Mother of Pearl

by Mary Morrissy

  He kept the cuttings; he knew it was inappropriate and so he did it quietly, storing the newspapers in bundles under the stairs and when the spotlight faded, secretly clipping and filing all the stories in a shoebox. He hid it at the bottom of the wall of boxes of old stock which lined the hall in Mecklenburgh Street. He was keeping it for the baby, he told himself. And if he savoured some personal glory from having this illicit record, he justified it as proof that would be needed in the future, proof of his strength in a moment of great adversity.

  Rita had become the baby in the tank. People drifted into view, large, blurred, indistinct. They spoke, but like goldfish mouthing through glass, she heard no words. She felt as if she were under water, a silent, green world of grief. Soon, soon she would rise to the surface, escorted by a spray of tiny bubbles and break the calm, thrashing and gasping, her first breath a great, agonised howl…

  When, after several weeks, the neighbours withdrew with their bowls and plates, the reporters went back empty-handed to their offices, and the plain clothes detectives retreated with their unanswered questions, Rita’s torpor gave way to a dogged determination. She knew where to look for her baby. The tinkers had taken her. One of their own had died and they had replaced her with Hazel Mary. (Rita whispered the name to herself to keep the baby alive, as proof that she had indeed carried a child and given birth.) She scoured the streets. Every Saturday morning she would go back to the market on Great Britain Street, sure that she would find the woman whose palm she had crossed with silver. It was this woman who had her baby. Mel would reluctantly accompany her.

  ‘She’s not here, Rita,’ he would say as they walked among the leavings, the tattered clothes, the battered pots. ‘We’re not going to find her here.’

  He held her hand; her air of distraction had made him tender. He was in awe of her desperation; he envied the extravagant expression of her loss.

  ‘Let’s go home, now. You’re only tormenting yourself.’

  Sometimes she would acquiesce, wilting suddenly and allowing herself to be led away. But, more often, she would pull away from him and stride off on her own.

  Once, on the way back from one of these expeditions, she spotted a tinker woman begging on the steps of St Xavier’s. There was a baby swaddled in a blanket on her lap. Mel had to run to keep up with Rita who darted across the busy street and made for the woman. She scrutinised the woman’s thick plait of hair, her leathery girth, her snaggle-toothed face, her ill-shod feet.

  ‘Give me my baby,’ Rita commanded.

  ‘Ma’am?’ The woman gaped at her, her eyes two brown pools of amazement.

  ‘You took her from me, give her back.’ She tugged at the tinker’s shawl. The woman, grasping at her skirts, struggled to rise.

  ‘Rita, please …’ Mel tried to drag her away but she struggled against him. She was all elbows and rage. The woman’s grip on her child tightened.

  ‘This is my first to live, ma’am,’ she said quietly. ‘This is my treasure.’ And turning, she scuttled away, peering anxiously behind her as she ran in case she might be followed. All the fight went out of Rita. She sank on the steps, sitting supplicant, defeated, those words ringing in her ears. My first to live.

  That was when she decided. Hazel Mary was dead. The story of the kidnap had been a game, a way to save her from fearing the worst, that her baby had been dead all along. The creature in the tent had been an impostor; no wonder she hadn’t loved it. Hazel Mary, her Hazel Mary had died at the moment of birth. That was why they had whisked her away. Mel and her father and Dr Munroe had concocted the story about the kidnapping. All that talk about reporters at the door asking about ransoms and rewards had all been part of an elaborate fabrication. First, they would tell her the baby had been taken, then, when she had got used to the idea, they would tell her the truth. A truth she had already tumbled to.

  She went back to the hospital. In fact, she haunted the place, where so recently she had dreaded going. She paced the corridors of the maternity ward, halting at this bed, and then another, eyeing their occupants, peering at their babies. She followed the nurses, badgering them to tell her what they had done with her baby. She singled out Nurse Matthews, who had been on duty that day; she would definitely know, Rita decided.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Spain. I’m really sorry. I was only gone for a few minutes. And she was doing so well, before …’ She halted.

  Rita heard the remorseful pause. Now, she willed her, now, tell me. She was doing so well before she died. But all Nurse Matthews said was: ‘If I could bring her back, believe me, I would.’

