Mother of Pearl

by Mary Morrissy

  This lack of belief seemed to dog me; I could not trust to happiness, it seemed constantly endangered. I thought death might take him away from me. I feared the knock on the door, men in uniform doing their official duty bringing news of a calamity. A car accident, the sudden swoop of illness, another shooting. His work took him to the north side often; he was a police photographer. He took pictures of the dead, the victims of snipers and bomb-makers. A steady clientele, he used to joke. I could only imagine what horrors he saw. From the television I knew about random death on the street, a corpse in its own blood, discreetly shrouded by a sheet or someone else’s coat. But Jeff drew back the shroud and looked at it straight on. There would be bloodstains sometimes on his clothes, the blood of strangers. He crossed the river bearing with him the spoor of other people’s bone and gristle, and worse, the ghastly images of the dead. I feared for him; it was a version of closeness, I suppose, this sense of fear for the other. But it felt more like a haunting, a rehearsal for the dreaded loss.

  I see us together, Jeff and I, busily carving out domestication, the rooms smelling of drying paint, the gnawing sound of wood being sawed in two. We put up a ceiling in the kitchen. Tongued and grooved. Tongue-in-cheek, I used to call it, in error. I remember handing the planks to Jeff as he stood, arch-backed on a trestle, hammer in hand, as if all our efforts in retrospect were just mere contortions. Each lath had a lip which fitted into its neighbour’s cleft to form a sky of pine overhead. But there were flawed ones in the batch that wouldn’t lock together. We dumped them in the coal shed, blackened and abandoned.

  There were days of sunshine like tender gifts offered up merely to please us, bright openings of the sky full of benediction as if we were being indulgently forgiven. And there was the comfort of skin on skin, the quiet miracle of coupling and its sated aftermath as if we alone had discovered some fevered secret, that two can become one, I suppose. Or that two can never be one. And then, briefly, there were three.

  The baby was a mistake. Neither wanted or unwanted. Not planned, in other words. I couldn’t believe it. Somehow, I had always thought it would be difficult for me. I thought of myself as one of those women who would have to labour for a child, engaging in a long process of trial and error. We could always adopt, I thought, an orphan from the north side, perhaps. I liked the idea of providing a safe home for a sad child. I relied on the notion that some physical obstruction would be found, some part of me that wouldn’t work, a flaw in the reproductive organs. For years, I thought of myself as barren. So when a baby edged its way into our lives it was like an unsought-for miracle. And I kept it a secret.

  I don’t even know when it was conceived. Was it that crisp, clear night, a single star in view, a shivering of trees at the window, or that Sunday morning, still indolent with sleep, the sheets in a tormented tangle beneath us when Jeff, moaning softly as he came, called me his precious, his jewel?

  She rose from the ashes of the north city, and travelling by night, she crossed the bridge and became a living, breathing child, clamouring for my attention. I caught fleeting glimpses of her in the street. A dark child grasping at the air for a mother’s hand. I saw her on buses and trains, a small face framed in the window, waving absently at the world. She appeared in the aisles of supermarkets, perched regally on a trolley, although when I hurried to catch up with her I would find that it was not her at all. Worst of all, her cries would wake me in the night. I would sit bolt upright in bed and hear her sobbing; she had woken from a nightmare and wanted to be comforted, to be reassured the bad dream would not come back. I could picture her, a small girl in pyjamas, in a dormitory somewhere, an institution of some kind, coming to in the darkness, howling. It was a high-ceilinged room, with varnished rafters, and light coming in from the long uncurtained windows. The white bedsteads all around her gleamed dully in the night. Hurried footsteps approached. I expected a mother, but it was instead the heavy tread of a large nun in slippers, beads clacking … Only then I realised that Jewel had no mother. It was not she who had been lost, it was her mother. And she was calling out for me, not from the dim recess of the womb or the dreamy distant city I had housed her in, but here in this world, in my world.

  I tried to explain it away. The hormonal tricks of early pregnancy. The nameless fears of one who is carrying something so small and fragile it seems impossible that it will survive in a world full of perils. I was granting my baby personhood before its time, giving it gender and a fully-formed body and a host of already garnered memories in which I had no part. Perhaps all expectant mothers did this, I thought, to render the growing foetus real, to rescue it from being just an imminent notion. A kind of superstition that if the baby is fully imagined, it can make its way down the birth canal, struggling to grasp the life already dreamed up for it. But the trouble was that I knew I was not creating dreams for this secret baby within, I was being revisited by the dream of a child I had created so long ago that I was amazed she still remembered me. I had left her behind, a little girl, my little girl, and now she was claiming me back. There she stood in a line of smocked orphans on parade waiting for the glassy door at the end of a long, polished corridor to open and a young woman to arrive who would single her out from the ranks of the disowned. And that young woman was me.

