Mother of Pearl (12 page)

If Rita could not grasp the sudden tumescence of her new life, then Mel felt his world to be shrinking. At night from the front room on Mecklenburgh Street he could see the prow of the Mansions and he felt like a man stranded, an emigrant who has disembarked at the wrong port. He had wanted to get away. But the teeming world of the Mansions, the noisy balconies and stairways echoing with bawling rows and bawdy endearments, the ragged laundry hangdog on the communal lines, the battered playground, seemed huge and certain as an ocean-going liner, while he was becalmed, bobbing uselessly on a lifeboat with a fretful child-bride and a baby on the way.

 

A TINKER WOMAN
had come to the door when Rita was six months gone. She heard the finger on the bell and waited, as she always did, for the hand outside to release the second chime. Once she would have bounded to answer. She always expected an extraordinary stranger at the door – a man, of course – a lost blood relation from the States or the pools man with news of a good fortune. The sandalled Franciscan, bearded and bird-eyed, barefoot even in the depths of winter, who doled out holy pictures, the soot-faced chimney sweep, even the piano tuner, she welcomed extravagantly as lucky emissaries from the outside world. But pregnancy had made her listless, and the smells of the trading street, a mixture of fumes and fetid fruit, left her queasy. She opened the door gingerly. A stout, weather-beaten woman stood outside with a sleeping child swaddled in a tartan rug on her hip.

‘A few coppers for the child, God bless you, ma'am.'

The woman hoicked the child further up on her hip and swayed dangerously.

‘I'd do the pendulum for you,' she offered eyeing Rita's bump.

Rita believed in signs. They ruled her life. Never trust a man whose eyebrows meet in the middle; never put a new shoe on the table. She had had her palm read. And sure enough, a tall, dark stranger had entered her life. Mel Spain.

She invited the woman in. She boiled milk for the child and filled the grimy bottle his mother proferred. He fed hungrily, making loud, sucking noises, while his mother swung Rita's wedding band on a length of thread over Rita's belly.

‘It's a boy,' she declared, showing a mouthful of gold.

Rita, splay-legged, rejoiced. This, at least, might make Mel happy.

It had never struck Rita that it would be hard to
make
someone happy. She thought it would just happen. Tutored by the oiled romance of movies she had not counted on the knotty perplexities of intimacy. The grinding silences at mealtimes, the grim scrape of cutlery. Her father worrying at gristle between his teeth while Mel wolfed hungrily as if there was a danger the plate might be whipped away before he was finished. He mopped up the grease with wads of white bread which he tore into pieces before stuffing them into his mouth.

‘Any more?' he would ask with his mouth full.

She was afraid of his appetite. No matter how much she cooked there never seemed to be enough; she felt accused, as if she were being a bad wife.

‘Oliver asks for more,' her father would say slyly.

Rita would stand up decisively and start stacking. For the first time in her life Rita began to resent him. His wronged silences punctuated with deep sighs as if he couldn't bear the heaviness of his disappointment. He had been like this ever since she had told him about being in the family way (that was how she had said it; not ‘having a baby',
that
seemed too terrifyingly concrete). She had expected anger; what she got was defeat. He had denied her the chance to rail against him, to justify her love for Mel.

‘Well,' he simply said. ‘I hope you're satisfied now.'

It was Lily Spain who had insisted on the marriage; in years to come Rita would hate her for this; she blamed all the messy intricacies of her life on that ill-fated shotgun wedding. She had set up an expectation of respectable happiness which would dog Rita to the end of her days.

‘Never let it be said,' Lily had warned Walter Golden in the parlour upstairs ‘that any son of mine shirked on his responsibilities.'

She had come around for a ‘pow-wow', as Mel had put it. Then, Rita and Mel had been able to joke about it. Like children who had outwitted the adults, they had sat together in this very room, racked with stifled explosions of laughter while above them, Mel's mother huffed and puffed and Rita's father appeased. Rita remembered how their wicked delight had made them reckless; they had sneaked into the darkened shop and done it again on the polished floor, among the bargain bins and the footstools. It was rougher than the first time; it had felt like a contest, as if they were wrestling with one another to see who would win. He pinioned her to the ground, his hands manacling her arms, his unshaven jaw scalding her cheek. She found herself struggling, while willing him to finish, aware suddenly of the profanity of this coupling within earshot of her father. He planted a love bite on her breast. By morning there was a blossom of a bruise.

