The Herbalist (22 page)

Half an hour later he was still spitting
fire over the damn book. Opening it and letting out exclamations of outrage at whatever
offending sentence he happened to pounce on.

‘This has to be reported. Brought to
the gardaí; it’s the only thing. You can’t have this sort of smut around a
girl like Sarah, it will contaminate her mind! Listen to this: “‘Mrs
Betty,’ said he, ‘I fancied before somebody was coming upstairs, but it was
not so; however,’ adds he, ‘if they find me in the room with you, they
shan’t catch me a-kissing of you.’”’

He slammed it shut, glared at his wife.
Opened it again … read a section, snapped it shut. Glared. Opened it … on he went, over
and over again, with the same exaggerated expression of wide-eyed horror. It reminded
Carmel of a Charlie Chaplin film. She just wished it were a silent one. Was this the
same man who’d whispered once a week like clockwork, ‘Do you want to go to
bed, love?’ Like his own lust was a meek weekly cuckoo.

If that’s shocking you, Dan
darling
, thought Carmel,
I could say something that would really get your
cuckoo hopping.
She smiled but couldn’t keep her eyes open and dozed off
by the fire. Maybe she should’ve listened more carefully.

One Saturday after work, when Sarah was
looking forward to collapsing in a heap, Carmel asked her to take a message to
Emily’s. She set sheets of brown paper on the counter, parcelled up some bacon and
then a fruit soda.

‘That should be enough, for
what’s left of the Maddens now.’

She cut a piece of string with her teeth.
Sarah really wished she wouldn’t do that, nibble on string like a rat. The bacon
grease darkened the paper as soon as it was wrapped.

‘Used to be, let me see, Mo, Brian,
the four young ones, and the lad that helped. That’s seven altogether. Now look
what’s left: just Emily, Charlie and their father. How things change. The house is
well in off the road, on the right, behind hedges let grow high. A run-down house with a
madman’s garden. You’ll know it when you see it.’

Carmel gave her a sharp look and handed over
the parcels.

‘Now don’t dally.’

How like Carmel to forget that Sarah’s
working day had ended an hour earlier.

Sarah began to wonder if she had passed the
house when the hedges began to swallow the road and she saw a narrow gap where an open
gate leant back. There was fuchsia on either side: Sarah popped open a red bud and
stepped through. The house was a large square two storey. It must’ve been a fine
building at some stage, but now the stone was smothered in ivy, and the window-frames
were rotten. The garden was overgrown with nettles, poppies and foxglove. It felt lush
and heavy. It made her notice things, like the smell of lilacs after rain. It made her
want to lie down.

A hammer tapped on tin. A young man sat on
the ground at the side of the house, his back against the wall, a bucket between his
legs. It must be the brother, Charlie. Sarah was shocked at how
handsome he was. Dark and well built, nothing like Emily. Tarzan with his clothes on.
She walked towards him, but he didn’t look up. She even coughed but still he
didn’t look up. Sarah’s shadow crossed him. He jumped to his feet, let his
hammer fall. Frowned at her. God, he was gorgeous.

‘Mrs Holohan sent me with this.’
She raised her greasy parcels. ‘Is Emily about?’

‘She’s in her room – go on in.
It’s at the top of the stairs. Mind you don’t frighten
her
to
death.’

The front door was open; the cracked
red-and-black hall tiles were gleaming. The stairs were bare and scuffed. At the top,
something touched Sarah’s shoulder: a wilting piece of flowered wallpaper. Sarah
gave a gentle knock on Emily’s weather-beaten door and lifted the latch.

Emily was kneeling on the ground. If she was
surprised, she didn’t show it. She nodded hello. A dress pattern fluttered on the
floor in front of her, with cotton fabric tacked to it. The draught created as Sarah
shut the door set pins rolling across the carpet and made the paper flap. Emily sighed.
Scattered on the floor were coloured spools, scraps of fabric, a pin cushion full of
needles, cards of darning cotton, skeins of embroidery cottons, a jar of buttons,
another full of hooks and eyes. Emily had huge shears in her hand.

‘Wait a tick.’

Sarah sat on a chair. Despite the disorder
on the floor, Emily’s room was beautiful. The white bed-cover was embroidered with
a border of bluebells and violets. The pale grey curtains were also embroidered at the
edges and held back with swathes of blue velvet. Miniature patchwork dolls lined the
windowsill, perfectly attired, and each with a different felt hat. She watched as Emily
began to tack together the pieces she had cut out. She worked quickly. There was a
treadle sewing machine sitting beside her bed in the way other people had
nightstands.

‘Where did you learn to
sew?’

‘I learnt in school, and from Mam.
Didn’t you?’

‘Only to hand sew.’

‘Sure what’s the
difference?’

Not the welcome that Sarah had expected.

‘What’s the occasion?’

‘Oh, I don’t have an occasion
yet. This is the kind of dress I would wear to a dance. Only then I’d make it from
satin. A bias-cut of the darkest blue, with a row of tiny pearl buttons.’

The fabric on the floor was yellow cotton.
The colour of a duckling. Poor thing – as if she’d be invited to a dinner dance.
Emily lifted the whole ensemble on to the bed as carefully as if it were a baby.

‘The leg-of-mutton sleeves are
fabulous,’ she murmured to herself.

Emily turned then and looked at Sarah as if
she had only just noticed that she was a real live visitor. She seemed at a loss as to
what to say. Sarah handed over Carmel’s parcels.

‘Would you like a cup of tea?’
Emily asked.

‘I would.’

