Mother of Pearl (14 page)

‘Aren't you a little cutie,' Lily Spain was cooing, nuzzling her lips close to the baby's forehead. ‘Wouldn't you just run away with him?' Nobody, Rita thought sourly, was going to run away with hers.

Lily hurriedly returned the baby to his crib at the end of the next bed. She settled herself down as Rita clambered painfully into bed. She was blissfully unaware of the underground resentment that accompanied her visits. No one had told her that Mel had abandoned ship for three days. For Walter it was no surprise; he treated Mel's disappearance as only to be expected, while Rita had been too ashamed to admit the fact that Mel had left her. But both of them, separately, wanted to punish Lily Spain for her son's fecklessness. Her very unknowingness seemed to provoke them.

‘Has your milk come in?' Lily asked urgently.

Rita nodded miserably, aware of the hard globes of her breasts and the great brown saucers that were her nipples.

‘You'll hardly have enough milk,' Lily went on, ‘not with those little titties.'

Walter blushed and looked away. Titties; she used words like that.

Rita dreaded visitors. Aunt Gracie, Uncle Bartley, Mrs Spearman. They bounced into the ward bearing flowers or gifts for the baby, only to stop short at the empty crib. It made Rita feel like a fraud, as if she were a child feigning illness who had been caught out. To prove otherwise she would show anyone who would look the long scar on her stomach; she had counted the number of stitches. Imelda squawked and covered her eyes.

‘Where's the baby, that's what I want to see,' Imelda said. But Rita would not willingly show the baby to anyone. She wanted her to look better. She did not want others to see her as Rita did, as something not quite human.

‘Go on,' Imelda insisted. ‘
Please
, Rita.'

‘I'm tired … it hurts to walk.'

‘Well, then, I'll go down myself.'

She tripped out of the ward. Rita could hear her heels tapping down the corridor to the nursery. Then silence. She half-expected to hear Imelda scream or to be so shocked at what she saw that she would flee. She knew what a bad liar Imelda was. If there was trouble at school, Rita remembered, the nuns would always ask Imelda who was responsible. She would stammer, and instantly incriminate herself or somebody else with her ham-fisted attempts at deception. She couldn't even take a prompt, Rita remembered. She would blush and stumble when reading aloud, while all around her the air hissed with the word she was reaching for. She pored over her blotched copybooks magnifying her mistakes. It had made Rita feel good to know that Imelda would always be worse than her. Now as she sat waiting for Imelda's verdict, Rita remembered how she had exulted in telling Imelda she was going to marry Mel. She had always suspected that this was the one department where Imelda might have a head start.

‘He's such a dish,' Imelda had said eyes popping in amazement.

She would hardly be able to manage the same enthusiasm this time around.

She heard Imelda's footsteps return.

‘She's a sweetheart, that lovely mop of dark hair and those squinchy little eyes. And her skin … the nurse let me touch her. Oh … Rita.' Imelda sighed.

It was Rita's turn to be chastened. She felt a rush of gratitude for her friend's generosity, followed by a dart of competitive envy. If Imelda could see these things in her daughter – her daughter, how strange it sounded – then why couldn't she?

‘And such a little fighter …' Imelda was saying. ‘You should be proud of her. What are you going to call her?'

‘John Francis,' Rita said sulkily. She and Mel had never even discussed girls' names.

‘Oh Rita, you're a howl! Seriously though, what are you going to call her? She looks so pathetic down there with just Baby Spain on her name tag. Poor wee mite.'

Rita shrugged. ‘Mary, I suppose.'

Even
that
had been decided for her. As she was being wheeled away, Rita remembered a nurse's voice close to her, pressing upon her some urgent question. In her fever she believed that she was dying and that this was the act of contrition being whispered in her ear. And so she started to pray druggedly ‘Hail Mary …' As it happened it was not she but the baby who was in mortal danger and the nurses wanted to baptise her quickly just in case. What they were asking was the name she had chosen; what they heard was Hazel Mary. Rita had said nothing of this to Mel. Why should she tell him anything? But she knew he'd have a fit over the Hazel bit.

