Mother of Pearl Read online

  Irene watched him stride away down the grassy knoll towards the lake, proud, fierce and lonely. Like a beacon, he had always been there, a monumental presence. She could barely remember a time that did not include him, and the memories of the past to which he did not belong seemed so distant and intangible to her that they hardly mattered. At Granitefield, Irene’s childhood had become a murky dream, a sort of pre-existence: it was this place that had borne her. And made her.

  Grief-stricken, Stanley did not notice the gathering of phantoms. He suspected that in her low moments what Irene missed was home, though he did not know where home was. She spoke little of the small port town in the far south where she had grown up. He knew that cargo ships docked there, and liners from the Mediterranean. Sailors and naval cadets swaggered on the quays. Rhododendrons bloomed in the gardens of the big houses – it was in the Gulf Stream. Emigrants started their passage there for the New World. Foreign tongues were common. A Turkish merchant sold sweetmeats from the Orient on the main street. A Jewish watchmaker fleeing from Poland had mistakenly disembarked there and set up shop believing it to be New York. It was a foreign country to Stanley. And he had brought her to this – a stony-faced imperial city, the clank and grind of shipbuilding. The light was thin and Nordic, the winds from the river hostile. And there was no joy on the Sabbath.

  The big, hostile world that Irene had been afraid of for years turned out to be a small, terraced house on Jericho Street on the north side of the capital. The street seemed forbidding, two rows of red-brick houses baring teeth at one another, rising to a vertiginous height and blocking off the view of the city below. She compared it to the broader vistas she had come from, the dim perspectives of the institution, the sweep of corridors, the scale of penitential grounds. Used to roaming through the wards or sitting in the humming kitchens, she found Number 24 stifling and cell-like. The enclosure of it worried her – the shrunken rooms, the coal-dusted yard, the cloying proximity of neighbouring lives. The only concession to openness were the tiny patches of garden out front which ran into one another with no clear boundaries.

  The tiny house oppressed her because it bore so keenly the traces of Stanley’s recent loss. Only a place so mean could hang on to its owner so tenaciously, whereas Granitefield had lost so many that its large and airy wards could absorb the ghostly vestiges of its dead, and disperse them like dust motes floating in summer light. But here, the dead hand of Mrs Heather Godwin was everywhere. Not that she owned much. There was a meagre supply of cutlery and crockery, two large pots – one for stew, one for porridge – and a heavy, cast-iron frying pan. Everything had a place and a function. The hook on the back of the door where Mrs Godwin’s apron still hung, a cubby-hole in the chimney breast for matches, a nail near the window for keys and bills owing. Irene had expected cosiness; instead there was a feeling of functional absence, and time marked slowly by the loud ticking of a wall clock. Yet, the paucity of utensils, the lack of pictures on the walls, the serviceable furniture, gave Irene a more acute awareness of Mrs Godwin than all the personal clutter she had expected.

  Irene’s idea of home was a place that could house a plethora of useless items. Cupboards for odds and ends, drawers full of bobbins and washers, tables and mantels groaning with decoration. But this sparseness unnerved her. It was as if Mrs Godwin was an absentee landlady who had made the place ready for new tenants but had not relinquished her hold. Indeed, Irene couldn’t shift the notion that she might at any stage return, marching in with busy purpose, unhooking the apron from the back of the door (Irene dared not to touch it) and setting to with a duster or mop. She suspected that Stanley felt the same. He looked up sometimes when she came in and an expression she couldn’t quite decipher would flit across his features. It was like a mild confusion as if he had forgotten which day it was, or as if he were unsure, just for a split-second, what Irene was doing there.

