Three Wise Men, page 4
She’s still wading through birth weights and welcomes from brothers and sisters when Mick walks in.
‘Eimear phoned last night and said she’d be in this morning,’ he tells her.
‘Been and gone,’ replies Gloria as he leans over to kiss her. On the forehead again. Does the man think she’s had her lips amputated?
Gloria surreptitiously turns the page so he can’t see Birth Announcements but Mick isn’t fooled.
‘I don’t believe it, you’re not at that again, Gloria, you’ll do your head in.’
She toys with the idea of tears but hasn’t the heart for them.
‘I was only taking a quick look at some names.’ She smiles brightly. ‘What do you think of Aoife?’
‘I think you should have your head examined putting us both through this. What are you doing, picking out names for babies after what’s happened to the two of us.’
His tone is so vexed she feels aggrieved.
‘You’re not the one who needed a massive blood transfusion, you’re just the one who snored like a pig until I was knocking on death’s door.’
He throws her a reproachful glance. ‘It’s mentally unbalanced, reading up on baby names at a time like this. You’ll push yourself over the edge and I’ll be left to gather up the pieces.’
She realises it’s madness but she can’t help herself, it’s like picking a scab – she knows it won’t help the healing process but there it is on her knee insisting on being fiddled with.
Perhaps if she could say this to Mick it would help but she doesn’t, she rolls over and faces the door, her back towards him. Lunch arrives and she leaves the tray untouched.
‘You must eat,’ he insists, ‘you’ll never get well otherwise.’
‘I’m not hungry,’ she pouts.
‘Force yourself.’
‘No.’
‘It’s criminal to waste food like that.’
‘You eat it if you’re so concerned.’
‘I didn’t come to hospital to eat your lunch,’ he objects.
‘Well what did you come for? It certainly wasn’t to cheer me up or distract me with news or keep me company – from what I can see you came to lecture me and order me about.’
Mick lifts his coat. ‘I’ll call back later when you’re feeling calmer; this is a difficult time for me too you know.’
He compresses his lips into a paving crack and stalks off.
Gloria removes the cover from the lunch plate – vegetable curry. Trifle to follow. She leaves the curry, eats half the trifle – ‘A drop of sherry would work wonders for you,’ she addresses the bowl – and switches on the television. Imelda calls by with some medication and mentions that she’ll be discharged on Monday. She also reveals that the Australia fund is seriously depleted as a result of last night’s session.
‘Another hen party?’ asks Gloria.
‘No, leaving do for one of Gerry the Guard’s schoolfriends New York-bound to make his fortune.’
‘So you gave it some welly.’
‘I gave it some shoe – I lost one, don’t ask me how, and Gerry the Guard had to piggyback me up the garden path but he slipped on ice and we ended up skittering about all over the place – he got me there in the end though it was more of a slither than a manly stride. They don’t have that snake on the Garda Siochana crest for nothing.’
Imelda bounces away, fresh-faced, but reappears within seconds. ‘Call for you, Gloria, I think it’s your mother. I’ll wheel the phone in.’
Gloria’s spirits lift at the prospect of a maternal chat but it turns out to be her mother-in-law, the real Mrs McDermott. She’s not the worst in the world but Gloria isn’t in the humour for her.
‘Lovie, I know exactly how you must be feeling,’ bawls the voice on the end of the line. ‘I lost two babies myself before Mick came along, bless him. You never forget a miscarriage, no matter how many babies you have afterwards.’
‘That’s a comfort,’ Gloria thinks bitterly, holding the phone a few inches from her ear.
‘Oh, it was hard in my day, sure enough,’ she bellows, ‘you had to get on with it if you lost a baby.’
Her mother-in-law continues in this vein for five minutes, while Gloria fantasises about hanging up and claiming they were disconnected.
‘Still, I have my boys and I wouldn’t trade them for the world. You should always remember this about babies, lovie, if they don’t make you laugh they’ll never make you cry.’
‘Margaret,’ Gloria interrupts, desperation lending her fluency. ‘You’ve no idea how much I appreciate your call, it’s helped so much. But there’s only the one phone on this corridor and I can’t monopolise it. I’m going home soon, I’ll ring you then.’
‘Are you indeed? I’ll pop down and visit you, so. I have the free travel since I turned sixty last year.’
