Mother of Pearl

by Mary Morrissy

  ‘I’m going to be a father,’ he said.

  It was Stanley who gave the child a name. It will be a girl, he declared with proud certainty, and she shall be called Pearl. Pearl had been his mother’s second name, he explained, the one she had favoured herself. He was like a man bewitched, intoxicated with unexpected passion. So this, he thought, was what Rose Toper had felt when she would declare mournfully ‘I love you’. It wasn’t like walking on air, as she had said, it was like being air. He was in flight, a glorious, airy sensation. From his lofty height everything seemed steeped in munificence. The house, the street, the ghastly, jagged outlines of the city had become benign, withdrawing like respectful elders allowing them to luxuriate in their new-found joy. Even Irene seemed transformed. There was a curious grace in her movements now; he could see her thin, hard body, roundening and softening, and her watchful gravity becoming serene.

  The new devotion Stanley lavished on her was the care Irene associated with a mother. It was the kind of love Stanley knew all about. He stopped her carrying coal in from the yard. He made her take naps in the afternoons. He worried extravagantly about her health. He would help her to rise from the low armchair in the parlour, placing his hand in the small of her back. In the evenings he came home with shop-bought cake. Basking in this new solicitude, she felt prized and cosseted as if she were a delicate, doomed child. To watch him during those months was to know what he would have been like had he been in love with her. His tenderness bloomed into something active and joyful, their marriage – for her, an escape, for him a need for shelter and protection – had become a right and fitting union. The child she had conjured up out of light and air had done all of this. Like a fairy or a sprite (no earthly child could have done it) she had waved a wand and granted them a wish. Irene wondered when he would call a halt to the make-believe while secretly hoping it would last just a little while longer, if only to delay the punishment she knew would inevitably come. And yet, in the midst of it, Irene imagined she could feel a stirring in her womb as if a little being was sprouting wings in there. Stanley would press his hand to her belly and believed that he felt something too. Between them they had formed a child destined to be lost. A pearl of great price.

  It didn’t last, of course, Stanley’s flight. After three months of dizzying dislocation he fell to earth. It happened at the entrance to the shipyard. A light drizzle was falling. Summer seemed to have retreated behind a thicket of grey cloud. There was a large crash, the thump and boom of a girder falling to the ground from a crane that had been stealthily moving across his line of vision. A siren started wailing and there was the crunch of boots on gravel as men rushed to the scene. Matthew Earley, they cried, it’s Matthew! Stanley stood, rooted to the spot. Above him the arm of the crane hung like the limb of a deformed god. The gaping belly of a liner with men crawling like insects over it, the agonised cries of the wounded one … and the spell broke. It was not Matthew Earley who lay pinned beneath a lump of iron, it was the coiled form of an infant, whom Stanley had been carrying for months. She disintegrated before his eyes, her smooth, glazed face like the remnants of eggshell trampled in the dirt. He stooped to pick a fragment up, something to remember her by, but there was nothing on the ground but tiny shards of glass and the stink in his nostrils of his own foolishness.

  The miscarriage was announced at the beginning of the fourth month. (Irene had spoken of it too soon, the neighbours said quietly among themselves; she had tempted fate.) Stanley took Len Alyward aside one Saturday morning and said simply: ‘We’ve lost it, the baby.’

  ‘Bad luck, old squire,’ Len said, ‘but not to worry, there’ll be others. Plenty more where that came from, eh?’ He punched Stanley playfully on the arm.

  Stanley felt a sharp pang of anger. He wanted to catch Len by the throat and throttle him. The idea of the child was festering inside him, poisoning him.

  ‘She’s not robust, you know,’ he said evenly, ‘Irene.’

  It was one of her secrets, Stanley knew. Irene had taken great care to give the impression that she had worked at Granitefield but had not been a patient, for fear of being driven out again for being unclean. Len nodded sagely.

  Galvanised by a rush of malice, Stanley went on.

  ‘She may never go full term.’ There, he thought spitefully, but it wasn’t enough. ‘It’s the TB, you see, it’s left a weakness.’ Tellingly, he tapped his temple.