‘Did I do that?' he had asked.

She had expected remorse. But he was proud. Proud that he had marked her.

Except that Walter Golden knew the La Scala existed, he would have suspected his new son-in-law of being a criminal. He kept the hours of one, lounging in bed until noon, leaving the house at dinner time and not returning until the early hours. Like a hotel guest, Mel came and went. Days would go by and Walter would not see him at all, or if he did it was only as a shambling, tousled apparition framed for a moment in the doorway en route from bedroom to bathroom. In the mornings Walter was forced to tiptoe about and whisper; the sanctity of Mel's sleep was observed reverently as if
he
was the man of the house. He did not know which angered him most – seeing Mel or not seeing him. His presence irritated Walter, his swagger, his brutal unconcern for the misfortune he had brought upon them. But his absence gave no respite either. Rita's condition was a constant reminder. Walter had known no good could come of this marriage but he had not raised a word of protest. The child could have been adopted and Rita could have made a fresh start. But, in truth, he had been afraid of opposing her. Love, or whatever the puppyish infatuation she felt for Mel, had changed her. It had given her command. He had seen the mettle of her certainty and was frightened of it. He knew he was no match for her. It was ridiculous, but Mel had made a woman of her.

The workings of women were as mysterious to Walter Golden as the innards of clocks. There were lots of cogs and wheels he didn't understand the use of but even the minutest of them had teeth. He remembered his late wife's passionate wilfulness, the sudden descent of a gloomy mood, the equally alarming outbursts of gaiety. He was an ageing man alone, a merchant, a strictly over-the-counter man. He lived by the tenets of modest, honest trade. Quiet and honourable, he was at sea when it came to the stormy wilfulness of emotions. What you see is what you get, he would tell the customers in the shop, a declaration as much about himself as the merchandise.

‘The trouble with you Wally, me boy,' his brother, Bartley, had said at the wedding, ‘is that if it were left to you, nobody would be good enough for your Rita.' He let out a beery guffaw, hot and stale. ‘So it might as well be this young lad Spain as anyone else.'

His wife, Gracie, shushed him. ‘Poor Connie would have been very proud,' she said gazing regretfully at Walter.

Poor Connie, Walter thought, poor Connie indeed. Rita's mother would be turning in her grave; three years before she had collapsed in the shop, a blood clot to the heart. He marvelled at his sister-in-law's provocative insincerity, a delicate balance of sympathy and venom. Her intention was to wound – but politely. Long years in trimmings had made her a woman who examined everything; the stuff of Rita's dress, the table settings, the bridesmaid's bouquet; she had already calculated the cost of the reception. She fingered the pillars on the tiered cake and changed the subject.

‘Are these edible?' she asked.

Rita Golden was lost. Her own name seemed strange to her, like a faint tinselly echo, or a glittering promise withdrawn. Rita Golden had no history. No sooner had she taken flight, a shaky fledgeling on a short, tentative foray from the nest, than she had been preyed upon. She no longer knew herself, a married woman, a mother-to-be. Rita Golden, or the notion of her, was fading away. Rita felt a mournful kind of pity for this motherless girl, roaming the summer streets full of a vague and tender optimism. For a brief time Rita Golden had lived and then she'd been killed off by getting what she had always wanted. The boy from the Mansions.

 

THE BABY CAME
early. Rita woke, paralysed by some instinct, and listened to the ticking of her own body. That was how she saw it now, as something separate and wilful, which, if she moved gingerly, would not cause her grief. She knew something was wrong, or rather she was aware of an imminence, a bracing alertness in her limbs. She felt them crouching, ready to leap. The knowledge her body had, which she did not, frightened her. She ascribed this extra sense she seemed to have gained to the baby. She imagined it as a wizened old creature, wise in the ways of the world, wiser than she was. She listened to the throb and gurgle as if she had turned to liquid and then, almost as soon as she had thought it, the waters broke in one big glop. The sudden gush made her feel as if she had lost all her substance. She expected her belly to shrivel up like a balloon while she, having abandoned her gravity, would drift away high into the corner of the room. She lay for a moment, revelling in this sensation of release, before alarm registered.

‘Mel, Mel…!'

