Grimaldi's Garden

Part One (Continued)

The narrow town house in which Francis lived with his wife and children had not been built with pianos in mind.  The architect's mandate had apparently been to design the houses in such a way as to fit as many as possible on to the plot of land owned by the development company.

The living room was wedge-shaped, nine feet across at its widest point and six feet at its narrowest.  A long couch stood against one wall, the television against the other.  When the piano was delivered, Francis pushed the television down to the narrowest end of the room, leaving the couch facing tightly up against the piano.  Gerald went up to his computer in a huff, Valerie disappeared out into the night to tell her friends that her dad had finally flipped.  Marian threw a fit when she came home from her car-maintenance course and found Francis seated on a stool in front of the piano, trying to pick out a tune.

'What is it?'

'A piano.'

'I mean, what's it doing here?'

'I bought it.'

'What!  How much?'

'Er ... Two hundred and fifty pounds.  Free delivery.'

'Two hundred and fifty!  What about the microwave I've been on at you to buy that you said we couldn't afford.'

'We have an oven already.'

'Not a microwave. Everyone has one these days.  Have you any idea how much easier my life would become if we had a microwave?'

Francis thought privately that Marian already had quite an easy life but considered it judicious not to say so.

'What about the children?  They live here too, you know.  How can they watch TV?  They'll get cricks in their necks.'

'They watch too much television.  Especially the boy.'

'Gerald.  His name happens to be Gerald.'

'Yes, him.'

'You can't even play the damn thing.'

'I can learn.'

'At your age.  Don't be stupid.'

'You go learning all sorts of things.'

'Not to play the piano.  That's for children.'

'Our children could learn.'

'Hah!'

Francis was trying to remember whether the library held any music tutors.  He picked out 'Pop goes the Weasel' on the white notes.

'Even the sound is wrong,' commented Marian from the kitchen where she was making coffee.

'I can get it tuned.'

She re-entered the room, clutching a mug.  She hadn't made any for him.

'It's so ugly.'

'I'll clean it up.'

'It doesn't suit the room ... It doesn't suit the house ...' (This was quite true.  With its dull, shabby wood and broken candle-holders it looked totally out of place amid the bright veneers, the sprigged wallpaper, the satined and glossed paintwork, the tufted couch - like a tramp, like an interloper.)  'It doesn't suit us.'

She burst into tears.  She was puzzled and hurt.  Why had he done this to her?  She insisted the piano be sent back. He saw the tears as blackmail and refused.  It was a long time since they had had a row.  Not because they got on so well but simply because their lives didn't cross to any great extent.  Francis had forgotten that Marian could get quite nasty.

Later, trembling with emotion, Francis went out to the pub, passing through a horde of amazons who jostled him and burst into peals of laughter at his back.  It was horrible.  The whole thing was horrible.  He was a stranger in this familiar world, as ill-fitted as the piano.  When he came back, after several pints and closing time, the house was dark.  Peering in at his piano, he found it pushed down into the wedge with no space for a stool and covered with a lacy cloth.  The television was back in its old position.

Ruth's mother, a widow, lived in Kent.  The garden of England, people said when she told them.  It wasn't like that.  It was a featureless suburb that in Ruth's childhood had appeared to be full of featureless people.  Her father was shadowy, a man who absented himself a lot, drinking with cronies every night or locked in his 'study', the spare bedroom where he usually slept and where he pipe-smoked sweet Dutch tobacco. The scent could still give Ruth a jolt.  She later thought her parents must have stayed together for the sake of herself and her sister and wished that they hadn't, for the house was cold and loveless.

But her mother, a religious woman, disapproved of divorce.  She did numerous good works with a grim expression on her face, had a circle of virtuous women friends who collected clothes for down-and-outs, was a badge-wearing member of the Mothers' Union, complained about the vicar's wife who had a job and organised bazaars and cake-sales to raise funds for unmarried mothers (none of whom were in the Union) or church missions to Jews.  She called the Israelis Israelites.  When Ruth finished college, her mother had imagined, without asking her or without ever attempting to find out what went on in her daughter's head, that Ruth would come home to live and teach in a local school.