Somebody up there has really got it in for her. Gloria sends the telephone trolley clattering against the wall and prepares to treat herself to another wallow, she’s earned it. So they’re turning her out on Monday: out to the tender mercies of a mother-in-law determined to be supportive if she loses her voice in the process, and of a husband who can’t bear to touch her. Gloria’s grown curiously attached to this sloppily painted orange hospital room although she’s shed tears in it, raged at Mick in it, leaked more tears in it and railed against life in it.
She contemplates her departure. Time to count her blessings instead of sheep, that’s what Bing Crosby recommends and he wouldn’t give you a wrong steer. On the plus side: she’ll have her own things about her, and didn’t Maureen O’Hara stress the importance of that on behalf of women everywhere in The Quiet Man. On the minus side: no nurses, fewer visitors and she’ll have to make her own tea. She confides in the bedside locker: ‘Maybe I’ll send Mick out to Amott’s for a Teasmaid, it can be my coming-home present from him.’
Except he doesn’t want her home, he prefers her safely out of the way in hospital.
CHAPTER 5
Eimear always expected to be implacable if she discovered Jack straying. No wavering, no listening to excuses, no nonsense. Funny how wrong you can be. She still can’t bear to listen to his explanations, she finds it offensive enough that it happened without hearing the gory details to salve his confessional binge. Describing the affair makes the woman flesh and blood, she prefers her shadowy. Anyway, Eimear couldn’t care less about her rival.
‘Stop, she’s not a rival, this isn’t a competition for Jack O’Brien’s affections,’ she shrieks, equanimity in splinters.
Now what brought that on, she frets into a soothing Baileys with ice, leftover Christmas supplies. She’s rationalised this, it’s his infidelity that bothers her; the other woman hasn’t cheated and lied, Jack has. The other woman hasn’t ignored any pledges, Jack has. Eimear has no quarrel with her. She empties the dregs of the bottle into her glass, can’t be bothered adding more ice, and wishes Jack O’Brien’s other woman disease-ridden and bankrupt. Is that too extreme? She contemplates moving on to the remnants of the Tia Maria and decides it’s not extreme enough. How about disease-ridden, bankrupt and bald.
Perhaps she should make some coffee and pour the Tia Maria into it. To heck with coffee, it dilutes the alcohol. Jack’s other woman, the one with hair falling out in clumps if hexes work, is no sister of hers whatever the sisterhood claim. Eimear trails the liqueur over her tongue and glances at the clock: drinking at 11 a.m., see what Jack O’Brien has driven her to. Aided, abetted and bloody-well-chauffeured by a woman.
She vacillates between a rational need to understand and an irrational urge to bludgeon someone, preferably her husband but the other woman will do very nicely too. If women are all meant to be sisters, why do some of them allow themselves to become susceptible to married men? Sibling rivalry obviously, female emancipation means empowerment, so that when you envy another’s toys you snatch them off her. No room for maidenly modesty here. Eimear contemplates her unknown challenger: it would make her smash and grab easier if she dumped Jack and she doesn’t propose to do anything so convenient for her machinations.
But she does intend making him suffer for a while. Her strategy is that tried and tested formula, the silent treatment, coupled with separate meals and even more separate beds.
He’s lucky they’re still sleeping under the same roof.
A memory intrudes on Eimear’s punishment scheme, lurching into her thought processes and tickling a reluctant laugh; Kate always called Tia Marias ‘Tina Maries’ because she overheard two old dears order that once. The giggle turns into a snuffle and then a sob.
Eimear drags herself back from the brink and stands up, sending her chair clattering. She recaps the bottle so forcefully she loses a fingernail; it’s drinking in the morning that’s making her feel weepy, not this wobble in her relationship with Jack.
But she’s going to chart it back on course now and that means showing him the error of his ways. He relishes his home comforts, let’s see how he likes it when they’re unavailable to him.
‘This is a war of attrition,’ Eimear advises the Baileys bottle in the instant before catapulting it into the kitchen bin. ‘Whoops, forgot to recycle. Ah, so what, the world has stopped turning – doesn’t matter if the environment is banjaxed.’