  Finally, Dr Munroe took her aside. He showed her into his office. On the walls were charts of the human skeleton, the red veins and blue arteries like the complicated depiction of a railway junction. Dr Munroe did not sit down. He loped back and forth as if he were a prisoner on designated exercise, his hands sunk deep into the pockets of his coat. He was working himself up to it, Rita thought, gauging his every movement.

  ‘We think it would be better, Mrs Spain, if you stopped coming here,’ he said, still pacing, his head sunk on his chest as if he were musing to himself. He stopped.

  ‘I’m sure the police are doing all they can.’ He ran a hand distractedly through his straw-coloured hair. He paused and leaned over her.

  ‘You can be assured that your baby is being well cared for. Whoever has taken her means no harm to the child. Probably a mother who has lost a baby of her own.’

  ‘Show me,’ Rita said, rising suddenly from her seat.

  ‘Show you what, Mrs Spain,’ he replied evenly.

  ‘Show me what you’ve done with her. She’s here. I know she’s here. She’s dead and no one will tell me.’

  ‘Mrs Spain, there is nothing I can show you. Your baby isn’t here. Your baby is out there, somewhere. Somewhere else.’

  A shallow grave, he thought grimly to himself.

  She hunted through the bowels of the hospital. The basement was a series of large, empty rooms, reached by a clattery service lift. Along the dim corridors were grey metal lockers and large cages of laundry. There were tall, slim cylinders with gauges attached, their red needles registered at nought. She could hear the sound of an engine running somewhere outside. She pushed open a large metal door and found herself in a small, enclosed yard. At the far end of it was a shed. She ventured closer. From the doorway she could make out the figure of an overalled man labouring in the gloom. He opened a hatch in the darkness. A square of leaping flames shot up illuminating the dim interior. He dumped something into it, a bag containing something soft and pulpy. The fire flared at his shoulder. He stoked it with a shovel, then turned to lift another bag up. His face was blackened, his hair singed, his eyes like pale moons in his sooty face, beads of sweat glistening on his grimy brow. Rita could smell burning flesh. She screamed.

  ‘What the …?’ he yelled closing the iron grid at his back. It clanged dully, eclipsing the roar of the flames.

  Rita fled. She had found what she was looking for. A glimpse of hell.

  RITA HAD SEEN the vengeful hand of God. He had sent her baby to the burning fires of hell right before her eyes. She was being punished. The sin of the mother had been visited upon the child. She had thought that when she had said ‘I do’ at the altar in St Xavier’s six months before that she had escaped his wrath. She remembered the pea-green light in the church and the soaring figures of the Trinity emblazoned in the stained-glass window in the nave. Father, Son and Holy Ghost. The eye of God in the glass had looked down on her that day and had seemed forgiving. But it had only been a trick of the light. His eye was so high up she had had to crane her neck to see; it was, she saw now, black and solid, lofty and cruel. She studied that eye many times, gazing fixedly at it. He had but one, one all-seeing eye; the other was eclipsed by the shadow of what Rita thought was an eyelid. She came to see it as a malicious wink. What she didn’t know was that there was a hole in the window of the nave. Years before, a boy from the Mansions had climbed a tree o
utside the church and once he had reached the height of God’s shoulder he had used his catapult to fire a small stone through the glass. He aimed for the bull’s eye. It had gone clean through; he had taken out the eye of God. That boy was Mel Spain.

  Rita spent many hours in the church amidst the hissing sibilance of solitary prayer. She knelt in the front pew within earshot of the drone of absolution from the confessionals and waited for a sign. It was not devotion which brought her there. No amount of prayer, she knew, could save a soul from hell. Indulgences could win an unbaptised baby from limbo or the throngs of pagans who had never known the face of God, but hell, hell was final and absolute. She was turning to God or was it the devil – she remembered the custodian of the flames at the hospital – in a desperate attempt to ward off worse. She made a bargain. He could take Mel, she offered, eyeing the lofty nave, he could even take Mel, if she could have her baby back.

