Three Wise Men, page 31
‘I can’t, the baby wouldn’t approve,’ Gloria protests, quivering.
‘Tea then,’ and Kate guides her into the kitchen where she plugs in the kettle and fishes around for mugs.
Tea, the great panacea, the camomile lotion that soothes all stings. Any crisis can be dealt with by a cup of tea – death, unemployment, separation. It gives people something to do in the wake of bad news, this ritual that occupies the hands and disengages the brain.
Gloria watches her dunk teabags in mugs.
‘Eimear would complain to the high heavens if she saw you doing that,’ she says.
‘What she doesn’t know can’t hurt her,’ winks Kate, slinging the used teabags in the sink.
They sip in silence but behind the peaceful exterior Kate is railing inwardly: she’s ageing before her time, life is all tea-drinking and no champagne-swilling. And she hasn’t had sex for months, she’ll have forgotten how to go about it if this lasts much longer – she needs a refresher course. Soon. Seeing Jack has rekindled some sensations – Kate always prided herself on being the sort of woman who, asked what sort of sex she liked, answered ‘frequent.’ She doesn’t want Jack back, but she’s reminded how physical their relationship was. She’s jolted from her flesh-toned reverie by Gloria.
‘He’s after my baby, Kate.’
‘A share in it, maybe.’
‘Has he any rights?’
‘I don’t know, Glo, it’s not my area of expertise. I can look into it for you if you like.’
‘He’s my baby, I don’t want to share him,’ Gloria says fiercely. ‘Especially not with Jack O’Brien. I don’t want a man like him anywhere near my child.’
Kate strokes her dark hair. ‘He’s not all bad, Glo,’ she tells her, again wondering why she’s championing him. ‘He did supply the sperm when you were desperate – without Jack there wouldn’t be a baby.’
‘I know,’ she howls, tears spilling out at last. ‘Oh, Kate, I’m so frightened he’ll take my baby away from me.’
Kate calms Gloria down, piles her off to bed for an early night and slips out quietly. She’s looking forward to a long drink in a tall glass, with ice-cubes clinking around the bottom and a slice of lemon if her fruit bowl can run to it. A hand covers Kate’s as she unlocks the car door, simultaneously another hand muffles her incipient shriek.
‘Don’t panic, Kate, it’s me, Jack,’ he whispers, mouth close against her ear.
Fury lends her strength and she breaks free, whirling around to challenge him.
‘What on earth are you playing at?’
‘Ssh,’ he flaps a placatory hand. ‘I need to talk to you – can I sit in your car for a minute?’
‘On your granny.’
She jumps quickly into the Spitfire.
His hand snakes in after her and grips the door frame – if she slams it, she’ll crush his fingers. He’s so close she can smell his fresh sweat and she’s lost, she can’t do it.
‘Get in,’ Kate murmurs, head slumped against the steering wheel.
‘This is about Gloria,’ he begins, his body angled towards hers in the narrow confines of her mucky green car. She never seems to find the time to wash it.
Kate looks ahead, she can’t risk turning towards him.
‘Gloria needs me.’ He regards her at close range. ‘She doesn’t realise what she’s letting herself in for as a single parent, nor what she’s depriving her baby of.’
‘She has her friends and family.’
‘The Mallons are all in Omagh or London – there’s only you here in Dublin. You’re surely not counting on Eimear to melt when she hears there’s a bouncing baby to dandle.’
‘So what are you offering, to marry Gloria and play Mammies and Daddies?’
Now Kate does turn to look at Jack.
His face creases. She notices he has a suntan, he must have been abroad because there’s been no sun in Dublin.
‘Even if I wanted to, I’m not in a position to marry anyone, Eimear and I have to be separated for four years first. Besides which, I don’t love her.’
‘Naturally not.’ Her tone is caustic. ‘Your notion of love is very self-contained – it’s Jack O’Brien first and last.’
‘Maybe,’ he shrugs, unleashing his little-boy-lost look on her, the one that always had her reaching to comfort him.
Kate quashes the rising tide of emotion and returns her gaze sternly to the streetlight a few doors up from Gloria’s house.
‘Kate, please intercede with Gloria for me, she listens to you.’
‘Why should I?’
