Mother of Pearl (6 page)

‘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 dockers – 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.

‘I'm going to be a father,' he said.

It was Stanley who gave the child a name. It will be a girl, he declared with proud certainty, and she shall be called Pearl. Pearl had been his mother's second name, he explained, the one she had favoured herself. He was like a man bewitched, intoxicated with unexpected passion. So this, he thought, was what Rose Toper had felt when she would declare mournfully ‘I love you'. It wasn't like walking on air, as she had said, it was like
being
air. He was in flight, a glorious, airy sensation. From his lofty height everything seemed steeped in munificence. The house, the street, the ghastly, jagged outlines of the city had become benign, withdrawing like respectful elders allowing them to luxuriate in their new-found joy. Even Irene seemed transformed. There was a curious grace in her movements now; he could see her thin, hard body, roundening and softening, and her watchful gravity becoming serene.

The new devotion Stanley lavished on her was the care Irene associated with a mother. It was the kind of love Stanley knew all about. He stopped her carrying coal in from the yard. He made her take naps in the afternoons. He worried extravagantly about her health. He would help her to rise from the low armchair in the parlour, placing his hand in the small of her back. In the evenings he came home with shop-bought cake. Basking in this new solicitude, she felt prized and cosseted as if she were a delicate, doomed child. To watch him during those months was to know what he would have been like had he been in love with her. His tenderness bloomed into something active and joyful, their marriage – for her, an escape, for him a need for shelter and protection – had become a right and fitting union. The child she had conjured up out of light and air had done all of this. Like a fairy or a sprite (no earthly child could have done it) she had waved a wand and granted them a wish. Irene wondered when he would call a halt to the make-believe while secretly hoping it would last just a little while longer, if only to delay the punishment she knew would inevitably come. And yet, in the midst of it, Irene imagined she could feel a stirring in her womb as if a little being was sprouting wings in there. Stanley would press his hand to her belly and believed that he felt something too. Between them they had formed a child destined to be lost. A pearl of great price.

It didn't last, of course, Stanley's flight. After three months of dizzying dislocation he fell to earth. It happened at the entrance to the shipyard. A light drizzle was falling. Summer seemed to have retreated behind a thicket of grey cloud. There was a large crash, the thump and boom of a girder falling to the ground from a crane that had been stealthily moving across his line of vision. A siren started wailing and there was the crunch of boots on gravel as men rushed to the scene. Matthew Earley, they cried, it's Matthew! Stanley stood, rooted to the spot. Above him the arm of the crane hung like the limb of a deformed god. The gaping belly of a liner with men crawling like insects over it, the agonised cries of the wounded one … and the spell broke. It was not Matthew Earley who lay pinned beneath a lump of iron, it was the coiled form of an infant, whom Stanley had been carrying for months. She disintegrated before his eyes, her smooth, glazed face like the remnants of eggshell trampled in the dirt. He stooped to pick a fragment up, something to remember her by, but there was nothing on the ground but tiny shards of glass and the stink in his nostrils of his own foolishness.

The miscarriage was announced at the beginning of the fourth month. (Irene had spoken of it too soon, the neighbours said quietly among themselves; she had tempted fate.) Stanley took Len Alyward aside one Saturday morning and said simply: ‘We've lost it, the baby.'

‘Bad luck, old squire,' Len said, ‘but not to worry, there'll be others. Plenty more where that came from, eh?' He punched Stanley playfully on the arm.

Stanley felt a sharp pang of anger. He wanted to catch Len by the throat and throttle him. The idea of the child was festering inside him, poisoning him.

‘She's not robust, you know,' he said evenly, ‘Irene.'

It was one of her secrets, Stanley knew. Irene had taken great care to give the impression that she had worked at Granitefield but had not been a patient, for fear of being driven out again for being unclean. Len nodded sagely.

Galvanised by a rush of malice, Stanley went on.

‘She may never go full term.' There, he thought spitefully, but it wasn't enough. ‘It's the TB, you see, it's left a weakness.' Tellingly, he tapped his temple.