  Mel watched bleakly as Rita’s hysteria turned to penitential resolve. It had been one of her saving graces that she was not a religious girl. In fact, he would never have got his way with her if she had been. At some stage in the tussle she would have called a halt, reclipped her rolled down stockings, tucked in her crumpled blouse and with a hand through her messed hair she would have got up and stumbled away. Mel had not believed his luck when she had not resisted. He remembered the intoxication of schoolgirl flesh, and Rita’s ardent but tremulous submission. He ruminated nostalgically on these things in the months after the baby was taken. He had plenty of opportunity. It wasn’t that Rita wouldn’t let him touch her. He got plenty of hard little kisses. In bed at night, she would stroke the hair at his temples and croon at him endearments she had never used before: ‘My pet’, ‘Pet lamb’. Pet lamb indeed. That’s exactly what he felt like. Something soft and woolly that could be babied. But if he tried to hold her, lodge his tongue inside her mouth, she would wriggle free saying ‘No Mel, not yet!’ He did not know that she was practising for a time when he would be taken away from her.

  He had reckoned on a period of mourning, three months he estimated at the outside. But as time passed and Rita’s scruples became more, not less pronounced, it began to dawn on Mel that perhaps this wouldn’t pass. He would climb in next to her after a late show at the La Scala and find her curled like a warm, downy baby in the hollow of the bed, nightdressed to the neck. He would knead the skin he could only imagine beneath the rubbed cotton she wore, seeking out the curve of breast or hip, smuggling touches that now seemed forbidden to him. But his urgency would always give him away (he wanted to take her not to finger her) and she would wake finding his hand trying to worm its way in between her legs. He always took it away smartly as if he had been caught grave-robbing, as if his desire was unseemly. But she was his wife, after all.

  He sought consolation in the dingy vulgarity of the La Scala and bouts of hot, furtive sex in the projection room with Greta, one of the usherettes. Romantic hostilities broke out between them from time to time; he never knew when he was going to get the go-ahead. Her indifference excited him. Weeks would pass and she would barely glance at him, sashaying about in her stained brinylon sweaters and too tight skirts, cradling her torch idly in her lap. She had a fringe and long black hair – out of a bottle, Mel suspected – and a dishevelled kind of glamour. She was older than him by several years; pushing thirty, the other girls said. He would feign disinterest too but felt he was less successful at it. He had the feeling that she knew what she was doing, whereas he felt the victim of her whims. After weeks when they would barely have exchanged a word, she would smile at him, all teasing invitation, and he would know that it was on. Her hunger outdid his own; there were times with Greta when he felt he was being devoured. She would suck and scratch and bray; sometimes he would have to clasp his hand over her mouth in case they would be heard above the rumble and boom of other love stories which shimmered bluely over their heads. Afterwards he would feel that he had been in a scuffle with someone, the fright of it still pounding in his veins mixed with relief that he had had another lucky escape. Never again, he would vow, but there always was another time. Until Greta left. Inexplicably. Captain Prunty said it was for personal reasons, a bereavement of some kind. The girls said otherwise. Mel pumped them slyly for information.

  ‘Love life,’ Celia Shortall said knowingly. ‘Imagine, she had a love life!’ Celia warmed to her subject. ‘Someone broke her heart. That’s what she said. Mind you, she was a bit tipsy at the time.’

  ‘And who was it? Anyone we know.’

  ‘Nah,’ Celia said. ‘Some married fella. I suppose when you get to her age that’s all you can get.’

  Mel was relieved. It was somebody else then, nothing to do with him.

  The sacristan at St Xavier’s was waiting for a miracle. In the dead hours of the afternoon he watched the young woman in the lace mantilla sitting in the front pew. Like most people on Mecklenburgh Street, he knew Rita’s history, though with the passing of time the details became obscured so that the missing baby became reduced to some vague trouble of Rita’s that she should be over now. Was she the girl whose baby was taken, they would muse, or was it a miscarriage? As he hurried about his business, the sacristan noted her stricken, imploring expression, the piety of her prayer. He would sneak glances at her, eager to witness the consuming light of beatification. She had the kind of face that might see visions. The gift came to those who were young; it was through them the Lord spoke. He polished the candlesticks, brassed up the altar rails, he bore in fresh flowers, readying his church (he regarded God as merely a joint owner) for a major spectacle.