  ‘IN THE MORNING, when I raised myself to give my child suck, a dead child was there; and it was not till I looked at it more closely under the full light of day that I found this was never the child I bore. And when the other woman said, No, it is thy child that is dead, mine that is alive, she persisted in answering, Thou liest; it is my child that lives, thine that is dead …’

  It was only after their loss had been made public that Irene fell from grace. Not, she felt, for the untruth she had told but for failing to sustain the dream of a child. Stanley had believed and did no longer and he blamed her. As if she had the giving and the taking away of faith. She had created the child. She had fashioned it, a graceful phantom of light, but it was he who had nurtured it; his blinkered belief had made it flesh and blood. He had even given it a name, so that it had lost its wings and had fallen to earth. He had made it real. She had been a proud ship bearing a precious cargo; now she was a rusting bulk on the seabed. A woman who had lost his baby. And yet, it was he who had finished her off. Out there in the glare of his beloved street, he had wrung the life out of her with his big, bare hands. Irene looked, at his soft, dejected face, his palpable but unuttered grief, the honest grime of his toil and despised him.

  Stanley felt himself finally to be alone in the world. The magnificence of his foolishness tormented him. His deepest longing, so secret that even he had not been aware of its power, had been exposed. It was in Irene’s hands now and he could not trust her with it. He was appalled at how casually she had lied. It had simply come into her head, she said. What disturbed him was the malice in it, an intention to strike out not Martha, as she had claimed, but him, and the ease of it which spoke of a lifetime’s practice. He had felt Irene to be his protection against the world; now there was menace in her companionship. He imagined she was mocking him, sneering at him behind his back. A ridiculous old man. He sensed her disenchantment, not like Rose Toper’s baffled incomprehension, but something more unpredictable, as if she might do him harm. He did not know, if he ever had, what she was thinking. They shared the same bed but she would no longer touch him. He had long ago convinced himself of his own failure, but as long as Irene had not lost faith, there had still been hope, faint hope. Now she had taken even that away. Where once he had dreaded her advances and her fevered attempts to please him, he hungered now for even the merest brush of her fingertips.

  A visitor arrived in the winter of that year. A visitor for Irene. In the five years they had been married no one known to Irene had darkened their doorstep. Stanley answered the peremptory tattoo of the knocker and opened the door to a wiry, handsomely dark young man. He had black, oily hair and a thicket of moustache. He was muffled up in a greatcoat, his hat brim tilted back rakishly. He was blowing on his hands and rubbing them together; his hot breath played briefly in the chilly evening. Two large cardboard suitcases stood at his feet and an order book was wedged under his armpit.

  ‘We’re not interested,’ Stanley said.

  Door-to-door salesmen were ten-a-penny. It wasn’t a fit occupation for an able-bodied man, Stanley thought. These sort of men made their living preying on women. He was about to shut the door when Irene strayed into the hallway. She had been dusting in the front room and she held in her hand a small, blue, china bowl. Curiosity had brought her this far and she cocked her head to catch a glimpse of the stranger framed in the slice of light from the street. There was a shattering sound as the bowl fell unheeded to the floor. She clutched her apron in a bunch to her lips. She looked as if she had seen a ghost.

  ‘Charlie Piper,’ she murmu
red. ‘Charlie Piper.’

  The man let out a low whistle of surprise.

  ‘Well, I’ll be damned! As I live and breathe!’

  Stanley stood awkwardly between them, guarding the threshold.

  ‘Irene! Irene Rivers!’

  Stanley registered her maiden name with a soft shock. He had always thought of her as simply Irene, an orphan in the world, without a past except for Granitefield which might well have spawned her.

  ‘Why don’t you come in?’ he said, inching the door open.

  The man struggled with the cases, shunting them into the hallway with his foot, then dusting his hands on his backside as he straightened. He started to unpeel his coat. He looked like a spiv, Stanley thought distastefully, scrutinising his cheap, creased suit, his unbuttoned shirt collar, the carelessly loosened knot in his tie.

  ‘Surprise, surprise!’ Charlie said jauntily. ‘Cat got your tongue?’

  Irene had not moved. She was aghast.

  ‘I thought you were …’

  ‘Typical!’ he said turning to Stanley and winking broadly. ‘She thought they’d put me six feet under.’

