Mother of Pearl (2 page)

‘That's not the spirit, Mr Piper,' Sister Baptist would reply tartly. ‘We play for the fun of it.'

Despite the lack of gain, Sister Baptist played with an exacting energy.

‘Snap!' she would cry, gleefully gathering up a winning bundle. The games brought out the savage in her. Victory made her wilful and greedy.

Mr Powers peered over his spectacles, his jowls quivering. He had been a schoolmaster, though in Granitefield, Irene realised, it did not much matter what you had once been. She could imagine Mr Powers, a once portly man whose flesh was caving in now, stalking between the schoolboy rows rapping on the desks with his cane or bawling out the roll call. He would know his pupils only by their surnames. When he wasn't pacing in the aisles he would stand at the back of the class so they would not know where he was at any given moment. And he would wait for the first boy to peer back over his shoulder …

But they had exacted their revenge. While he had been hearing tables, his charges had infected him.

At cards he was never quite quick enough. He pouted when he missed but played on manfully, confident now only of defeat.

‘Pick one from the top,' Sister Baptist would bark at him.

He was bullied into death, slinking off before the game was finished.

Netta Cavendish grew petulant and quarrelsome at the card table. Netta blamed her dancing days for her present condition. Dance hall sawdust had irritated her breathing tubes, she said. That and a drenching after cycling home in the small hours of the morning. Like every patient at Granitefield, Netta had to justify her illness; none of them, Irene noticed, could accept the random hand of fate. It was all due to something they had done, or something they had failed to do.

‘You only dealt me six,' Netta would wail.

She dithered endlessly before abandoning a card, fingering one and then another, afraid to make the final choice. She died in much the same way, refusing to relinquish because she felt she had been wronged.

The Mother of all the Boys kept the score. She was an amazon of a woman; broad in girth, her shoulders larded from farm work, her hands like hams. She wore working men's boots with the laces undone. It was almost impossible to imagine such a bulky frame surrendering to any kind of illness, and yet watching one of her coughing fits was like seeing an oak tree, huge and terrible, creaking perilously in a storm. Irene never knew her name.

‘I am the Mother of all the Boys,' she would declare, ‘Pascal, Mikey, Florence, Bill and little Tom.'

But they never appeared, the five strong lads she boasted of, not even when she died, crashing heavily into darkness.

Meanwhile, Sister Baptist played on. Only Irene, tenacious for its own sake, could match her.

Granitefield had been a poorhouse in famine times; the high walls remained; the blue lime-washed corridors; in one of the outhouses was the huge, cast-iron cauldron in which the communal gruel had been stewed. Everything there was named twice, like signposts in a lost native language. The isolation units – their official name – were known by the inmates as The Camp. Home to the infectious, who remained nameless, shut away, until they were pushed, blinking, into the sunlight. Thence to The Manor as it was grandly called by the staff – the stone building visible from the road. For the ill these were The Wards. The sloping grounds which led down to the lake were referred to as The Yard. So called because every morning, the grass still wizened with hoarfrost, a duty nurse, or sometimes Matron herself, would lead snakes of patients out there for their daily constitutional. The exercise was good for them, the bracing air would revitalise their ailing lungs and punctured chests. Home to bacilli and tubercles, even their bodily parts were not their own. They were a motley bunch, their day clothes – layers of vests and woollens, greatcoats and hats – worn over regulation pyjamas. Like windswept scarecrows they tramped, two by two, down the gravel path that led to the lake shore and then, once, briskly around its perimeter. Crows cackled in the trees as they laboured, a chain-gang in search of occupation. Sometimes Irene worried that they might be led away to some strange, neglected place and abandoned. Or worse.

The route the walkers took was dotted with secret stashes – half-smoked Woodbines were hidden in the urns on the front balustrade, naggins of whiskey strapped to the underarm of the jetty – and this alone gave the daily dose of exercise the air of an excursion. There, skulking in the seeping woods among the dead leaves, a mouthful of spirits or a hurried draw of tobacco was like a draught of freedom. A taste of life.

Unfit for life they learned other skills. Afternoons in the Day Room, a crackling wireless on the go. The reception was always bad.

‘Due to our position in the world,' Mr Powers said.

Which to judge from the radio was down a seething mineshaft. The sound came in waves, hissing and fading. Ernie Troubridge had taken charge of it. Ernie had been a docker; the coal dust had got him. He tinkered continuously with the radio, heaving the set about the room and perching it high up and low down, tilting it this way and that to minimise the static. He had fashioned a make-shift aerial out of a clothes hanger which stuck out like a twisted wand; it made everything much clearer, Ernie insisted. This became his occupation – carrying an angry box of sound around. Whenever he set it down he would stand over it impatiently twisting the knobs when, it seemed, the broadcasters had moved deliberately out of range. Occasionally he would thump its polished top and, scarified, it would leap to attention only to slouch again as soon as Ernie's back was turned. What pleasure he got out of listening to it Irene could never fathom. The news either irritated him or confirmed his worst suspicions, though he responded to certain items with a triumphant ‘Aha!' like a poker player with a winning trick. He liked to listen to the gale warnings. ‘Badweather up ahead, Cap'n,' Charlie Piper would taunt, winding his head around the door of the Day Room.

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 expansiveness), 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.