Walled Garden Read online

  ‘I’ll see you out,’ she said.

  On her way past, he reached out and touched her arm.

  ‘I’m fifty-one, Alice. Don’t make me wait too long.’

  She hesitated for a moment, almost paralysed. Her arm was warm, tingling where he had touched her. Everything around her seemed to become slow and distant as he raised his hand to stroke her hair. She could feel her face begin to burn as he pulled her gently towards him, one large hand still on her hair, the other around her waist, pressing her to him. She felt the coarse material of his waistcoat scratching against her cheek until he released her, cupping her chin in his hand. He bent towards her, his face warm, pressed closely to hers. He kissed her lightly, once. Alice felt almost dizzy with delight until panic surged, making it difficult to breathe. What am I doing? She broke away from him abruptly, pulling her eyes away from his blue gaze; she wanted, needed to break the spell. He let her go.

  She kept her eyes down, then, waiting for the pounding feeling in her chest to go away. He touched her shoulder once more, just as he was leaving.

  ‘I’ll see you very soon.’

  His voice had gone quiet. She wondered what he was thinking. She nodded, wordlessly. She reached out and opened the door, her hand just a little shaky. She hoped he hadn’t noticed.

  He settled his hat as he stood in the porch, delaying. Mrs McGrath was sweeping up the clippings from her hedge, the last cut before the winter. Alice could see her curiosity, could almost discern the twitch in her ears as she listened for scandal. And Jack Keating hardly cold in his grave. Alice could imagine her satisfaction, her smug little triumph that she had finally detected unseemly behaviour on the street she regarded as her own.

  ‘Good night, Arthur.’

  She closed the door quietly behind him.

  *

  Alice heard the click of the bedroom door as the wind gusting through the window finally pushed it closed. She opened her eyes, suddenly wide awake. For a moment, she couldn’t move; she knew where she was, instantly, and yet her surroundings felt unfamiliar, displaced. Arthur’s presence in the room was so strong she had to hold her breath, afraid that any sudden movement would disturb him. After what seemed like a long time, the room began to lose its sense of otherness, and to settle itself around her again. She breathed more easily. He was almost gone.

  ‘Silly old woman,’ she grumbled aloud, her eyes fixed on the crack in the ceiling above her. ‘It’s a bit late to start believing in ghosts at your age.’

  In one brisk movement, she pulled herself up to sitting. The wave of love she’d felt at Arthur’s touch began to recede; she shrugged the remains of it off by straightening her shoulders and patting the back of her hair. She looked down, checking for any hairpins that might have come loose during sleep. But nothing had been disturbed. She plumped up the pillow, smoothing the lace edging. Now she felt refreshed, alert again. Even if she weren’t resting properly at night, these brief afternoon naps seemed to make up for any loss. She glanced at her watch and was surprised to find it was almost six. She’d a couple of hours yet before Keith came. She sat up straighter, feeling the floor with the tips of her toes, looking for her shoes. All of her movements had become decisive, purposeful; no more nonsense. But as she closed the window of Elizabeth’s bedroom, she had to fight the memory of the way Arthur had walked away, down the front path, lifting his hat to Mrs McGrath, stooping to open the door of his red Volkswagen. She paused by the window, letting the soft curtain material drift through her fingers. Physical movements alone were not enough to dispel him completely. Even her shoulder still felt tingly, warmed by his final touch. Her head was alive with the vivid images of sleep: at first, when she’d opened her eyes, she hadn’t been sure whether it had all been dream or memory. It didn’t really matter; there was no confusion, the pictures were bright and clear in her mind. That’s the way it always was now when she revisited her other life. Confusion saved itself for the assaults it made from time to time on life lived in the now, a place from which she was beginning to feel more and more remote; all of her emotional energies were becoming refocused on the other Alice, the one who was still young, vital, with her grip on life and reality strong and assured. There was the growing sense of something deep and still having been disturbed within her. No wonder this was one of those things she had kept locked away, carefully, instinctively understanding its power to wound.

