Three Wise Men, page 14
‘So you can see why there’s not much point in unveiling Mr Right, producing him like a white rabbit from a magician’s hat, when it might all go pear-shaped at any moment.’
‘I thought you said you’re wild about him and he’s wild about you,’ objects Eimear.
‘An untamed pair and no mistake,’ hisses Gloria. Kate ignores her.
‘It’s … complicated,’ she says. ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen with us, so it’s better to stay low key until I see where we stand.’
‘Shouldn’t that be lie?’ asks Gloria.
Eimear looks at her in astonishment, she’s never seen Gloria snipe like this.
‘I’m not lying,’ insists Kate.
‘But you do a lot of lying around with your man, what’s his name, don’t you? What did you say his name was?’ Gloria’s face is the picture of innocence.
‘I didn’t,’ answers Kate evenly. ‘Least said, soonest mended.’
‘Broken hearts aren’t so easily mended, neither are broken faith or broken trust.’ Gloria is like a demon, her hormones must be playing her up, thinks Eimear. ‘I’m sorry for his wife; what about you, Eimear?’
Eimear feels she has to take Kate’s part, Gloria is giving her such a rough ride.
‘Maybe she deserves everything she gets. Is she a battle-axe, Kate, does your man slink about in mortal terror of her?’
Kate looks edgy as she responds: ‘She’s beautiful but she’s a handful. I think they’ve simply come to the end of their road. Some roads take fifty years to travel and some only last three or four years. Theirs is finished.’
Gloria snorts. ‘Sounds to me like yours is an unapproved road.’
Her outburst hangs in the air unanswered. Eimear glances from one friend to the other, surprised by Gloria’s antagonism and by Kate’s acceptance of it. Normally she gives as good as she gets but she seems willing to allow Gloria unlimited leeway tonight, she must realise the hormone treatment is having a poisonous effect on her.
‘What about the wife?’ continues Gloria. ‘Is she aware that they’ve come to the end of their road or is she still wearing hiking boots and striding uphill in the hopes he’ll catch her at the next bend?’
‘What is it with you two and your laboured analogies,’ Eimear tuts. ‘This conversation is taking an extremely peculiar turn. Enough already. Kate, head off and enjoy your date – you can tell us all about him when you’re ready but I’m sure he’s wonderful. And you, young lady,’ she turns to Gloria, ‘are in dire need of hot chocolate with melted marshmallows on top.’
‘Have you and Kate had a tiff?’ Eimear asks later, over steaming mugs.
‘No, she just jars my nerves sometimes, she’s so selfish,’ shrugs Gloria.
‘Which is more than can be said for you, dote,’ Eimear squeezes her shoulder. ‘You’re loyal to a fault.’
She realises Gloria’s anti-Kate bluster has been directed at shielding her from the harsh reality of other people having happy relationships.
‘Let’s crack open some more marshmallows and I’ll tell you again how my life’s ruined,’ jokes Eimear, as they slurp. ‘I’ll have to ask Kate for some pointers on getting over one man and getting under another.’
CHAPTER 17
Eimear stands at the front door and looks at Kate as though seeing her for the first time. A sixth sense tells Kate this is no social call and she braces herself. She watches her friend warily, noting the uncombed hair and the rumpled shirt – a sure sign of distress, Eimear even presses her tea towels. Eimear hovers, fingering her car keys like worry beads, then she speaks.
‘Is it true?’
The words are monotone. Kate doesn’t need to ask what she’s talking about; her stomach embarks on a rollercoaster ride around her body and various possibilities flit through her mind. She contemplates lying, trying to explain, closing the door without answering and hiding behind the sofa.
But she abandons each alternative. Instead she looks directly into Eimear’s achingly bright blue eyes, the colour of someone swimming in chlorinated water, and nods because she can’t trust her voice to work.
Kate waits for Eimear’s reaction. Pallid to begin with, Eimear blanches visibly at this affirmation. She’s longing for a denial, even one so risible that only a fool could believe it, but Kate is facing her and brazenly admitting to an affair with her husband. She isn’t so much as blushing. Kate’s the reason Jack doesn’t love her any more and the knowledge is beyond endurance.
