Free The Lost Garden by Kate Kerrigan Page B

you on your toes, anyway,’ Iggy added. ‘Sure you can hardly dig them as quick as she can pick them.’
    The cheeky lad looked as if he was going to say something else, but Jimmy stared at him good and hard and made him think again. Jimmy was a joker, but when it came to people talking about Aileen, the men had learned to hold their tongues with the banter.
    ‘He’s got it bad with that Doherty girl surely.’
    ‘Red hair? You’d never have a moment’s luck in your life.’
    ‘Skinny wee thing too – not enough meat on her for my liking.’
    The men were worse gossips when they got together than the women, but Mick’s job was to keep them in line.
    ‘Mind Jimmy doesn’t hear you on about her like that. He may be small, but I’d say he’d take an awful lump out of you as soon as look at you if he was riled. And as for the brothers, they’d kill you stone dead.’
    By mid-morning Aileen had filled as many buckets as the grown men would do in a full day. By the end of the first week she had been selected by Biddy to be the assistant to the fore graipe. This was a big honour, not only because it took you from hard labour into the more feminine domain of the kitchen, but it also meant you got paid a small stipend for the extra work. So, at 11 a.m. sharp, the truck came to take the two women back to the bothy to prepare the main meal of the day, which would be eaten at midday. Mick would have put money aside from each of their wages to pay for the best of meat – steak, ham – and he always made sure there was plenty. Because Mick had been coming to Scotland for so long, he was friends with the locals and would buy animals direct from a pig farmer; then, for an overall price for the season, he would keep them with Finlay, the butcher in Cleggan, whose wife also providedthem with such foods as Biddy did not have the equipment or ingredients to make herself – like butter and jam. Dinner was as good as you would get in any fine restaurant. Not that Jimmy had ever eaten in a fine restaurant, but it was as good as anything his mother had ever served up to him, and privately, he thought this bode very well indeed for Aileen’s prospects as his wife. On one or two occasions he had looked over at his father as the two men were pounding gratefully into a plate of fried bacon, cabbage and spuds, and given him a look that clearly said, ‘Well? What do you think?’
    Sean had just smiled and shaken his head in amusement at his hopelessly infatuated son.
    ‘Will you have some sense, boy, and stop hounding the poor girl? If you hold back, you’ll get further.’
    ‘I think she’ll be a grand wife,’ the incorrigible boy said. ‘Will Mam like her?’
    ‘Of course she will – she’ll love her.’
    Twice a week Biddy and Aileen missed the afternoon shift and stayed behind in the bothy to catch up on the housekeeping. On these occasions Jimmy could barely wait for the day to end. Just those few hours when she was not within his sights made him feel anxious. So he was always first on the truck and hauling the others up onto it trying to hurry them along.
    Carmel was the last on, as usual, dragging her heels and complaining. ‘My feet hurt,’ she’d whine. ‘Ow! Don’t tug my arm – I’ve caught my skirts . . .’
    Although she was certainly difficult, Jimmy was starting to feel sorry for Carmel. He could see that she was madly in love with Paddy Junior, and he knew what it was like to be so in love with somebody that you were in constant danger of losing yourself. As the weeks had passed, people were starting to distance themselves from Carmel’s constant spoilt moaning. Even herfather had taken to travelling on the other truck both to and from the fields. He was fearful, Jimmy suspected, of either admonishing his outspoken daughter or incurring the disrespect of his workforce if he was seen not to.
    He said as much to Aileen that evening, as she was drying up the food things after supper, although she was not