Mother of Pearl Read Free Page A

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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜All clear!’
    He spoke in shorthand. Irene almost expected him to say ‘over and out’ at the end of his sentences.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜You don’t want to go, do you?’
    She shook her head miserably.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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