Mother of Pearl

by Mary Morrissy

  A familiar combination of smells assailed Irene’s nostrils when she entered the hospital just after eleven. Ether and floor polish. She inhaled it deeply, savouring the lostness of the memories it evoked. The lift beckoned. She hesitated before taking it; confinement frightened her. But she wanted to act, to do the deed as quickly as possible. She stepped inside, noting the three other occupants, an elderly man, a mother and a small child. She kept her eyes on the floor, firm in the belief that if she didn’t look at them she would remain invisible. The young woman yanked the metal grid closed. The lift whirred and they began to move, edging slowly upwards. A red spot of light winked above the door. The boy, no more than three Irene guessed, was mesmerised by it, his large blue eyes fixed on it as if he were transfixed by a vision. Irene willed the flashing light to travel faster and as she did there was a sickening lurch and they were plunged into darkness. The lift swung airily between floors. Irene, pinned in the corner, saw in her mind’s eye the vertiginous lift shaft. She imagined that all that was keeping them aloft was a series of frayed ropes and creaking pulleys like a cradle teetering on a fissured branch. She held her breath, afraid that any false move of hers might send them crashing down. In the dimness she could only barely make out the furry silhouettes of strangers. She caught the rank smell of her own fear. The woman jabbed angrily at the button near the doors, then banged on the metal grid.

  ‘Help!’ she bellowed.

  Irene felt something cold and sticky brush against her skin. She stifled a scream imagining some gelid discharge running down the walls of the lift as a result of the jolt, but it was only the child seeking out his mother’s hand in the darkness. Irene took it gratefully. The woman thumped on the bars of their cage a second time. The lift shuddered again like a beast wakened from slumber. There was a whine and they were off, thundering down the shaft, clanking and squealing – afterwards Irene couldn’t tell if their voices had joined in with the machinery’s protesting wails – before landing on the ground floor with a jarring thud. Another safe arrival. They tumbled out gratefully into the dazzle of daylight, Irene leading the little boy by the hand until he looked up and, realising that she was not his mother, swiftly withdrew his hand and spat on his palm.

  She made for the stairs. Maternity was on the third floor. At the entrance to the ward there was a linen closet with its door slightly ajar. Irene slipped inside and locked the door. She set her bag down. She took off her hat and coat, hanging them on the back of the door. All around her were piles of newly starched linen, among them a number of white coats. She did not consider this lucky. There was no luck involved here. She took it as her due, as proof of the rectitude of her mission, the fruit of her long years of apprenticeship at Granitefield. She was an explorer who, having studied the maps, finds the terrain corresponds with the cartographer’s drawings. This was her territory; she could have reached her destination blindfold.

  Coat flapping, she stepped out into the corridor and, pushing the swing doors briskly, she entered the ward. Two nurses gossiping over a trolley of medicaments were aware only of a flash of white as she swept by. On her right she saw the nursery. It was a long, bright room with an aisle down the centre between the rows of cots. She moved towards the door which stood invitingly half-open. Gingerly she stepped inside. For a moment, standing there in the glass-walled room she felt totally exposed, a predatory fish gliding menacingly in a bowl. She braced herself. She mustn’t lose her nerve now. Wrapping the white coat around her for protection she walked boldly between the serried rows of cots. They were empty; they were all empty. It must be feeding time she realised with a sharp pang. She was about to turn and flee, smarting at this lack of foresight when she spotted right at the very end of the room a little pink mound. A little girl – she knew from the colour of the blanket – her little girl. Heart pounding, she made for the distant cot. She leaned over the sleeping baby. How peaceful she looked. It seemed a shame to disturb her. Irene, clutched by terror but greedy with desire, froze. If the baby were woken she would surely cry and that would draw attention. Or would it? Babies must cry all the time here. Their plantive whimpers must be part of the tapestry of the place. Panicked, Irene looked about her. A young man, a father she guessed, was peering in through the glass at her. She turned her back on him swiftly and found herself bathed in the green gaze of a newly-born. Pearl!

