The Lost Garden (18 page)

‘Not a problem,’ Biddy said, her hands on her hips. ‘You tell me what you want and we’ll find it. I have a book my father gave me at home with the name of every plant under the sun.’

‘Really?’ The cloud lifted somewhat.

‘Oh yes,’ Biddy assured her, ‘and pictures too. Beautiful colour illustrations to leave no doubt in your mind as to what is what.’

‘I saw a book like that once in the travelling library,’ said Aileen. ‘I wish I had paid more attention to it now. Do you think it would be of use?’

‘Certainly,’ Biddy said.

‘And do you think if I had a book like that and knew the names of things, that I might be able to order some plants from somewhere? Do they cost much money, do you think? I am wondering now . . . how . . . ’

She did not finish the sentence. Part of Aileen knew that restoring this garden was no longer merely an improbable idea but had grown, in actual fact, into an impossible undertaking. However, if she gave that part of her a hearing, she would have to walk out of the garden that moment and away from all she had done so far. If she did that, Aileen feared that a part of her would die. There was not so much of her spirit left that she could afford to lose any more of it.

Whenever Aileen allowed herself to hope that she might transform this garden into something magnificent, despite herself, Jimmy came flooding into her mind.

He was always filled with hope and possibility.

‘I’ll buy you a ring with a diamond the size of a boulder; then I’ll buy a boat as big as a house.’

‘You’re a dreamer and a fool, Jimmy Walsh,’ she’d say.

‘We’ll sail round the world . . .’

‘Where do you get these silly ideas from at all?’

‘. . . and we’ll go on our honeymoon to Paris.’

‘A dafter eejit never walked this earth!’

All the time she’d be laughing and thinking that if any man could make such dreams come true, it was the invincible Jimmy Walsh.

She did not ask Biddy if she knew whether Jimmy was alive or dead because the older woman would volunteer the information if she knew but also because Aileen didn’t want to know. As long as she was uncertain Aileen could dream. Every night, as she lay in her greenhouse bed, after she had listed off the names of plants she had fed and watered, and listed off the jobs that had been done for the day, Aileen allowed herself to dream of Jimmy and the wild future of boats and diamonds and world travel he had planned out for them. With her body exhausted and her mind too tired to fully reason, Aileen could allow her heart to open and wonder about her lover. Perhaps he was alive and well and simply waiting to take delivery of his crazy big boat? Perhaps she would be on the beach one day and see an enormous ship ploughing through the water; then it would stop in the bay, with the whole island out looking at it; then a wiry figure would emerge from the sea, dripping wet and laughing – her crazy, impulsive Jimmy come to claim her. Where would they go then? What would they do? How would she feel when he looked at her again? And she’d melt into the soft night half believing he lay beside her.

Other times her mind was not tired enough to go straight from sweet thoughts to sleep and her rational mind would hijack
her heart. Aileen would remember that Jimmy’s injuries were serious enough that they might have killed him. Even if they had not, her dreams of his romantic return were wrong in themselves because they would make her feel happy and it wasn’t right for her to feel happy after all that had happened. Then Aileen would realize it was dangerous to allow her mind to wander into such territory, that the best thing she could do was to put all thoughts of Jimmy Walsh to one side.

Aileen’s life now was this garden. Here she had found a way of living that made her feel safe and useful and, if not fully alive, then at least connected to life itself.

This was a huge job, she knew that. Would Biddy be able to help her? Was she crazy even to be thinking of attempting this restoration?

Biddy shook her head and waved her hands in front of her face in a gesture of definite assurances, as if to contradict her would be a pointless, fruitless, laughable exercise.

‘My dear girl, you can buy any plants you like and even the most exotic seeds from all over the world for a halfpenny through my relations in the mainland shop. Really. Not a problem. Goodness me, as easy as . . . making bread. Now, are you planning to grow vegetables at all?’

Aileen came back to herself and all but ran through to the vegetable garden and stated her plans.

