Mother of Pearl Read online

  He was about his business, a thriving black market in cigarettes and oranges, a complicated moneylending scheme. Everyone owed him. Ernie Troubridge, bent in the dusk like a man in conciliatory prayer to a spitting, vengeful god, ignored the jibes.

  ‘Tyne, Dogger, German Byte … falling slowly.’

  And Irene Rivers would remember her lost father, keeping his lonely vigil at the edge of land, holding out against the storms.

  Miniature industry flourished in the Day Room. There was Betty Long who knitted with a tight-lipped ferocity as if she were on piece-rates. She worked from two battered patterns – one a lemon-yellow matinée jacket, the other a baby-blue pair of bootees.

  ‘Oh, Irene, look,’ she would cry, fretting over lost stitches.

  Irene would gently rip back to the flaw and Betty would start again. For whom the baby things were intended Irene never learned. She could have clothed an orphanage with the volume she produced but Irene suspected that she stored them away, a trousseau of candyfloss smalls for the children she would never have.

  At the green baize card table Isla Forsyth did shell pictures; Babe Wrafter appliquéd; Mary Cantalow made cathedrals out of matchsticks; Sister Baptist crocheted. Small intricate things. Chalice covers, Irene guessed. Once, while showing Irene a complicated stitch, she asked sweetly, ‘You are one of us, dear, aren’t you?’

  Irene looked at her stonily. That doughy expression, the unctuous eyes hungry for confession. She did not reply. What she believed would have shocked Sister Baptist. That there was no God; there was only sickness and health. And no one to save you but well-meaning strangers who cut you open and left a wound.

  DR AUGUST CLEMENS. These were the words Irene used in prayer. Dr August Clemens. His name set him apart but he was one of them. A consumptive. He, too, had been cracked open like a shell, had sweated out the fevers and had been wheeled out, teeth chattering and hands blue, to inhale his icy cure. He was a stocky, robust man, his high colour the only legacy of his disease, though that seemed merely an extension of his good humour. He breezed about, coat flapping, hand perpetually raised in greeting. Ruddy-faced and foxy-haired, as if blessed with the bloom of the outdoors. The lord of the manor, some of the male patients sulkily called him, usually when he had tracked down a hideout for smokes or a gambling racket. His rude health seemed almost an offence in the midst of the ghostly sick; a defiant gesture, a fist waved in the face of God. To Dr Clemens, Irene granted the kind of loyalty which only the fiercely grateful can sustain. He was the first man to rescue her. The second would be Stanley Godwin.

  ‘Well, my girl, good news!’

  Dr Clemens sat astride a chair in his small office, his tapered beard, flecked with grey, tickling his broad forearms. In one hand, a sheaf of blue X-rays.

  ‘All clear!’

  He spoke in shorthand. Irene almost expected him to say ‘over and out’ at the end of his sentences.

  ‘You can go home.’

  Irene sat threading the belt of her dressing gown through her fingers. This was the moment she had been dreading. Cure. Final and irrevocable. In the six years she had been at Granitefield she had found a tranquil order, a gravity of purpose which suited her temperament. The hostile world had retreated; she could not imagine venturing out there again, orphaned and adrift.

  ‘Well?’ demanded Dr Clemens.

  Irene looked beyond him. Through the grimy barred window she could see the lake shimmering. The trees, clothed for high summer, regarded her reproachfully. A mop-haired boy – she recognised him from Ward C – was trying to sail a kite by the water’s edge. He threw the red triangle up in the air and made mad dashes, unwinding the string as he did from around a tin can. But there was not enough wind and each time the kite would slowly dip and sink, landing crumpled at his feet.

  ‘Nothing to say?’

  Dr Clemens looked at her with a dogged eye. She could not bear his gaze of kindliness and understanding. He understood too well; it made her uneasy. She did not wish to be so easily read.

  ‘You don’t want to go, do you?’

  She shook her head miserably.

  ‘But you’re young, your whole life’s ahead of you. You can put this behind you now. It’s different for me, it’s my life’s work, you understand?’

  Irene nodded; this she did understand. The singularity of vocation was not new to her. She had only to think of her father.