‘Mary?' Imelda queried. ‘Just Mary, plain Mary? Is that because it was a virgin birth? I mean, it was your first time, wasn't it?' Imelda cackled. Rising, she bent over and kissed Rita on the temple as if she was as endearing as her baby. Rita caught the intoxicating whiff of perfume.

‘Must dash. I'm going out on the town tonight.'

Rita felt frumpy and inert, her hair falling lankly around her face and a sour smell of baby coming off her. It must be the milk, she thought.

‘What do you think of this colour?' Imelda asked flashing her fingernails.

‘I did them at work today between clients. They called it pearly pink. Looks more like faded knickers to me.'

She laughed merrily and with a swing of her crimson coat and the clack of her black pumps, she was gone.

 

A WEEK LATER
, Rita was sent home, leaving the baby behind. She was relieved. The hospital exhausted her. The round of visitors, the dispiriting trips to the nursery, the broken sleep. She was constantly woken by the hungry cries of babies and the sound of suckling. Their greed appalled her, the way they clamped on to the breast, the ferocity of their sucking. It looked to Rita like an assault, yet when she had observed the mothers around her feeding (what else had she to do?) she couldn't help noticing the dreamy calm they seemed to fall into when their babies were on the breast. It was a hypnotic kind of union, like being in love. She couldn't understand it; it both baffled and irritated her, this love-sickness.

Her father came to collect her. He stood sentry outside the drawn curtains as she dressed and packed her things. How little had really changed, she thought. She had been in hospital once before – to have her tonsils out and he had nursed her afterwards, feeding her tentatively with soup and ice-cream, and inept concoctions from the kitchen. If she closed her eyes she could just about imagine herself as a sick little girl and her daddy waiting to take her home. But she could only go so far with this fantasy; after all, what was wrong with her now even Daddy couldn't make better.

‘Three weeks and she'll be all yours,' Dr Munroe said as she and her father gazed for the last time through the nursery window. ‘And you can come every day to see her!' He beamed at them. Three weeks, Rita thought, a reprieve. She refused to consider the lifetime after that.

The house seemed to have grown strange. Dim and quiet after the din of the hospital, its rooms looked secretive and neglected and refused to grant her the gift of familiarity. The staircase was narrower and more forbidding than she remembered; the kitchen seemed to be sulking. It was a shock to find Mel there. The upheaval of the last week had convinced her that in her absence her past was being carefully pieced together again and that Mel, the wedding, the baby, were part of some nightmarish aberration, the product of feverish illness. But no, there he was, large as life, sitting in the kitchen, his mouth bulging with a half-eaten sandwich. Around him on the table were several opened jars of pickle and jam, a half-empty milk bottle, the splayed remains of a sliced pan. He looked guilty as if he'd been found with his hand in the till.

‘Ah, Mel,' her father interjected. ‘There you are.'

Rita recognised the forced heartiness of the tone, the one he might have used if he had come across the plumber on his hands and knees under the kitchen sink. It made her sorry for Mel, despite herself.

‘Hello there,' he said, rising and pulling back a chair for her. She was oddly touched by the gesture; Mel had never been what she would have called a gentleman. She sat down next to him while her father busied himself noisily with the kettle. She found herself suddenly shy of him, afraid to meet his gaze.

Mel, sensing the air of truce, hazarded a smile and Rita, glad of being rescued, laughed ruefully. Her life with Mel would always be like this. A series of starting overs. Short joys, long penances.

For three weeks she became Rita Golden again. She squandered hours at Eileen's salon on Great Brunswick Street. It was close to the hospital so after Rita had dropped in to view her baby through the glass – she could see no change though the nurses purred about weight gain – she would call into the salon. If Imelda wasn't doing washes, they would sit in the curtained-off area at the back where the hair-driers were and chatter, or leaf through the tattered magazines, choosing styles for themselves. Imelda did Rita's nails, chiselling and scraping, then polishing her cuticles before applying varnish. It required her to be utterly still as Imelda held her hand and painted laboriously, her tongue inching out between her lips in deep concentration. At school they used to laugh at Imelda for this. Mother Alphonsus would say tartly – we don't use our tongues to write, isn't that right, girls! Now, Rita was glad of such uncomplicated attention. She was vain about her hands; they deserved to be pampered, they, at least, had remained unchanged. The rest of her body had been curiously altered. It did not feel her own any more. Throughout her pregnancy it had been clenched tight, now it sagged. Inside it felt slack and laggardly, dejected at having lost its prize so reluctantly borne.

