Mother of Pearl

by Mary Morrissy

  He was shot through the eye; God’s peashooting revenge. He was standing in the foyer when the killers struck. There was some disturbance in the cinema, a fist-fight between two men. They came to blows because one of them, the taller of the two, kept on shifting in his seat and obscuring the view of the screen for the other man’s girlfriend. A patron (Captain Prunty insisted that the customers be referred to as patrons) roamed into the lobby looking for somebody in charge and found Mel slumped on the carpet. His torch was still on, lying limply in his hand, its glare covered by his other hand. A flustered Captain Prunty came on the scene, Mel prone on the ground and a young woman bending over him. His patience was wearing thin. It would not be the first time he had had to reprimand Mel for unbecoming behaviour; he had, once before, come across him and one of the usherettes engaged in a compromising tussle on the back stairs. But this front of house indiscretion was going too far. It was only when he saw the bloodied mess of Mel’s right eye as his head lolled back in the woman’s arms, his torch falling from his grasp extinguishing its fragile beam that Captain Prunty realised something serious was wrong.

  ‘Holy Jesus,’ he breathed and crossed himself hurriedly.

  Joey Tate reached for the house lights. A groan went up from the stalls, couples coming to from secret gropings in the dark, the others brutally awoken from the azure spell of a Western sky. A ripple ran through the cinema. The two men who had been raining blows on one another sat down abruptly. There were several minutes of baffled confusion while the film played on looking frenziedly pale in comparison to the real-life drama. Captain Prunty, holding Mel Spain’s hand, was embarrassed and exasperated. Embarrassed by the intimacy of the moment, holding Mel’s hand futilely – as if that was going to help anything – and exasperated by the din and clamour of the patrons. This sort of thing was bad for business; the kiss of death. He should really clear the place. But they would be looking for their money. He felt it unseemly to leave Mel there, crumpled and … dead, for God’s sake, in the midst of strangers with a late feature running. And then, luckily, the reel ended and the intermission sign flashed up on the screen. Captain Prunty dropped Mel’s hand and bounding down the aisle, leapt on to the stage.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I would kindly ask you to leave your seats. The rest of the show has been cancelled.’

  A loud boo came from the front rows.

  ‘There’s been a death, here, here in the cinema, one of our staff …’

  His voice trailed off before he added reluctantly, ‘A full refund is available at the box office.’

  Mel Spain’s last hours were spent in Row K of the La Scala where he had spent most of his life – in the dark.

  At first, Rita thought it was a gag. Captain Prunty at the door at two a.m. Mel often talked about the practical jokes they played on the usherettes, locking them into the cinema after closing time, stealing the batteries from their torches. She struggled to get to the door, negotiating her way around the furniture which seemed in the early hours of the morning to jostle in her path, and cursing Mel for having forgotten his key.

  ‘Mrs Spain?’ Captain Prunty enquired.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied doubtfully.

  ‘Captain Prunty,’ he said by way of introduction.

  So this was Captain Prunty, Rita thought, putting a face finally to the name. She fully expected that at any moment Mel would materialise from some hiding place beyond her vision.

  ‘Hello,’ she said carefully.

  ‘I’m afraid, Mrs Spain, there’s been an accident…’

  He looked shiftily over his shoulder. There were two policemen standing in the shadows but Captain Prunty had insisted that he would break the news.

  ‘May I come in?’

  ‘Of course,’ she said and ushered him inside. He closed the door emphatically.

  ‘It’s Mel,’ he said.

  ‘What about Mel?’ She was alarmed now. Was this the stranger at the door she had always feared, the bearer of bad news?

  ‘I’m afraid, Mrs Spain, he’s dead.’

  This was definitely a joke, Rita decided.

  ‘Dead?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m afraid so,’ he said shaking his head sorrowfully.