  ‘Only a madman or a drunkard would choose to work in a place like this.’ Dr Clemens gestured with his large hand (not like a surgeon’s, more the weathered mitt of a sea captain) to the high, stained walls, his tilting desk propped up under one gammy leg by a large medical volume. Dust motes swam in the bath of distilled summer light. From the corridors, the crash of bedpans. ‘Or an incurable …’

  A fly buzzed around him. He swatted it away.

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said sadly, ‘that’s why I’m here.’

  She was put to work in the kitchens with Bridget and Annie. Annie was wiry and lean-jawed with crossed eyes, which gave her a transfixed air as if some small insect had settled on the bridge of her nose. She, like Irene, had been adopted by Dr Clemens. It was a small club, Irene discovered. A nurse here, a cleaner there, had been smuggled on to the staff, a place found for them.

  ‘We need you,’ he would say to Irene referring to his secret troupe. ‘We need you to fight off despair. You are on the front line.’

  Bridget, on the other hand, was from the outside. She did the heavy work. Plump and able, she peeled potatoes and hoisted the large cauldrons on and off the stoves. The three of them laboured in the large, dim basement room, lighting the huge ovens and tending the gas jets which kept pots abubble all day. From early morning until darkness fell, they heaved and toiled. Irene loved the clatter and steam. After years of enforced idleness it was like finding herself suddenly on the assembly line of a munitions factory, part of the war effort. The very building seemed to sweat – the fogged windows, condensation rolling down the walls, the greasy black and red flagstones. She welcomed beads of perspiration on her own brow, no longer a sign of fever or the harbinger of confinement. She loved the kitchen’s functional air, and the scale of it. The sheen of the bain-marie, the cavernous refrigerator, its door like the hatch of an aeroplane, the enamel bins marked FLOUR and SUGAR with their lean-to lids and scoops the size of shovels. The work, after what seemed a lifetime of miniature occupation, pleased her enormously. Each day a fresh start, a confirmation that life did indeed go on. The early calm gave way to a mid-morning storm, heat and panic as pots boiled over or supplies suddenly ran short. There was the clamour of dinner time, the flap and rush of bearing food in and out, the confusion, the collisions, the inevitable spillages. Then, plunging hands into sudsy water and scouring for an hour, a welcome purging. Irene’s favourite time was the mid-afternoon when an eerie hush fell and they could sprawl around the scrubbed kitchen table drinking tea and picking at leftovers.

  Sometimes the peace would be shattered by a request for tea in the Matron’s office. It was she who often broke the bad news. Tea always helps at a time like that, Matron would say. Helped her at any rate, Irene would think, trying to imagine Matron (Nancy Biddulph – Irene was surprised she had a name; Charlie Piper called her the Matterhorn) tackling something as vague and enormous as death. She was more at home with the concrete indignities of the living. A smart blow on the rump after a bed bath, the quick whip of a thermometer from the rectum. She treated illness with a stiff, naval kind of jollity.

  As Irene cut sandwiches and buttered scones for the bereaved, she would sometimes imagine that the guest in Matron’s office was her mother, coming to claim her back now that she was cured. She would pin up her hair and take her apron off and, bearing a loaded tray through the mute corridors, she would practise her most willing and engaging smile. In Irene’s version of the reunion, her mother appeared more refined and prosperous (as if she had come into money, the only circumstances Irene could imagine which would justify this new expa
nsiveness), wearing a cloche hat and white gloves. These she would peel off, finger by gracious finger, in nervous anticipation as Irene, with an armful of shivering china, steered towards her. But the prospect was so dizzying, so delectably unbearable, that by the time Irene reached Matron’s office she could only manage to knock and holler ‘Tea, ma’am’ before abandoning the tray outside and fleeing.

  ‘I used to know an Irene once,’ Charlie Piper said to her one day when she came to deliver his dinner tray. ‘She was a real goer, I can tell you! She used to …’

  ‘That’s quite enough, Mr Piper,’ Nurse Dowd interjected, holding his thin wrist between her fingers in search of a pulse. He was back in The Camp then; it was just after his failed escape attempt. Irene slid the tray on to his lap. He winked at her. His jokiness belonged to a healthy man; here it seemed macabre.

