Mother of Pearl Read Free

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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.

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    DR AUGUST CLEMENS . These were the words Irene used in prayer. Dr August Clemens. His name set him