  She hesitated no longer. This was her child, the only one here without a mother. She stooped and gently gathered Pearl in her arms, swaddling the pink blanket around her. She pressed her lips to Pearl’s downy head. Her fontanelle fluttered in time to Irene’s racing pulse. They were as one. She threaded her way carefully back, through the open door, and past the young man who was still peering in at the window with a puzzled look like a man who has lost something. Down the sheeny corridor, through the swing doors – Irene anticipated each step of the journey – and then a sharp left into the haven of the closet where she, no, they (it was the first time Irene had thought in the plural) would be safe.

  She almost dived for the closet and once inside with the door safely locked she leant against it for several minutes, hugging Pearl to her. She felt weak. There was a sticky film of sweat on her brow. Calm, calm, she told herself, it is not over yet. She switched on the light and made a bed for Pearl in a nest of towels. From her bag she drew out a blanket and discarding the regulation pink wrapped this around Pearl. She peeled off the white coat and flung it in a corner. Hurriedly she put on her own coat, stuffing her beret into the pocket. She looped the bag around her wrist and then carefully gathered Pearl in her arms.

  ‘Shush there,’ she whispered.

  But there was no need. Pearl, her knotted face nuzzling at Irene’s breast, was adrift in sleep, her tiny fingers curled at her ears.

  Irene edged the door open. Through the slit she could see a knot of people gathered at the lift. An orderly slouched over an empty stretcher, one of the gossipy nurses fingering stray wisps of hair escaping from her starched cap, an elderly couple, the wife clasping the man’s hand, for balance not for love. She tried to imagine her own parents now, wondering how they had aged, but all she could see was the high tower and the steady warnings, a pattern of light and shade. William and Ellen Rivers. She used their proper names now as if they were but distantly related.

  She inched the door almost closed and waited for the screech of the lift. It came and went. She waited. There could perhaps be visitors loitering outside, disgorged from the lift, lost travellers in a foreign country unsure of which road to choose. She heard the slap of the swing doors to the ward. She peered out again. On the threshold she found an easeful lull she recognised, a mid-morning hush. She remembered it from Granitefield. Dust swirling in the weak light, the throbbing stillness of a building holding its breath as if waiting to be stormed. These were sacred moments as in a silent church aquiver with candlelight. Sacred but short-lived. Irene stepped out on to the corridor and walked with purpose to the stairwell.

  Only one person passed as she tripped down the stone flights, a nun, head bowed. Irene would remember only a swish of serge, the clack of beads, the stiff rebuke of a wimple. She, on the other hand, would have no memory of Irene, lost as she was in some vague thought of God. Irene made for the river. A clamour of black-nosed traffic greeted her, the rickety shrill of bicycles. The bridge beckoned. Alabaster over green. Soon, soon, they would be safe.

  STANLEY GODWIN OPENED the door of 24 Jericho Street on a stormy Saturday afternoon to find Irene standing there, a pitiful creature in the rain, laden down. Shopping, he thought resignedly. Her rare trips south were invariably marked with untypical extravagance. This time, she had told him, she was going back to Granitefield, to revisit old haunts; he had not expected her back so soon. A taxi throbbed on the street behind her.

  ‘Would you pay him?’ Irene asked him, gesturing to the driver who was standing on the kerb with a coat over his head to protect him from the downpour.

  ‘I didn’t have enough,’ she said as she
brushed past him. It was only then he saw the baby and it was such a fleeting glimpse – a notion of a downy head, a tiny fist – that he wondered if his eyes were deceiving him. Sometimes, when he was exhausted, he would close his eyelids and find in his new blindness the exploding fragments of his last waking memory. It was a trick of the mind, he decided, a purblind vision of the phantom child they had lost.

  ‘Right, chief?’ the driver called.

  Stanley dug into his pockets.

  A well of silence greeted him when he shut the door.

  ‘Irene?’ he called from the foot of the stairs.

  He placed his foot on the bottom step but was frightened to proceed any further. There were times when Irene could conjure up a dark mood out of thin air.

  ‘Boil some water,’ she shouted.

  ‘Irene, what’s going on?’

  He could hear her rummaging in the spare room. Pearl’s room. She was pulling out drawers, drawers he knew that were filled with baby clothes and stacks of nappies she had bought when … There was a cot in there, always made up as if a baby might at any time arrive out of the blue.

