Mother of Pearl Read online

They were invariably grateful, the infectious ones. Shut up in their little coops all day, their arms picked up and dropped for pulse-taking, their mouths a receptacle for thermometers, their chests and backsides like pin cushions, they longed for a touch that lingered. Someone to pause, hand on flesh, to marvel at this breast bone, that hollowed-out nape, the wing of an eyebrow, to stroke the shattered line of a ribcage or the ghostly shadow of a haunch. She had her rules. She would never let them penetrate her. If they wanted gratification they must do it themselves. She could touch them, but they must never lay a finger on her. Irene would remain a virgin; she was saving herself. This was her calling, she believed, her life’s work.

  At first the names had faces. Billy Ratchett; Mossie Watling; Matthew Bennett. Matthew gave her nylons, Mossie traded with scented soap. Billy Ratchett had unwittingly left her a calendar stalled at the month of his death. It showed a Swiss chalet, its wooden gable set against an apron of blue.

  ‘The great sanatorium in the sky,’ he had said, laughing grimly. Phil Morgan, John Conway, Jim Thorpe … afterwards they became blurred, a procession of the wounded, whom Irene recalled with the helpless fondess of a mother for her absent, roving sons.

  Davy Bly worked in the laundry. It was a place of torture for clothes. Pyjamas, bed linen and towels emerged from it thin and scratchy as if they, too, had caught a debilitating, terminal disease. The battering they got seemed like a mirror of the nerve-racking round of injections and rib-cracking their owners endured. Davy, another of Dr Clemens’ refugees, fed the stolid machines which laboured constantly, drumming away softly against one another. They looked as if they were being put through some kind of drill as they harrumphed into action and shuddered together in a comradely fashion. The high tide of suds rising in their portholes and the constant thrum made the laundry feel like an infernal cabin deep in the bowels of a ship, close to the engine room. Irene had never liked Davy. She distrusted his goitred eye, his drinker’s face. She found his bulbous gaze and the spittle which gathered in the corners of his mouth lewd. And she had seen him handle things, the innards of the machines, for example, as if there was some secret gratification in it.

  He did errands ‘for the lads’ as he called them, ‘backing the gee-gees’ or smuggling in drink. As a patient, Irene had secretly cheered such anarchy; now she saw it as a reneging of duty. Davy, another ex-patient, was on the front line; he did not take his responsibilities seriously. He cornered her one evening when she arrived to deliver a basket of soiled teatowels from the kitchens. Years of practice had made Irene alert as a wild animal to the swoopings of men’s appetites. Nobody would ever surprise her as Charlie Piper had done. The moment she entered the steamy laundry she sensed his tense readiness, the gathering of limbs for ambush.

  ‘More of your dirty washing, eh?’ he said with an odd air of menace. He was standing lazily by one of the machines, arms folded with the satisfied air of one who has delivered an opening shot. Even the din was menacing, Irene thought. The machines seemed to thunder like the pulse of Davy’s evil intent.

  ‘Where shall I leave it?’

  ‘Anywhere you like,’ he said, smirking. ‘You haven’t been fussy up to now, have you?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I know what you’re up to, I know what you do.’

  He raised a hand and for a minute she thought he was going to strike her, but it was only to point a finger.

  ‘You go around here, Miss Holier Than Thou, looking down on the likes of me, doing favours for the lads, and if I make a few bob on the side, what harm? But you!’

  He jabbed his finger at her. His hands, which she always expected to be filthy, were flakily clean.

  ‘You’re nothing but a tramp. And Charlie Piper is your pimp!’ He licked his lips and smiled triumphantly.

  It had never struck Irene that Charlie had been exacting a price for his referrals. Sickened, she saw how she had been duped, her life’s work degraded, her crusade besmirched; they had turned her into a whore. Irene set the basket down.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I wonder what your precious Dr Clemens would think about this …’ Irene shuddered. She could not bear for him to know. He would not understand that she had done this for him, her small equivalent of his sacrifice. He would see it as Davy did, that she had sold herself for favours.

  ‘I’m sure we can come to some arrangement between ourselves, don’t you?’