  He thumped his chest victoriously. ‘Listen to that! Clear as a bell!’

  Stanley edged his way between them. He feared Irene was going to faint. She was swaying slightly as if the hall was the deck of a boat, and she was rolling with a gentle swell.

  ‘This must be your old man, then,’ he said extending a hand to Stanley. ‘Charlie Piper at your service.’

  She recovered enough to invite him into the parlour but it was Stanley who had to withdraw and make the tea; she seemed to have entirely forgotten her manners. As he waited for the kettle to boil, he could hear Charlie’s boyish voice from the next room, full of congratulation. Stanley hovered in the scullery longer than he needed to, arranging the cups on the tray and after he had scalded the pot, gripping the steaming kettle in his hand. He felt the need to steady himself, as he might do if he were expecting bad news. He shook the thought away and fetching up the tray decisively marched into the parlour.

  ‘Well, aren’t you the wicked one!’ Charlie Piper was saying as Stanley edged the door open with his foot and set the tray down. ‘Running off with a visitor!’

  So, thought Stanley, the connection was Granitefield.

  ‘Irene’s just been telling me, Stannie, how you two got hitched up.’

  Stanley winced at the diminution of his name.

  ‘Strictly against the rules, I can tell you! Fraternising they used to call it, isn’t that right, Irene?’

  He smiled saucily at Irene. She blushed and looked away. Stanley detected conspiracy.

  ‘But then, Irene, you were always a special case.’

  A special case. The phrase rankled, somehow. Stanley had always regarded Granitefield as a neutral place where intimacy would have no quarter. It was an institution, a factory of sickness and death. He had never thought of it having a secret, sensual life.

  ‘And what about you?’ Irene asked as she poured the tea. ‘Sugar?’

  ‘Oh, footloose and fancy-free, as ever! You know me, never had much time for settling down.’

  You know me: Stanley tried to decipher meaning from Charlie’s emphasis. ‘As I was saying to Irene, Stannie, after you’ve been in a place like Granitefield you never want to stop anywhere long enough to be caught again.’ He balanced his cup and saucer carefully in one slender hand. He was painfully thin, Stanley noted.

  ‘I tried to escape once,’ he said bashfully. ‘Did Irene tell you?’

  Stanley shook his head.

  ‘Nearly damned well killed myself in the process. And the thing is, you can never escape it, really. Am I right, Irene?’

  Irene didn’t answer.

  ‘That place is in my bones, Stannie, I can tell you.’ He sighed, then brightened. ‘Still, it can’t be all bad, can it? I mean it brought the two of you together!’

  Stanley met Irene’s gaze across the room. There was a pleading in her eyes. Don’t spoil it, that look said.

  ‘True,’ was all Stanley could manage in response. But it was said heartily. Despite himself, he found Charlie’s blatant optimism infectious.

  ‘Any kids?’ Charlie enquired.

  ‘Yes,’ Irene said promptly, ‘but she’s asleep right now.’

  She pointed at the ceiling and put a finger to her lips. Alarmed, Stanley made to contradict her. There it was again, out of the blue. A totally brazen lie.

  ‘She’s nearly three months old,’ Irene was saying. He realised with a pang that this was the age Pearl would have been. Her vengeance knew no bounds. He got to his feet hurriedly. Next Irene would be using her name; that was a cruelty he could not bear.

  ‘Well,’ said Charlie, taking the hint and also rising, ‘I must be off! Nice to meet you folks!’

  Irene fetched his overcoat from the hall.

  ‘Good to see you again, Irene,’ he said to her as he shrugged it on. ‘Oh, I almost forgot… you’ll have to see my samples now.’

  She bought a remnant, a floral pattern, navy sprig on a white ground. It might make a cushion cover, she said idly, putting it to one side.

  ‘Trust Charlie,’ she said, ‘never one to miss the chance of turning a quick shilling.’

  Grudging and wry, it was not the tone Stanley expected. Not the way she might talk about an old flame. But why had she lied about the child? And why to him?

  As if reading his thoughts, Irene said dreamily: ‘He’s the one who started all of this.’

