Mother of Pearl

by Mary Morrissy

  ‘There’s one composition I’d like to read aloud …’

  These were words I grew to dread. No wonder Stella tired of it.

  ‘Oh,’ she would mimic, ‘you must be Mary Spain’s sister!’

  Stella left school at sixteen. If Grandfather Golden had been alive, he would have protested but it was my mother’s rule that went now. She worked in a succession of jobs. A dry cleaner’s, a bookie’s shop, an undertaker’s. It didn’t seem to matter. What did matter was there were boys. Disembodied voices at the end of the phone who would materialise at the door bearing only their first names. Paul, Frankie, Raymond. I see them now as a composite, curly-haired, beefy, with a certain shy kind of swagger. There they stand, hands lazily fisted in their pockets, narrow-eyed and sullenly defiant, cigarettes dangling from their lips. I looked at them and saw my father. This was the kind of boy he must have been. My mother took much pleasure in their ardour; it was as if she were being courted herself. And they, in turn, loved her. They lapped up her coy gaiety as she hailed them from the kitchen – come in, come in. If only all mothers were like this, I could almost hear them think, as they brushed past me in the hall and straight into my mother’s showgirl embrace. They shared their cigarettes with her, lighting hers with those snappy gold lighters that were the fashion then. Meanwhile, upstairs, Stella would be coolly dressing. I remember her wardrobe from that time. Peach-coloured dresses to the knee, granny-print skirts to the ankle. Scoop-necked tops, faded flares. Small bead handbags, sling-back shoes. And lots of careful make-up. Eyeliner that didn’t show; lipstick with a faint pearly gloss. I see her casually clipping on earrings as she backed out of her room where clothes dripped from doors, mirrors, picture frames, and spraying perfume between her breasts as she hurried downstairs. Where had she learned such tricks, I wondered. She had passed me out when I wasn’t looking. She was the elder sister now.

  My mother would sit up into the small hours waiting for Stella to come home from parties or dances, not to berate, but to share in the whispered confidences of the night. I would hear them in the kitchen, laughing delightedly together, then hushing one another extravagantly like … like sisters, while I lay wakeful. They turned me into an irritated mother, sick with fear at the hours they kept and disapproving of their flightiness. Sometimes I would bang on the floor to quieten them (this behaviour was more the territory of tyrannical grannies) or I would stumble downstairs, gummy and cross with sleep. Their animated chatter would halt immediately as if they were discussing adult secrets I was too young to understand. As I clattered sulkily around the kitchen, my mother in dressing gown and hairnet would slink disconsolately to bed; Stella would sweep up her earrings and her discarded shoes and I would be left alone with the lipstick-smudged cigarette ends wilfully bent and stubbed out, the curdling coffee dregs, the whispers of sex. I felt both excluded and abandoned. The truth was I was terrified. This version of the world which my mother and Stella offered was too calculatingly female. I feared I would never manage out there. The lopsidedness of our household constantly reiterated itself. I longed for the saving grace of Grandfather Golden or my long-dead father, some male ballast, some man, any man who would show me that this was not the only way.

  I SWAPPED ONE institution for another. From school to hospital in one swift move. My mother was perplexed at my choice.

  ‘A nurse, for god’s sake,’ she said, ‘all those sick people! And you were never a good patient.’

  She is terrified of hospitals; she sees them as factories of disease as if the very buildings devour people. I like their scale, their vastness, the urgent sense of vital business going on. Life and death at the same time. And the work itself which demands such careful vigilance. Night duty when the busy clamour of the day has died away and every sound is magnified. When the thrum of plumbing, the creak of a door, the ticking of a floorboard becomes significant, slyly asserting itself in the huge silence. When the human voice becomes a sacrilegious boom. And it feels like we are aboard a doomed liner, going down. I listen then intently for my patients’ breathing, those shifts and whispers smuggled into the night. I go up close to them. I am tempted to touch them (I touch them all the time, of course, I take their temperatures, I give them bed baths) to push back their hair from their foreheads and croon to them. I curb the temptation; it is not seemly. I distrust myself. Who would want to wake up to a veritable stranger hushing them, trying to inch some feeling from them while they sleep? Not me.

