Mother of Pearl (24 page)

 

JEFF AND I
were married on a winter's morning. Grey clouds brooding with snow hugged the steeple as we stood shivering in the churchyard. His mother and father crossed the river for the ceremony. Both his parents were living – I attributed this to some great carefulness of Jeff's affection; we, on the other hand, consigned our loved ones to early graves or great distances. I thought at the time that they were adopting me and the church ceremony with its elaborate rituals of handing over and surrender seemed to endorse this. Now, of course, looking back on it, I see that it was I who adopted them. His mother was a thin, stately woman. I imagined her as the loyal wife of a disgraced monarch who had abdicated for love, though the image did not hold looking at Jeff's father, rumpled and gamy, a man who seemed destined to be errant even when he didn't have a drink in his hand or an arm around some woman's waist. I remember meeting them for the first time. They lived in a small, terraced house on the north side, in the shadow of the shipyard, on a street that rose grimly, steep and inevitable. The worthy poor, Jeff said as we drove through a tangle of red-brick lanes, strung across with washing lines. Women gathered at the street corners, children skipped on the flagstones, men stood in their shirt sleeves in doorways pulling on cigarettes. Banter flew across the narrow streets, bunting flapped from the eaves. A dizzying sense of familiarity assailed me as Jeff pointed out the rusting gasometers, the poised cranes. But then I had been looking at them all my life from a distance. To drive through these sodden streets, punctuated by derelict patches and the gable ends of burnt-out terraces, was like being in the territory of dreams, a private landscape suddenly populated. The street names leapt out at me – Babylon, Macedonia, Jericho – like a ruined and cryptic version of home.

I kept on expecting to meet somebody I knew.

The Speights welcomed me with open arms. Mamie, serving tea in the dim back scullery, appropriated me as if she had known me all her life.

‘Spain,' she said musingly when we first met. ‘A real southern name, that. Rings a bell, somehow.'

‘That usher who was killed at the La Scala, oh, must be twenty odd years ago, he was a Spain, wasn't he?' Jeff's father said.

‘My father.'

For a moment, he was there. Young Mel Spain, in uniform and cap, a ghostly witness summoned and giving us his blessing.

‘I have no memory for these things,' Mamie confided.

I was like the daughter she never had, she said.

‘We longed for a wee girl, but it wasn't to be … I had several misses, after J.F.'

She used his initials; it was a family joke. He had been christened John Francis, because of a mix-up at the church. Two babies, one of them a girl, arrived where only one was expected and the priest had mistakenly baptised him as Frances. His father decided to keep the unwanted second name. It stuck, like the ghost of his sister who had never come.

‘You never forget them, you know, the lost ones,' Mamie said. She observed a moment's silence.

For the first time in years I thought of Jewel, dark companion of my childhood, because, I suppose, I had finally ended up in her territory. It was to these streets, to just such a house, I had banished her. As I looked around its cramped rooms and Mamie's scallop-edged net curtains, the carefully crocheted antimacassars, the good china brought out in my honour, I felt the sharp shock of recognition as if I had been here before.

Jeff's father bent to the stove and opened its creaking door.

‘Fire's nearly gone out.'

He tramped heavily to the back door and stepped out into the dank yard. The shipyard hooter sounded three times calling the men to work. He heaved in a bucket of fuel.

‘Glad that's not for me,' he said as he piled the turf into the glowing porthole of the stove. Jeff's father had been a shipbuilder. In the good old days, he would say, when there was plenty of work.

‘The
Queen Bea
was built here, did you know that? A beauty, she was, a proper cruise liner …'

‘Which went down with all aboard, if you remember,' Jeff said.

‘Don't get him started,' Mamie interjected. ‘Do you know all I remember of those years? Loads of grimy laundry and the stink of grease. Good old days, my eye.'

Jeff laughed fondly. And I joined in, glad to be inheriting their nursed grievances and small rivalries because for once they did not implicate me. For the first time in my life, I felt entirely blameless.

