Mother of Pearl Read Free Page B

hoisted the large cauldrons on and off the stoves. The three of them laboured in the large, dim basement room, lighting the huge ovens and tending the gas jets which kept pots abubble all day. From early morning until darkness fell, they heaved and toiled. Irene loved the clatter and steam. After years of enforced idleness it was like finding herself suddenly on the assembly line of a munitions factory, part of the war effort. The very building seemed to sweat – the fogged windows, condensation rolling down the walls, the greasy black and red flagstones. She welcomed beads of perspiration on her own brow, no longer a sign of fever or the harbinger of confinement. She loved the kitchen’s functional air, and the scale of it. The sheen of the bain-marie, the cavernous refrigerator, its door like the hatch of an aeroplane, the enamel bins marked FLOUR and SUGAR with their lean-to lids and scoops the size of shovels. The work, after what seemed a lifetime of miniature occupation, pleased her enormously. Each day a fresh start, a confirmation that life did indeed go on. The early calm gave way to a mid-morning storm, heat and panic as pots boiled over or supplies suddenly ran short. There was the clamour of dinner time, the flap and rush of bearing food in and out, the confusion, the collisions, the inevitable spillages. Then, plunging hands into sudsy water and scouring for an hour, a welcome purging. Irene’s favourite time was the mid-afternoon when an eerie hush fell and they could sprawl around the scrubbed kitchen table drinking tea and picking at leftovers.
    Sometimes the peace would be shattered by a request for tea in the Matron’s office. It was she who often broke the bad news. Tea always helps at a time like that, Matron would say. Helped
her
at any rate, Irene would think, trying to imagine Matron (Nancy Biddulph – Irene was surprised she had a name; Charlie Piper called her the Matterhorn) tackling something as vague and enormous as death. She was more at home with the concrete indignities of the living. A smart blow on the rump after a bed bath, the quick whip of a thermometer from the rectum. She treated illness with a stiff, naval kind of jollity.
    As Irene cut sandwiches and buttered scones for the bereaved, she would sometimes imagine that the guest in Matron’s office was her mother, coming to claim her back now that she was cured. She would pin up her hair and take her apron off and, bearing a loaded tray through the mute corridors, she would practise her most willing and engaging smile. In Irene’s version of the reunion, her mother appeared more refined and prosperous (as if she had come into money, the only circumstances Irene could imagine which would justify this new expansiveness), wearing a cloche hat and white gloves. These she would peel off, finger by gracious finger, in nervous anticipation as Irene, with an armful of shivering china, steered towards her. But the prospect was so dizzying, so delectably unbearable, that by the time Irene reached Matron’s office she could only manage to knock and holler ‘Tea, ma’am’ before abandoning the tray outside and fleeing.
    â€˜I used to know an Irene once,’ Charlie Piper said to her one day when she came to deliver his dinner tray. ‘She was a real goer, I can tell you! She used to …’
    â€˜That’s quite enough, Mr Piper,’ Nurse Dowd interjected, holding his thin wrist between her fingers in search of a pulse. He was back in The Camp then; it was just after his failed escape attempt. Irene slid the tray on to his lap. He winked at her. His jokiness belonged to a healthy man; here it seemed macabre.
    â€˜Ooh,’ he cried in falsetto, spotting the dessert. It was a Sunday. ‘A bit of tart!’
    He poked at the pale apples which fell drunkenly out from the pastry and splayed out on to the plate, bringing their juices with them. They were windfalls which she and Annie had