Biddy had tomatoes and lettuce seeds and onion bulbs and any number of good ordinary Irish vegetable plants she could bring up the following day.

What Biddy did
not
have was a relationship with anyone who could get their hands on exotic flowers at any stage of their existence, or indeed an encyclopedia of plants given to her by her father or otherwise.

Biddy knew what she needed was a miracle, but as she watched
the red-haired girl down on her knees, her white hands lifting the soft crumb of the soil she had created as if it were sand running through her fingers, she thought perhaps she had already found one.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

When Jimmy had first arrived in London, he was determined that his time here would be merely a means to an end. Like every Irishman in London during wartime, he was here for one reason only – to earn money. He had planned to save every penny for an operation on his face, after which he was determined to return immediately to Ireland to claim his true love, Aileen, like he had promised. Like he wanted more than anything. Getting the girl was his clear goal, his mission, his obsession.

However, the longer the young fisherman stayed in London, the more it started to feel like home. Not the home he had in Aghabeg, where things were so familiar that he didn’t notice them: his mother’s plain cooking or the faces of the island fishermen he had known from birth, the curves of their warm brown faces as familiar and everyday to him as the simple wooden furniture in his parents’ cottage. In London, as soon as things become recognizable, they could change. He had just got to know the man in the booth selling tickets in Leicester Square Station when he was replaced by somebody else. The shows playing the theatres along Shaftesbury Avenue seemed to change names with the flash of a light; the photographs of the actors with their made-up faces caught mid-expression would be torn down and a new set of people in the midst of great passion or
amusement put up in their place. Walking down the main streets around Piccadilly Circus or Leicester Square, Jimmy rarely noticed the same face twice.

On top of all this, it was 1942 and there was a war on. The bombing of London and the air raids had stopped, but there was still a sense of uncertainty in the smashed buildings and the decimated streets Jimmy passed on his rounds every day.

The backstreets of Soho, where Jimmy lived himself, were different in that things there seemed to remain more the same – the shop windows with their opulent mixture of cured meats and clothes and books; the Manzinis never altered their menu and that gave Jimmy a feeling of home.

In a few weeks Jimmy could not believe how his life had become so different. In Aghabeg, taking a swim out to sea was the biggest adventure a day might contain, and if you had a good haul of mackerel on top of that, you’d be finished off with excitement altogether. Your mother might get a bit of bacon once a week, and at the end of the month, she’d be doling out the last of the shop-bought jam like it was a precious elixir. In contrast, even with the war rationing, London seemed to Jimmy to be a land of plenty: plenty of food, plenty of entertainment – all the jam you could eat. His father had warned him that the streets weren’t paved with gold, but for Jimmy they might as well have been. He had always craved excitement, ploughing his wiry arms through the dangerous water of the sea, while others stood on the shore and called out for him to be careful. Now he was in a place where everything was different and it felt as if anything could happen every day. He wasn’t swimming alone anymore. Within weeks of arriving in London he felt like a different person to the one who had arrived, wet behind the ears, straight off the boat. He looked back at the boy who had never eaten a lasagne or drunk coffee made from proper grounds or
travelled on the London Underground and he could not believe he had ever been that innocent.

Manzini’s cafe became his regular haunt. Rationing seemed to make little odds to the food here, as the Italian mamma had the gift for thrift as well as flavour and produced mountainous plates of pasta flavoured with spices and cured meats. As a result, the cafe was always bustling with a regular crowd. At breakfast time, each booth was occupied with single men, like himself, eating a proper meal to set them up for their working day. He had got a few looks in his first few days, but Jimmy quickly came to believe that his initial discomfort was unjustified. Nobody really paid heed to your appearance here and Jimmy grew to think that their curiosity was more to do with the fact that they had not seen him before. Why, after a week, he was a regular and had started studying the faces of newcomers himself! The evening crowd was more mixed. A few Italian families coming in for a cheap plate of pasta, the odd tourist and couples mooching over a bottle of wine before the theatre. When Jimmy wasn’t eating with Anthony, Juliana ‘Mamma’ Manzini put her best customer in a corner booth and brought him across a copy of
The Times of London
– as if he were a fine gentleman.