  Benediction came on an evening in December; the sky was a bowl of grey, the wind dank and chill. A sudden squall of rain had just started as Rita stepped into the church porch. She looked out at the greasy street and the spitting of the heavens, and felt the stirrings of defiance. It was two years now. Only the reporters kept the anniversary.

  ‘Any news of Baby Spain?’

  There would be some mumbling at the doorstep – they always asked for Mel – and they would leave dejectedly. Mel treated it as an inconvenience, a minor irritation as if he were being asked a technical question he didn’t know the answer to.

  Walter Golden would scowl and return to his accounts. ‘Why don’t they just let us be?’

  Business was bad. After years of brooding calm, the city had erupted unble to contain its differences. Several bombs had exploded in power stations and factories along the river which marked the boundary between north and south. It made people wary and nervous of travelling into the city centre. And money was tight; his customers were saving their shoe leather.

  There was an uneasy truce in the house on Mecklenburgh Street. Walter, Rita and Mel had the air of survivors, a small group with a shared ordeal in common. They never mentioned the baby. At the start it was incredulity that prevented them. There was no need since she would soon be back with them. It was only a matter of time. This deference had hardened over the years into superstition. Each of them buried her in their own way. Walter regarded the whole episode as an illness, as if Rita had suffered a breakdown or had been sent to a sanatorium. His memory of it was feverish, all blur and haze, a series of alarms and relapses.

  Mel fuelled his rejection by blaming Rita. In some obscure way, he believed this was all her fault. She had trapped him with the threat of a baby, a baby that had vanished almost as soon as it had appeared, like a clever conjuring trick. Now you see it, now you don’t. He did not wish to be reminded of how badly he’d been duped.

  And Rita, Rita wanted it to be over. She hungered for and feared a final verdict. Any sense of imminence bothered her. A knock on the door, her name called out. She would watch anxiously as her father sliced envelopes open with his thumb and forefinger and drew out the letter inside. She could no longer answer the phone. Even the minutest silence before callers identified themselves made her quake. This, she would tell herself, this is it. Out on the street, the sound of scurrying footsteps behind
her brought her to a shocked halt. She would turn around very slowly, bracing herself. A boy with a telegram. A man in uniform. In shops she expected to be paged, to be called away with news. But it was worst at home since either Mel or her father could judge at any moment that it was time to confirm what she already knew. That her baby was dead. She shook the rain from her scarf as she entered the church. Canon Power was reading from the lesson.

  ‘Pharoah’s daughter came down to bathe in the river, while her maid-servants walked along the bank. She caught sight of the basket among the rushes, and sent one of her attendants to fetch it; and when she opened it, and saw the baby crying, her heart was touched…’

  The high altar was ablaze, a red carpet was rolled out in the aisle, there were garlands on the pews.

  ‘… Take this boy, Pharoah’s daughter said, and nurse him for me; I will reward thee for it. So the woman took the boy and nursed him till he was grown; then she handed him over to Pharoah’s daughter who adopted him as her son, and gave him the name of Moses, the Rescuer …’

  And lo, there were angels. They nestled in twos near the vaulted ceilings, cherubs with sculpted curls and tiny wings. One, stonily sightless, genuflected by the door beneath the weight of a scallop shell containing a low tide of gritty holy water. Another pair stood at each side of the altar on pedestals, one with a flaming sword, the other holding aloft the ruby glow of the sanctuary lamp. They wound into the bark of the pulpit; they trumpeted at the baptismal font, a well of grey stone. They trooped across the altar steps, small creatures gowned in red and white, marching down the aisle in formation towards her. A sweet, smoky, scent filled the air. A thurible chimed plan-gently. A golden sun was rising at their heads, its jagged, encrusted rays glittering. The litanies sang in in her head. Mirror of Justice, Seat of Wisdom, Mystical Rose, Morning Star, Tower of Ivory, Mother of Christ, Mother of Divine Grace, Mother Most Pure, Mother of Pearl. …