  Jeff was brought in with gunshot wounds. Trouble, when it comes, comes in waves; there are weeks of sporadic shootings and revenge killings and then like a fever, it dies away. The calm is often more eerie than the storm. We listen more closely to the news bulletins then; it is during just such a calm that the whole thing could explode and engulf all of us, both north and south of the river. Through the war we have acquired new specialities – shrapnel injuries, false limbs. The wounded are often taken to South Side General. I was on duty in Casualty when Jeff arrived. A random victim. In the wrong place at the wrong time. His belly gaped; a towel had been stuffed into the wound to staunch the flow. This was our bloody beginning; not unlike the end.

  He was taken to theatre for emergency surgery. I remember the journey through the dull, glazed corridors, the blurred white squares of light overhead which he kept on counting to keep himself awake, while I held the IV pouch overhead. He panicked when they came to put him out. It is like a rehearsal for death, volunteering to go into the darkness alone. I held his hand, simply that. A hand that anchored him, secured a place for him in this world, I suppose. And I was there when he woke, bleary-eyed from his long journey. He smiled sheepishly.

  ‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘when all this is over …?’

  I watched him avidly during his convalescence, indulging in a kind of lovelorn surveillance with a mixture of appalled gratitude and empirical curiosity. So this is what people felt when they talked about infatuation. At that stage I didn’t dare use a word as presumptious as love. The fact that he was in danger gave my feelings a suitable urgency, though it seems absurd now to think of him as doomed. The first time we made love was in a broom cupboard on Ward D; it smelt of starch and gumption. We grappled with one another like terminal patients with nothing to lose, tenderly consumed by a startled kind of innocence. It was hot and urgent, yet even so I could not surrender to it completely. The memory of a child conceived in a rotting house on a summer’s evening invaded. I felt the pebbles that must have left their dimpled imprint on my mother’s thighs. A grating soreness between her legs; astride her, my father would not have waited. A bruise on some soft fleshy part (I cannot imagine him being gentle; I cannot imagine him at all). And afterwards her swollen mouth and smarting cheeks as she gathers up her scattered clothes – how is it that after sex, it is the blameless underwear that seems soiled? It was only when Jeff pressed his lips between my legs, labouring like a suckling child, his tongue divining a cleft until it struck a spring and a joy seeped out, a joy so bleak it was akin to desolation, that I was released into his world, a battleship-grey dawn, the whine of sirens, the spat of gunfire, the crash of soldiers’ boots, the splintering of wood.

  He was from the other side of the city. Perhaps it was that fact alone which made our association in those early days into something illicit and dangerous. That and my circumstances. I was in the nurses’ home at the time. The corridors were patrolled by nuns checking to see if the toilet seats were up, or so the joke went. There was a lot of smuggling going on in the form of live cargo – men disguised as brothers or cousins – and Keystone Kop scenes on the fire escapes as, half-dressed, they made their getaway at odd hours of the morning. I remember the dishevelment of my small room after a weekend spent in bed together. Tea trays on the floor, the Sunday papers dismembered between the sheets, the jet-lagged sense of time. Going to sleep when dawn was invading the room and waking to the muteness of the Sabbath, rain dreeping from the sills.

  I would rise early on those mornings I was on duty an
d, emerging in an ironed uniform and starched cap out of the cramped cave we had crawled into, I would set out across the forecourt to the hospital smug in the secret knowledge that I had left a man behind, and that he would still be there by the time I got back, having barely stirred in the crumb-ridden bed. These routine habits, the animal comforts of intimacy were new to me then. Now they seem distant and outlandish, like the rituals of an abandoned religion.

  Unlike Stella, I didn’t bring him home for inspection. It pleased me to think that my mother knew nothing about him; it pleased me even more to think that she didn’t know that he existed. He was just one more secret I was keeping from her. She would not have approved. I was consorting with the enemy; the very people who had killed my father. We should cut them off and set them adrift, she would say, as if we were not adrift already.