  ‘Ooh,’ he cried in falsetto, spotting the dessert. It was a Sunday. ‘A bit of tart!’

  He poked at the pale apples which fell drunkenly out from the pastry and splayed out on to the plate, bringing their juices with them. They were windfalls which she and Annie had gathered in the grounds.

  ‘Really!’ Nurse Dowd scowled, and dropping his hand, marched out. He jiggled his eyebrows at her retreating back. He communicated by such deft arrangements of his features, at once mocking and self-deprecating.

  ‘Really!’ he mimicked.

  He spoke of women like a condemned man. Of Gloria, the telephonist who sat in a box inside the main hall. He lusted after her, her fat glossy lips, her painted hands, the beauty spot high on her left cheek. Her encasement behind glass.

  They traded innuendos.

  ‘How’s your lordship?’ Gloria would sing out.

  ‘Oh, picking up, darling,’ he would reply, ‘all the better for seeing you.’

  And then, inexplicably, he changed. One evening when Irene came to collect his tray, he leapt out at her from behind the door.

  ‘Aha!’ he cried. ‘Gave you a fright, did I?’

  He pushed the door closed and wedged a chair under the handle.

  ‘Now, I have you!’

  Irene felt a quick pang of alarm. But it was only Charlie Piper.

  ‘Irene,’ he whispered, tracing a path with his fingertips along her cheek. There was a hungry look in his eye. ‘Irene …’

  He crushed her to him, nuzzling his chin into the crook of her neck, his fingers clutching at the hair around her nape. A strange warmth invaded her limbs. It stopped her from crying out. This was just a game, she told herself. Soon he would laugh out loud and smirk at her. She felt his tongue in her ear. His hand was clutching the fabric at her breast. Playfully she tried to push him off but he had the wiry resistance of the chronically unwell. He plunged a hand beneath her blouse; a button popped. ‘It’s been so long,’ he breathed, ‘Please.’

  Over her shoulder she could see the tea tray she had left earlier, the food untouched. She fixed on it as Charlie Piper’s other hand scrabbled at her crotch. He steered her towards the bed, locked in a stiff embrace. And then, suddenly, he released her. He sank on the side of the bed as if all his strength had seeped away. He held both of her hands in his.

  ‘I just want to look.’

  Mutely she complied. Unbuttoning first her tunic and peeling it away from her shoulders, then the waistband of her skirt which slid away, ballooning at her feet. She carefully undid her already molested blouse noticing the gaping buttonhole which Charlie had torn. The silky chattering of her slip up around her ears. Her vest next, of which she was ashamed. Grey and ragged-ended from too many washings; there was a rip in it now below the underarm. She unhooked her stockings and rolled them down to her ankles. She unclipped the stays of her corset, slowly, deliberately, taking care to unfasten each one when normally she would wriggle out of it before they were all undone. She concentrated on the ritual, stonily releasing the clips of her brassière – she fumbled a bit with this, her fingers working blindly away behind her back – then she lifted her breasts carefully out of the cups. It fell with a dejected flap. And then her knickers (bloomers, her mother always called them bloomers, she remembered). Calmly she edged them down over her thighs until they slipped, joining the frothy hem of stockings and skirt floating around her shoes. Her shoes. She had forgotten about her shoes. And all the time she kept her eyes on the tray. The beetroot, she could see, had bled into the hard-boiled egg.

  Charlie Piper came in his hand, his eyes shut tight, his head thrown back, the cords of his neck clenched, a pulse in the hollow of his throat throbbing.

  Neither of them spoke. She gathered up her fallen garments and retreating to a corner of the chalet, she clumsily redressed. He sat, head bowed. She skirted around the bed to fetch the tray; there were ten more to collect and she was way behind time now. There was an ashtray on the bedside locker. It was a bright canary-yellow with ‘Souvenir of St Helier’ in green writing around the rim. She fingered it briefly. Charlie turned around.

  ‘Neilus Grundy,’ he explained. ‘Fell down on his last payment. Not that it’s much use here. Or where I’m going for that matter.’ His face brightened.