Emotion so compelling surges through Eimear that she totters; she gropes with her hand towards the door post to balance herself. Instinctively Kate reaches out a steadying hand and Eimear recoils. Eimear realises that she can’t manage this scene after all – she thought she could confront her Judas friend but she can’t even bear to breathe the same air as her.
Wordlessly she flees to the lift, determined not to break down in front of Kate, who’s had everything else but she won’t take her pride. Eimear jabs at the buttons, pressing all of them, suffused with fury at the mechanical object that’s supposed to carry her away from this humiliation.
Kate dithers over whether or not to chase after her – to offer some kind of excuse. But she recognises that her need to justify herself is illogical; Eimear’s entitled to feel resentment. She’s loath to fuel Eimear’s sense of grievance with a public spectacle. Perhaps silence for now might be the best option.
Common sense always operates better in theory, however, and Kate is immeasurably moved by the incomprehension on Eimear’s face. Perhaps if she could make her understand … She steps hesitantly towards the quivering woman stabbing at lift buttons.
‘Eimear,’ Kate begins, as it arrives, ‘come inside the flat and talk with me, don’t leave like this. We’ve been friends too long to throw it away, let’s try and salvage something. I love you, Mulligan.’
Eimear looks back at Kate, reproach welling from her eyes. She’s touched by the nickname, by the affectionate tone, she glances towards the apartment’s open door and is drawn to it – perhaps Kate has an explanation after all. One she can bring herself to believe.
‘Jack and I,’ begins Kate and the words sting Eimear. It should be Jack and HER, not Jack and Kate. The lift mechanism whirrs as the door closes and Eimear springs through the narrowing gap.
‘Hijacker!’ She spews the jibe at Kate.
As though, thinks Kate later, she’d boarded Jack illegally and taken over the controls, reprogrammed him to fornicate with her and lie to his wife.
The lift door slides across Eimear’s face, still resolutely tearless. ‘At least I didn’t cry in front of Kate,’ she tells herself as she weeps with all-consuming self-pity on a bench in St Stephen’s Green, just out of sight of Kate’s living-room window.
Back in her apartment, Kate is shaking. She pours herself a tot of neat vodka and gulps it down, then sinks on to the floor, curling in a foetal position alongside the coffee table. Kate can’t believe she and Eimear have finally come face to face over Jack. That it’s over and Eimear’s gone. Out of her life after twenty-six years.
She rings Jack at college but he’s in a lecture, she leaves a message saying he’s needed at home urgently but it’s hours before he arrives back. Aeons alone in which Kate drinks more Finlandia and rewinds the terse encounter with Eimear.
She thinks about calling Gloria but decides that would be selfish – Eimear is probably pouring out her heart to Gloria, she can wait for Jack. Where is he anyway, why hasn’t he responded to her SOS?
‘Jack will make it better,’ she promises herself, rocking backwards and forwards against the marble-topped coffee table.
Jack is less reassuring than she expects, however. He pounds through the door, frantic to know the nature of the emergency, and is dismissive when Kate tells him.
‘I thought something like this might happen,’ he admits. ‘It had to come sooner or later – at least it’s behind you now.’
‘How did she find out?’ asks Kate.
It’s only been nine days since he moved in with her – what was it about threes in this friendship. Ex-friendship. She was hoping for a longer period of grace – or should that be disgrace?
Jack looks shifty. He turns away and starts fussing with his briefcase, then he glances cautiously at Kate and admits: ‘I told her.’
Kate is speechless. She reaches for the vodka bottle and finds it empty – such a time to run out. By dint of Herculean effort, she speaks slowly and calmly.
‘Jack, I’ve just had a searing visit from Eimear, it was an encounter you could have prepared me for but didn’t. I think I deserve a reason. What in the name of God made you tell her and why didn’t you discuss it with me first?’
Jack shrugs. ‘She took a Stanley knife to my Patrick Kavanagh first edition.’
‘So you decided to land me in it?’
‘It wasn’t so much a decision as a knee-jerk reaction. I called around to the Donnybrook house to collect some belongings to keep here – I want to feel your flat is my home – and I discovered the book in shreds. I told her then, I didn’t think of the consequences.’