  Arthur Boyd had been every bit as real to her this afternoon as he had been forty years before. His presence had touched her, stirring something that demanded to be heard, finally, to be felt and seen and tasted. Alice had never been one for regrets; her life had been far too busy, filled by her children and their needs. She’d always prided herself on her lack of sentimentality. But now, in the deceptive calm of these unbusy days, her mind had suddenly turned traitor. It was making her pick over the broken pieces of that part of her life she had thought long and safely buried. In her practical, no-nonsense daily existence, Alice had always known that most things could be mended – broken delph, fraying carpets, stuck door handles. And she had learned to cope with all of them, becoming gradually more and more familiar with the contents of Jack’s toolbox. What she couldn’t fix, whatever was beyond repair, she unceremoniously threw out, without sentiment, without nostalgia. That’s that. But now it seemed that her memories weren’t so accommodating. Of course she couldn’t change what had happened between her and Arthur, nor could she mend it. But something was nagging at her to put the pieces back together again, just so that she could see the whole picture one more time, and become familiar with its contours. She felt helpless for a moment, wondering where to start. It was all such a long time ago and regret was such a wasted emotion. Suddenly, she knew that she wanted to tell Elizabeth about Arthur, felt sure that her daughter would understand what was only now forming into words inside her head.

  The August evening was fine, the summer light still good. Alice decided she’d begin the letter straight away. She wanted to do something with the sudden surge of energy that had been released by Arthur’s visit. She sat down at the little desk again, and pulled her writing paper towards her.

  ‘Woodvale’

  11th August 1999

  My dearest Elizabeth,

  I need to write to you again, this time from the little desk in your old bedroom. I’ve been spending a lot of time in the house in the past two weeks, tidying up, gathering together loose ends. I’m very careful that James doesn’t see any of this, or he’d insist that I came to stay with him and Olive. He’d worry, and want to make sure he could keep a close eye on me. But I like this time on my own – I don’t feel lonely and, strangely enough, I’m not frightened in the house any more, even though I’m waking at night much more frequently than before.

  There is something inside that’s been nagging at me recently to meet my old memories head on – I’ve woken up on three different nights now, standing beside the wardrobe in your old bedroom. Today, I decided to try and find out why, to discover whatever it is that seems to be drawing me back to the same place, again and again. So I’ve taken to spending time here, working at the desk your dad made for you. You used to do your homework at this desk – do you remember us fighting because you had Radio Caroline on at full volume? You insisted that the music helped you to concentrate. Music – how are you! Many’s the time I threatened to throw that transistor in the bin. The more we fought, the louder you turned up the volume on the following night. Of course, we weren’t fighting about music at all, but about much more important things. I belonged too much to the old school, I think, where children had to be seen and not heard. You certainly didn’t seem to be aware of that piece of old wisdom – you fought very hard indeed for your right to be heard. You were, I think, that word which I rarely hear applied to children nowadays – wilful. I’m sure now that it wasn’t right to try and bend that will as much as I did. You insisted on being yourself, and I think you were right to do so. My generation understood a lot about duty to ot
hers, and very little about duty to ourselves.

  Alice stopped herself. This wasn’t what she’d meant to write about at all. The last sentence took her somewhat by surprise. She, who had chided Elizabeth on so many occasions in the past about her duty and responsibility to others, now seemed to be questioning its value in relation to her own life. She must be rambling. She tapped her pen impatiently on the desk, and started again.

  I’ve never really talked to you about the time after your dad died. The belief then was that children didn’t really understand loss, that if we didn’t talk about death, it would somehow go away. I know that even then I never really believed it, but at the time it was comforting: I didn’t have the strength to deal with your grief as well as my own. I feel sad about that now, for you. When you got older, it became easier to talk about the times when your dad had been alive, and we did: you used to test your memories of him on me quite a lot. But we never talked about what it had been like to lose him, what life was like for each of us after he died.

