Three Wise Men, page 15
In the bedroom she mechanically peels the sheet from the bed and lifts the champagne bottle. It’s empty – Jack must have had a glass or two while he packed. She wonders which is the girl’s glass, there are no lipstick stains on either. Kissed off before they reached the fizz, she thinks tartly. Or so young she doesn’t need make-up. Even more tartly.
Kate sinks on the bed, clutching the bottle. Imagine falling in love with a man so tacky that he’d steal your champagne to seduce another woman and not even chain the door to prevent you walking in from work early and catching them. It’s a farce. All she needs now is for the butler to appear, minus his trousers, and intone, ‘His lordship’s compliments, ma’am, cocktails will be served on the terrace at seven.’
Then she spots the pants half-hidden down the side of the mattress. She lifts them gingerly by the label, reluctant to make contact with cloth: they’re a pair a child might wear, white with a pattern of tiny pink flowers. No wonder the girl spent so long in the bedroom dressing, she was probably on her hands and knees searching for these.
She considers posting them to the literary editor of a national newspaper with a note: ‘The latest poetic offering from the prolific Jack O’Brien’ or framing them and sending them to his office with a caption reading: ‘Another trophy bagged by Black Jack.’
The reverie entertains Kate as she walks to the kitchen bin and drop the pants into it. She turns away, wheels back and peers into the bin. Still there. She lifts the teapot, always to be depended on for a few mouldering teabags and stewed tea, and empties the remains over the pants. Now they’re not so white, now they’re not so juvenile-looking. She spies a wheaten loaf sticking out of the bread-bin, crumbles a few slices on top of the gunge and steps back to admire her handiwork.
Consoled, Kate finds she has an appetite for coffee. She plugs in the kettle and makes a mug of instant, drinking it through one side of her mouth – even then it smarts – while she phones the doctor for an appointment. It’s still so early that she’s clicked on to the answerphone; she decides to turn up at the surgery and wait.
Next she rings Gloria, just awake and bleary, suggesting they meet for lunch. Gloria vacillates, grumpy from the early call and her disapproval of Kate’s affair.
‘I’ve some news to share, news about Jack and me,’ Kate entices her.
Curiosity overcomes Gloria’s instinct towards censure.
Now Kate digs out a pair of sunglasses – isn’t that what battered women are supposed to wear, to hide the evidence, to protect the man. The cheek throbs where the frame rests on it.
‘You’re handling this very well,’ Kate encourages her semi-disguised reflection in the hall mirror. She has to keep busy so she doesn’t think about Jack. But he trickles into her mind as she flicks a comb through her sleek copper hair, still damp from the shower.
‘I had the wrong kind of Jack-attack,’ she tells her reflection.
The doctor, a woman who’s treated her for five years, takes in the bruise and Kate’s brittle demeanour.
‘What happened?’ she asks.
‘Lovers’ tiff,’ shrugs Kate.
‘Do you want to talk about it?’
‘Not much.’
‘It doesn’t have to be with me, I could refer you to someone,’ she suggests.
‘Maybe.’
‘In the meantime I’ll make a medical report on this. You’ll need it if you want to press charges.’
Kate is taken aback. Press charges. Speak to the guards. Complain about her treatment. She deserves this blow, she’s owed much worse than the back of a man’s hand across her face for the way she behaved towards Eimear.
‘I haven’t thought that far ahead, I just need to get through today,’ Kate tells the doctor.
The older woman adjusts her glasses and looks at her carefully.
‘It’s your decision. But remember, a man who’ll hit once will hit again. Other women could be hurt too.’
Kate nods and accepts her prescription for painkillers (‘Don’t mix them with alcohol’). She’s not like those women you read about who stay with men after they repeatedly rough them up, didn’t she give Jack his marching orders as soon as she saw him in his true colours, the monochrome of a cad? Didn’t she land one on him before he retaliated?
Gloria isn’t convinced. Over lunch, she lectures her friend.