His face was buried in the pillow as if to shut out all trace of her. He complained about sleeping with her. She was too big, he muttered. He groaned and opened a sticky eye. ‘It's the baby, Mel, it's coming …'

All she could remember was the pain of it. A sluggish, damp pain alternating with a searing clenching in her groin as if her body wanted to keep its prize. She felt herself at sea, rolling and heaving on crashing waves, her brow drenched, sweat dripping from the tips of her hair as she battled with ropes to keep her boat afloat. But it was too heavy for her. She could feel the swell of an angry tide tugging beneath her, dragging her down.

‘Push, push,' the voices roared above the din of her pain.

But she was too weary. Her shoulders ached, her hands were slippery from clinging to the edge. She felt she was going to be split in two, she and the boat alike, sliced into two halves.

‘It's in distress …' she heard them say.

The crew rushed forward, a practised jailer's arm on each of her limbs.

They were going to throw her overboard. Women and children first … they cut her open.

She caught a glimpse of a bloodied little bundle, raw angry skin, a bloated head with a sodden down of black hair. She struggled to rise but they pushed her down. Someone mopped her temple. It was deliciously cool. It made her head feel as if it was floating above her body, which was throbbing viciously below her somewhere, lost in the depths.

‘Where's my baby,' she tried to say but as in a nightmare no voice came out.

‘Hush there,' a nurse said kindly, ‘it's all over now.'

‘But…' She stretched out a hand, appealing, but found only thin air. There was a lot of movement suddenly, an urgent clamour, and she realised that it was she who was moving. Doors swung open and she was drifting through them. The boat was afloat again, the harbour in sight. She lay back, she surrendered.

As Mel Spain stepped out of the hospital – just for a walk, he told himself, a breath of fresh air – he was lighthearted for the first time in months. He felt as if he was leaving a great burden behind. The bustle of the labour ward reassured him. Its officialdom, the white coats, those capable nurses with their tiny watches pinned to their breasts relieved him. It was as if they were taking charge of all of his unwanted responsibilities. With a wave of the hand, they had seemed to absolve him. There was an end to this mess;
they
would take care of it.

It was chilly outside and beginning to rain. The lights of a pub across the street caught his eye. There was a golden gleam from its windows, the brasses on the door winked merrily at him. As he pushed his way through the crowd, the hearty sound of revelry cheered him. He felt he was rejoining the world. He sat by the bar and ordered a drink. All around him was a crush of bodies, a woman's clear laughter within earshot. In the mirrors behind the bar he could see his reflection, a lone, young man in the midst of a Friday night throng. At first he felt tempted to talk to the barman, to tell him he was about to become a father. But the longer he sat there the more buoyed up he felt by his own anonymity. There was no need in this company to admit who he was. Nobody knew him here and nobody cared. He could be a commercial traveller passing through the city, a sailor on shore leave. In his pocket he had a brown envelope with his wages for the week. He was out and he was free.

The obvious simplicity of escape astounded him. Ten years earlier, Alfie Spain, father of six, had left the Mansions one Sunday morning to buy a newspaper and had simply never come back. He wasn't even wearing a coat, a fact that Lily Spain clung to for years as proof that some tragedy had befallen him. Mel and his mother scoured the early morning dockers' pubs, the seamen's hostels and hunted among the down-and-outs squatting in doorways. He could have lost his memory, she said, and when that excuse wore out, she insisted that he must have been set upon by thieves. On her insistence, the river was dragged. Every body that was washed up had to be viewed. By the age of twelve, Mel Spain had seen more corpses than an undertaker. It was only when he rebelled and refused to go to the city morgue to check out one more bloated or mangled body that his mother gave up the ghost. But she still set a place at the table for his father and for years she expected that he might just rove in one day, the paper under his oxter, as if he had just popped down to the newsagent's and been delayed. He had been a law-abiding man, a dutiful father, a loyal husband. He had shown no irritation at his circumstances, straitened though they may have been. They were always short, but Lily got by using cheap cuts and strict rations, and resorting to the pawn shop coming up to Christmas. Alfie Spain had left no debts. He was the kind of a man who handed over his wages every week to his wife, keeping back just enough for a few pints on a Saturday night which he drank quietly at the bar while Lily sang her head off and joined in the knees-up in the ladies' snug. Years later, a neighbour claimed he had spotted Alfie on the Mainland working on the roads. There were rumours that he had a second family over there but Lily put that down to bad-mouthing.