  So tell me, I can hear Stella say, what was he like? I hid him from her too. I liked his hands, sturdy and graceful, and his russet colouring like a fallen apple. His endearing freckles, a perfect set of teeth. When he smiled it was like watching the sun come up in his face. How hard it is to sum up the beloved. It is as if we get so close we cannot see. Like viewing a cathedral, it is a simple cornice we remember, the blue of a mosaic, the mother-of-pearl inlay. That is how I will remember him. Tantalising fragments of a lost dream.

  Stella stole away into the night, or that’s how it seemed. She stealthily gathered her papers together, visa and passport, and booked her passage. I arrived home to the Crescent one evening to find the house in disarray and my mother in tears.

  ‘She’s going,’ she said, ‘she’s going away. Another one of my babies … lost.’

  I was shocked. Stella had been keeping things from me.

  ‘Talk to her,’ my mother pleaded with me. ‘She’ll listen to you.’

  But why should she? I was no better than a stranger, someone who had been billeted with her. She had escaped from me a long time ago.

  ‘Don’t you start,’ Stella said eyeing me menancingly. A suitcase gaped on the floor. Dresses wept from the bed. ‘I’ve had enough hysterics for one day.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Just listen,’ she said. My mother wept noisily in the next room. ‘She wants to live my life for me.’

  ‘No,’ I protested.

  It had never struck me that Stella might have ambitions for anything other than the round of young men, and the gleeful confederacy with my mother. She plucked up a pale green sweater and held it up against her.

  ‘What do you think? Too heavy for where I’m going.’ She tossed it aside.

  ‘No,’ she amended, ‘she wants to have my life.’

  ‘What do you mean? I don’t understand.’

  ‘Surprise, surprise! Where have you been all these years, Moll?’

  I was startled for a moment. By the baby name, firstly. An appropriation of some knowledge of me she had once owned. And then by the accusation. The accusation of absence.

  ‘She had her turn and she made a mess of it. Now she wants my turn.’

  ‘But I thought …’

  ‘What did you think? That I enjoyed watching her act like a teenager, competing with me all the time?’

  ‘Well, no …’ I started.

  ‘You opted out so she pinned all her hopes on me. She wants to be Rita Golden again as if none of this, you, me or even that fucking baby that forced her to get married, had ever happened.’

  Her ruthlessness amazed me.

  ‘I think she made it up, you know?’

  ‘Made what up?’

  Stella’s capacity for absolutes had always alarmed me. Her easy delivery of neat resolutions. Things I had been mulling over for years, she seemed to have solved.

  ‘That baby,’ she said, sneering. ‘The Cupid baby.’

  ‘No!’

  This was private territory she had no right to invade.

  ‘All in her head, I reckon. Pure fantasy.’

  I tried to play for time.

  ‘Would you not wait a bit? Let her get used to the idea.’

  I knew I was pleading, not for my mother’s sake, but for my own. I was afraid of being left alone with her. And I suspected my mother’s panic was not just about Stella’s departure, but the fact that she would be left alone with me.

  ‘What’s the point? She won’t like my going no matter how long I wait. No point in prolonging the agony. Anyway, there’s nothing for me here. Look at the place.’

  She gestured to the window. A light summer drizzle was falling on the Crescent. The apron patch gardens were lush green and glistening. Beyond, out of sight, the distant city, the pearly glint of river and the racket of gunfire. It was a volatile time, marches on the streets, angry mobs besieging public buildings and setting them alight.

  ‘But this is all so sudden …’

  ‘Sudden to you, maybe,’ she replied tartly.

  She heaved the suitcase on to the bed.

  ‘Do you know what she asked me when I said I was going?’ She laughed wryly. ‘You’re not pregnant, are you?’

  My mother and I saw her off. The mail boat at dusk, the twin piers hugging the harbour. The lighthouse at the edge of land blowing tantalising kisses of light. And Stella leaning over the rail and waving vigorously as if to dispel the ghostly defeat of other losses.

  ‘So long!’ she hollered above the din of farewell and the clank of iron chafing against the quayside. Her hair whipped about her in the wind. ‘Wish me luck!’