Instead Ruth went to Paris for a year and studied stage design, an excuse for having a good time and continuing to be a student.

'Thank God,' Ruth's mother would say to her friends or even, as she got older, to complete strangers in Ruth's hearing, 'that I have one good daughter.'

Linda, Ruth's sister, a cheerful girl several years her junior, had become a dental technician before marrying the only boyfriend she'd ever had, settled down, not too near her mother, not too far away, and reared two healthy children.

After Starveling was born, Ruth's mother assumed that the child would be given up for adoption.  She had written to tell her daughter that the vicar, in complete confidence of course, had recommended an appropriate organisation.  When Ruth announced she was keeping the baby, her mother told her not to think of visiting her with it.  She saw Starveling once or twice at Linda's, but refused to touch her as if she was contaminated.  When it emerged that the child was slow, her mother's comment was that Ruth should have had it adopted while she still could.  It was on this occasion that she referred to Starveling as 'the Judgement'. 

Ruth in turn called her mother 'a wicked old woman'.  She had never been back.

Francis was walking round the large peninsula on the north side of the city known as Howth Head.  He had imagined that, out of town, away from people, in the open air he would at least be able to think clearly.  But the only thought he had, buzzing round and round in his brain, was that he had made a terrible mistake.  Once, long ago, he had taken the wrong road and was lost forever now in tangled paths as on one of his son's computer games.  The trouble was that he had no lives to spare.

It was a warm day and the effort of walking made it seem more so.  Luckily there was a breeze.  He had parked his old Renault in Howth village, his destination, and had taken the bus back over the hill where he started his walk, past the Martello  tower that gave a view out over the bay to the city, clambering over the cliff called the Red Rock and tracking the winding path that led past a small pebbled beach, littered with empty beer cans and other detritus.  There was no one about.  No sound but screaming gulls nesting amid the rocks.  Soon he rounded a cliff and cut off all sight of civilisation.

Gradually he forgot his frustrations.  He took off his sweater and tied it round his waist for convenience.  He tunnelled through the rhododendron bushes and other thick plants that came over the cliff at the back of the gardens of the rich and privileged who lived on the hill.  In places it was so overgrown he had to push through thorny shrubs that caught at his clothes.  Flies buzzed round his head, the occasional blue or brown butterfly.  Finally he came out at the furthermost tip of the peninsula, the lighthouse.  He continued towards the village, on the lower walk that hung at times precariously to the side of the cliff, with a steep drop down to jagged rocks.  A head bobbed in the waves below him.  Not a swimmer, no.  Not here.  A seal, splashing and diving.  He remembered that seals were thought to have originated the legend of mermaids.  Looking now at the stubby pale brown head, he considered that the sailors who imagined them to be alluring fairywomen must have been even more shortsighted than he was.

Another head caught his eye, an extraordinarily red head below and in front of him on the cliff, moving with difficulty as if trying to swim up through the thick ferns.  He could see that their paths were likely to cross and automatically quickened his pace to avoid a confrontation.  He wanted to be alone.  He didn't want to smile and say 'Fine day', or else walk eyes down, pretending not to see, pricked by a familiar fear.

He soon realised all he had gained by hurrying was to ensure the meeting.  The boy - he could tell now it was a boy - had spotted him and, heaving himself up the last few yards, was actually waiting for him on the path.  He was slight, in jeans and an inappropriately thick jacket, with a crest of the short, bright red hair standing up on his head.  His face was very pale but had a zig-zag mark on the left cheek, below the eye.  Francis thought it was painted on until he came close and saw that it was a livid scar.

'This was where it happened,' the boy said to him, 'They jumped there.'