 

‘
IN THE MORNING
, when I raised myself to give my child suck, a dead child was there; and it was not till I looked at it more closely under the full light of day that I found this was never the child I bore. And when the other woman said, No, it is thy child that is dead, mine that is alive, she persisted in answering, Thou liest; it is my child that lives, thine that is dead …'

It was only after their loss had been made public that Irene fell from grace. Not, she felt, for the untruth she had told but for failing to sustain the dream of a child. Stanley had believed and did no longer and he blamed her. As if
she
had the giving and the taking away of faith. She had created the child. She had fashioned it, a graceful phantom of light, but it was he who had nurtured it; his blinkered belief had made it flesh and blood. He had even given it a name, so that it had lost its wings and had fallen to earth.
He
had made it real. She had been a proud ship bearing a precious cargo; now she was a rusting bulk on the seabed. A woman who had lost
his
baby. And yet, it was he who had finished her off. Out there in the glare of his beloved street, he had wrung the life out of her with his big, bare hands. Irene looked, at his soft, dejected face, his palpable but unuttered grief, the honest grime of his toil and despised him.

Stanley felt himself finally to be alone in the world. The magnificence of his foolishness tormented him. His deepest longing, so secret that even he had not been aware of its power, had been exposed. It was in Irene's hands now and he could not trust her with it. He was appalled at how casually she had lied. It had simply come into her head, she said. What disturbed him was the malice in it, an intention to strike out not Martha, as she had claimed, but him, and the ease of it which spoke of a lifetime's practice. He had felt Irene to be his protection against the world; now there was menace in her companionship. He imagined she was mocking him, sneering at him behind his back. A ridiculous old man. He sensed her disenchantment, not like Rose Toper's baffled incomprehension, but something more unpredictable, as if she might do him harm. He did not know, if he ever had, what she was thinking. They shared the same bed but she would no longer touch him. He had long ago convinced himself of his own failure, but as long as Irene had not lost faith, there had still been hope, faint hope. Now she had taken even that away. Where once he had dreaded her advances and her fevered attempts to please him, he hungered now for even the merest brush of her fingertips.

A visitor arrived in the winter of that year. A visitor for Irene. In the five years they had been married no one known to Irene had darkened their doorstep. Stanley answered the peremptory tattoo of the knocker and opened the door to a wiry, handsomely dark young man. He had black, oily hair and a thicket of moustache. He was muffled up in a greatcoat, his hat brim tilted back rakishly. He was blowing on his hands and rubbing them together; his hot breath played briefly in the chilly evening. Two large cardboard suitcases stood at his feet and an order book was wedged under his armpit.

‘We're not interested,' Stanley said.

Door-to-door salesmen were ten-a-penny. It wasn't a fit occupation for an able-bodied man, Stanley thought. These sort of men made their living preying on women. He was about to shut the door when Irene strayed into the hallway. She had been dusting in the front room and she held in her hand a small, blue, china bowl. Curiosity had brought her this far and she cocked her head to catch a glimpse of the stranger framed in the slice of light from the street. There was a shattering sound as the bowl fell unheeded to the floor. She clutched her apron in a bunch to her lips. She looked as if she had seen a ghost.

‘Charlie Piper,' she murmured. ‘Charlie Piper.'

The man let out a low whistle of surprise.

‘Well, I'll be damned! As I live and breathe!'

Stanley stood awkwardly between them, guarding the threshold.

‘Irene! Irene Rivers!'

Stanley registered her maiden name with a soft shock. He had always thought of her as simply Irene, an orphan in the world, without a past except for Granitefield which might well have spawned her.

‘Why don't you come in?' he said, inching the door open.

The man struggled with the cases, shunting them into the hallway with his foot, then dusting his hands on his backside as he straightened. He started to unpeel his coat. He looked like a spiv, Stanley thought distastefully, scrutinising his cheap, creased suit, his unbuttoned shirt collar, the carelessly loosened knot in his tie.

‘Surprise, surprise!' Charlie said jauntily. ‘Cat got your tongue?'

Irene had not moved. She was aghast.

‘I thought you were …'

‘Typical!' he said turning to Stanley and winking broadly. ‘She thought they'd put me six feet under.'

He thumped his chest victoriously. ‘Listen to that! Clear as a bell!'

Stanley edged his way between them. He feared Irene was going to faint. She was swaying slightly as if the hall was the deck of a boat, and she was rolling with a gentle swell.

‘This must be your old man, then,' he said extending a hand to Stanley. ‘Charlie Piper at your service.'