‘For Gloria’s sake and for the baby’s.’
‘No mention of the benefits to you, Jack.’
‘I know you have no reason to do me any favours, I don’t have a right to ask on my own behalf.’
‘And what is it exactly that you want from Gloria?’
She’s still looking resolutely ahead, memorising every line of that streetlight.
‘Just to share her baby, to be there for both of them. Not to play Daddy, as you put it, but to have a part in his life.’ His tone alters, become guttural with emotion. ‘You see, Kate, I know what it’s like to grow up without a father. I know the emptiness and the neediness, I’ve lived with the conviction I’m the reason why my mother and father aren’t together, that I’m somehow unlovable.’
She steals a glance at his face and is moved, in spite of herself, by its bleakness. Jack’s voice cracks as a story emerges that she doesn’t think even Eimear knows.
‘My father left home when I was five. “I’ll write to you, son,” he promised, “and I’ll be back before the summer’s out.” Every day I scanned the road, watching for him. I bolted my breakfast and climbed the tree at the bottom of the garden for a better view of the way he would come, I hardly wanted to go in for my dinner. But the leaves fell off the tree and still no sign of him. Christmas came and went without a card. Finally my mother said he’d moved to Australia to start a new life and it was better that way. She said I should forget him.’ His voice trails off and he gazes sightlessly ahead, then he takes up the story again. ‘He used to keep a bar of chocolate for me in the breast pocket of his jacket. I’d run to him when I saw him coming from work and he’d swing me up into his arms and I’d push my hand into the pocket to find it. It had a purple wrapper. I can remember the chocolate bar vividly but I can’t see his face.’
A splattering of rain raps the windscreen, Kate contemplates turning the key in the ignition to activate the wipers but decides she prefers looking at the world through a haze.
‘Did you never try to contact him when you were older?’
Jack knuckles his eyes. ‘When I was twenty or so I started making enquiries through the Australian embassy. It wasn’t easy, all we knew was that he’d arrived in Sydney fifteen years earlier but it’s a vast country and there was no way of knowing where he’d ended up.
‘Finally I located him in Broom, in Queensland. But I was a few months too late – he’d died of cancer. I visited his grave on a lecture tour of Australia in 1992. His tombstone said: “Jack O’Brien, born Tipperary, Ireland 1929, died Broom 1981. Sadly missed by his wife Jennifer and sons Ned and Joe.”’
‘So you have brothers,’ Kate exclaims. ‘Did you go looking for them? You always wished you weren’t an only child.’
He brings his fingers to his forehead and rams them hard along his eyebrows. ‘My parents never divorced. He must have married that woman bigamously. How could I approach her and her children with news like that? There were fresh flowers on the grave, they obviously cherished his memory. I had no right to defile it.’
She reaches out and holds his hand. He grips Kate’s, crushing the bones. She glances towards Gloria’s house and is relieved to see it’s still in darkness.
‘Shall I drop you back to Trinity, Jack?’ asks Kate after the longest time.
He starts, as from a trance. ‘No, my car is at the top of the street, I’ll drive myself.’
He touches her chin, stroking the dimple, and opens the car door. Before he steps out Kate speaks, stumbling in her rush: Til speak to Gloria for you.’
Thank you.’ The ghost of his old smile flits across his countenance. ‘You always were a pushover for a sob story.’ And he’s consumed by the night.
CHAPTER 37
‘He’s a poet, he has something called an imagination to play with. It’s obvious he’s lying.’
Gloria’s voice curls derisively.
‘You didn’t hear him, Glo, he was breaking his heart hauling all that buried grief to the surface. You wouldn’t invent a story like that.’
Her mouth is twisted out of shape. ‘Hearts don’t break. Arms, now they break, legs break, so do necks. But hearts? I don’t think so.’
‘Gloria, I have no reason to think well of Jack O’Brien, I have no reason to plead his case with you. This is the man who clocked me one, this is the man who used my flat for a tryst, who wooed his pop-tart with my champagne.’
‘Which he never replaced,’ Gloria intones, before Kate has a chance to lodge her usual complaint.
