Once in a Lifetime

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Prologue (#ulink_13c7631e-a87e-5ebd-bd14-6efab5f3c66b)

Star Bluestone had talked to bees all her life. She talked to her flowers too, murmuring to the rare yellow poppies she’d nurtured from seeds gathered in the old Italianate garden thirty miles away across the Wicklow hills. She and the young Kiwi gardener there had such great chats, he walking her through the orchard and reaching up to cradle a baby apple bud the way another man might touch a woman.

He understood that people who loved the soil talked to their plants and to the bees whose careful industry made their flowers bloom. Even though he was only thirty to Star’s sixty years, he didn’t think she was an eccentric old lady. Rather, he was impressed by Star’s encyclopaedic knowledge of plant life. His earnest, handsome face became animated when they talked.

When she watched this kind boy, Star always remembered fondly that good gardeners make good lovers. Nobody capable of the tenderness required to separate delicate fronds of fern for replanting would ever be heavy-handed with another person’s body.

It had been a few years since Star had lain in a man’s arms. She’d had many lovers, but the one she would remember for the rest of her life, the one whose memory was imprinted upon her skin, hadn’t been a gardener. He’d been a poet, although that wasn’t how most people knew him. To the world, he was a conventional man, handsome, certainly, with beautiful manners and an important job waiting for him. To her, he was the man who sat with her under the stars and recited poetry as he traced his fingers along her face and talked about their future.

That had been over thirty-five years ago. Star talked to flowers and her beloved bees in their white hives back then too.

When she’d been growing up, her school friends hadn’t understood why Star did this, but they didn’t question it. After all, Star was different in most things. So was her mother. Their mothers didn’t grow herbs with such skill or know how to brew potions of feverfew and camomile to soothe menstrual cramps, nor did they stand gazing up at the Midsummer moon.

Eliza Bluestone did, and that it picked her out from all the other mothers in the small town of Ardagh was both a blessing and a curse to Star. The blessing was the knowledge her mother gave her. The curse was that knowing so much made her separate from all her friends.

Eliza mightn’t have told her daughter all the wisdom in her huge, midnight-dark eyes, but that knowledge somehow transferred itself to Star anyhow.

When she was a lithe young girl of twenty, and wanted to dance with her friends and flirt with young men, being wise was an impediment. She just knew that few people would be lucky enough to meet their soul mate in a pub ten miles from their home. Finding the right man to be her husband was going to be hard because the Bluestone family–which meant Star and her mother–were hardly conventional and it would take a strong man to love them. In the same way, she knew that her friends would not all have the joy and happiness they expected in their lives, because not everybody could. It was obvious. To imagine anything else was folly.

Though, Star, like her mother, couldn’t actually predict what would happen in the world, she had enough wisdom to understand the rules of the universe. While her friends threw themselves blindly into everything and were surprised when the man they’d met at the club hadn’t called, or shocked that other people could be bitchy, Star was never surprised by anything.

As she grew older, Star’s ability with her flowers and her garden grew. Talking to her plants wasn’t the whole trick: caring for them with reverence was and Star did that, plucking weeds from around the orange-petalled Fire Dragon so it could breathe again, moving the old redcurrant bush away from the dry soil beside the shed, pausing occasionally in her labours to listen. For Star loved music. She never grew tired of hearing the distant singing of the church choir, even though she had never set foot in the building–this was another thing that set her apart from her friends. Star’s church was the trees and the mountains and the mighty roar of the sea. And although she loved church music, she loved the music of nature better. The song of the bees was, her mother had taught her, the Earth’s song. Melodic and magnetic, with the bees moving to some ancient dance they’d moved to long before man came calling. And was there anything more uplifting than the sound of pigeons under the eaves, skittering about and squabbling as they sheltered from the rain?

It was raining now. As Star lay in bed, she could hear the raindrops bouncing off the window panes. As usual, she had woken at six a.m.; in summer, she would have risen immediately to make the most of the golden sunrise, but on this cold February morning, dawn was at least two hours away–and it promised to be a murky one.