  I’ve been thinking about those days a lot as I’ve been going through the old photographs, the ones at the top of your wardrobe. It is, at times, quite painful. But I want to see it through to the end, because I’m learning things about myself, and beginning to feel more complete, somehow.

  I don’t think that I’m expressing myself very well – I’ve a tendency to stray from the point, these days. My dream will probably explain things better. I’m dreaming a lot more these nights, and sometimes in the afternoons, too. I usually take a little rest after lunch, and the dreams then can be especially vivid. I had a really strange one the other day: I was dressing up to go to a party. I knew it was me, because in a dream, you do – you just know these things, even though I couldn’t see my own face, and when was the last time I went to a party! I was putting on Granny McKinney’s pearls – you know the necklace I’m talking about, the single string with the little diamond-chip clasp? Your dad and I used to call it our insurance policy. Anyway, there I am in front of my dressing-table mirror, fastening the clasp, and suddenly, the string breaks. I feel shocked, paralysed in that awful, suffocating, dream-like way, when you can’t even move your head or your arms. I watch as all the pearls scatter across the bedroom floor, bouncing on the wood, disappearing under the bed, hiding in the gaps between the floorboards. I am unable to move until all the scattering has stopped. Somehow, I know how many pearls there should be – don’t ask me how, because I certainly don’t know that in reality. I start to pick them up, one by one, and the sense of shock begins to get less. I remember feeling very happy, very still inside, as a voice says to me, ‘You must gather together all the pieces of yourself to become whole.’ At this stage, I know I’m dreaming, but I still can’t wake up. The dream continued until I had picked up every single pearl, and then I woke, my head so full of what I had dreamt that it felt like another reality. I remember thinking, ‘What an extraordinary dream!’ The voice has stayed with me, it was so real, so old-fashioned and formal, that it was utterly convincing. I actually got out of bed and took the pearls out to have a look at them, to check and see if I was going mad, or what. (Remember where they’re hidden – in the last drawer of your dad’s wardrobe. They’re for you and Laura.)

  They were in one piece, of course, and I was relieved to see that they were. The dream gradually faded over the next few days, but the powerful sensation of picking bits of myself up off the floor has not gone away. That’s the instinct that’s been disturbing my sleep and pushing me to look at old photographs, even to write like this to you and James. I feel that there are bits of me, fractured, all over the place – after your dad died, I blocked out so much of my life because it was too painful to remember. But the memories have been refusing, lately, to stay locked away. They are surfacing in all sorts of surprising ways. Today, I spent all afternoon remembering Arthur Boyd, a good friend of ours, and your dad’s employer. You might remember Arthur’s sons – you and James used to swim with them on the Sundays when we all went to Bray together. After their mam died, they used to visit here quite a bit with their father. You would have been about six at the time. Their visits stopped just over a year after your dad died.

  Around the time of Jack’s first anniversary, Arthur asked me to marry him. I knew, instinctively, that he was going to, that day. I think I’d probably known for some time. I was tempted. He was handsome, kind and well-off. Any other woman would have given him hope, at least. But I couldn’t. I felt guilty that I could even think about marrying him, less than a year after Jack died. It felt almost like being unfaithful. You see, I never really lost the sense of your dad’s presence all around me in this house and particularly, when I stepped out into his beloved garden.