‘Right,’ Kate agrees. ‘There are some betrayals a woman can never forgive, he crossed my Rubicon with that one. However I still say – don’t write him off. I learned something about him last night and it’s not important any more whether we approve of him or forgive him. He’s a product of circumstances, like all of us, of choices – his own and other people’s. He’s not admirable or evil but a mixture of both. I think he needs this baby as much as you do. Give him a chance.’
‘If I give him an inch he’ll take a mile,’ Gloria protests. ‘Jack O’Brien is sugar-coated arsenic. Look at what happened when he meshed with you, it nearly drove Eimear to breaking point. And see the result of my encounter with him – he couldn’t keep his gob shut and now we’ve both lost Eimear and there’s no way she’ll come around a second time. There are no bridges to build there, the ground has turned to quicksand. And if all that isn’t enough, the man has me tormented, he’s forever pestering me, he’s even swayed you to his camp – the one person who should know better. He has to learn that he can’t have everything he wants for the asking,’
‘You’re terrified of him, aren’t you, Glo? What is it that petrifies you – are you wary of his charm, frightened of falling in love with him? Are you attracted to him, is that the problem?’
Kate is chancing her arm but the barb hits home. Gloria looks startled, then guilty, then mulish. ‘I’m not going to dignify that ridiculous allegation with an answer.’
But Kate knows and Gloria knows she knows.
‘So,’ muses Kate, ‘Eimear has his name, I had his body and you’ll have his baby. The wife, the mistress, the mother. Jack’s shared himself out equally among the three of us, like a sheikh servicing his harem. Except we haven’t been glad to take turns with him, have we, we’ve scrapped over him and become enemies because of him.’
Gloria shrugs. ‘We’re better off without him, the man’s a jinx. Let him in the door and who knows what might happen, you and I could be at each other’s throats. I say he’s history – ancient history, like Nero. Jack O’Brien doesn’t exist.’
Gloria has developed a taste for intransigence during this pregnancy. Kate deems it best not to thwart her and retires, defeated – for now.
‘Have it your own way, Glo. He’s bad, badder, baddest. He’s irredeemably wicked and we’re both plaster saints. Still, I won’t push you any more; I promised I’d put in a good word, I didn’t offer to brainwash you. Now, Isabel Eccles says there’s a new and very Beautiful Boy working at the Put A Cork In It, an American backpacker on a year out from college – will you come out with me till we give him the once over?’
Gloria smiles, relieved the unpleasantness is at an end. ‘When did you have in mind, oh seducer of fresh-faced buckos?’
‘Would-be seducer. Why not tonight? Fun and games have fallen by the wayside around here, time to put that to rights.’
Gloria looks doubtful. ‘I fancied a bath and an early night to be honest, Kate. I’m finding it heavy weather standing about on my feet in the classroom, my back aches by going home time – still, only another month or so to go.’
‘And you will have an early night, my sweet,’ promises Kate. ‘I just want a gander at our All-American boy, I don’t plan to pinion him on the counter and deflower him then and there.’
Gloria dithers. ‘Do they serve food in the evenings?’
‘Food?’ Kate spoofs. ‘Isabel says it isn’t food, it’s manna and yes, they serve until 9 p.m. Put your shoes back on and I’ll treat you to a banquet of gastronomic superlatives.’
‘I probably won’t be able to get into them.’ Gloria huffs and puffs as she struggles to ease on her flat-heeled courts. Her ankles are swollen and she’s already wearing a size up.
‘Never mind shoes, slip on some sandals,’ Kate is businesslike; she’s spotted a pair under the coffee table.
‘It’s hardly the weather for open toes,’ Gloria objects, pushing her feet into the navy sandals. ‘This had better be door-to-door service, I’m not sashaying through the streets of Dublin in these.’
‘Your chariot awaits you, ma’am.’ Kate executes a sweeping bow and ushers Gloria into the Hurtle Turtle. But Spitfires weren’t designed for pregnant women and it is with considerable difficulty that she finally folds her friend in.
Isabel is right: the new waiter is a gift from the gods. Six feet four inches tall, eyes the colour of antique pine, curly blond hair and a chest like a teddy bear’s. He’s exactly Kate’s type – unfortunately every woman in the Put A Cork In It feels the same way. There’s so much oestrogen floating around the man’s in danger of being either smothered or mothered to death, she thinks, fluffing out her red hair. Just in case he notices her.