  They shared what they both referred to as his mother’s room. Gloomy and green, with a brown barque of a bed, it seemed always bathed in a dim, ferny light. For the first year, Irene lived out of a suitcase, draping her clothes on the back of a chair because Mrs Godwin’s clothes hung in the cavernous wardrobe. At one end of the mantel Irene carefully arranged her things – a brush and comb, hairclips, a hand mirror (this latter was a luxury; in Granitefield only the communal bathrooms had mirrors) and a jar of hand cream. After years of rough work in the kitchens only now did she feel permitted to look after her hands; now that she was a married woman. At the other end was Stanley’s shaving brush and hair oil. Between them a dusty space which neither of them could populate. In their bed, too, as Irene was to discover. She would stretch her hand across the sheets touching Stanley’s fleshy forearm. Her fingertips exploring the hollowed dimple that was his vaccination mark, travelling over his bare chest and down a serpent of hair to his clothed haunches. He would lie there, surrendering to her probing, his eyes averted as if she were conducting a humiliating, physical examination. He lay unmoved as she laboured. He was like a great liner weighing anchor and her efforts to please him like tiny streamers – primrose yellow, rose pink, cornflower blue – thrown from the deck, snapping as it pulled away. Irene, on the quayside, watched as they seeped into the murky shallows. Her life’s work, the joyless skills of years, were of no use. Stanley Godwin was impotent.

  DEFERENTIALLY THEY BOTH withdrew; sometimes in the night Stanley would reach out for her tentatively, a flutter across her breast. But if Irene felt the blushing smart of her own desire she would damp it down. She had wished to be united in pleasure, not to be observed in it. The act of being looked at, at being done to, was weighed down with memories of Granitefield. She remembered the men she had saved. Their wanting, their yawning longing had always seemed to Irene more precious than the consummation which had expressed itself only as desolate relief, their moment of abandonment as functional as expectorating into the sputum jug beside their beds. She was glad that Stanley would never achieve this, the lonely spilling of seed and its death-like aftermath, the terrible spentness of it. It kept him apart from them; it made of him someone proud and unassailable, one who had secrets of his own he was not willing to share. She did not resent this. Rather, she fed on other tendernesses which Stanley offered, often unknowingly. His hand on the nape of her neck, the soft, burly strength of his embrace, his worshipping gaze. She loved the geography of his face, a country she had explored with her fingertips and the rough crevices of his blameless hands. She liked to watch him shave, the fluffy application of soap, the delicate dabbing of the shaving brush, the dangerous scrape of the cutthroat, his skilful mastery of jaw and cheekbone. When they went to church – she still did not believe but she went for his sake – she liked to link him on the street. It made her feel anchored, his bulk beside her steady and reassuring, a bulwark against the resistance she felt all around her.

  She would always be a stranger here; the very street seemed to exhale disapproval. A brooding sense of violence seemed to seep from the bricks; at night she imagined she heard the pounding of troops on the slimy cobbles, the crashing down of doors, the seizure of captives in the dark. Stanley chided her; it was all in her head, he said. The neighbours hailed Stanley merrily when they were together but when Irene ventured out on her own she felt reproof and wariness in their greetings. She knew what they wanted from her – information, some means of placing her. A family name they could trace, a townland however distant they could ascribe to her. She was an unknown quantity among them and she knew that the only way she could counter that was to bear a child, whom they could claim as one of their own. The first thing they asked if they met her at the dairy or in the church porch was ‘Any news?’ By that, they meant one thing, the one thing Irene knew she could not deliver.

  ‘Why do they torment us like this?’ she would ask Stanley.

  ‘They’re just concerned, that’s all.’

  ‘They’re just nosy, that’s what you mean. Don’t know how to mind their own business. Why can’t they
just let us be?’

  Stanley would shrug and turn away. But as time went by he too began to dread the dogged enquiries after Irene’s health. He would dodge neighbours on the street if he saw them first, longing for the simplicity of those years alone with his mother, a union without any expectations.