‘You can’t have this on your conscience, you must get the law on him. What if he hits his next girlfriend and she ends up in hospital? It would be partly your fault for staying silent now – this isn’t about revenge, it’s about justice.’
‘Gloria, I don’t have much of a case, I hit him first,’ protests Kate.
‘A tap on the cheek, he hardly felt it. He’s not the one walking around in dark glasses, he’s not the one who went to the doctor’s. Let’s see, Jack’s four inches taller than you and three or four stone heavier, that’s hardly a fair fight, now, is it?’
‘Did Eimear ever mention him hitting her?’ asks Kate, sipping her gin and lime through a straw.
Gloria shakes her head. ‘Never. But they say women are so mortified that they hide it even from their best friends.’
‘Ashamed to be beaten?’
‘Yes, and ashamed they’d stay with a man who could raise a hand to them. He has them in his power twice over. That’s what it’s about, mastery and submission, threat and silence.’
‘What about you and Mick?’ asks Kate.
‘Mick? You must be joking, he’s a pussycat. He’d cross the road at the first sign of trouble. There’s times I want to shake him until he rattles to generate a response but he’s never touched me, he hasn’t a violent bone in his body.’
‘So you think Jack may have hit Eimear but she feels obliged to cover up,’ persists Kate.
‘Look, Kate, I couldn’t say one way or the other. That’s something you’ll have to ask her yourself.’
‘That should be straightforward enough, considering she hangs up if I ring, slams the door in my face if I call, uses my letters as firelighters for all the response I get from them and is generally treating me like a pariah.’
‘Which you deserve,’ points out Gloria.
‘Which I deserve,’ concedes Kate.
She looks pleadingly at Gloria.
‘Couldn’t you speak to her for me, tell her Jack and I have disintegrated, lay it on thick about how truly, madly, deeply sorry I am and maybe you could just drop in the episode about him punching me one when I interrupted his fun and games with his latest playmate.’
‘You’re shameless, Kate,’ Gloria reprimands her.
‘Granted, but it might help her to know I got what was coming to me.’
‘I can’t believe you mean that. No woman deserves to be walloped by a man, not for any reason on earth, understood?’
Gloria’s voice is rising with anger and the other diners are watching them covertly. The waiter undulates over to their table. Under normal circumstances the pair of them would be giving him the eye, he’s easy enough on it, but they’re too distracted to bother.
‘Everything all right, leedies?’ he asks in his sexy French accent. You can bet he’s from Drumcondra.
‘Tray bong,’ responds Kate, ‘especially if you lob another couple of gins in our direction when you get half a chance, cherry.’
He withdraws with a grimace that could pass for a smile on a stormy night. Surely it’s not her French accent that pains him; Kate’s gratified at the possibility as she sips noisily through the straw.
‘I said, do you understand?’ repeats Gloria.
‘Certainly I do, there is no justification for a man to raise his hand to a woman but I’m eternally grateful to Jack for doing it to me.’
‘Because?’ prompts Gloria. ‘And this had better be good.’
‘It’s left me feeling I might be able to look Eimear in the eye again,’ she explains. ‘It can only be the one eye because my other’s closed over.’
‘Are you incapable of ever being serious? Do you have to turn everything into a joke?’
‘Incapable.’ Kate considers the word. ‘Not capable, unable, incompetent. Yes, I think I am incompetent, an incompetent in the business of life. As for joking, well, it strikes me that life is no laughing matter, which is why there’s an imperative on all of us to chortle at it as often and as loudly as possible. And that, my friend, is the gospel according to Kate McGlade. Make of it what you will.’
‘You’re hopeless. I’ll speak to Eimear for you; God knows if she’ll listen but I’ll give it a lash,’ she sighs. ‘I trust you’ve learned your lesson now – men may come and men may go but friends go on forever. Unless you cheat on them.’
Kate composes her face into a mask of decorum.
‘Don’t turn all sugar and spice with me,’ Gloria warns.
‘Ah, Glo, it’s not as if I’ve made it my life’s mission to slither around stealing husbands,’ protests Kate. ‘This was an aberration, a never to be repeated error of titanic proportions. Now throw me a life jacket, for the love of God.’