  ‘Irene,’ he called out again.

  And then he heard it, unmistakably, a baby’s cry. He hadn’t dreamt it up. An old joy stirred in him but he stifled it.

  ‘Irene,’ he called testing out his voice against the phantoms. And then, resignedly, he did as he was bid.

  He lit the fire in the parlour. The rain lashed against the window but Irene and the baby were heedless to the noisy inclemency of the weather. He watched them and felt as if he did not exist, except as a notion, a thought not materialised. He was afraid to go near in case the picture might disintegrate. He feared if he did that he would wake up and find he had been seeing pictures in the blue and gold flames in the grate. He rushed to and fro, setting the baby’s bottle at Irene’s feet, warming water in the tin basin and placing it in front of the hearth. He tested the water with his elbow; just tepid, Irene had said. He spread out a bath towel and drew back as Irene unswaddled the baby. She lay it out on the towel and free of its encumbrances it kicked and waved its arms, its eyes thrown back, attracted to the shimmering glow of the fire. With a soft shock he realised it was a girl child.

  For as long as the baby was there, there was no need for either of them to speak. The child was all. Stanley noticed Irene’s deftness as she stroked the child’s silken skin and plashed the water gently round its head. There was something supple and reassuring about her movements; he felt a twinge of jealousy. This surety of touch had once included him. He was reminded of his own mother carding wool before this very fire with the same knowing serenity. And he realised that once, so far back that he couldn’t remember, such care must have been lavished on him. He watched Irene as she touched the baby’s tiny fingers, gently rubbing the wrinkless that would become knuckles and the fingernails which were like delicate slivers of mother-of-pearl. She traced around the little hump of her forehead, her hairless brow knitted, as if even sleeping required the utmost concentration, her button nose, the perfect cleft above her puckered lips. There was a strawberry-coloured mark on the baby’s chin, a raised luscious bump, a fruity blemish as if she had been picking berries in that other place from which she had so recently come.

  At six, Irene went upstairs and put the baby to bed. Stanley could hear her overhead. A loose timber creaked as she moved back and forth, singing quietly to the child and hushing her with a threatening kind of tenderness. He dreaded Irene’s return alone. He wanted the spell to continue. The anxious father resting before the fire, the attentive mother singing lullabies to her baby above, and all around him the indisputable evidence of a new life – the bottle, the tin bath, the little clothes, a stray bootee. He heard her step on the stair. A terror gripped at his throat. He both wanted to know and was frightened of finding out the price of their newly born happiness. Even in a few short hours, the baby had bound them together. It gave a logic to their existence, sharing this house, living as man and wife. If he could have stayed silent, he would have. Silences between them were nothing new, after all. But he couldn’t. As she entered the room, he cleared his throat.

  ‘Don’t ask,’ she said.

  ‘But, Irene, please …’

  ‘It’s better if you don’t know.’

  She sank into a chair opposite him and picked up from the floor one of the child’s things, a pink blanket. She played with its satin-edged hem.

  ‘Where did the baby come from?’

  ‘I found her under a cabbage leaf.’ She laughed grimly.

  ‘Irene, tell me.’

  ‘It’s Pearl, Pearl has finally come home. And this time she’s mine, all mine.’ Her eyes glinted fiercely in the firelight.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You killed her off, remember, my first one?’

  ‘Irene, whose child is it?’

  She sighed and bit her lip thoughtfully.

  ‘Irene, for God’s sake …’

  ‘It’s Charlie Piper’s,’ she said finally.

  ‘Charlie Piper?’ There was a taste of bile in his mouth.

  ‘He came back …’

  ‘You mean it happened here?’ He rose slowly. ‘And all these months …’

  ‘Yes,’ she said bitterly, ‘all these months and you noticed nothing.’ She stared at him stonily.

  He cursed himself. He had been so preoccupied with phantoms he had been blind to the truth.

  ‘Do you love him?’

  ‘He had something I wanted.’ She corrected herself. ‘He had something we wanted.’

