Mother of Pearl (7 page)

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 interrupted, 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!'

What he heard was the scrape and scurry of mice.

‘Irene, Irene …' Leaning on one elbow he would place a restraining hand on the crook of her arm, his only touch these days. ‘You know that's impossible.'

And he would turn away, his broad, flannelled back a reproach. All his refusals were absolute.

‘Mrs North?' Mrs Blessed repeated, calling her back.

Irene wished she wouldn't keep using her name like that. It was proprietorial, somehow, as if it was hers to bandy about, as if she had some claim to it.

‘Oh, just the one.'

‘Not from these parts then?' Mrs Blessed said as she penned Irene's name in the register. ‘I detest a Southern accent.'

Irene shook her head.

‘On a visit then?'

‘Mm … yes,' Irene faltered. ‘The hospital…'

‘Nothing serious, I hope?'

‘Oh no, not me. No, there's nothing wrong with me.'

‘A friend, then?' Mrs Blessed prompted.

‘Yes, that's right. She's just had a baby.'

‘Isn't that nice! And you've come
all
this way …'

Was she being pleasant, Irene wondered, or just fishing.

‘When I was having mine, I can't tell you how pleased I was to see my girlfriends,' she confided. ‘I used to get weepy, you know. And men, men are no good at a time like that. I won't have a word said against my Eric, God rest him, but they just don't understand, do they?'

She turned and lifted a key from the rack behind her.

‘Whereas
we
do,' Mrs Blessed said looking at Irene meaningfully, ‘don't we?'

Irene blushed with a secret pride; she had been mistaken for a mother.

‘Number two, I think.'

‘No, no, it's her first one.'

Mrs Blessed chuckled.

‘We seem to have our wires crossed. I'm putting you in room number two.'

‘Home sweet home!' Mrs Blessed said, throwing open the door of number two with a flourish.

They had travelled to the top of the house, up several flights of stairs carpeted in whorled crimson, geese flying in formation on the flocked fleur-de-lis wallpaper, a gilt tureen housing an asparagus fern on the return. None of it had prepared Irene for this barren interior. It was a white attic room, long and narrow, with a window at the far end under which two single beds were wedged, a locker squeezed between them. The timbered ceiling which sloped to one side had once been painted but it flaked and blistered now as if afflicted by a leprous disease. There was a curtained cavity for clothes. Over the bricked-up fireplace a picture of the Virgin hung.

‘It's really for two, as you can see,' Mrs Blessed said, bending to smooth one of the pink candlewick spreads. ‘But in your case, I won't charge.'

In your case.
Irene pondered on this.

‘My radio officers were in here, bless their hearts. Lovely lads. But my, what a racket they made. They used to practise their Morse code at the table, clinking their spoons against the cups. Sending messages to one another, if you don't mind!' She folded her fat arms.

‘Now,' she said, ‘rules of the house!' She tapped a notice which was tacked to the back of the door. ‘The Ten Commandments, I call them! No baths after ten, bathroom's across the landing, and no men in the rooms, but I'm sure I don't have to tell you that.'

She fidgeted briefly with the waistband of her skirt as if she longed to inch the zip down just a fraction.

‘Breakfast at eight sharp and we like our guests to vacate by nine.'

She turned to leave, worrying at a stray strand of hair that was curling around her earlobe.

‘Oh yes, I nearly forgot. The front door is locked at midnight. I tell my girls I only keep Cinderellas!'

And with a merry laugh, she retreated.

An hour later, dodging Mrs Blessed, Irene slipped out. She knew the hospital was close by – it was why she had chosen the Four Provinces – and she wanted to see it, just from the outside. From the step she could see its jigsaw of roofs and gables, and the dome of a copper cupola rising above them. She prowled around the perimeter of the building. It took up almost a block. There was the lullaby hum of a generator somewhere in its juggled heart, and steam gasping from the laundry into the dark night. It was pot-bellied in front, bulging into a pillared rotunda, as if the builders had vainly tried to fence in its fecundity. Irene sheltered in a pub doorway opposite the entrance and watched as visitors streamed through its portals. They were mainly fathers, some with children, ham-fistedly attired, buttoned incorrectly into their coats. Even temporary motherlessness seemed to give them an unkempt, woebegone look. Irene was loath to leave her vantage point. Like a woman bewitched by the house of love she examined the sooted curves of the portico, each lighted window.

Her child was in there, after all, and this place would become part of her history, however briefly. Some day Irene would have to describe this – the raw night, the soft drizzle leaving a glistening film on her cheeks. Her hair lay damply on her forehead. The wet, chilly air made her seem oddly feverish. Was this a maternal bloom, an anxious glow on the eve of birth? Or was it the old disease come back? At that thought, she pulled the collar of her coat up and hurried back to the Four Provinces.