The Lost Garden by Kate Kerrigan

Author:Kate Kerrigan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK

Chapter Twenty-Three

Life goes on. Somebody had said that to Aileen’s mother at her father’s and brothers’ month’s mind Mass. They were standing outside the church, slightly back from the rest of the widowed families, and Nelly French, a rather large, talkative woman who lived near the church, came over to Anne and said, ‘You must be terribly lonely, Anne. Still, you have this lovely young woman for comfort –’ she squeezed Aileen’s arm ‘– and life must go on, eh?’

Anne had bristled and responded to the mourner with nothing more than an icy smile. It was among the many things Aileen had heard people say, outside Mass, in the shop – stupid, awkward things said for the want of offering some solace in the face of terrible misfortune. They’re in heaven now with God. They’re at peace. Pointless words that didn’t help and only served to make you feel worse. ‘Life goes on’ was a popular one and particularly pointless, Aileen felt. Of course life goes on: it was obvious we were still alive, yet this expression was supposed to mean ‘normal’ life after someone had died. It was nothing more than a myth, people wanting to believe that everything would go back to how it was before. What made that expression all the more irritating for Aileen was that in some part of her she had hoped it would be true. Even though her father and brothers were dead, somehow she had hoped that life might go back to how it had been before they had died. That was what Aileen had been trying to make happen: recreating her world as it had been before she had brought this bad luck on them by travelling to Scotland. Clearing the garden, painting the cottage, trying to make things ‘normal’ again. Then her mother had run away on her and changed everything.

Aileen decided that the only way she could approach this dramatic change in her circumstances was to change everything around her. She felt dead inside. That would never change – not now. Her family were either dead or had abandoned her. Jimmy was a memory too painful to accommodate. The dark, anxious feeling she had now was who she was; there was a permanence about it; the fire, its destruction and death had branded her. Her only hope for survival now was to change everything about her life and never go back. She would never be happy again, not deep down, not how she had been when playing on the beach with her brothers as a child or kissing Jimmy as a young woman. But Aileen could, she found, at least pretend to be happy when she was around John Joe and the children, and for all that it was a lie, it was better than the black despair she knew she would fall into if she went back home alone.

So Aileen did not go back to her cottage; she stayed living with the farmer and his niece and nephew.

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