'Oh?' Francis said enquiringly, 'fine day' dying on his lips.

'The ones who died, last week,' the boy explained.

Francis remembered the incident faintly.  A tragic accident.  But there were so many casual deaths.  He looked down at the postcard scene, the waves crashing on the rocks, throwing lacy spray up into the air.

'I knew them,' the boy said.

'I'm sorry,' Francis replied helplessly.

'I wondered if they'd left any signs.'

How ghoulish, Francis thought.  Bloodstains, crushed fern where they had rolled, the contents of pockets?

'Did you find anything?' he asked.

'I heard their screaming.'

'Seagulls,' Francis said quickly.  'There's thousands of them.'

'Funny that people scream when they kill themselves.  When it's something they've actually chosen to do.'

'I thought it was an accident.' Francis started to walk along the path, trying to get away from the spot, hoping the boy might go in the opposite direction.  The boy walked with him.

'It wasn't an accident.  I knew them ... They were afraid of death, see.'

Francis didn't.  He felt terribly uncomfortable.  The continuing cries of the seagulls now sounded sinister.  Hadn't someone said it was the dead calling?

'They were so afraid, they couldn't bear to live any longer in a constant state of dread.'

The boy stared at him with large flecked green eyes.  He was terribly pale.

'Are you all right?' Francis asked.

'I feel ...' the boy staggered and Francis caught hold of him as his eyelids flickered and he went limp.

The path was wider here and Francis gently laid him down on a bank of heather.  He opened the jacket.  The boy came round.

'Sorry,' he said.

Francis tried not to panic.  It was at least a twenty-minute brisk walk to the village.  He couldn't remember any nearby houses though there were probably several, concealed by the rocks.  It would be unthinkable to leave the boy by himself.  He looked round the cliffside.  No one.

'Can you make it?' he asked.

They walked together on the path, the boy's hand in his.  It was a curiously pleasurable sensation to feel the trustful nestling, as if he held a tiny creature.  Franics remembered long ago, taking one or other of his children on an outing, holding hands like this.

'You're kind,' the boy said.

To change the subject, Francis started talking about himself, the first thing that came into his head.  He made a joke of the piano which he now imagined he would have to sell back to the old man, probably at a considerable loss.  Maybe, he thought aloud in a wave of philanthropy, he could even find the woman with the peacock feather in her hat and present it to her.

The boy looked at him.  'You could put it in my house,' he said.  'You could come and play on it whenever you wanted.'

'That's very nice of you,' Francis replied, 'but I'm sure your parents would object.'

'I don't live with my parents,' the boy said.  'It's my grand-mother's house.'

'Well then, she'd object,' Francis smiled.

'No, she wouldn't.  She likes music.  And in any case, she's dead.'

They walked in silence.

'If you want,' the boy said.

Francis was exceedingly glad to reach the village and find it just as expected.  Three years had not passed as when the soldier met the devil in The Soldier's Tale.  Twenty years had not flown by as when Rip van Winkle feasted in the cave of trolls.  On the other hand, he regretted the ending of the walk, he was sorry to let go of the boy's hand.

He insisted they go to a pub for a drink, meaning coffee or orange juice.  The boy ordered brandy.  Surely he wasn't old enough.  Still, he probably needed it.  Francis bought a brandy for the boy and a beer for himself.

The man, the moral guardian, walked systematically through the city streets, ripping down posters advertising a meeting on 'A Woman's Right to Choose'.  When he couldn't rip them off, he defaced them with an indelible marker bought especially for the purpose.  No one paid any attention to him.

How stupid he was!  How lucky he had not given himself away!

Even after another brandy, the boy was still dead white, apart from the livid zig-zag scar, and Francis had insisted on driving him home.  It was not until they were standing in the hallway of the grandmother's house that he had said rather self-consciously, 'Actually my name's Francis.'

And the boy, the boy, had replied, 'Hello Francis.  I'm Sonya.'