Scenes from a cottage home. I am standing at the kitchen window watching Jeff bowing to a spade, wet earth on his boots, his sweater the colour of rotting leaves. It is autumn, a day drenched with recent rain. He is building up a pile of sodden twigs and branches. It is slimy underfoot where apples have fallen and decayed, and I am wondering if the bonfire will ever catch. It may smoulder and smoke a little, trying hard to be a flame, but it will never blaze.

This lack of belief seemed to dog me; I could not trust to happiness, it seemed constantly endangered. I thought death might take him away from me. I feared the knock on the door, men in uniform doing their official duty bringing news of a calamity. A car accident, the sudden swoop of illness, another shooting. His work took him to the north side often; he was a police photographer. He took pictures of the dead, the victims of snipers and bomb-makers. A steady clientele, he used to joke. I could only imagine what horrors he saw. From the television I knew about random death on the street, a corpse in its own blood, discreetly shrouded by a sheet or someone else's coat. But Jeff drew back the shroud and looked at it straight on. There would be bloodstains sometimes on his clothes, the blood of strangers. He crossed the river bearing with him the spoor of other people's bone and gristle, and worse, the ghastly images of the dead. I feared for him; it was a version of closeness, I suppose, this sense of fear for the other. But it felt more like a haunting, a rehearsal for the dreaded loss.

I see us together, Jeff and I, busily carving out domestication, the rooms smelling of drying paint, the gnawing sound of wood being sawed in two. We put up a ceiling in the kitchen. Tongued and grooved. Tongue-in-cheek, I used to call it, in error. I remember handing the planks to Jeff as he stood, arch-backed on a trestle, hammer in hand, as if all our efforts in retrospect were just mere contortions. Each lath had a lip which fitted into its neighbour's cleft to form a sky of pine overhead. But there were flawed ones in the batch that wouldn't lock together. We dumped them in the coal shed, blackened and abandoned.

There were days of sunshine like tender gifts offered up merely to please us, bright openings of the sky full of benediction as if we were being indulgently forgiven. And there was the comfort of skin on skin, the quiet miracle of coupling and its sated aftermath as if we alone had discovered some fevered secret, that two can become one, I suppose. Or that two can never be one. And then, briefly, there were three.

The baby was a mistake. Neither wanted or unwanted. Not planned, in other words. I couldn't believe it. Somehow, I had always thought it would be difficult for me. I thought of myself as one of those women who would have to labour for a child, engaging in a long process of trial and error. We could always adopt, I thought, an orphan from the north side, perhaps. I liked the idea of providing a safe home for a sad child. I relied on the notion that some physical obstruction would be found, some part of me that wouldn't work, a flaw in the reproductive organs. For years, I thought of myself as barren. So when a baby edged its way into our lives it was like an unsought-for miracle. And I kept it a secret.

I don't even know when it was conceived. Was it that crisp, clear night, a single star in view, a shivering of trees at the window, or that Sunday morning, still indolent with sleep, the sheets in a tormented tangle beneath us when Jeff, moaning softly as he came, called me his precious, his jewel?

She rose from the ashes of the north city, and travelling by night, she crossed the bridge and became a living, breathing child, clamouring for my attention. I caught fleeting glimpses of her in the street. A dark child grasping at the air for a mother's hand. I saw her on buses and trains, a small face framed in the window, waving absently at the world. She appeared in the aisles of supermarkets, perched regally on a trolley, although when I hurried to catch up with her I would find that it was not her at all. Worst of all, her cries would wake me in the night. I would sit bolt upright in bed and hear her sobbing; she had woken from a nightmare and wanted to be comforted, to be reassured the bad dream would not come back. I could picture her, a small girl in pyjamas, in a dormitory somewhere, an institution of some kind, coming to in the darkness, howling. It was a high-ceilinged room, with varnished rafters, and light coming in from the long uncurtained windows. The white bedsteads all around her gleamed dully in the night. Hurried footsteps approached. I expected a mother, but it was instead the heavy tread of a large nun in slippers, beads clacking … Only then I realised that Jewel had no mother. It was not she who had been lost, it was her mother. And she was calling out for me, not from the dim recess of the womb or the dreamy distant city I had housed her in, but here in this world, in my world.