  But away from their prying glances, Irene’s presence, the very fact of her gave him courage. When she was not there he fell prey to a sense of foreboding, convinced she would not come back. If she travelled to the southside of the city, he imagined a catastrophe; a train crash; a murder. He felt oppressed in the backwash of her departures, surveying the cluttered house to reassure himself. She could not bear empty spaces. She had filled the rooms with all sorts of trinketry. Decorative plates adorned the walls, spotted delph sat proudly on the dresser. She had pinned pictures from magazines and cut-outs from greeting cards on the walls of the kitchen. Old calendars showing Alpine scenes still hung though their dates no longer had a bearing. She collected ashtrays, though neither of them smoked, souvenirs of places she had never been. Brighton, Inverness, St Helier. There was one without a declared place of origin, a gruesome object, molten-like, as if it had been boiled down from ghoulish droppings or lava. Greetings from Mount Etna, Stanley thought wickedly. She crocheted covers for things, cushions, tea cosies, even a pouch for the lavatory paper, as if everything must be disguised or dressed up as something else. The neighbours, he knew, considered the decor fanciful and further evidence of Irene’s oddness. But he liked the busyness of it. It was like living in the stall of a bazaar; who knew what treasures lay hidden here? It was in this way he felt Irene had made herself known to him, substitutes for the small worries, the female confidences he had expected. Instead, she offered her delights – the antimacassars, the doilies, the paper blossoms – with a girlish flourish. Their significance was lost on Stanley. Guiltily, he mistook them as shows of gratitude.

  In years to come both Stanley and Irene, separated by distance and circumstance, would look back on the early years of their marriage as a surrogate childhood, a time on which the adult world had made no claim. He would recall the sense of protection she inspired in him, the telling gestures that indicated anxieties she would never speak of. He noticed how she examined her arms, fingering spots or exploring her wrist or elbows as if for bruises or marks of some kind. He felt she was looking for traces of illness, her old illness. She was conscious of the scar left by her operation and would always undress in the dark as if someone, other than him, was watching and would be shocked, though by then it was no more than a red seam on her flesh, like a light scrape with death.

  Irene, in turn, would remember Stanley’s softness, which in the harsh light of Granitefield she had determined as weakness but which she came to recognise as a kind of helpless power. She marvelled at what he allowed her to see of him, his fearfulness, his resigned acceptance of the world, even the absence of his desire. It seemed to her that all of these should have been hidden; for Irene what kept people intact was what they withheld. Her father, Dr Clemens – though she never considered them in the one breath – were understandable, one for his brutality, the other for his professional kindness, because by their nature they had achieved a safe, knowable distance. But Stanley occupied a place dangerously close to her; he entrusted her with knowledge she felt she shouldn’t have. She worried that she might use it against him.

  He was afraid of moths, she discovered. She came upon him in the bedroom one night, standing as if transfixed, while a moth flapped helplessly near the light bulb. He was stripped to the waist like a man about to do battle and it was only when she noticed his fingers clenched white around the collar of his shirt that she realised his terror. The moth was trapped behind the parchment shade. Its frantic clatter, the frenzied movements of a creature so small – it was inconceivable to Irene that this could be something to be afraid of. She was tempted to mock but something stopped her, some delicacy of the moment. She whipped the curtains closed and switched the light off. The mesmerising whirring ceased with the swift plunge into darkness, but Stanley still stood paralysed. She could sense the throb of his fear across the room.

  ‘It’s still in here somewhere,’ he said. ‘I can’t sleep knowing it’s here.’

  So Irene would spend many daylight hours hunting away sleeping moths. How clever they were, she thought, melting grainily into wood, inhabiting the darkness and making it their own. Only the light fooled them; they threw themselves at it and betrayed themselves.

  It was a hazy morning in April when Irene met Martha Alyward outside the Monument Dairy on the corner of the street. Irene had always considered her a rival. A flaxen-haired woman born in the same year, the mother of three schoolgoing sons. She had the knack of delicately prying into other people’s lives. For Irene she was the epitome of Jericho Street – neat, tight-lipped, righteous. She fastened on to gloom, grimly watchful for the worst. An accident in the shipyard, a sick child, a drowning in the river. News of these invariably came through Martha who fed needily on the awfulness of the world.

  ‘And how are we today?’ Martha asked setting down two bulging bags of shopping. She took Irene in in one swift, critical glance. Irene had lost count of the number of times she had been surveyed in this fashion followed by the same sly inquiries and for Irene the inevitable humiliation of not being able to offer even the smallest of prizes. The pre-ordained pattern of it depressed Irene. She usually tried to avoid engaging Martha in conversation but sometimes, like now, it wasn’t possible. She longed to be able to silence Martha, to shock her into submission, to get the better of her. The thought of such a victory made her suddenly giddy.