  And then there was the money. I was broke, I had nothing. Arthur was wealthy, and he had always been a generous man. But I felt ashamed that I was now poor, that charity might be part of his motive for wanting to marry me. I was afraid, too, that I was the solution to his need for a housekeeper. He would have taken care of all of us, I know that. But that wasn’t the point. I just couldn’t do it. Part of me felt that I was being bought over, although I do believe that he was genuinely fond of me. I looked at his four sons – Colm, the youngest, was eight at that stage, Peter was eleven, the same age as James. David was fourteen and Arthur junior, sixteen. All I could see was my two children being swamped, swallowed up in a household where all of those boys came first. I agonized about it for a long time, and eventually I told Arthur no. I’ve never really known if I made the right decision. Years ago, I stopped wondering about it. I wouldn’t even let myself think about it – but it’s come back to haunt me – literally. Today, I felt the presence of Arthur so strongly that I could hardly breathe. He came back again to ask me to marry him, just exactly as he did forty years ago. It was like being given a second chance. I wanted to hold on to him, I could feel how warm and alive he was. The sense of him being there, beside me, was overwhelming. When I woke up, I was disappointed to find he had gone. I hardly dared move, I wanted to keep him with me a little bit longer. It should feel ridiculous and pathetic, but it doesn’t. It feels like an enormous pool, a great deep well of loss, and I’ve nobody to blame but myself. I’m writing to you now in the aftermath of that dream, or vision, or whatever it was. As I write, I feel sadly conscious of a missed opportunity – a very important one in all our lives.

  Should I have said yes? Wouldn’t we all have been happier, less pressured as a family if I had agreed? Or is this just so much useless nostalgia? We were close, the three of us, weren’t we? A real family? I wish I knew that I’d done the right thing by all of us. I wish I could feel it. I often felt guilty for refusing him – he was terribly hurt and disappointed the night I said no, finally. I almost changed my mind, seeing him sitting at the kitchen table, looking smaller, hunched in on himself, as though someone had let the air out of him. He’d brought flowers, and the water was seeping through the white paper, making a little puddle on the table, making the wrapping all grey and soggy. I’ll always remember that. That was the last time I ever saw him; he was married less than a year later, to a much younger woman. I wrote to him, wishing them both happiness. But I never heard anything back. I suppose I must have been hurt, but everything seemed to ooze into numbness at that time of my life: I could hardly distinguish one feeling from another. I suppose I was too busy.

  I’ve often asked myself did I love him. I really don’t know. That whole year was so traumatic, so difficult in terms of money and grief and worry about the future, that I really don’t know what I felt. Your dad hadn’t been working long enough for Boyd and Sons to get any sort of a pension, but Arthur cashed in an insurance policy your dad had started once he joined the firm, and I got a few hundred pounds for that. It helped with the funeral, and afterwards. I’ve often wondered whether that policy really existed; I have my suspicions – I think Arthur was just being good to me. He was a good man, a very good man. And still, I turned him down. I know he fully expected
me to say yes. But I couldn’t shake the notion that his family would always come first, that you and James wouldn’t get the attention you deserved. And maybe I wasn’t ready to be a mother to six children. It was all I could manage to be a good enough mother for you two. I made the choice then to go it alone, and we’ve all lived with the consequences of that decision.

  Anyway, once Arthur disappeared from our lives, there was never anyone else for me. I put my head down, earned my few pounds cleaning and cooking and, later on, sewing, and I brought you two up as best I could. And I’m very proud that you and James got such a good education – I’d have to say that I’m proud of myself for making that happen. I never wanted to see my children cleaning other people’s floors or preparing other people’s food as I had to do. I wanted more for you, more than your dad and I had had. But it was hard. I know what it’s like to be lonely, and to carry all the responsibility. That’s why I worry about you. I suppose what I’m trying to say is, that if I had my time again, I might make a different decision. It’s a long life, living it on your own. I’ll probably never get the chance to talk to you like this, so I’m going to say what’s on my mind: will you please try again with Tony? He’s a good man and I’m sure he still wants you back, any fool could see that he never wanted to let you go in the first place. Years don’t mean anything when that sort of strong feeling is there between two people. Don’t give yourself something to regret when you’re eighty.

  I heard that Arthur died about ten years ago. I didn’t go to the funeral. He was the mainstay of the family firm: once he retired, that would be almost twenty-five years ago now, his brother, Robert, let the business go to hell. He’d never been interested in it, not really, not in the same way that Arthur was. He basically drank it to death, and within a few short years, there was nothing left. You’d wonder what it’s all for, sometimes, wouldn’t you?