  Not gone, not missing, not taken like Hazel Mary had been. Dead. A piercing shriek of laughter came from somewhere in the pit of her stomach. Because … because it wasn’t a joke. And then she remembered her bargain, the offer she had made to God. Take Mel, she had said, take Mel. And he had. And yet, even while she sat there refusing to believe his death just as in the early years she could not believe his life and hers as one, she knew how fragile their existence together had been and how slender the thread of deceit. And she had always known it would come to this, the distant object of her desire shifting back to its natural position spinning away like a silver token, a coin tossed into the river glinting as it catches the light.

  ‘What happened?’ she asked dully.

  ‘There was a shooting,’ he said, ‘he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. They shot him down like a dog. It was the takings they were after.’ He did not add that it had been a matter of mistaken identity. It was Arthur Prunty, police informer, they had meant to kill.

  IF RITA SPAIN had seen the two men crossing the playground fourteen floors below her on a sunny April day she might have fallen prey to her old sense of superstition. A priest and a detective, unlikely companions unless, as Rita knew, there was bad news to be broken. Canon Power, who had both baptised and married Rita, was a thin whippet of a man with flaky skin and thinning white hair. He picked his way carefully among the knots of children milling on the gravel patch. The first games of the street calender were in progress; skipping, hopscotch, an energetic scuffling that passed itself off as football. He clamped his hand lightly on their heads as he passed, a habit both benedictional and proprietorial. Con Mullarney, bluff and windswept, ambled by his side, glad that for once the news he was bearing would bring no grief. He had seen too often the bloodied ends of things. He thought of the woman they were about to meet, unknowingly working in her kitchen, vacuuming perhaps, or ironing, and felt the precious excitement of these moments, the before moments. As soon as he and Canon Power crossed her threshold, she would be entering the after of her life. It was they who would draw that line; the power of it made him shiver.

  Rita had just put Stella in the playpen when the doorbell rang. It was during these mid-morning hours that she missed Mel least. She could pretend as she busied herself around the flat that he was only temporarily absent. Sleeping late in the bedroom, which, with the curtains drawn during the day, always reminded Rita of the artificial darkness of a cinema. She kept them drawn still but she could not recreate the warm, clammy, cave-like air that Mel had given it when he had inhabited it. He had slumbered the hours of a toddler; it had been like looking after a second child. She worried about what he ate; she fretted about his lost sleep.

  As she answered the door, she wondered irritably who it could be at this hour. Mrs Loman, next door, for a cup of sugar, or perhaps the plumber to fix the dripping tap in the bathroom. She was no longer in a hurry to open the door to strangers; she knew the perils they could bring. She was not expecting Canon Power. He had called several times after Mel had died and sat in the kitchen wringing his hands and looking at her, doe-eyed, as if his oozing sympathy might cure her. He was here to comfort her, he had said then, but he seemed uneasy with the task and his visits were peppered with aching silences during which she would gaze around the kitchen and consider repainting the cupboards or buying new blinds.

  ‘Canon Power,’ she said shortly, hoping not to encourage him. She had a duster in her hand and she effected an air of interrupted work.

  ‘May I come in, my child?’

  She nodded glumly.

  Another man stepped in behind him. He lifted his soft hat and smiled.

  ‘Detective Mullarney,’ he said quietly.

  Rita felt a pang. She cast her mind back to old sins. She had be
en light-fingered as a teenager; she and Imelda had stolen trinkets from a store in town. Earrings on cards, sampler bottles of perfume. She could not take for granted any more the notion that she would not be punished, even for the smallest and most distant of misdemeanours. Reluctantly she showed them into the kitchen where they parked themselves uneasily at the table. She offered tea, but they refused. She stood still, clutching the duster, leaning against the counter.

  ‘Mrs Spain,’ the detective started, then shot a helpless glance at Canon Power. Rita wondered vaguely if this had something to do with Mel. Perhaps he wasn’t really dead after all, perhaps it had all been a terrible mistake. And for a moment she forgot that he was dead and felt an old stab of irritation; he was never here when he was needed.

  ‘Mrs Spain …’ he tried again.

  ‘Rita,’ Canon Power said finally. ‘We have some news for you.’