He exudes penitence and Kate lays his head on her lap, stroking the thick black hair. She’s the one in need of comfort but she struggles against this reaction and concentrates on Jack, soothing away his feelings of guilt. Willing herself to love him enough not to mind about Eimear.
Jack bends her neck towards him so he can reach her lips and she’s compliant, waiting for the amnesia of passion to exert its blinkered hold on her. They move to the bedroom but their coupling is perfunctory; the adrenaline fails to function as an opiate this time. He sleeps in her arms and Kate lies awake with a cramp in the elbow cradling his head. Be careful what you wish for …
CHAPTER 18
She’s young, not much more than a child. Flushed from drinking champagne – probably her first taste of it – and euphoric in the spotlight of his undiluted attention. Lissom body, from the glimpse Kate catches, there’s no substitute for youth.
‘Oh my God, it’s your wife!’ gasps the infant lover.
Kate feels as outraged as a wife. Why should they have the monopoly on betrayal?
‘Of course it’s not, silly – put your clothes on,’ replies the chivalrous Jack.
He follows Kate out to the living room, zipping up his flies.
‘Couldn’t you at least have taken her to a hotel?’ she asks. Deceptively mildly, judging from his reply.
‘Baby girl, it wasn’t premeditated, it just happened. It has nothing to do with what’s between you and me,’ he protests, attempting to wrap his arms round her.
Kate backs off, for his touch smarts as much as his casual dismissal of philandering.
‘If it wasn’t premeditated, how come you brought her to my flat?’ she challenges him. ‘Don’t tell me she just wandered in off the street, started peeling off her clothes and you thought, “Mustn’t look a gift mare in the mouth.”’
‘Bitter words from such a sweet mouth,’ coos Jack, advancing, arms extended like the Christ statue in Rio de Janeiro. ‘I deserve them but’ – and here comes the part Kate finds truly unforgivable – ‘I can explain everything, it’s not what it seems.’
‘I knew I shouldn’t have agreed to you moving in with me,’ she spits, fending him off. ‘I turned into Eimear for you when that happened, didn’t I? As soon as your clothes were in the wardrobe and the laundry basket and on the ironing pile you reverted to type.’
Bitterness threatens to engulf her. ‘More fool me, I should have realised the leopard never changes his spots, he simply changes his prey.’
Jack adopts the little-boy-lost expression she’s always found irresistible and says with his sweetest smile, ‘You’re the only one that matters, baby girl.’
‘So this isn’t the first time, is it?’ She wills him to deny it.
He shrugs, palms outward, a repentant smile contorting his features into something quintessentially repugnant.
‘You’ve only been living here with me a few months. Wasn’t I enough for you? Am I too old, too tired, too boring?’ she’s pleading with him now as her voice sinks lower than her plummeting heart.
‘It’s nothing, you’re taking this out of proportion,’ he insists, still managing to look bewildered. ‘She dropped by for some advice on an essay and we were a little carried away, it must’ve been the champagne.’
‘Why did you need pink champagne to read an essay in the first place, Jack O’Brien? I’ve heard of rose-coloured spectacles but this is ridiculous.’
He rubs his chin and changes tack. ‘This would never have happened if you took a leave of absence like we discussed.’ His voice has a petulant note. ‘You know I need attention when I’m writing.’
‘Also when you’re reading, eating, walking, driving, watching television, taking a bath and whistling down the wind,’ Kate shrieks, her voice hoarse – she thinks it’s an overwhelming anger but it might be something else. Hurt cloaked in fury, say, or grief masquerading as outrage. Time enough to lick her wounds, for now she has to dance to the cliché tune.
‘How could you do this to me?’
Jack’s boyish mask slips. ‘Get off your high horse, Kate – you did it to Eimear.’
Appalled, she stares at the semi-clad stranger propped nonchalantly against her bookcase.
‘We never romped in her home – in her bed,’ she objects.
‘Oh, so there are shades of right and wrong, are there?’ he says pleasantly. ‘You cheated on your friend but you stuck to certain rules invented by yourself and that made it all right.’
‘It was love with us, not sex.’ Kate shakes her head in disbelief.