‘For the love of Eimear,’ she corrects Kate. ‘It’s doing her no good at all, this moping around wishing she had Jack back. Maybe now she’ll see him for the slug he is – if you ask me, you’ve both had a lucky escape. I thought bounders like that went out with plus-fours and monocles.’
Kate empties her glass with a rattle of ice cubes. ‘You, Gloria, are a star. I may not be good for much, but I’m superb at picking friends.’
CHAPTER 19
Kate’s indulging in an unpleasant bout of self-analysis. It’s obscene, here she is in a fertility clinic giving the glad eye to a prospective father, a few weeks after the love of her life cheats on her. Outrageous behaviour, nearly as bad as sharking down a labour ward. There he is, doing the caring husband bit, holding his wife’s hand and bending his face towards hers as they sit in the waiting room until it’s time for her embryo transfer.
Kate is watching them because he seems so concerned and she seems so dependent on his solicitude. Her name is called, they both stand up but the nurse tells him only his wife is needed yet – she’ll collect him later.
‘Send positive vibrations,’ urges the wife as she’s led away.
‘Vibes already on their way, my pulse,’ he promises.
Kate is eavesdropping, as everyone does from boredom in these places, when he looks her straight in the face. And instead of turning away, he carries on staring. She glances away, then back again – and he’s still watching her. Poor woman, Kate feels sorry for her, behind that wall with a surgical instrument holding her insides open, and her husband busy channelling his vibrations towards the wrong womb.
Still, there’s something dashed attractive about him, as they say in old-fashioned novels. He has a young face with prematurely grey hair and judging by the long legs stretched in front of him he must be six feet and a couple of spare inches. The clincher for Kate is his flying jacket: call her predictable, but she’s always had a passion for pilot types. So instead of doing the decent thing and walking away for some water from the cooler, she stares straight back at him. No flirty lash lowering and raising, just a level gaze.
He smiles and a dimple appears in his left cheek. Smiles are next to impossible not to respond to, it’s instinctive to grin back. Which she does. He stands up, he’s on the point of walking across to her, when the nurse reappears.
‘Liam, you can go in to your wife now.’
And that ravishing arc of teeth is unleashed on the nurse. He follows her without a backward glance. She watches as Mr Come-Fly-With-Me blows out of her life – not that he really entered it but he was a man with potential. Potential to throw her overboard, it’s true, but they could make a few glorious waves together en route to the shipwreck.
‘Control yourself, McGlade,’ mutters Kate.
She’s sitting in the fertility clinic with the sole purpose of being a rock of support for Gloria – not to eye up the clients. She realises she’s probably Gloria’s third choice steadier, since neither Mick nor Eimear, doyenne of the hand holders, could make it. She may even be fourth or fifth on the list, best not to enquire too closely. Best simply to ooze steady-eddie reliability and behave impeccably.
Naturally Gloria isn’t in the waiting room while the oral propositioning scenario is unscrolling. Life could be worse, thinks Kate, she could be married to a desperado like that Liam fellow instead of only catching his eye. He’s the sort of man who’s a prime case for castration never mind reproduction – people with genes like his should be banned from replicating them. Her own aren’t much better.
‘Do people have many more appointments after the embryo transfer?’ Kate asks when Gloria returns to the waiting room from her blood-letting.
‘You’re ahead of yourself, I have to finish producing eggs, have them extracted and then fertilised before ever we get to the embryo transfer,’ she responds.
‘Right, of course. And then what happens after the transfer? I suppose you’re back in here every day being monitored.’
‘You’re taking an uncommon interest in this.’ Gloria eyes Kate suspiciously. ‘No, after the embryo transfer they don’t want to see you again until you’re pregnant – or have reason to believe you might be. But all that’s weeks away yet for me.’