  HOW CAN I explain this madness? She was real, she was there, I swear it. She had been there all along, fostered out to parents of my choosing, living a life not her own and waiting for this moment to be restored to me. The baby within was but a pulse beating, a mollusc of flesh, lightly embedded on the ocean floor amidst cities of pebbles driven by the swell and tangles of swollen-podded seaweed, ochre and brown. But Jewel, Jewel was fully formed, a child who was part of me, whom I had nurtured and loved and thought I had lost. How could I have abandoned her? She lived and breathed, she stalked my dreams, she begged for my attention. I could not turn my back on her. She was my firstborn, my only child. No other baby could be allowed to take her place.

  Jeff is the stranger who arrives in the middle of the nightmare, the man in the white coat, all reasonableness and calm, who steps across the bloody threshold and tries to restore order. There is the conjugal bed, steeped in blood, the sheets tormented as if the witnesses to violent love, a woman clawed by the pangs of birth, screaming. His first instinct is that she has been attacked, that someone has literally tried to slaughter her in her bed. He searches the rooms for evidence of an intruder, a forced lock, rifled drawers, a weapon that could have inflicted such wounds. And finds it in the knitting needle beside the bed. He tries to stem the flow of blood but cannot staunch it. He talks to her through her delirium which has transformed her silence into a kind of exultance of pain. She rides on waves of it, like someone possessed, exhilarated by the sting of seaspray and the thunderous roar of the sea.

  ‘What have you done?’ he shouts at her.

  At this stage it is merely a question. Only after the ambulance arrives does he ask again, sorrowfully, the blue light flashing across his face, the scream of a siren drowning out her answer.

  ‘What have you done?’

  ‘You should have told us,’ my mother says rubbing my hand regretfully. She has never given me such attention. ‘About the baby, I mean.’

  ‘It was a secret.’

  ‘Poor Jeff, even he had no idea.’

  My secret, it seems, is safe. His parting gift. He must have told her no more than that this was just another lost baby.

  ‘There’ll be others, you’ll see. After all, I had you and Stella after my first one.’

  But she is wrong. There will be no others as compensatory gifts.

  I am a tabula rasa, born again, with my history excised, cut out of me. Vacant and bleakly empty, only now am I ready to begin my life. There can be no future with Jeff. I am unfit to be with him, unfit to be with anybody. Cursed, as I am, by a savage reversal of the natural instinct. I have killed his child by my own hand. I struck out and tore away the very stuff of dreams, the cringing flesh and blood, the t
hrobbing pulse. And all for a phantom, a wilful sprite, a demon, perhaps. I will return to our cottage home. Alone. A criminal. Will it be haunted too? That bed, those sheets? Will I wake in the night and hear the cries of the creature I expelled there in a mess of a blood and sweat? When I open the wardrobe will it be filled with ghosts or just slack-limbed clothes? Will the drawers house murder weapons, or mere household implements, useful items for opening tins or uncorking bottles? Will there be a secret existence hidden there, lurking in the comers of the rooms or hovering airily with promises? Or will there just be the hard, bright, concrete things of the world saying, now, live with us? This life, a life reduced to one.

  Jewel? She is gone. I try to summon her up, the little girl in the orphanage waiting in line but I cannot. The corridor is empty. The glassy door is shut. Dust motes swirl in the weak light and there are echoes of children at play outside. But Jewel is not among them. I have been left in peace, liberated from the shackles of a child that never was. A dream child.

  I was wrong about her. Blindly mistaken. Those ghostly memories I ascribed to her, they’re mine. They were always mine. Memories not of this life, but of a life before. Before birth. Not the scaly, red, wet burbling of the womb. No, before that even. The Garden of Eden. And my first parents. Adam and Eve. Already under threat of expulsion but hanging on to the dream of happiness. Eve, knowing she has stolen her joy, savours it precisely because she knows it will all come to ruin. My first mother, consumed by an illicit love. And Adam, ignorantly happy in the hours before banishment. My banishment. I wonder if my Eden still exists? Or has it turned to wilderness without me? You see, I have resorted to biblical metaphor. But it is all I know. And so much more exotic than the literal truth. A mother exasperated by my difference, a father who exited too early, a sister who keeps her distance. I almost drowned. Drowned in the absence of someone whose presence I have never known. And it seemed more real to me than all the presences. Perhaps this is what all human beings feel in the world, an exquisite loneliness, an absence unaccounted for. As for secrets, there are none. I have stopped believing that my life is littered with clues that I have failed to see. There will be no angel with news. It is I who am the skeleton in the cupboard. I have become the family secret. Shameful and dangerous like the shadow on an X-ray that speaks of death. A vessel of guilt, carrier of original sin, a child of Eve.