  ‘I’m not the best, to tell you truth,’ she offered cryptically.

  ‘Oh?’ prompted Martha.

  Irene watched her expression change. A greedy curiosity replaced her usual pitying concern. Irene could not bear it. She pounced.

  ‘I’ve been feeling queasy these past few mornings …’

  ‘Oh?’ Martha repeated.

  Irene could smell blood; she was surprised at how easy it was. Martha needed only the vaguest implication.

  ‘At first I thought I’d eaten something that disagreed with me. You know the way it is, you never think about the obvious …’

  It was a moment of pure spite.

  ‘You’re not…?’

  Irene gloried in Martha’s dumbfounded surprise. After four years, even she had stopped asking ‘Any news?’

  ‘Well,’ Martha said finally, ‘and when are you due?’

  ‘November,’ Irene said triumphantly.

  ‘You’ll have it in the Royal, I suppose?’

  ‘Oh no,’ Irene replied, moving away, ‘I’ll be going south.’

  Stanley was the last to hear. Len Alyward stopped him on the street as he trudged home after the evening shift. He waved heartily from the bald patch that counted as his garden. He grew roses. Stanley was always amazed that anything would grow in the soot-laden air. Secateurs in hand, Len wandered across the street.

  ‘Well, aren’t you the boyo?’ He laid a hand on Stanley’s shoulder.

  Stanley looked at him blankly.

  ‘I knew you had it in you!’ He nudged Stanley in the ribs. ‘Oh come on, Stan, the whole street knows. You know what Martha’s like. Bush telegraph!’

  Len snapped the secateurs playfully. ‘Congrats, old man, the first of many, eh?’ He shook Stanley’s hand. ‘A celebration is in order, don’t you think?’

  Stanley frowned, still trying to figure it out. Len had always had the capacity to make him feel dull-witted.

  ‘Give over, man, don’t be coy! It isn’t every day a man finds out he’s going to be a father!’

  From that moment, Stanley believed. Out of the mouth of Len Alyward, here on the dusty, weathered street, it just had to be true. They went to the Crown. Gold and gleam and the pour of liquor, ale that seemed to have taken on the colour of wood. The raucous jollity of the place – the crones in the snug, the scrums of docke
rs – convinced him that the whole world was in on the secret. The noises of their revelry danced in his fogged brain. He drank to prolong the moment of belief. After years of grounded loyalty, he felt the joy of the convert. The world had taken wings. He was no longer a rocky outcrop; he was joined, hip and heart. And Irene had made it possible, somehow.

  It was two in the morning by the time he made it home. Irene, awake and fearful, heard his key in the lock. He fumbled with it several times before slotting it into place. He leaned heavily against the door after shutting it. Irene heard the pause as a gathering up of rage. She had seen it many times with her father, like the pawing of a bull before the charge. Her sense of victory over Martha had long since dissipated, giving way to a bleak panic. This lie, the calculated misunderstanding she had set in motion, would undo them both. It would strip everything bare. It would make visible the void at the centre of their marriage. And all the other deceptions would become obvious too. Stanley would know what she had become at Granitefield and would see it as Davy Bly had done, as a piece of whoring. She had thought of fleeing – she got as far as rescuing her suitcase from the attic – until she realised there was nowhere to go, and no man to save her.

  She lay in bed listening to Stanley’s heavy tread on the stairs, strangely exhilarated by the imminence of danger. When they were first together she had longed to be bruised by him, to have blue mottled marks on her thighs, love bites on her neck. A black eye, even. He entered the room, and sat heavily with his back turned to her on the other side of the bed.

  ‘I met Len Alyward,’ he offered, an explanation for his condition and the lateness of the hour.

  Irene braced herself. She stretched out a hand to touch him. It was a conciliatory gesture but she fully expected the swipe of his fist in return. Instead he turned to her, his features blurred by drink bathed in an expression of almost beatific gratitude.