Danu and Bridget, her two cats, stretched on the bed beside her, making their morning noises. Bridget was a showy white ball of fluff, her magnificent fur requiring lots of brushing. Danu, the smaller of the two, was a rescued tabby who’d been given to Star the year before, the moment exactly right because Moppy, Bridget’s sister, had just died. Life had an odd way of doing that, Star knew: giving you what you needed when you needed it. Not wanted–your want didn’t come into it. Want and need were very different things.

Star lay in bed for a while, stroking the two cats, and staring out of her window at the dark shapes of the trees and shrubs in her garden. She could see the red maple tree she’d planted when she was twenty and lost in love.

‘Plant something to remind you of this,’ her mother had said, and Star had been surprised.

‘I’ll always remember,’ she’d said simply.

Everyone said she was at the peak of her beauty then, lush like her mother’s precious peonies, full-lipped, and with hair of spun gold–the Bluestone women always had golden hair, no matter what their fathers looked like–that fell about her slender waist. She’d secretly picked out her wedding dress with her best friend, Trish, and she knew that Danny and she would be so happy if they rented the house on the hill road. From there they could see the town and the sea, and he could be at his father’s garage, where he was one of the mechanics, in five minutes.

Still, she had liked the idea of a tree for them both and planted the red maple.

But, ‘I’m too young to settle down,’ Danny had told her not long after the tree was planted, when its roots had barely had time to unfurl into the earth and Star was still patting it each morning with joy at all it represented.

‘That’s not what you said before,’ Star replied, knowing in a painful instant that the wedding dress, a jewel she’d mistakenly thought was meant for her, would remain on the rail in Brenda’s Boutique.

‘It’s my mother,’ Danny said reluctantly. ‘It’s about the business, too. She said–’

‘She said you needed a better wife if you want to expand the garage. She said she didn’t want you marrying one of those atheist Bluestone women with their strange herbs and their unnatural hair.’

Star wasn’t bitter towards Danny. It wasn’t his fault. She should have known that he wasn’t a strong enough man to turn the tide of public opinion. Even in the mid seventies, when the rest of the Western world seemed to be enjoying free love and the Pill, the more conservative parts of Ardagh ate fish on Fridays, blessed themselves when they passed the church and remained unsure of the Bluestones.

Old Father Hely, the parish priest, and Sister Anne, headmistress of the Immaculate Mother of God Convent, had both been remarkably understanding about Eliza’s preference for her daughter not to practise the Catholic traditions. Learn them, yes. Eliza was all for learning and tolerance. She was fascinated by all religions: Catholicism, Protestantism, Hinduism, Buddhism, everything out there. But not practise. Eliza saw the central truth in the world around her, a world that had been there longer than any man-made religion.

‘We’ll take care of Star in school,’ Sister Anne said firmly. ‘You might not come to our church, but you understand Christianity, Eliza. I know how kind you are to those who need it. There are plenty here in town who trot along to Mass every day and still don’t love their neighbour,’ she added grimly.

‘Indeed, you’re right, Sister Anne. Nobody in this parish will ever hear me say a word against you,’ agreed Father Hely, who’d studied too much Christian history, from the Crusades to the Inquisition, to be doctrinaire when it came to unusual Eliza Bluestone with her earthly wisdom and her home-made elderflower wine.

However, not everyone in Ardagh agreed with Father Hely and Sister Anne, and many of the people who went to Sunday Mass and hung holy water fonts inside their front doors disliked the Bluestones because they were different. And clearly Danny’s mother fell into this category. Star hadn’t realised before quite how strong this dislike was. She herself didn’t care what or whom anyone worshipped and was astonished that other people could object to her views.

‘You’ll always have your tree,’ Eliza told Star the night Danny broke the news there would be no wedding. Mother and daughter sat in the hand-hewn walnut love-seat in their garden that overlooked the sea, and sipped rosehip tea.

Star gazed gloomily at the tree. And then looked around at all the other trees in the five-acre plot. The house, a higgledy-piggledy concoction of white clapboard with slanting roofs and an oriel window, was surrounded by trees: smooth-skinned, tall ashes, swooping willows, a graceful plane tree, a crowd of copper beeches by the vegetable garden, and another sharp-leafed maple that turned blood red in the autumn.