  PART FOUR

  THE BUS THAT took Irene Rivers – she had reverted to her maiden name – back to Granitefield was much the same as the one she had taken twenty years before. The same suitcases rattling overhead, the same nautical list as it negotiated corners. She could have sworn it was the same driver, but that couldn’t be. The day was bright and silvery, reminding her of that day in another life when she had stopped to watch the waves dance in the autumn breeze and the Queen Bea drift into view. If she shut her eyes she could erase all that had happened in between, half a lifetime consumed in the blinking of an eye. The three-year jail sentence, reduced by six months for good behaviour. According to prison records she had been a model inmate, adapting well to institutional life. She did a stint in the prison kitchens. She seemed to have experience in this area and enjoyed the work. Almost, though the records did not state this, as if she had found her vocation. She received no visitors.

  She was in high spirits as she walked up the driveway. She was well, her lungs were clear, and she was going home. It had all changed. It was no longer a sanatorium; the reign of the White Scourge had ended. It was now a home for the aged. Still a place of dread for some, but nobody held their breaths passing the gateway anymore. And all the people she had known were gone. Dr Clemens, Matron Biddulph, Gloria. She didn’t presume them dead, however; Charlie Piper had cured her of that. The isolation huts had all been torn down. New grass had been laid in their place with crescent beds of hectic daffodils. She climbed the front steps, gazing down proprietorially across the grounds to the lake, then turning, she stepped into the familiar hallway. She halted at the reception desk, no longer boxed in as it had been in Gloria’s day to divide the healthy from the sick. A permed and soft-faced nurse sat behind it, a large ledger in front of her, a phone trilling at her elbow.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  Irene was dumbstruck. She didn’t know why she was here except that it was the only place left to her.

  The nurse took her in in one glance – a timid woman, slightly down-at-heel, wearing a well-worn coat, and a hat several years out of date.

  ‘The kitchen job, is it?’

  Irene nodded enthusiastically.

  ‘Down the corridor, turn right, ask for Matron’s office.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Irene replied as the nurse silenced the phone. ‘I know where that is.’

  It’s a live-in job, for which Irene is grateful, though there is a high turnover in the younger staff who cannot take the isolation. It suits Irene perfectly. In the afternoons, when the lull descends, she makes tea and sitting at the kitchen table she sifts through the mementos of a unique and poignantly short history. There is a strand of Pearl’s hair, springy as a coil and glinting impishly when the light catches it. A single bright green mitten snapped from the string which once attached it to the child’s coat, a painting she made of the house, a pleasing rectangle with puffs of charcoal from its chimney and the sun a bright yellow ball, a reader for beginners, The Sleeping Beauty, in the corners of whose pages are tiny teethmarks. And there are photographs of a plump-faced baby with a gummy smile and a mark on her chin.

  ‘Is this your baby?’ Clare, the kitchen maid, asked, coming across Irene alone with her treasures on one such afternoon. She is a gawky child, lanky and bravely awkward. She is the same age as Irene was when she came to Granitefield first; it makes her feel tender towards Clare. ‘Yes, but she’s a big girl now,’ Irene told her, ‘Fully grown.’

  ‘And do you see her often?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Irene tells her and for once it is not altogether a lie. She sees her every day, in fact, a child skipping ahead of her on a dusty street, arms spread wide greeting the future, a future Irene has relinquished. It gives her ease to know that Pearl has an existence, somewhere, even at a distance and with another mother. Better that than she were dead. The knowledge that she lives and breathes is enough to sustain Irene. Pearl is out in the world and as long as Irene lives, she is not lost but merely waiting to be found again.

  Acknowledgements

  I am indebted to Dr Noël Browne’s autobiography Against the Tide for an overview of the TB epidemic in Ireland and John Molloy’s Alive Alive O courtesy of the Gilbert Library, Dublin and Irish Collection, for his first-hand account of daily life in sanatoria.

  Special thanks also to Sinéad Matine, Marych O’Sullivan, Joanne Carroll, John Vincent, Séamus Martin and Joan Forde and grazie to Paul Cahill and Fernando Trilli. For all her work, my agent, Carol Heaton, to the Arts Council of Ireland for a literature bursary which aided in the writing of this book and to the Irish Times for that most precious of commodities – time.

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  Copyright © Mary Morrissy 1996

  Mary Morrissy has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Pate
nts Act 1988

  First published by Jonathan Cape in 1996

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library