nearly as happy as the men.
Aileen had some idea of what was coming, but she was afraid even to dream such a thing.
‘Who’ll tell her, Da?’ said Martin.
‘I dunno,’ said her father. ‘Will you tell her, Paddy Junior?’
‘Maybe I will,’ his elder son said then, picking up on the joke, ‘and maybe I won’t.’
Patrick Doherty turned, his face full of mischief, from one son to the other and said, ‘Should we tell her at all, do you think, lads, or leave the surprise for another day again?’
Aileen loved it when they teased her like this. She felt like Queen of the World when her father and brothers made her the centre of attention.
‘Will you tell the child, for God’s sake?’ shouted Anne. ‘I have the tea on.’
‘We’re leaving for Scotland tomorrow,’ said Paddy Junior.
Then his younger brother added, ‘And we’re taking you with us.’
Chapter Two
Jimmy knew that red-haired women were bad luck for fishermen.
If you passed a red-haired woman on the road before heading out for the day, you might as well pack up your nets and go home. Ditto a red-haired man, or a child in fact – all red hair was a no-no. Jimmy’s grandmother had told him that a redhaired infant had once been born to an otherwise entirely black-haired family. The whole lot of them, three generations of islanders, left Aghabeg before the child was six days old and moved to the mainland, never to be seen or heard of again. Jimmy’s grandmother believed them all surely dead at the hands of the fairies, or otherwise that they had drowned the baby and then escaped to England, which amounted to the same thing. Red hair was a curse, whichever way you looked at it. Jimmy knew that, but he didn’t believe it. He might have thought there was some truth to it if it was the only thing people on his island were suspicious of – except that red hair was only the tip of it. The men wouldn’t like any class of woman near them when they were mending their nets. The eldest woman of the house, no matter what her age or how harsh the elements, had to throw a hot coal from her home fire directly after the boats when they were leaving land. Indeed, they could only leave when the sun
was set a certain way in the sky so that you would be facing it but not too directly. There were so many things that could bring bad luck on a fisherman that if you believed it all, it would surely be the most dangerous job in the world.
It was a line of thinking with which Jimmy frequently tortured his father, Sean. ‘If you ever let on that you think that in front of your grandmother,’ Sean would say, because big man and all that he was, he was still afeard of his mother, ‘so help me but I’ll throw you overboard myself for the sharks and the gulls!’
‘Ah – but I’ll be swum ashore before they can get me, Da.’
Then his father would raise a mock fist at his incorrigible son, and if he could catch him, hold his head in a lock and make the pup confess he was not ‘invincible’.
Invincible Jim.
That was the nickname his carefree son had earned himself at the age of eleven, when he had been caught teaching himself to swim.
No one on the island swam. Swimming was the worst thing a fisherman could learn to do, because if the sea wanted to take you, it would. There was no escape in being able to swim – you were just prolonging the inevitable. The fishermen of Aghabeg respected the might of the sea alongside the might of God Himself. They worked in tandem. To try and save a drowning man, even a member of your own beloved crew, was an act of treason against both.
Yet, knowing all of this, on the summer he turned eleven years old, Jimmy Walsh had, without giving warning or notice of any kind, jumped into the deep, clear water at the edge of the rocky path down to where the men kept their currachs; then, using his arms and legs to propel himself upwards, he had pushed his head through the wall of freezing water and held himself there, kicking his legs and screaming with delight. As family and
neighbours stood open-mouthed in a mixture of shock and awe at the immediacy with which this young boy had conquered the water, Jimmy splashed around laughing and feeling on top of the world while his father roared at him to get out.
‘Perhaps he’s special,’ his mother had said that night, when his father complained about his son’s insubordination.
‘Perhaps he’s a fool that’ll get us all killed,’ Sean mumbled, although nobody had said anything against the child, and that was Sean’s main concern.
Secretly Sean wondered sometimes if the talk and superstitious nature of the island women wasn’t worse in itself than the dangers they constantly predicted, that the fears they inspired were worse than the fate itself could ever be. On a still summer’s day fishing near the shoreline, he would surely prefer a son who could find his way back into the boat with the strength of his arms and legs rather than surrender to the depths, sinking slowly out of sight while men watched on, helpless – bereft. Sean suspected that believing was the undoing of his fishing community, that it stopped them from doing all that could be done to protect themselves, and perhaps also from being all they could be. However, Sean kept his reservations to himself. The island was small and there was no value in upsetting people.
So his rebellious son became Invincible Jim, an exception to the no-swimming rule – a sort of lucky charm for the island’s fishermen. He was too young and too likeable for anyone to think badly of him, so his defiance of the sea simply proved to the islanders that young Jimmy Walsh was blessed with good luck.
So when Jimmy saw the beautiful girl flicking her long red hair on the beach, he saw no reason not to steer the hooker in a bit closer to land, at least far enough so that he might swim in.
He put this to his cousin Tom, who was having none of it.
‘Are you mad in the head, Jimmy? I have to get this baby back into port by teatime or I’ll be skinned. We’re cutting it fine for getting you back home as it is, and anyway, I can’t see anyone out there.’
Jimmy held up the telescope again. She was gone. Curse and damn his stupid cousin for distracting him. He shouldn’t have taken his eyes off her for a second. What direction had she gone in? She can’t have gone too far, anyway. He started to unbutton his shirt.
‘Don’t you even think about it.’ Tom was considerably more suspicious by nature and sceptical about Jimmy’s ‘lucky’ status. ‘We have no idea what the pull is like on the water around here. This coastline is full of shoals and sandspits – you wouldn’t know what’s happening under the water.’
‘I’ll be fine,’ Jimmy said, so impatient with the buttons he was already pulling the shirt off over his head.
‘Oh no, you don’t.’ Larger and a good deal stronger than his wiry young cousin, Tom grabbed him and held the struggling teenager down on the bench. ‘I’m not going back to your father to explain how I lost you to a mirage of a woman,’ and as the shirtless youth struggled wildly against him, he added, ‘happy and all as I’d be to see you drown . . . Jesus!’
Jimmy had bit his arm and in one swift movement set himself free and dived overboard.
It took longer than usual for Jimmy’s face to surface, especially as he had barely remembered to draw breath properly before diving in. He spat out a mouthful of saltwater and, grimacing, checked the shoreline ahead of him. There was still no sign of her. No matter. He’d find her – and he began to swim. He had not taken six strokes when he felt what seemed like hands pulling him down under the water, except that he knew
it wasn’t hands; it was a whirlpool gathering around his legs. The waters around Aghabeg were predictable. When they were still on the surface, they were still beneath. This was different. He’d move free, though – it was only wat—
As he was pulled beneath the surface with an almighty tug, he heard his cousin cry, ‘Grab this, Jimmy. Grab it . . .’
Flailing around – down, down, down – drowning, Jimmy – don’t breathe in – don’t drown, Jimmy – something hard and sharp hit the side of his head and he reached up and grabbed it as his cousin pulled him up, up, up, bringing Invincible Jim to the surface of the water and over to the boat. Every bone in Jimmy’s body wanted to let go of the anvil and try to swim ashore again, but he was woozy from the hit to the side of the head, and he wasn’t sure if it was worth risking his life again – for a girl? And a red-haired one at that?
As Tom dragged him up the side of the hooker, roaring at his stupid cousin for his foolhardiness, Jimmy smiled as broad and bold a smile as his face had seen in nineteen years.
Ah, but yes. She would have been worth it surely.