  ‘You take it, go on.’ He flashed a grin. ‘Something to remember me by!’

  CHARLIE PIPER MUST have told the others. The male patients used to gather after church on Sundays and talk among themselves. Talk dirty, Irene suspected. Dressed up in their shiny suits and shirts with threadbare collars (Irene was able to calculate how long a man was ‘in’ by the cut and fashion of his suit), they became the men they had been on the outside. They regained their stature even though their clothes had been made for bigger men. They stood in knots outside the chapel sizing up the female patients, who also dressed for the occasion. The women did not rely on the clothes they had brought in with them. Sisters would arrive on visiting days with a borrowed dress, or a pair of stilettos would be smuggled in courtesy of the bed-mechanic. If Dr Clemens thought the recreation period in the Day Room on Saturday evenings catered for his patients’ social needs, he was sorely mistaken. The real exchange took place on Sunday mornings during Mass. Notes were passed, trysts arranged and a great deal of ogling went on among the pews. There was an air of suppressed gaiety which rose with their voices to the vaulted roof of the chapel. They sang lustily despite their coughs for the glory, not of God, but of health. Of survival. And afterwards they indulged their capacity for survival by flirting and gossiping, or resorting to forlorn tussling in the woods behind The Camp.

  Irene had never ‘paired off’. In the early years she had concentrated on getting well and getting out. She had thought it was a simple matter of picking up her life where she had left it. As if that lunch hour when she had left The Confectioner’s Hall to go for the X-ray had merely been extended. She had asked Julia Todd to put a cream horn by for her and she liked to think of it sitting there in the shelf beneath the till, the cream and jam smearing the greaseproof wrapping, kept for her return, as if no time at all had passed. She was wearing her uniform when she left, a striped pinny and a white Miss Muffet hat. During her first months at Granitefield she worried that she had never returned the uniform. She feared it would militate against her getting her job back. She would wonder who was filling in for her now, and if they were getting the tots right. Every week she would check in the newspaper to see how she was doing. Each patient had a number so that relatives would know how they were faring, even if they couldn’t visit. B4704: infectious. B4704: critical. B4704: fair. She wondered if Jack or Sonny ever opened these pages to seek her number out? Did they even know what it was? Or her father? She remembered how when she was small he would come up behind her and, swooping from behind, would toss her high in the air, crying ‘And how’s my little girl?’ Or he would nuzzle his head in the crook of her neck and make growling sounds. Why, she wondered, did he care no longer? What punishment was this, and when would she be forgiven? She worried away at these questions but to no avail. And as the months went by and nobody from home or work materialised at Granitefield, it s
lowly dawned on Irene that she would never go back to that life. It was going on, but without her.

  It was Arthur Baxter who first approached her one Sunday morning, bearing a box of chocolates.

  ‘These,’ he said, ‘are for you.’

  He was a big man with a sad, sagging face. The skin on his knuckles as he clutched the box, was stretched and sheeny but it hung from his face in pendulous folds like an ill-fitting coat.

  ‘Why, thank you, Arthur …’

  A gift, particularly in Granitefield, was as rare and wondrous as a smile from a beloved.

  ‘I thought you might be able to help me,’ Arthur said, still holding the chocolates hostage.

  ‘Oh?’ Irene said. ‘In what way?’

  He looked at her queasily. ‘Charlie Piper says that you might be able to render me a service …’

  It was always done in darkness. In the boiler room at the back of the camp, or the spit room where they boiled the sputum, or the mortuary. As she stripped, Irene would think of the many times she had done this for Dr Clemens, how he had poked and prodded, listening intently to the workings of her congested chest and clogged lungs. He did not seem to see the exterior, her breasts, her bare shoulders, goose-pimples rising on her forearms. No, he saw only a collection of livid organs, the pictures of which she had seen so often that she began to recognise herself only by them. She feared that one day she would look in the mirror and see a blue skeleton, a trellis of ribs and two pear-shaped sacs that were her lungs. To be watched as she undressed had been robbed of any erotic allure; she felt she was revealing very little. She had already been seen through, down to the marrow of her bones.