  Irene would remember this encounter as if it had been a brush with death. Or a relapse. A dangerous recurrence of the old disease. A sharp rise in temperature; a sudden collapse of the lung. He had no right, he had no right to reappear like that, no right at all. And with a great welcome for himself. Talking about old times, taunting her with his bonhomie, gloating. She could have lived a blameless life but for him.

  It might have been Charlie’s visit that prompted Irene to brood on her operation in Granitefield. She had not dwelt on the matter since she had left. But for the scar like a large fish bone traced on her skin, she would never have had to consider it at all. It was what they called an identifying mark. If she were dragged nameless from the river, that and her fillings would give her away. She could trace the route of the scar, fading though it now was, as surely as if she were sightless and reading Braille. If she were ever to have a baby – oddly, she considered the prospect more concretely since they had lost Pearl – it would mean another slashing of skin, a new wound. It would be by Caesarean; she knew this with a certainty she couldn’t justify. No man had ever entered her; how could a baby come out? It would have to be torn from her, yanked out like her shattered ribs had been. What had become of those delicate shanks of bone removed so long ago, she wondered. Had they been stored in tall jars of formaldehyde like pickled ghosts? Or buried perhaps, a spindly quartet of ivory. Or had they been used, as Irene now suspected, to make something new. She saw a group of doctors, unknown to her, closeted away in a bubbling laboratory, grinding each rib down by hand into a fine dust. They would add something then. Using pestle and mortar. Milk, of course. Mother’s milk. To make a paste as pliable as dough. And from that dough a baby make. A plaster-cast infant, glazed and prettied and cooked in the oven until hard. From dust and ashes, new life. This was her offspring, hers alone, the child of her illness, Irene’s first loss. And she was still out there. Not dead, simply lost. In a hospital ward somewhere, unclaimed, waiting for her mother. This time Irene determined she would tell no one, not even Stanley. She would seek out the child who was rightfully hers, the fruit of Eve’s ribs.

  MAY BLESSED STOOD on the steps of the Four Provinces with the backs of her turned wrists resting on her hips like decorative jug handles. The VACANCIES sign on a pole lashed to the railings creaked rustily. Irene set her bag down and looked up hopefully at the buxom woman framed in the doorway.

  ‘I’m looking for a …’

  ‘Come in, come in,’ Mrs Blessed in
terrupted, beaming. ‘Plenty of room at the inn!’

  She ushered Irene over the threshold and pushed the heavy front door to on a damp, mauve dusk.

  ‘Mrs Blessed,’ she declared. ‘May Blessed.’

  She gave her name as if it were tidings of great fortune.

  ‘And you?’ she enquired.

  ‘Mrs North,’ Irene said plucking a name from the air. A telephone jangled.

  ‘Oh dear,’ Mrs Blessed said letting her hand fall. ‘No rest for the wicked!’

  She disappeared through a glass-panelled door marked OFFICE.

  ‘Four Provinces,’ Irene heard her purr through the half-open door. ‘Can I help you?’

  Irene wandered out of earshot. Mrs Blessed had tried very hard to turn her rooming house into a hotel. There were little attempts at sophistication. The U-shaped reception desk padded in red vinyl, a latticed noticeboard for letters and announcements (the times of Masses), an umbrella stand. But inside the front door, left on the latch, dry leaves had gathered in rustling covens. A man’s bicycle was propped up against the wall with a damp stain on the lino under the back wheel. Near the back stairs, a black call box was affixed to a pocked piece of chipboard embroidered with spidery names and numbers. A faint smell of stale fat hung in the air.

  ‘Now, Mrs North,’ said Mrs Blessed, emerging from the office. She lifted a large register and thumped it down noisily on the desk. ‘How many nights?’

  How many indeed. Startled into wakefulness in the small hours by a timid scratching from the other room, her room. Irene, bolt upright, would strain to read the night noises. She would shake Stanley.

  ‘Do you hear it?’

  She did not believe, as Stanley did, that it was the mating calls of toms that had roused her.

  ‘What?’ he would groan through a fog of sleep. (They joked about it at the yard when Stanley appeared hollow-eyed and dawny for work. Good night with the missus, eh Stan?)

  ‘It’s Pearl, listen!’