Kate sighs as she considers Gloria and Mick’s relationship. They can scarcely bear to look at each other, she can’t imagine how they think they’re going to rear a child. Still, Kate rationalises, she’s hardly in a position to cast aspersions. Ah feck it, why not cast a few aspersions. Gloria and Eimear are making a right mess of their lives. Not that she can claim to be the expert but at least she knows she makes a pig’s ear of it, regularly, and always admits it. The way they’ve always carried on you’d swear sweet fulfilment glowed from every comer of their relationships.
She knew there had to be some brimstone mixed among the treacle, nobody could be constantly ecstatic all the time. In Eimear’s case she had proof positive via her husband’s pillow talk and as for Gloria – well, she’s known Mick longer than Glo and Kate can see the man is miserable. Men aren’t as adept as women at showing a brave face to the world.
Probably they’re the better for it, she’s not sure how it benefits you to conceal unhappiness instead of addressing it or even giving in and having a moan to a friend.
‘You know something, Gloria,’ says Kate, ‘men don’t know the meaning of monogamy. It’s too cruel a rule, they whine. They think variety is the spice of life. Even if they’re married to a Miss World or a supermodel they’ll still give the au pair a quickie if it’s on offer. I don’t even think they see one-offs like that as infidelity, it’s just a little lapse. A day off for good behaviour.’
‘Jack’s dolly dalliance still rankling?’ asks Gloria, not particularly sympathetically.
Kate wrinkles her nose. ‘Jack’s no worse than the rest of the mob, he just has more access to girls. He probably didn’t even see that afternoon in the right bed with the wrong woman as infidelity, certainly not to me let alone Eimear. He’d never have dreamt of confessing it. Scratch the surface – no, scratch his face while you’re at it – and the chances are you’ll find a Jack in nine out of ten men.
‘Confessions are for major affairs as far as men are concerned and even then they’ll only admit to them because (a) they want to leave their wives and are tendering the affair as the reason or (b) they’ve been rumbled and imagine a mea culpa will generate automatic forgiveness. “I’ve done my part by confessing, now you do yours with the absolution. Bless me mother for I have sinned.”’
‘You sound like a woman who doesn’t like men very much,’ Gloria observes, watching out for the nurse who’ll call her back in for her scan.
‘Oh, I do,’ Kate contradicts her. ‘But liking them doesn’t mean you’re blind to their faults. Liking them doesn’t mean you treat them like women – you can’t, you need to regard them as a totally separate species who operate by different rules. You see, women think men are breaking the rules when they have affairs but they’re not necessarily. A man might not believe he’s doing anything wrong – and most don’t till they’re discovered – and even then he’s sorry for his blacklisted status and the recriminations rather than for the adultery.’
‘Maybe we want too much,’ offers Gloria, remembering how Mick pleaded pressure of work yet again as he declined to accompany her to the fertility clinic. He gets the jitters if he as much as steps through its door. She knows he wants a baby but he seems reluctant to acknowledge the unorthodox way they’re going about it, even to himself.
‘You mean we want a saint and a scholar but we’re only allowed either or,’ says Kate, thinking of Jack. ‘We’d all be a lot more content if men and women simply accepted we viewed everything differently – and I do mean everything, from 100 seats being left up to whether or not monogamy’s an optional extra.’
Kate shivers as she glances around the clinic, this place gives her the creeps. All these people desperate for a junior version of themselves – or worse, their partner. Imagine being 100 per cent responsible for another human being for eighteen years or so, you’re a hostage to fortune. There’s days she doesn’t even like being responsible for herself let alone someone else.
She eyes Gloria with curiosity as her friend extracts a Hello! magazine from the jumble on a nearby table. Parenthood is the ultimate life-insurance and that’s what Glo is investing in. You have a child so you won’t be lonely in your old age, so someone will visit you in your sheltered accommodation or give you a granny flat in their house. Maybe it’s Gloria’s way of dealing with a fear of nothingness: even if there’s no afterlife and no reincarnation some part of her will carry on.
Kate shrugs. People say it’s selfish not to have children, as though you’re committing a social solecism by swanning around spending all your money on yourself when you should be buying nappies. What’s wrong with spending money on yourself? Don’t you earn it yourself? Whatever happened to free choice?