  He lunged at her, moving so quickly that for a moment she thought something had fallen on her, as if the ceiling had suddenly given way. He struck her across the cheekbone once and then again on the upstroke. His face was taut with anger, shiny as a death mask. He tore her dress from shoulder to waist, then flung her against the wall. The pink blanket slithered to the floor. She reached out for it but he stamped on her wrist with his foot. She struggled to rise. He pushed her down and sat astride her. The flames played on his face, turning his eyes to dark shadows. He spat at her. She could feel his spittle running down her face. He spat, and spat again.

  ‘Whore,’ he snarled at her. ‘Whore.’

  She turned her face away and shut her eyes tightly. She tried to wriggle a hand free to ward him off but he had her manacled now, her right cheek pressed against the skirting. And then, from above, she heard Pearl crying. That was all she heard, the child sobbing, as Stanley tore down her stockings and yanked at her underwear. She swung wildly at him with her free hand as he unbuttoned himself and entered. It was merciless. He laboured, sawing at her like a log he was trying to split in two. He came in one huge spasm, a terrible trembling in his limbs before he fell on her, a dead weight. And then he heard it too, the child’s cries. He rose and blundered out of the room. His daughter needed him; he must see to her.

  Irene did not stir. She lay there, motionless, a woman almost dead, semen on her thighs. She touched her bruised cheek. Her eyelid was already closing. She imagined how it would be in the morning, puffed up with a plum-blood bruise on the rim of the bone. She let her eyes wander around the defiled room, the toppled chairs, Pearl’s scattered things, the dying fire. It was a child’s eye view; the drawn curtains yawned above her, the standard lamp tall as a building, the sofa solid and safe as a pier. She must have lain there for an hour or more, while above her Stanley crooned to the baby, rocking her in his arms as he paced with her. A blessed darkness overtook her. After several hours the coldness of the room summoned her back; the fire’s embers were dying. Numb and stiff, she rose, pulling the torn fragments of her clothes around her. All was quiet; the house was at peace. She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror above the mantelpiece. A half-crazed creature, hair wild and matted and a wound on her face. She touched it gingerly and smiled weakly. She had finally been punished. Punished for all the things Stanley did not know about her. Everything would be alright now.

  A CHI
LD ANSWERED the door to Charlie Piper. Her hair, parted in the middle, was tied in pigtails; her eyes when she peered up at him, were hazel. She wore a puzzled expression, her brow knitted into two tiny wings. There was a birthmark on her chin. It struck a chord with Charlie. Then he thought of Gloria, the telephonist at Granitefield, the one with the sexy beauty spot. This one, he thought, would also grow up to be a heartbreaker.

  ‘Hello there!’ Charlie leaned down and took one of her sticky hands. She made to withdraw but he held firm.

  ‘Ah now, don’t be like that, this is your Uncle Charlie!’

  ‘Who is it, Pearl?’ someone called from the interior. Charlie recognised Stannie’s voice.

  ‘It’s Uncle Charlie,’ she shouted.

  Charlie searched through her features for some resemblance to Irene but couldn’t find any. Must take after the other side, he thought.

  Stanley, in vest and braces, coming to the door, saw above his tow-headed girl the inevitable future, the defeat he had always known was in store. But even then, he thought he could ward it off. He and Irene had protected this child with a ferocity borne of the very danger there was in having her and the fear, unspoken between them, that she might one day be taken from them. It was Irene, who, after weeks of keeping Pearl a secret, had told Martha Alyward that the child was adopted, an unwanted baby, the product of sin. Stanley had been astounded by her insouciance; she had said this without flinching. And yet he knew why; it was as much to punish herself as him. Pearl was a well for both of their sunken secrets. And the one person who could threaten all of this was standing in front of him.

  ‘Stannie!’ Charlie rose from his hunkers. ‘How goes the war?’

  ‘What do you want?’ He placed a protective hand on Pearl’s shoulder.

  These Northsiders, Charlie thought, dour lot, too direct for his liking.

  ‘Just a social call,’ he said dropping the child’s hand. He felt somehow as if he had been caught doing something improper. ‘No samples, this time, I promise.’ He laughed nervously. ‘Irene about?’