I tried to explain it away. The hormonal tricks of early pregnancy. The nameless fears of one who is carrying something so small and fragile it seems impossible that it will survive in a world full of perils. I was granting my baby personhood before its time, giving it gender and a fully-formed body and a host of already garnered memories in which I had no part. Perhaps all expectant mothers did this, I thought, to render the growing foetus real, to rescue it from being just an imminent notion. A kind of superstition that if the baby is fully imagined, it can make its way down the birth canal, struggling to grasp the life already dreamed up for it. But the trouble was that I knew I was not creating dreams for this secret baby within, I was being revisited by the dream of a child I had created so long ago that I was amazed she still remembered me. I had left her behind, a little girl, my little girl, and now she was claiming me back. There she stood in a line of smocked orphans on parade waiting for the glassy door at the end of a long, polished corridor to open and a young woman to arrive who would single her out from the ranks of the disowned. And that young woman was me.

 

HOW CAN I
explain this madness? She was real, she was there, I swear it. She had been there all along, fostered out to parents of my choosing, living a life not her own and waiting for this moment to be restored to me. The baby within was but a pulse beating, a mollusc of flesh, lightly embedded on the ocean floor amidst cities of pebbles driven by the swell and tangles of swollen-podded seaweed, ochre and brown. But Jewel, Jewel was fully formed, a child who was part of me, whom I had nurtured and loved and thought I had lost. How could I have abandoned her? She lived and breathed, she stalked my dreams, she begged for my attention. I could not turn my back on her. She was my firstborn, my only child. No other baby could be allowed to take her place.

Jeff is the stranger who arrives in the middle of the nightmare, the man in the white coat, all reasonableness and calm, who steps across the bloody threshold and tries to restore order. There is the conjugal bed, steeped in blood, the sheets tormented as if the witnesses to violent love, a woman clawed by the pangs of birth, screaming. His first instinct is that she has been attacked, that someone has literally tried to slaughter her in her bed. He searches the rooms for evidence of an intruder, a forced lock, rifled drawers, a weapon that could have inflicted such wounds. And finds it in the knitting needle beside the bed. He tries to stem the flow of blood but cannot staunch it. He talks to her through her delirium which has transformed her silence into a kind of exultance of pain. She rides on waves of it, like someone possessed, exhilarated by the sting of seaspray and the thunderous roar of the sea.

‘What have you done?' he shouts at her.

At this stage it is merely a question. Only after the ambulance arrives does he ask again, sorrowfully, the blue light flashing across his face, the scream of a siren drowning out her answer.

‘What have you done?'

‘You should have told us,' my mother says rubbing my hand regretfully. She has never given me such attention. ‘About the baby, I mean.'

‘It was a secret.'

‘Poor Jeff, even he had no idea.'

My secret, it seems, is safe. His parting gift. He must have told her no more than that this was just another lost baby.

‘There'll be others, you'll see. After all, I had you and Stella after my first one.'

But she is wrong. There will be no others as compensatory gifts.

I am a
tabula rasa
, born again, with my history excised, cut out of me. Vacant and bleakly empty, only now am I ready to begin my life. There can be no future with Jeff. I am unfit to be with him, unfit to be with anybody. Cursed, as I am, by a savage reversal of the natural instinct. I have killed his child by my own hand. I struck out and tore away the very stuff of dreams, the cringing flesh and blood, the throbbing pulse. And all for a phantom, a wilful sprite, a demon, perhaps. I will return to our cottage home. Alone. A criminal. Will it be haunted too? That bed, those sheets? Will I wake in the night and hear the cries of the creature I expelled there in a mess of a blood and sweat? When I open the wardrobe will it be filled with ghosts or just slack-limbed clothes? Will the drawers house murder weapons, or mere household implements, useful items for opening tins or uncorking bottles? Will there be a secret existence hidden there, lurking in the comers of the rooms or hovering airily with promises? Or will there just be the hard, bright, concrete things of the world saying, now, live with us? This life, a life reduced to one.

Jewel? She is gone. I try to summon her up, the little girl in the orphanage waiting in line but I cannot. The corridor is empty. The glassy door is shut. Dust motes swirl in the weak light and there are echoes of children at play outside. But Jewel is not among them. I have been left in peace, liberated from the shackles of a child that never was. A dream child.