One afternoon, when Eileen was out, Imelda offered to ‘make her over'. Rita watched as she saw herself disappear under layers of powder and blusher, eyeliner and lip gloss. She felt, literally, like a new woman.

‘Why don't we cut your hair?' Imelda asked as she stood behind her, lifting, then letting fall, her lank strands. Since the baby, it too had seemed colourless and dull.

‘Why not?' she said taking up Imelda's tone of defiance.

Imelda set to. Rita saw the clippings spread at her feet in a carpet of fair down. It looked like baby's hair, curling and defenceless. She was glad to be rid of it. Instead of a dull weight around her shoulders, it bobbed cheekily at her ears. Rita was pleased with the effect. It made her look older, like a married woman. She emerged on to the street on a cloud of chemical whiff. She touched her hair as she walked; it felt tacky and stiff. She caught glances of herself in shop windows; she saw a taller, more stately reflection than she was used to. The perm gave her a couple of inches and made her feel like an African woman bearing something precious on her head. The packed foundation on her face was like an armour, a way of fending people off and her new hair-do, a helmet. She was delighted when she passed Mrs Spearman on Mecklenburgh Street who looked at her quizzically but couldn't place her.

‘My god,' Mel said, ‘what have you done to yourself? What's that muck on your face?'

He was standing in front of the mirror in the kitchen adjusting his bow tie, making ready to go out to work. She thought he would have been pleased. A glamorous wife as trade for a dowdy girl. Before she could answer, her father emerged from the shop.

‘Have you told her?'

He didn't even notice her shorn locks.

‘The hospital rang,' her father said accusingly.

‘So?' She could hear the truculence in her voice.

‘We can take the baby home.'

The triumph of his tone toppled her newly acquired sense of grandeur. She trailed up to the bathroom and scrubbed her face until it stung.

There was a carnival air as they rose the next morning. Mel and her father set up the spare room. The Moses basket, which had been Rita's when she was a baby, stood proudly in the middle of the room. Rita had made it up the night before, running her fingers along the soft winceyette sheets and the satin-rimmed blanket which Aunt Gracie had crocheted. Two towers of nappies sat on the bed beside a basket crammed with cartons of talc, cards of safety pins, a cloud of cotton wool, jars of antiseptic cream, a tiny nail scissors. Rita was amazed at how many accoutrements babies needed, little vain accessories to primp and pretty, as if they were greeting the arrival of a pomaded princess. She remembered buying these things but it seemed so long ago now, belonging to a time when the baby had been all possibility and enhancement. She plucked out the lace christening robe in which she had been baptised from the bottom drawer of the chest in her father's room – her mother had kept it for just such an occasion – and a pink matinée jacket which Lily had given her. The choice of these items gave her a sense of history and celebration; it convinced her that everything, finally, would be alright. She was being given a second chance.

Dr Munroe greeted them in the entrance hall of the hospital. It was a perfect round. Grim marble busts sat on pedestals in the alcoves under the long, high windows, filled with lozenges of the blue day. The tiled floor, radiating in a chequered mosaic at their feet, still bore damp patches and there was a faint smell of pine, adding to the air of newly scrubbed morning. Rita was anxious to see the baby. In her mind, her child had grown fat and bonny, ruddy-cheeked with dimpled arms, a baby a mother would be proud to claim. Rita was seized by a kind of excitement, her baby about to be delivered to her. She could safely wipe out the memories of the past few weeks now – the awful birth and the mechanised limbo to which her baby had been consigned. Now, with her husband at her side, her new life –
their
new life was about to begin. The loving mother, the proud father, the doting grandfather, she saw the three of them as a blessed tableau. A Holy Trinity.

‘Mr Golden,' Dr Munroe said, smiling tensely. ‘Can I have a word?' He drew Rita's father a couple of paces away.

There was some anxious whispering. She nudged Mel.