  IRENE KNEW THE moment she saw Stanley Godwin that he was watching someone beloved die. Healthy people keeping vigil seemed to take on the symptoms of the disease. Fevered of eye and given to an unhealthy flush, their watchfulness made them gaunt and wasted as a patient in the last stages of consumption. Of being consumed. Irene was an expert in these things; she had spent ten years at Granitefield.

  Stanley visited Granitefield twice a week; it was a long journey from the capital. His mother had come south to tend an ailing sister, but it was she who had fallen ill, and now faced death in a strange place. As in much else, Stanley blamed himself. He was a burly, tender man of forty-seven. His hair was thinning on top; soon his crown would be exposed, wrinkled and puzzled as a baby’s pate. His frame, robust from a lifetime of physical work, eclipsed an innate deference: a wish to be left alone, to be let be. He spent hours with his mother, who was gone beyond conversation now (though even when she could talk, Stanley’s visits were punctuated by long, amiable silences). He read passages from the Bible to her or simply sat there with the air of a man deep in prayer. But inwardly he was quaking. He could comprehend the impending loss; what he couldn’t imagine was his life afterwards. A middle-aged man about to be granted unwanted freedom.

  His mother had raised him alone. A father was never mentioned and Stanley grew up barely believing in him. His mother had seemed to him large and mysterious enough, like a capacious cathedral, to have produced him on her own. He never felt a void in the household, nor was he curious about a man who had never become flesh, who existed only because Stanley knew he must have. He and his mother had lived together for almost half a century, their labour neatly divided. He earned the bread. She cooked and sewed and mended invisibly. Their companionship was one of necessity and did not need to be greatly indulged. A man and his mother. He came home to the smell of clothes drying over the range, a hot meal on the table and no questions asked. They both understood the contract they had made.

  Heather Godwin suspected that when Stanley was younger there might have been opportunities he had turned down – there must have been girls and once, she knew, he had had a chance to emigrate to the New World. But he had never spoken of it and she had never pried. What Stanley’s mother didn’t know was that the girl and the New World had been the one choice.

  She had been Rose Toper. They went to the pictures together. Stanley liked the cinema, sitting up close to the screen (though Rose complained it gave her a crick in her neck) and being enveloped in the big, grainy faces and the booming soundtrack. Rose sat beside him, a proprietorial arm wrapped around his, her head on his shoulder. Stanley found this paralysing, this unsought-for closeness; it made him afraid. He felt he was being bullied – most tenderly – but bullied, none the less. Stealthily, Rose was trying to take possession. She it was who had nudged Stanley into asking her out. Left to his own devices, he would have done nothing. She worked in the post office, at the savings grill where he lodged for his mother once a week. She was a severe looking girl, a thin, bony face, framed by a clipped auburn fringe. Someone not to be trifled with, Stanley thought, as he watched her, rubber-thimbled, riffling through notes or stacking coins with her careful talons. He was wrong; Rose wished earnestly to be trifled with. Initially cautious and polite, she took to flirting with Stanley in the end to elicit a response.

  ‘Mr Godwin!’ she would declaim cheerily and a little too loudly for Stanley’s liking when he approached the counter. ‘My favourite customer! Always lodging, never withdrawing!’

  After a while even her pleasant ‘H
ow can I help you?’ became weighted with obligation for Stanley. Something, he knew, was expected. Finally, exasperated, Rose shoved a note under the grill to him. ‘Meet you at the Palace. Eight o’clock show. Lost Horizon.’

  She was twenty-nine and she wanted to be married. She had lighted on Stanley because she knew he was a good man. And he was a saver. She did not realise – and would not for some time – that Stanley already had a companion, a woman who literally meant the world to him.

  At first, her brusqueness reassured Stanley. She took charge as if their weekly visits to the cinema, their Sunday afternoon walks, the day trips to the sea were part of a programme prescribed for an invalid. She talked about work. He heard all the gossip from the post office, the grievances and rivalries of her life inside the cage.