They went downstairs. Charlie was at the
kitchen table having his own tea amidst the debris. Sarah gobbled the generous slab of
buttered fruitcake that Emily set before her. Charlie looked over at her.

‘In some sort of trouble,
Em?’

‘No, I’m not, Charlie. This is
my good friend Sarah.’

‘The one who took your job?’

‘Yes, the very one.’

On the walk home, Sarah realized that she
and Emily had something in common. They had both lost their mothers. Sarah didn’t
feel the loss the way Emily must; didn’t know any way different. When she was a
child, she had often pestered Mai about her mother, asking where she was buried and why
they couldn’t visit her grave. Mai didn’t like to talk about her sister; she
just stayed silent and then would get fired up and point up towards the main road.

‘That’s the way, that’s
the road to the town where your mother’s buried. Now skedaddle down it if
I’m not good enough for you.’

She had meant to look before this, but almost
every daylight hour was spent doing Carmel’s bidding. Well, she was on her own
time now. Sarah set out to find her mother’s grave.

The cemetery was set across the railway
bridge, around a falling-down church whose stonework seemed knitted together with ivy.
She walked the narrow paving towards the back, where it was wilder, where the headstones
were older. The graves of the wealthier families were marked with big granite crosses
set behind ornate railings. The smaller iron crosses were less imposing but had more
flowers: pansies that looked like a bunch of butterflies, ox-eye daisies and pale blue
forget-me-nots. Inside the walls of the derelict church were graves of heavy slabs set
flat into the ground. Sarah sat on one, resting herself. Wondered if the stone slabs
were there to keep the dead in, or the living out.

She’d heard a story once about a woman
who’d been buried alive. Her grave was opened by two men intent on robbing her of
any jewels. One of the grave-robbers tried to cut off her finger. He was after her
wedding ring. She woke screaming and the thieves ran off in fright. What a way to wake
up. Though only for the robber she would’ve woken to a much more horrible fate.
She could’ve died scratching the lid of her own coffin. So sometimes bad brings
good along with it. Sometimes.

Sarah was consoling herself and she knew it.
She was growing something. There was the sickness, the tears and then the getting fatter
despite eating nothing. How hard the ground had felt beneath her that night.
Get up,
do what you came to do, Sarah Whyte.
Sarah rose and began to read the names on
the gravestones.

She had no luck finding anyone with her
surname. Why wasn’t she surprised? And she had spent too long among the
headstones; it was nearly dark. Perhaps she was wrong to be searching for her
mother’s grave. Mai was the only mother Sarah had known. She had delivered Sarah.
Delivered lots of babies but had never married and had one of her own.

That night Sarah dreamt she was dancing in
high shoes, handed down, black. Her best, which someone else had broken in. The pied
piper of Hamelin played the Walls of Limerick. How she hated the
Walls of Limerick. Tapping feet, open sesame, abracadabra.
He
reached in and
took a plastic bunch of roses from her stomach. A clown, a circus. Some carnival. She
heard the crunch of steps on gravel.

‘We must learn about solid
matter.’

Who said that? Whoever it was, he woke her
up. She lifted back the bed-covers and went to look out of the window. There was no one
there.

Sarah wondered what Mai was doing. Was she
also awake? Mai was often called upon at odd hours, to go to odd places. Seldom said
much when she returned; was never a one for telling stories. As a midwife Mai dealt
quietly with whatever the sins of the flesh brought her way. A woman of few words,
Sleep well … Morning, child.
Kind – you never met kinder – but she
wasn’t popular. Men didn’t know what to make of where she put her hands. And
she didn’t gossip enough to get on with women. When Sarah got that bit older, Mai
often brought her along but never introduced her by name, always said
This is my
sister’s child, God rest her.
Sarah once heard a gangly widow imitate
Mai. ‘My sister’s child, God bloody rest her!’ And she’d roared
with laughter.

Why so mean?

Sarah’s mother died giving birth. The
grave far off, down that road, the next town over. That’s all Sarah was told. Was
it a different road, a different town? Sarah tried to remember.

Pray for her in your head. You
don’t need a grave
. Enough said.

And, after making sure his wife’s
final resting place was in Ireland, Sarah’s father ended up buried with strangers
in Staffordshire. All Sarah had were Mai and Gracie and her cousins. And now she was
going to bring shame on them.

Sarah got back into bed. She was getting
wider. There was no getting away from it: she was expecting. She had drunk Mai’s
raspberry tea till it came out of her ears, taken every remedy she could think of, but
she had still ended up with this beautiful secret, a sweet one. A time bomb.

She slipped her hand beneath the blankets,
over the new hard
warmth of her stomach, and sang a lullaby for the
child, the hidden child.

‘Hush a bye,’ she whispered,
‘bide your time. You’re safe inside.’

In truth, she was terrified. She
couldn’t stop time. Redcurrants ripened, the washing line was full of whites, and
the sky was a heat blasted blue.

Sarah felt a rising panic.
Think of
something else
. She thought of school, of inkwells – who could have known
she’d miss those inkwells? White chipped inkwells sitting into her desk. The
Master standing over her. A stain spreading across her copybook. Her name in Irish.
Sorcha
. Strange in her mouth. Like the word ‘blotter’.

She drifted off and dreamt a mixed-up dream.
There were kiss curls, jars of Vaseline in a row, red ants and black ants. Someone
rubbed her cheek as she fell from her dream to oblivion, and she heard a whisper,
Mai’s voice:
It’ll be all right. It’ll be all right, a
leanbh.