‘Now, ma’am, what’s your pleasure?’ The American reaches their table, order pad in hand, and lowers himself into a chair with easy familiarity. His voice is southern states, one of the Carolinas maybe, and his grin is as wide as Georgia. This IS a suitable object of lust, Kate hugs herself, as she asks for some Ballygowan and a glass of house white.
‘I can recommend the Dublin Bay oysters,’ he beams, producing menus from the pocket of his dark green bar apron. ‘I had some for lunch. One of the perks of the job is I get to eat as much as I like. That’s why I do restaurant work, I’m always hungry.’
And with another flash of the killer grin, he heads for the bar.
‘He can whistle Dixie to me any day of the week,’ Kate whispers.
‘If I didn’t look like a beached whale I’d be dangling bait at him myself,’ agrees Gloria.
‘Wonder if there are any more like him at home. Glo, I’m entering that lottery for American work visas if he’s a representative sample.’
‘As soon as I can drink, I’m going to ask him for a mint julep – just to make him feel at home,’ says Gloria.
‘Do you know what’s in a mint julep? What if you don’t like it?’
‘Of course I do, there’s mint and um, alcohol. And liking it is irrelevant.’
His return interrupts their drooling session. ‘You fine ladies decided what you’ll have?’
They haven’t even opened the menus.
‘You couldn’t give us a minute,’ suggests Kate, capsizing into his golden eyes.
‘You can have as long as you need, ma’am.’
He prepares to move on to the next table but she detains him.
‘You’re American, aren’t you? What’s your name?’
‘Brad, ma’am, Bradley P. Kelly.’
‘Kelly, so you’re Irish?’
‘Yes, ma’am. I have Irish, Polish and Lithuanian blood. Also some Cherokee on my mother’s side.’
‘That’s quite a combination,’ notes Gloria. ‘What are you doing in Dublin, Brad, researching your roots?’
‘Yes, ma’am, but there doesn’t seem to be any of our branch of the Kellys in Dublin. My great-great grandfather came from County Galway so I’m going to call on the Kellys there.’
‘All of them?’ Gloria is taken aback. ‘You’ll have your work cut out.’
‘Are there a lot of Kellys in County Galway, ma’am?’
‘There are hordes of them in every county in Ireland, Brad. But good luck to you, I dare say you’ll rustle up a handful willing to claim kinship with you.’
‘And what do you work at back home in America, Brad?’ enquires Kate.
‘I’m still a student, ma’am, I’m on a year off from college. I’ve taken my degree and I hope to go back to do a master’s in international law. My father’s an attorney, he’s real keen for me to follow in his footsteps.’
‘Fascinating,’ she breathes, ‘as a matter of fact I’m a lawyer myself. Maybe I could get you into our office as a runner for a couple of weeks, give you a chance to see how we do business here.’
‘Ma’am, I sure would appreciate that.’
‘What other plans have you for your year off?’ smiles Kate, sending so much ‘I’m yours for the asking’ radar towards him it’s a wonder jet planes aren’t diverted off-course from Dublin Airport.
‘Well,’ he leans his elbows on the table and she notices tiny hairs glint on his bare arms. ‘I thought I’d travel around, see a bit of the old country. I’ve only been here four weeks and most of that time has been spent finding somewhere to live and this job.
‘I was in London for a month before that but I wasn’t so keen on it, people seemed in too much of a hurry and the air was so thick you could take a knife and fork to it. I may go on to Poland in a couple of months or I may hang out in Ireland for the rest of the year, I haven’t decided. Galway isn’t far from Dublin, right?’
‘Couple of hours,’ says Gloria. ‘You don’t want to go haring off to Poland, Brad, you’ve only just arrived here. Tell us what you think of the place.’
‘The people sure are friendly and the air seems clean but it’s colder than I expected. Is it always this wet?’
‘Always,’ Kate confirms. ‘We’re a south European people trapped in a north European climate, it’s a national tragedy. We’re awarded five days of sunshine a year, seven if the hole in the ozone layer rips again, and winter lasts from October to May. It’s not Ireland at all but Direland you’ve come to.’
