Mother of Pearl Read Online Free

gathered in the grounds.
    â€˜Really!’ Nurse Dowd scowled, and dropping his hand, marched out. He jiggled his eyebrows at her retreating back. He communicated by such deft arrangements of his features, at once mocking and self-deprecating.
    â€˜Really!’ he mimicked.
    He spoke of women like a condemned man. Of Gloria, the telephonist who sat in a box inside the main hall. He lusted after her, her fat glossy lips, her painted hands, the beauty spot high on her left cheek. Her encasement behind glass.
    They traded innuendos.
    â€˜How’s your lordship?’ Gloria would sing out.
    â€˜Oh, picking up, darling,’ he would reply, ‘all the better for seeing you.’
    And then, inexplicably, he changed. One evening when Irene came to collect his tray, he leapt out at her from behind the door.
    â€˜Aha!’ he cried. ‘Gave you a fright, did I?’
    He pushed the door closed and wedged a chair under the handle.
    â€˜Now, I have you!’
    Irene felt a quick pang of alarm. But it was only Charlie Piper.
    â€˜Irene,’ he whispered, tracing a path with his fingertips along her cheek. There was a hungry look in his eye. ‘Irene …’
    He crushed her to him, nuzzling his chin into the crook of her neck, his fingers clutching at the hair around her nape. A strange warmth invaded her limbs. It stopped her from crying out. This was just a game, she told herself. Soon he would laugh out loud and smirk at her. She felt his tongue in her ear. His hand was clutching the fabric at her breast. Playfully she tried to push him off but he had the wiry resistance of the chronically unwell. He plunged a hand beneath her blouse; a button popped. ‘It’s been so long,’ he breathed, ‘
Please
.’
    Over her shoulder she could see the tea tray she had left earlier, the food untouched. She fixed on it as Charlie Piper’s other hand scrabbled at her crotch. He steered her towards the bed, locked in a stiff embrace. And then, suddenly, he released her. He sank on the side of the bed as if all his strength had seeped away. He held both of her hands in his.
    â€˜I just want to look.’
    Mutely she complied. Unbuttoning first her tunic and peeling it away from her shoulders, then the waistband of her skirt which slid away, ballooning at her feet. She carefully undid her already molested blouse noticing the gaping buttonhole which Charlie had torn. The silky chattering of her slip up around her ears. Her vest next, of which she was ashamed. Grey and ragged-ended from too many washings; there was a rip in it now below the underarm. She unhooked her stockings and rolled them down to her ankles. She unclipped the stays of her corset, slowly, deliberately, taking care to unfasten each one when normally she would wriggle out of it before they were all undone. She concentrated on the ritual, stonily releasing the clips of her brassière – she fumbled a bit with this, her fingers working blindly away behind her back – then she lifted her breasts carefully out of the cups. It fell with a dejected flap. And then her knickers (bloomers, her mother always called them bloomers, she remembered). Calmly she edged them down over her thighs until they slipped, joining the frothy hem of stockings and skirt floating around her shoes. Her shoes. She had forgotten about her shoes. And all the time she kept her eyes on the tray. The beetroot, she could see, had bled into the hard-boiled egg.
    Charlie Piper came in his hand, his eyes shut tight, his head thrown back, the cords of his neck clenched, a pulse in the hollow of his throat throbbing.
    Neither of them spoke. She gathered up her fallen garments and retreating to a corner of the chalet, she clumsily redressed. He sat, head bowed. She skirted around the bed to fetch the tray; there were ten more to collect and she was way behind time now. There was an ashtray on the bedside locker. It was a bright canary-yellow with