  Her heart sang with alarm. The last person to use those words had been Captain Prunty. But what more had she to lose, she wondered.

  ‘We are the bearers of good tidings,’ Canon Power went on.

  Rita eyed him warily.

  ‘We think,’ he said drawing in a great breath and then exhaling. ‘We think we’ve found your baby.’

  Rita was at a complete loss. What was he talking about? Stella was in the playpen in the next room.

  ‘The baby you lost,’ Canon Power persisted gently, ‘the baby that was taken.’ He almost added ‘remember?’ but checked himself. What mother would need prompting to recall a lost child.

  ‘She has a birthmark, here,’ the detective said pointing foolishly to his own chin.

  Rita closed her eyes. The room swam in her head. She clutched the smooth rim of the counter.

  ‘Would you like to sit down?’ the detective asked, rising and steering her towards his chair. She sank gratefully into it.

  ‘It’s a miracle,’ Canon Power purred, ‘a miracle.’

  They had to drag her from the flat, Detective Mullarney literally prising her fingers from each piece of furniture which stood in the pathway to the door.

  ‘My baby’s dead,’ she kept on saying, appealing to him as he inched her towards the open door. ‘My baby’s dead, I tell you. She’s dead.’

  He was shocked by the ferocity of her denials. He had expected unbridled joy; now he felt as if he were apprehending a criminal. She had taken it calmly at first, sitting at the table while he told her about the the childless couple on the other side of the city and their small house on Jericho Street which had harboured its secret for four years. She’s quite safe, he kept telling her, quite safe and well. She had nodded dully when he had described the child, her dark hair, the colour of her eyes.

  ‘Hazel,’ she had repeated. ‘Hazel.’

  He had mistaken it for some spark of recognition but he was wrong. She had started sobbing, rocking back and forth. He had reached into his pocket and produced his hip flask. He raised it to her lips but she shook her head and pushed him away. She looked at her hands, splayed uselessly on her lap. Canon Power was hovering at her back, one hand on her shoulder, murmuring ‘there, there’. Useless, Mullarney, thought, bloody useless.

  ‘We have to go now, Mrs Spain,’ he ventured. He rose and touched her elbow. Canon Power circled around her.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ she said dazedly but made no move.

  ‘We have to go,’ he said more emphatically.

  She looked at him blankly. She was no more than a child herself, Mullarney thought.

  ‘Don’t you want to see her,’ he said taking one of her hands. ‘She’s waiting for you. Waiting for her mother.’

  And that was when the trouble started.

  ‘You’re taking me away?’ she said. ‘I’ve done nothing, you can’t take me away. I’ve done nothing.’

  He caught her more roughly than he had intended. He was afraid he might have bruised her, so brittle did she feel in his grasp. He shook her. ‘She needs you, she needs her mother.’

  ‘My baby’s dead,’ she said. ‘She died.’

  ‘No, Mrs Spain, she was given up for dead, but she’s very much alive.’

  The Cottage Home was a red-bricked building, full of intricate curlicues and a fairytale tower, as if a child had designed it. It stood on a high patch of green near a railway station. Trains rumbled in the embankment below like some vast disturbance of the earth’s crust, a groaning prelude to an earthquake. Rita Spain took it as a sign as she stepped out of the car with Detective Mullarney at her side. It was not just her world that had been turned on its head, the very earth was about to succumb to a monstrous upheaval. She was more composed now, he noted with relief. She was carrying her other child, the fair one, clutching her tightly as if she was afraid she might lose her. She had refused to allow Canon Power to carry her so he trailed after them as they stepped into the shiny hallway. A muted clamour greeted them. The cries of children, the clatter of cutlery. It was lunchtime; in the refectory steaming plates of food were being handed down the long tables.

  Mother Benildus, a stout woman with a pair of half spectacles perched on the broad bridge of her nose, rolled towards them, beaming.

  ‘Mrs Spain!’ she said clutching Rita’s free hand and squeezing it. ‘You’ve come for your little one!’

  Rita flared angrily. ‘There’s some mistake, I tell you. This is not my baby.’