One evening while he was eating with Anthony, his English employer announced, ‘I want to buy you a suit.’

Jimmy let out a small laugh. Anthony was a natty dresser himself, and while Jimmy thought the offer rather strange, he then looked down at his own hand-knitted and now rather tatty jumper and the good wool jacket that his father had got married in and had given him for this trip and realized, for the first time, just how badly he was dressed compared with Anthony and the other smart men around town. ‘Straight off the boat’ was an expression he had heard used in relation to his countrymen. That was how he was dressed and he didn’t like it.

‘Sure I’ll buy a suit myself,’ Jimmy had said. There were plenty of men’s clothes shops in London. He had passed them and looked in the windows with a vague curiosity but had never ventured into one because he had never thought of it before. To be honest, his overall appearance was the last thing Jimmy liked to think about – given what had happened to him. However, now that Anthony had put the idea into his head, Jimmy was all for it. There was no harm in being well dressed and he wondered why he had not thought of it before. He had money for new clothes after all. An inkling flashed through his head that perhaps the occasional disgusted looks people had given him had not been them judging his disfigured face but his scruffy clothes.

Anthony was insistent: ‘You are representing my company, Jimmy,’ he said, ‘so it is my responsibility to make sure you look smart when you are going to see my clients.’

Jimmy never did anything more than swap packages with any of them. Mostly they just opened the door a sliver and pushed an envelope of money back out at him.

Jimmy never asked Anthony too much about work because the Englishman did not like talking about his business. As far as Jimmy could gather, his office seemed to be the home he shared with Mandy and Lily. Jimmy’s bedsit had a large chest in the corner of it where Anthony kept his supply of medicine under lock and key. He trusted Jimmy more than the girls, he told him. He could see that Jimmy was an intelligent and trustworthy person who cared about the plight of the veterans he was helping and wouldn’t dream of stealing their medicine. Jimmy had no interest in the medicine one way or the other. He had had enough of them in hospital to last a lifetime, he told Anthony. Anthony smiled and said he was of the same mind, but some people . . . and he punctuated his sentence with one of his mysterious smiles.

‘In any case, there might be some other work coming up for you, Jimmy – other than the courier deliveries. How you look will be important.’

Anthony said that without any pause to consider Jimmy’s face. Perhaps because of his own scar, even though it was much less severe than his, Anthony genuinely seemed not to notice or care about Jimmy’s dropped, gnarled features. That was how Jimmy knew that for all his eccentric secrecy, Anthony was a good friend and a kind man whom he could trust: it was in what he did not say.

So, although Jimmy was intrigued about the possible change in his work, he didn’t push for more information.

‘Nonetheless I can buy my own clothes, Anthony. I’m not a child.’

Anthony looked shocked at the very suggestion.

‘Goodness me but I know that, Jimmy! This is a business. Let me get this suit for you,’ and he raised his hands as Jimmy tried to object, ‘as a gift. You can buy the next one.’

The
next
one? For a man to have one suit was something – for funerals and to get married in and now, it seemed, for just mooching about town in – but
two
suits? He had never known such extravagance, yet here he was in a place where an ordinary man such as himself might own more than one smart outfit.

They went to Marks & Spencer in Marble Arch. ‘I was going to take you down to Piccadilly to my tailor,’ Anthony said grandly, as they walked up Oxford Street, ‘but then a fine-figured slip of a lad like you, Jimbo, can buy off the peg and we’ll get it altered if need be.’

