Mother of Pearl (25 page)

I was wrong about her. Blindly mistaken. Those ghostly memories I ascribed to her, they're mine. They were always mine. Memories not of this life, but of a life before. Before birth. Not the scaly, red, wet burbling of the womb. No, before that even. The Garden of Eden. And my first parents. Adam and Eve. Already under threat of expulsion but hanging on to the dream of happiness. Eve, knowing she has stolen her joy, savours it precisely because she knows it will all come to ruin. My first mother, consumed by an illicit love. And Adam, ignorantly happy in the hours before banishment.
My
banishment. I wonder if my Eden still exists? Or has it turned to wilderness without me? You see, I have resorted to biblical metaphor. But it is all I know. And so much more exotic than the literal truth. A mother exasperated by my difference, a father who exited too early, a sister who keeps her distance. I almost drowned. Drowned in the absence of someone whose presence I have never known. And it seemed more real to me than all the presences. Perhaps this is what all human beings feel in the world, an exquisite loneliness, an absence unaccounted for. As for secrets, there are none. I have stopped believing that my life is littered with clues that I have failed to see. There will be no angel with news. It is I who am the skeleton in the cupboard. I have become the family secret. Shameful and dangerous like the shadow on an X-ray that speaks of death. A vessel of guilt, carrier of original sin, a child of Eve.

 

THE BUS THAT
took Irene Rivers – she had reverted to her maiden name – back to Granitefield was much the same as the one she had taken twenty years before. The same suitcases rattling overhead, the same nautical list as it negotiated corners. She could have sworn it was the same driver, but that couldn't be. The day was bright and silvery, reminding her of that day in another life when she had stopped to watch the waves dance in the autumn breeze and the
Queen Bea
drift into view. If she shut her eyes she could erase all that had happened in between, half a lifetime consumed in the blinking of an eye. The three-year jail sentence, reduced by six months for good behaviour. According to prison records she had been a model inmate, adapting well to institutional life. She did a stint in the prison kitchens. She seemed to have experience in this area and enjoyed the work. Almost, though the records did not state this, as if she had found her vocation. She received no visitors.

She was in high spirits as she walked up the driveway. She was well, her lungs were clear, and she was going home. It had all changed. It was no longer a sanatorium; the reign of the White Scourge had ended. It was now a home for the aged. Still a place of dread for some, but nobody held their breaths passing the gateway anymore. And all the people she had known were gone. Dr Clemens, Matron Biddulph, Gloria. She didn't presume them dead, however; Charlie Piper had cured her of that. The isolation huts had all been torn down. New grass had been laid in their place with crescent beds of hectic daffodils. She climbed the front steps, gazing down proprietorially across the grounds to the lake, then turning, she stepped into the familiar hallway. She halted at the reception desk, no longer boxed in as it had been in Gloria's day to divide the healthy from the sick. A permed and soft-faced nurse sat behind it, a large ledger in front of her, a phone trilling at her elbow.

‘Can I help you?'

Irene was dumbstruck. She didn't know why she was here except that it was the only place left to her.

The nurse took her in in one glance – a timid woman, slightly down-at-heel, wearing a well-worn coat, and a hat several years out of date.

‘The kitchen job, is it?'

Irene nodded enthusiastically.

‘Down the corridor, turn right, ask for Matron's office.'

‘Oh yes,' Irene replied as the nurse silenced the phone. ‘I know where that is.'

It's a live-in job, for which Irene is grateful, though there is a high turnover in the younger staff who cannot take the isolation. It suits Irene perfectly. In the afternoons, when the lull descends, she makes tea and sitting at the kitchen table she sifts through the mementos of a unique and poignantly short history. There is a strand of Pearl's hair, springy as a coil and glinting impishly when the light catches it. A single bright green mitten snapped from the string which once attached it to the child's coat, a painting she made of the house, a pleasing rectangle with puffs of charcoal from its chimney and the sun a bright yellow ball, a reader for beginners,
The Sleeping Beauty
, in the corners of whose pages are tiny teethmarks. And there are photographs of a plump-faced baby with a gummy smile and a mark on her chin.

‘Is this your baby?' Clare, the kitchen maid, asked, coming across Irene alone with her treasures on one such afternoon. She is a gawky child, lanky and bravely awkward. She is the same age as Irene was when she came to Granitefield first; it makes her feel tender towards Clare. ‘Yes, but she's a big girl now,' Irene told her, ‘Fully grown.'

‘And do you see her often?'

‘Oh yes,' Irene tells her and for once it is not altogether a lie. She sees her every day, in fact, a child skipping ahead of her on a dusty street, arms spread wide greeting the future, a future Irene has relinquished. It gives her ease to know that Pearl has an existence, somewhere, even at a distance and with another mother. Better that than she were dead. The knowledge that she lives and breathes is enough to sustain Irene. Pearl is out in the world and as long as Irene lives, she is not lost but merely waiting to be found again.

I am indebted to Dr Noël Browne's autobiography
Against the Tide
for an overview of the TB epidemic in Ireland and John Molloy's
Alive Alive O
courtesy of the Gilbert Library, Dublin and Irish Collection, for his first-hand account of daily life in sanatoria.

Special thanks also to Sinéad Matine, Marych O'Sullivan, Joanne Carroll, John Vincent, Séamus Martin and Joan Forde and grazie to Paul Cahill and Fernando Trilli. For all her work, my agent, Carol Heaton, to the Arts Council of Ireland for a literature bursary which aided in the writing of this book and to the
Irish Times
for that most precious of commodities – time.

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Epub ISBN: 9781473524866
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Copyright © Mary Morrissy 1996

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First published by Jonathan Cape in 1996

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