Once in a Lifetime. Cathy Kelly
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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.