  ‘Wait till you see her,’ said Mother Benildus linking her as they started to walk down the corridor, ‘she’s a little poppet.’

  Mother Benildus had seen this scene many times before, but in reverse. She had lost count of the number of parents who had accompanied her down this very corridor to leave their children; very few came to claim them back. There were adoptions, of course, but the taint of having been left once seemed to haunt her charges; she watched them leave with a heavy heart. The way they lived here was only a preparation for the big outside world; for the small inside world of families with their coiled-up secrets and hidden disappointments, the Home was useless; it was like trying to land an airliner in a vegetable patch.

  ‘And who’s this?’ she asked brushing her fingers along Stella’s cheek. ‘This must be Pearl’s little sister!’

  Rita stopped abruptly.

  ‘Pearl…?’ She turned and looked accusingly at Detective Mullarney. ‘See, she’s not my little girl. My little girl wasn’t called Pearl.’

  ‘It is her given name, it’s what she answers to,’ Mother Benildus said steering her firmly back on course. ‘She will learn another one in time; we all do.’

  But for the birthmark, Rita would have chosen the flaxen-haired child with the brown eyes and pigtails because she would have looked well with Stella. She certainly wasn’t going to go for the one with bandy legs and a cold sore, she thought vehemently. She watched as they trailed out of the refectory, two by two, the abandoned and the maimed. Ill-assorted clothes peeped out from under their regulation brown smocks. They looked cowed and unkempt. And she saw the way they looked at her, hungry for recognition. Take me, take me, their eyes seemed to plead. One little boy broke ranks and rushed at her skirts shouting ‘Mama, Mama,’. Rita had to look away as Mother Benildus unlocked him from his grasp around her thigh and said. ‘No, Robert, not yours.’

  In fact, the only way Rita recognised her in the end was that she was the only child not looking for her; she was looking for someone else entirely. She was almost at the end of the line, a sturdy, well-fed child, her nutmeg-coloured hair scraped back into regulation plaits from a pale, serious face, the little mark on her chin. Rita gasped involuntarily. Here was a ghost from her past. But not a ghost. She couldn’t relate this live little girl with the stick baby she had brought into the world. She felt the child’s size and health as a kind of rebuff, as if she could not have been so if she had stayed with Rita. Slowly she released Stella into Mother Benildus’ arms and knelt down in front of the small stranger who stood gazing up at her. Mel’s eyes greeted her; she felt a sharp pain and recoiled. She had thought, st
rangely, that all that would be asked of her was to point the child out, that she could leave then and go home to her simple life of two. But seeing those eyes – like Mel’s reproaching her from the grave – she knew there was no going back. She remembered her years of prayerful bargaining for the baby: her trade-off with God. She had wished Mel away, in the same way as she had wished them to be together in the first place, and he had been taken. Now she was coming into her reward. God was honouring the bargain.

  But she was being given back a stranger who had been suckled by wolves; who had lived among and been loved by the enemy, those very people who had killed Mel. She came as some gruesome kind of peace offering, a blood sacrifice from the other side, but with their blood not hers, running through her veins. A traitor in their midst; a child who lived because Mel was dead. A child who could never be trusted. Rita would never believe that this child and the lost baby were the same. Something had been lost in between. Her own innocence. And in its place a shame, the shame of a mother who, in her heart, had given up on her first-born as dead. How could that baby be anything other than lost, lost permanently? As she stretched out to touch the child’s hand, Rita became the mother of three – the lost one, Stella, and now, this one, her third – and contemplated yet another fresh start, her final one. But every fresh start contained a lie, Rita knew, a making over of the truth. To start again, she would have to rip and undo. A stitch of memory here, a seam of longing there, all would have to be remade. For the garment to be passed off as the real thing, the child must never be told that here in the portals of The Cottage Home, her second childhood had begun. How else could Rita make a family of a murdered husband, the child of another man, the ghost of a lost baby and now an orphan of war? She planted her lips on the child’s forehead and sealed her new and unknowing future – with a kiss.