  ‘When you sit behind the grill long enough,’ she told him once, ‘you begin to think it is the customers who’re trapped, locked in, and you are on the outside …’ She laughed her big, brave laugh.

  She would grab his hand roughly, or thump him merrily on the shoulder, the only way she knew it was safe to touch him. She proceeded with caution. This was the man Rose was going to marry; she had plenty of time, she reasoned. Their first kiss, seven months from the day they had first walked out together and after they had progressed from hand-holding to Rose planting his arm firmly around her waist, was a shock to Stanley. Not in itself but in the determination of Rose’s embrace.

  At thirty-three, Rose Toper was no closer to marriage. Their careful kisses under her tutelage, her anxiously tailored passion had failed to budge Stanley. They would go back to her digs sometimes and resort to a kind of furtive groping that reduced both of them to a state of tousled breathlessness like children engaged in energetic horseplay. But it all seemed to no avail. Rose knew, of course, about his mother, though the two women had never met. Indeed, in her darker moments, Rose wondered if she existed and toyed with the notion that Stanley had a wife and children hidden away somewhere. But she knew enough of him to know he was not capable of wilful deception, which made what she had come to see as his obduracy even more incomprehensible. He acted as if there was some insurmountable obstacle to their union.

  She decided to give him one last chance. She cashed in all her savings and booked a passage for America. She had a cousin there who had done very well – her husband was a realtor (Rose did not know what this meant but was none the less impressed); they had three children and a detached, timber-frame house. Rose told Stanley all of this with pointed emphasis. Mistakenly she thought that because this was what she wanted all she had to do was to dangle it in front of him to make him want it too. But it seemed barely to register.

  ‘Mmn, that sounds nice,’ he would say absently as if such a proposition could not possibly include him.

  ‘I’m going to go,’ she warned him.

  He would miss her, Stanley told her. And he would. Rose was the best friend Stanley Godwin had ever had. Her busy affection, her awkward brand of mateyness, Stanley would, and did, miss.

  ‘Think of it,’ she said, ‘the Statue of Liberty!’ She stood with her arm thrown up in mock imitation. ‘We could be there! The New World!’

  Stanley never even considered it. It was too grand, too conspicuously foreign a notion. Rose was holding out a version of the world he did not believe existed. And in the end, she left without him, heartsore but defiant, and relentlessly hopeful. Three months later she wrote to say she was marrying a longshoreman.

  Stanley and his mother simply continued on. They were not people to long after things it was not rightfully theirs to hope for. What might have been were words that did not enter into their vocabulary. She had not asked Stanley to make sacrifices on her behalf, in the same way as he had not asked her to take in laundry when he was a boy to make ends meet. For both of them these were the givens of life. Now, for Stanley, at Granitefield, one of those givens was being taken away.

  ‘And now two women, harlots both of them came and stood in the royal presence. Justice, my lord! said one of them. This woman and I share a single house and there, in her presence, I gave birth to a child; three days after my delivery, she too gave birth. Then, one night, she overlay her child as she slept and it died. So, rising at dead of night, when all was still, she took my son from beside me, my lord, while I slept; put him in her own bosom, and her dead son in mine….’

  Irene watched Stanley Godwin with bafflement. His plangent devotion puzzled her. He was like a child in pain mutely appealing for an explanation. It wasn’t that he lacked dignity. In her time at Granitefield Irene had seen extraordinary scenes of grief. Once an hysterical mother who had lost her child sobbed and screamed in The Wards for hours; she would have no one touch her; it was as if the pain had stripped her skin off. Stanley would not be like this, Irene knew. What mesmerised and appalled her was his lack of pride; all of his softnesses were on show.

  Stanley had noticed Irene too. When he left his mother it was not to Dr Clemens or to Matron he entrusted her in his mind; it was to Irene. When he thought of Granitefield, as he did daily, it was Irene he thought of. She became for him the emblem of the place. For months she had come and gone with trays of food while his mother was still ambulant, yet they had never exchanged a word. Sometimes, unasked, she would hand him a cup of tea. And as he drank it she would stand by his mother’s bedside and simply watch. He felt in these moments that she was taking the burden of vigil from him, standing guard on his behalf, allowing him to rove away mentally. Free to consider other things – the birdsong in the dusk, the shivering of the trees.