‘We have lots of trees,’ she said, suddenly understanding. She got up to touch the other maple. ‘You once said this was my dad’s tree?’

Star’s father had been the sort of man who preferred travelling to settling down. India was his favourite place in the whole world, especially the beaches of Goa, where a man could lie in the sun and not have to think about anything except what the human race was for and other philosophical questions.

‘I loved your father,’ Eliza said.

‘But he left?’

‘I planted the tree when we were in love,’ Eliza answered.

‘Then he left.’ Star got it. ‘What about the other trees?’ she asked, wondering how they’d never discussed this before. But then, her mother was a gentle and slow teacher: the lesson came when the lesson came, it would never be forced.

‘Two more I planted, both before you were born, before I met your father.’

Three loves.

‘And all these other trees?’ Star gestured.

‘My mother’s, her mother’s, all the Bluestone women have planted trees for as long as we’ve lived here.’

Star laughed then and ran around the garden, touching her hands to the bark of each of the precious trees. She loved this link with her female ancestors. It was like holding hands with all of them, listening to them laugh and talk, strong women who’d seen so much.

The trees, plants and flowers of her wild garden that gave such comfort to Star eventually provided the raw material for her livelihood. She designed and made tapestries embroidered and appliquéd with wools and silks hand-dyed from natural dyes. Star’s eye for nature meant her pictures were landscapes of hills and woodland glades, sometimes with a brightly plumaged bird peering out from the undergrowth, or a blossoming creamy magnolia positioned against a backdrop of verdant green, even the misty shape of a unicorn in the distance. For many years, she had sold her work in a tiny craft shop on the outskirts of Wicklow town and just about made a living out of it. Then someone had brought one of her tapestries to the attention of a buyer in Kenny’s department store in Ardagh.

Kenny’s were always on the lookout for new talent, the woman said, and Star’s exquisite artisan works would complement their homes department perfectly. The store didn’t deal in paintings: too complicated and time-consuming, but the Bluestone Tapestries were exactly what they were looking for. Within six months, Star’s tiny business had become a thriving cottage industry. That was five years ago. She had three employees now and they’d been working flat-out to complete their latest order for Kenny’s, which was where Star was bound that morning.

There were twenty hangings of all sizes ready in their moss-green tissue paper. She was dying to see what Lena, the buyer and one of the store’s directors, would think of her new departure, a large mermaid tapestry. Star hadn’t worked on many sea pictures before: the pigments were hard to make. It was easy to mix up rich loden greens and dusty ochres, but the pure blues and aquas for sea pictures had been more difficult. When she’d got into sea tapestries, she’d finally begun using hand-made dyes bought from artisans, although she still used the heads of pure blue hydrangeas to make rich blues, and her blackberries summoned up an inky purple that spoke of the ocean depths. Star had been in two minds about selling the mermaid tapestry at all. It would have looked so perfect on the wall in the kitchen, under the rail where the copper pots hung. But she’d hardened her heart and packed it up. The Bluestone Mermaid, with her foamy sea-green eyes and skeins of pale hair, needed to be out spinning her magic on someone else’s wall.

Star fed the cats, then made herself breakfast of fruit and yogurt, and stewed a cup of mint tea which she drank in the tiny conservatory. Breakfast over, she dressed. Her toilette never took long: she would shower, brush hair that was still as blonde as it ever had been, albeit with many strands of white, and apply a little kohl on her dark eyes. It was an unusual combination: pale hair, olive skin and dark eyes. Her old friend Trish, whom she sometimes bumped into in the supermarket, had grown round, and always wanted to know how Star remained as slim as ever.

‘It’s nothing I’m doing,’ Star would say. ‘My mother was the same, you remember.’

Trish nodded, remembering. And Star could almost read Trish’s next thought, which was that three children made a person put on weight, and Star, after all, had no children, and no grandchildren, and what was the point of being slim and sixty if you hadn’t the pleasure of a family?

Star would have loved to have children: the feel of a small, trusting hand in hers, a little girl of her own to sit with in the walnut love-seat and teach to plant trees. But that hadn’t been her path. She’d been given the gift of creating works of beauty, and the gift of making plants grow. Once, it might not have been enough. Now it was.