‘Love,’ he elongates the word, perverting it. ‘Lurve.’ Again he protracts it. ‘Love washes everything white, it’s our emotional Persil. We can behave any way we like so long as it’s in the name of love. Love conquers all – right, baby girl?’
‘Don’t you dare call me that,’ she shouts, incensed beyond measure at his inappropriate use of their special term of endearment.
Jack laughs and her rage ferments; a blonde head appears around the bedroom door.
‘I’ll be off now, thanks for everything,’ mumbles the girl, edging towards the hall.
‘It was his pleasure,’ Kate says nastily – a cheap shot, but what the heck.
‘I’ll see you at tutorial, baby girl,’ smiles Jack, with a sideways glance at Kate as he murmurs the last two words.
Kate is icily calm now despite the physical pain palpating within her. People talk about hearts breaking but what actually happens is they explode and the splinters jab at you lacerating kidneys, spleen, stomach lining. She’s just another of his baby girls and she has a foreign object inside her chest which is swelling and rupturing and is about to rip through the skin. The scene from Alien in which a monster bursts out of John Hurt’s belly pops into her mind and she can’t help herself, she laughs aloud.
Jack is relieved and joins in.
‘Good girl, I knew you’d see sense. We’re great together, don’t let this misunderstanding spoil what we have.’ He moves towards her again, smelling of semen and another woman’s perfume.
Kate lifts her coat and bag. ‘I’m off to see a film. I want every trace of you removed by the time I get back.’
Still he looms in front of her, teeth glinting, convinced his overwhelming charm can hypnotise any woman.
‘If you touch me I’ll hit you,’ she warns.
He reaches for her anyway.
‘I mean it. Jack.’
He tries to kiss her.
She slaps him across the face; almost immediately a crimson mark flares on his cheekbone and she gazes at it, aghast. So intent on staring is she that she doesn’t see what’s coming. Like for like.
Jack cuffs Kate back, part of the blow catching her on the ear and leaving a ringing noise. She stumbles, more from shock than the force of his slap.
Somehow she makes it to the front door, down the stairs and on to the street. By her Spitfire car, her legs buckle and she leans against it. A spasm grips her and she vomits over the windscreen. Dully she watches the baby food puree of semi-digested Spanish omelette and chips oozing across a windscreen wiper.
It started with a kiss and ended with a slap.
‘I deserve that blow,’ she whispers. ‘It’s my punishment for duplicity with Eimear, for abandoning Pearse, for falling for a con man like Jack. The only lessons you remember in life are the harsh ones.’
She welcomes that slap. Gingerly, Kate touches her face. It’s burning but it doesn’t hurt.
She crouches down and examines her face in a wing mirror. By the orange glow of the street light, she detects a fiery weal which seems to cover her entire cheek. She’s puzzled by its size, where did such an enormous blemish spring from?
Kate opens the door of her much-loved green car, dubbed the Hurtle Turtle within hours of purchase, climbs in and lies awkwardly across both seats, twisted around the gear-stick. She lets her hair float on to the injured cheek, enjoying the silky sensation of the strands.
‘Thank you, Jack, you’ve made it simple for me – now there’ll be no regrets,’ she whispers. It’s severance made easy.
The chill awakens Kate. She tries to sit up but is too stiff to move. As she lies, disorientated, she hears birdsong and then the distant roar of traffic. It’s brighter than she’s accustomed to – did she forget to draw the curtains? Was it one of those deliciously self-indulgent nights when she collapsed into bed without removing her make-up and the top layer of clothes? Slowly the truth percolates through her sluggish haze – she fell asleep in the car. Her watch indicates 5.10 a.m. Kate hobbles out and drags herself up the stairs to her flat. At the front door she hesitates – he might still be there. All she wants is a shower and clean clothes, she can’t handle a scene.
The flat is mercifully empty so she retreats to the bathroom and turns on the shower.
The water stings as she lifts her face to the jet, Kate cries out and jerks backwards. Rubbing at the steamed-up bathroom mirror with a towel, she sees a scaled down map of France welling below one eye, purple and green and blue. Inside the ear there’s caked-in blood. This will need medical attention. Good, her pain will help atone for Eimear’s.