  JEFF AND I were married on a winter’s morning. Grey clouds brooding with snow hugged the steeple as we stood shivering in the churchyard. His mother and father crossed the river for the ceremony. Both his parents were living – I attributed this to some great carefulness of Jeff’s affection; we, on the other hand, consigned our loved ones to early graves or great distances. I thought at the time that they were adopting me and the church ceremony with its elaborate rituals of handing over and surrender seemed to endorse this. Now, of course, looking back on it, I see that it was I who adopted them. His mother was a thin, stately woman. I imagined her as the loyal wife of a disgraced monarch who had abdicated for love, though the image did not hold looking at Jeff’s father, rumpled and gamy, a man who seemed destined to be errant even when he didn’t have a drink in his hand or an arm around some woman’s waist. I remember meeting them for the first time. They lived in a small, terraced house on the north side, in the shadow of the shipyard, on a street that rose grimly, steep and inevitable. The worthy poor, Jeff said as we drove through a tangle of red-brick lanes, strung across with washing lines. Women gathered at the street corners, children skipped on the flagstones, men stood in their shirt sleeves in doorways pulling on cigarettes. Banter flew across the narrow streets, bunting flapped from the eaves. A dizzying sense of familiarity assailed me as Jeff pointed out the rusting gasometers, the poised cranes. But then I had been looking at them all my life from a distance. To drive through these sodden streets, punctuated by derelict patches and the gable ends of burnt-out terraces, was like being in the territory of dreams, a private landscape suddenly populated. The street names leapt out at me – Babylon, Macedonia, Jericho – like a ruined and cryptic version of home.

  I kept on expecting to meet somebody I knew.

  The Speights welcomed me with open arms. Mamie, serving tea in the dim back scullery, appropriated me as if she had known me all her life.

  ‘Spain,’ she said musingly when we first met. ‘A real southern name, that. Rings a bell, somehow.’

  ‘That usher who was killed at the La Scala, oh, must be twenty odd years ago, he was a Spain, wasn’t he?’ Jeff’s father said.

  ‘My father.’

  For a moment, he was there. Young Mel Spain, in uniform and cap, a ghostly witness summoned and giving us his blessing.

  ‘I have no memory for these things,’ Mamie confided.

  I was like the daughter she never had, she said.

  ‘We longed for a wee girl, but it wasn’t to be … I had several misses, after
J.F.’

  She used his initials; it was a family joke. He had been christened John Francis, because of a mix-up at the church. Two babies, one of them a girl, arrived where only one was expected and the priest had mistakenly baptised him as Frances. His father decided to keep the unwanted second name. It stuck, like the ghost of his sister who had never come.

  ‘You never forget them, you know, the lost ones,’ Mamie said. She observed a moment’s silence.

  For the first time in years I thought of Jewel, dark companion of my childhood, because, I suppose, I had finally ended up in her territory. It was to these streets, to just such a house, I had banished her. As I looked around its cramped rooms and Mamie’s scallop-edged net curtains, the carefully crocheted antimacassars, the good china brought out in my honour, I felt the sharp shock of recognition as if I had been here before.

  Jeff’s father bent to the stove and opened its creaking door.

  ‘Fire’s nearly gone out.’

  He tramped heavily to the back door and stepped out into the dank yard. The shipyard hooter sounded three times calling the men to work. He heaved in a bucket of fuel.

  ‘Glad that’s not for me,’ he said as he piled the turf into the glowing porthole of the stove. Jeff’s father had been a shipbuilder. In the good old days, he would say, when there was plenty of work.

  ‘The Queen Bea was built here, did you know that? A beauty, she was, a proper cruise liner …’

  ‘Which went down with all aboard, if you remember,’ Jeff said.

  ‘Don’t get him started,’ Mamie interjected. ‘Do you know all I remember of those years? Loads of grimy laundry and the stink of grease. Good old days, my eye.’

  Jeff laughed fondly. And I joined in, glad to be inheriting their nursed grievances and small rivalries because for once they did not implicate me. For the first time in my life, I felt entirely blameless.

  Scenes from a cottage home. I am standing at the kitchen window watching Jeff bowing to a spade, wet earth on his boots, his sweater the colour of rotting leaves. It is autumn, a day drenched with recent rain. He is building up a pile of sodden twigs and branches. It is slimy underfoot where apples have fallen and decayed, and I am wondering if the bonfire will ever catch. It may smoulder and smoke a little, trying hard to be a flame, but it will never blaze.