  What Stanley considered, though, was Irene, her solemn gravity, her vigilance. And after many months, her sheer familiarity. She became inextricably bound up in his mother’s departure. He fretted secretly if she did not appear; as long as she was there the evil hour could be warded off. And she was there, right at the very end. By chance. Bearing away a jug of water which she had used on the useless flowers he brought. Standing at the foot of the bed, Irene recognised the signs. There was a moment before death when it seemed the world was holding its breath to inhale the dying one into the airy void. There it was, amidst all the noisy protestations – the battling, shallow breaths, the rasping in the lungs, the fevered twitching of fingers on the counterpane – a silence like the hesitancy before wonder. It was only by watching Irene that Stanley realised that his mother was about to die. It was her rapt attention which alerted him. An hour passed. A pallid hour of spring. She stood at the foot of the bed still holding the jug of water, the giver of life. The only move she made was to close his mother’s eyelids with a benedictional grace.

  The nurses came then, whipping the curtains angrily around the bed as if something untoward had occurred. They scurried back and forth intent on the business of disposal. Stanley, now an encumbrance, was asked to wait outside. The corpse, they said, must be prepared. He felt a stab of anger. All of this activity might have saved her instead of being expended now, when it was too late. He followed Irene out into the silent corridor. He had the impression that she had been waiting – for him. He had not planned to say anything, except perhaps to thank her, but for what he did not know. She had, in fact, done nothing but witnessed. But he remembered the raptured stillness of the hour they had just spent together, like a prayer, a contract already made between them. She watched him gravely as he reached for words.

  ‘Don’t leave me,’ he simply said.

  STANLEY GODWIN IN the mortuary. The pungent smell of varnish, a wild glitter of brass. The coffin lid stood on its end. He ran his hands along the wood and knocked on it with his fist as if it was a doorway to another world. Behind him on a trestle lay his mother on a bed of unseemly satin ruffled regally at the neck. At his feet a scattering of shavings like the shorn kiss curls of children. In the mote-flecked entrance, the hearse’s hatch-like yawn. And by his side, a girl he hardly knew who had shared his first hour alone in the world. It seemed inconceivable that he might lose her too. In his stiff white collar and fun
eral suit, within sight of his mother’s remains (yesterday a corpse, today a remains), Stanley Godwin asked Irene to marry him. He was the last of his line. In the official records ‘No issue’ would be entered after his name. While his mother lived it had not troubled him. It was enough to know that the brief details of his life would be enscribed in stone beneath hers, a full circle. But with her gone Stanley felt for the first time the solitude of one who would not go forth and multiply. Like the last outpost of an empire, his memory would not outlast him. Up to this he had been the offspring, the bearer of possibility; without his mother, he was simply an ageing man, imprisoned in the cage of the seventy-odd years he could expect to live. His world was shrinking. The gift of Irene – he saw her this way, as an unexpected, undeserved gift – seemed to reverse that. She was a map stretching southwards, a window that afforded glimpses of the sea. She offered what he knew was impossible. New life.

  Still in mourning, he took his new bride home. Death clung to him, whereas Irene, with years of it imprinted on her, shook Granitefield off with surprising ease. Or so Stanley thought. He watched fondly as she packed away her trinkets and keepsakes not realising that she was bringing with her the ghosts – and spoils – of dozens of other men. He did not register to their presence in the corridors of Granitefield, or see them lurking in the trees, shyly waving from the shadows. Nor did he know how important an escape this was for Irene. Free from the menace of Davy Bly, she could believe that her work here had been of value; it could remain mercifully intact. He did not notice how anxious she was to leave, now, straight away, nor how the only farewell that distressed her was Dr Clemens’. Wrapped in his broad embrace, she wept silently, burying her tears in the white starch of his generous shoulder, as he patted her companionably.

  ‘There, there, my dear. No tears today! The world is waiting for you … you belong out there.’ He released her and stepped back. ‘You belong with the healthy and the strong.’