Incredibly red, incredibly short hair, an androgynous face, bare of make-up, a quirky little mouth that turned down, a slight straight body.  A girl.

Later he thought, when he was able to think, that it was providential that he had believed her to be a boy.  He would have behaved very differently if he had known the truth.  He would have run a mile.  And nothing of what happened would have happened.

'You can bring the piano here and come and play it whenever you want.'

It was a large old redbrick house in its own grounds, dark green paint emphasizing the gloom, a smell of generations of dust.  The room Sonya was showing him as suitable for his piano was on the side of the house.  Bushes rubbed against windows that at the top were inset with red, green and blue panes of glass, stylised flowers.

'I don't know,' he said.

'Your wife doesn't want it in the house, right?' the girl asked.

'No.'

'Bring it here while you're making up your mind.  I've always thought this room needed a piano.'

It was long and full of huge mahogany dressers.

'That thing can go in the hall.'  She pointed at a sideboard.  'Then there'd be room.  Come on, let's shift it.'

It was a struggle.  The sideboard was solid and had to be emptied, enormous tureens and piles of plates and soup bowls carefully positioned on the floor.  Drawers were removed.  Francis found an old piece of carpeting and managed to get it under what remained of the sideboard and then pull it into the hall.  A ghostly patch shone on the dark wall where light had been stopped for so long.  It seemed like the outline of his piano.  He could already see it there.  He could hear it singing out and knew that it would look much more at home here than in his own sparkling house.

'It's perfect,' the girl Sonya said.

He could even get candles for it.

'All right,' he said.  'All right.'

She made two coffees in the old, primitive kitchen, brewing and straining the grounds through an unsavoury-looking bag.  The place was in chaos, every surface piled with clean or dirty ware and pans, opened packets of food, fruit and vegetables, magazines and books.

'Do you live here alone?' he asked.

'Generally I have people in.  There's an extension out the back but the woman who's living there at the moment is moving out soon ... My cousin sometimes comes when he's in Dublin, but he prefers a fancy hotel.'

She laughed for the first time.  Extraordinarily, the corners of her mouth did not lift but seemed to turn down even more.

The coffee smelt delicious and tasted almost as good.  Sonya gave Francis a key, so that he could bring the piano over whenever he wanted.

He left at last.  Marian did not speak to him until he told her that the piano was going. Then she smiled briskly and kissed his cheek.  He didn't think it necessary to tell her in detail what had happened.

There was a demonstration.  A life-sized photograph of a statue of a miracle-working Madonna was taken in procession through the streets.  Among the large crowd, the moral guardian walked tight-lipped as onlookers nudged and giggled and catcalled.  They said the photograph wept just as the original statue did when in the presence of great evil.  The guardian was expecting the Madonna to weep, for the evil in the city was very great.  He stared intently at her, concentrating his powers.  The sun flashing on the shiny surface of the photograph blinded him temporarily.  He stumbled.

Later, blossoms fell from the sky.  It was a miracle, they said.  But what did it mean, the moral guardian wondered.  He grabbed a few of the blossoms and put them in his notebook.  He would think about it later.

Ruth did not want to move out of Sonya's extension.  It was a wonderful place for a painter to work.  Unlike the rest of the house, it was bright and airy, with a large skylight set in the roof.  True, when Ruth had first arrived, she had had to clamber up precariously and scrape off the green mould that had accumulated on the glass, but once that was done, the place was perfect.  Sonya was easy-going about rent, charged little and didn't make a fuss if there were problems.  Ruth was, however, scrupulous about paying her share of the gas and electricity, and putting coins in the box whenever she used the telephone.