All his mother’s and father’s smart clothes were made by a tailor in Donegal town, aside from the ones his mother was able to knit or sew herself. Jimmy was therefore much more impressed
by the idea of going into a city department store. Marks & Spencer did not disappoint. When they walked in, they were faced with an enormous room with racks and racks of clothes behind wooden counters manned only by girls – each one prettier than the next. Even the menswear department was staffed by girls: all the men were away fighting. Anthony marched them straight down to a section of the store where the walls were lined with men’s clothes. There was an artificial torso of a man sitting atop the wooden counter, smiling from under a slicked-back hairdo and pencil-thin moustache, and wearing a shirt, tie and slim-fitting knitted woollen vest in a shade of yellow as bright as summer sunshine. Jimmy instinctively reached out to touch the fabric, and as he did, a young woman popped up and said, ‘I see you’ve met Errol? After Errol Flynn. Well, we had to call him something considering there are no men around here anymore.’

‘Well, we’re here to keep up the numbers,’ Anthony said. ‘As you can see, we’ve already been through the war, so we need to make sure we’re not letting the side down any further with shabby clobber.’

The girl’s eyes filled with a mixture of intense pride and pity. Jimmy felt guilty at the lie and looked down.

Anthony nudged him to not be such a sap and checked the girl’s name pin.

‘So, Daisy, meet my friend Jimbo – as you can see, he is in rather dire need of some of your finest men’s clothing.’

‘Hello, Jim,’ she said, giving him a wink that he could not quite identify but thought could be flirtatious. ‘Now, what are you after?’

‘A suit,’ Jimmy said. He wished he could have thought of some witty way of putting it. He had always found some roundabout clever way of saying things with Aileen, but that was
different. Aileen lit him up and made him charming, but that was before his face . . .

‘Grey, blue, brown?’ The girl had already walked over to a rail and was pulling things off and holding them up to him. Jimmy looked around for Anthony, but he had wandered off. Jimmy shrugged. He felt so stupid. So gormless! Daisy put a wide selection into a changing booth and said, ‘Let’s try them all on, then.’

She pulled the door closed and Jimmy started to strip off. In the changing-room mirror he looked at his reflection; deep scars ran down his arms and his torso under his vest. When he was out and about enjoying London, eating lasagne, drinking coffee, seeing the sights, hopping on and off trains, Jimmy forgot. The girl had been chatting him up, flirting with him like there was nothing wrong, but there was something wrong: his grotesque appearance. A suit wouldn’t cure this.

‘Are you ready yet?’ the shop girl called in. ‘Come along – don’t be shy . . .’

Jimmy wanted to hide in there forever.

He walked out and the girl said, ‘I’m not sure brown is your colour, sir. Try the grey pinstripe, and this . . .’

She handed him a fresh shirt and the primrose-yellow vest he had seen on the way in.

Anthony came along just as he was coming out again.

‘Oh, very smart,’ he said. ‘Daisy, you’re a genius!’

As she was packing up the clothes, Jimmy had a moment where he thought he might ask her to go for a coffee. She was pretty enough, and although not beautiful like Aileen, she reminded him a little of her. She seemed kind and had bright, intelligent eyes. Would there be any harm, he wondered, in being friends with such a girl? He imagined the two of them in Lyon’s Corner House, him in his new yellow vest, saying, ‘Have
whatever you like – it’s my treat,’ and her blushing sweetly and ordering a fancy cream cake, and him joking, ‘I’ll be Mother,’ and pouring the tea for her. He noticed that her hair was pulled up at the back and her neck was creamy and white. What noise would she make if he leaned in and kissed it? The pleasure might overwhelm her before she had the chance to object. Then he remembered Aileen’s low groan and he knew he had better stop imagining.

Anthony paid, but she passed the bag to Jimmy.

As she handed him the bag, he carefully watched her face and instead of light flirtation he read polite pity and perhaps a shred of fear. Jimmy wanted to cry.

This girl, a stranger whose job it was to smile and hide such things, could not fully conceal her pity for him.

He and his boss walked back out into the vast, anonymous flow of Oxford Street and Jimmy’s resolve hardened. He could have no life with a face like this and he wanted to get home to claim back his dreams. He was a proud and passionate Irishman and not about to compromise his love for Aileen to settle for some pretty London shop girl, however kind she seemed.

Jimmy Walsh was going to see the surgeon that very week and get his face restored.