The trouble began when Starveling learned how to walk.  She took longer about it than she should have done.  She was well over two years old before she got up off her bottom but once she started she couldn't be stopped.  She was soon even able to push open the door and wander off into the huge back garden that had become overgrown.  One time Ruth, immersed in work, had failed to miss her for what could have been more than an hour.  Calling out the back door at last, she finally heard a tiny sobbing in the far distance.  When she tracked it down, she found the child had fallen into a kind of pit that looked horribly like a grave.  It turned out to have been dug by an old man who had been growing onions and other vegetables there for many years with the permission of Sonya's grandmother.  From time to time he turned up at the kitchen door and left something, a cabbage, a couple of leeks, a bunch of carrots.  Sonya accepted them apparently without knowing or caring that they had been grown in her own garden.

But there were all kinds of dangers, briars, stinging nettles, a hedge that could be pushed through by a small person and which gave access on to a road, trees that were easier to climb up than down, a wreck of a shed, with broken glass windows, rusty nails - a mother's nightmare.

It was usual for Ruth to mount a exhibition of the work of her pupils at the end of the school year, in May or June.  As well as her Ireland's Eye picture, Marian was planning to show her first reasonably successful work, a still life with a bottle of wine and a bunch of grapes.  A school hall was to be used for the show, which took place over a weekend.  Ruth found she liked her pupils better when they were helping good-humouredly to set the thing up clearing chairs and tables out of the way, heaving screens into position, hammering nails.

Most of the pictures had been framed at the pupils' own expense and looked when hung, Ruth grudgingly admitted, better than she had expected.  She put up a couple of her own more accessible landscapes alongside them, just for fun.

The grand opening was cheerful, with a glass  of wine and canapés made by the ladies.  Marian contributed tiny vol-au-vents stuffed with mushroom cream.  Francis was late - he was off somewhere - and people assumed that the man whose arm Marian was holding was her husband.

Liam looked around, mightily impressed with Marian's efforts and offering to buy the still-life.  She said he could have it as a present.  He paused in front of another canvas.

'I wouldn't give you tuppence for this one,' he said.  'I could do better myself.'

'You should come to the class and try,' Ruth smiled at him, moving off.

Marian giggled, 'Liam you're dreadful.  That's my teacher and that's her picture.'

'What's it supposed to be?' Liam asked, staring puzzled at the sweeps of colour.

'It's called Wicklow III,' Marian said, peering at the label.  'She doesn't think pictures should look like postcards.'

'Well, she's succeeded then,' Liam commented.  'Imagine sending that to anyone - Wish you were here.  Wish I wasn't.' He laughed at his joke and swallowed his white wine grimacing, a pansy drink.

Later, Francis arrived, flustered.  He'd forgotten about the exhibition and knew he was in the wrong.  He told Marian he'd been delayed in town traffic, when actually he'd been trying to play his piano.

There was no wine left and only a few canapés on soggy crackers.  Ruth had left and the rest of the class was discussing adjourning to a pub.  Francis glanced round at the paintings which he found horrible.  Only Ruth's own wild and windy mountains caught his eye.

Back in early childhood Francis had been given piano lessons.  Now he found he could remember how to read music.  He went to Walton's music shop and browsed through the manuscripts.  The elementary books looked boring.  He picked out some Bach preludes.

Sometimes he went to the grandmother's house in his lunch break.  More often in the mornings when there was late opening at the library, or at the weekends.

'Are you sure I won't drive anyone crazy?' he asked Sonya.

'There's nobody here much during the day,' she told him, 'except me, and I don't mind.'

Sometimes he was aware of other people moving around, a toilet flushing, someone boiling a kettle in the kitchen, a door slamming.  He never actually saw these people and wondered fancifully if they could be ghosts, the dead grandmother and her family.

As for Sonya, she told him she was an actress, which accounted for her irregular hours.  She wasn't working at present, she told him, but had something coming up.

Often he was totally alone in the house.  He would let himself into the dusty hall and feel the silence wrap itself round him.  Then he would sit motionless at the piano, forgetting time, forgetting everything, light filtering through the stained glass dappling him red, green, blue.