She slumps back at the kitchen table, cradling her cheek with the heel of her hand. It’s peculiar, she reflects, how few men have any stomach for the kind of skirmishing that women excel at. Recriminations he can handle, tears he can handle, but silence and sulking and ignoring him? He’s actually accused her of mental cruelty.
Their conversation went like this:
Jack: ‘What sort of a day did you have?’
Eimear: Silence.
Jack: ‘I said what sort of a day did you have, Eimear?’
Eimear: Silence.
Jack: ‘Is it a crime to make conversation now?’
Eimear: Silence.
Jack: ‘Answer me, is it a fecking crime to make conversation now?’
Eimear: ‘Do you have to repeat everything twice but with expletives for good measure?’
Jack: ‘At least you’re talking to me.’
Eimear: Silence.
Jack: ‘Come on, Eimear, do you want blood? A pound of flesh? I’ve said I’m sorry, I’ve tried to make it up to you, you can’t bear a grudge forever. Tell me you forgive me and I’ll never look at another woman again, so help me God. I’ll give my lectures in blinkers, I’ll cross the street if I see a skirt approaching, I’ll stop kissing my mother if that’s what it takes.’
Eimear: Silence.
Jack: ‘You’re a cold piece and no mistake. This is cruelty, deliberate and premeditated. At least what I did was in the heat of the moment. You’re a hard-hearted witch and you’re savouring every minute of this. I bet you’re delighted you caught me out, it reinforces that innate sense of superiority you have.’
(She leaves the room.)
He’s right, Eimear admits now, curled foetus-like on the bed. She is gratified at having Jack in the wrong in a ditch and herself sitting pretty on the moral high ground. Except she loves this man, desperately, although he’s cheated on her and will again given half a chance.
‘He doesn’t even need half a chance, quarter would do him,’ she snivels. ‘He’s one of those libidinous men for whom one woman is never enough, there’s another conquest around the corner and she’s always more exciting than whoever’s waiting at home.’
Eimear prepares to abandon herself to the luxury of tears, but realises within seconds that her turquoise silk tunic is in danger of being dripped on and sniffs to a halt. Instead she decides to go and talk to Gloria, she’s always to be relied on for tea and sympathy.
She throws on a coat, lifts her favourite umbrella, painted with cats and dogs plummeting from the sky, and is soon striding along Herbert Park towards Ranelagh. Eimear realises she should have phoned first but she can’t bear the idea of the bell pealing out, unanswered, in Gloria’s redbrick terrace – at least walking there is using up some of the nervous energy agitating within her.
‘Of course I knew he was a flirt when I married him, it’s something he can’t help,’ she tells Gloria while they’re waiting for the kettle to boil.
Eimear intended to restrain herself until they were sitting down with a teapot in front of them but she can’t hold her tongue.
‘Put him in a room with a waxwork of a woman and he’ll still try to chat her up. Mostly he isn’t even conscious of it. I never found it threatening in the early days – I used to treat it as a lark, you marry a character and how can you complain when he behaves like one, but I don’t feel so tolerant any more.’
‘Maybe you’ve been too patient,’ suggests Gloria guardedly, elbows on the kitchen worktop, green eyes clouded with concern as she watches her friend.
‘Exactly!’ Eimear sounds over-excited. ‘It’s time to make a stand, lay down some ground rules I should have made sure he was clear on from the start. I’m facing facts now. I listed them at the back of that Medieval Women at Work diary you bought me for Christmas, Glo. Shall I run through my checklist?’
‘You brought it with you?’
‘No, I know it off by heart.’ Eimear paces as she reels it off:
‘Fact one: There’s no woman Jack wouldn’t shag, apart from you and Kate. He’d never have the nerve to approach you two because you’d give him his marching orders and fill me in on his manoeuvres. Dear God, why am I thinking in military metaphors? Maybe I’m watching too much M*A*S*H, you see what marital discord visits upon a woman.’
‘Eimear, come and sit down, the kitchen isn’t big enough for prowling. I’ll wet the tea and then we can discuss it calmly. Would you like some camomile? It’s calming.’
Eimear ignores her, up and down the galley kitchen she parades, wheeling sharply left by the broom cupboard and back to the marble wall-clock above the door.
‘So you and Kate are out of the loop – a twenty-six-year friendship matters to women, thank heavens for some constants. But every woman apart from you is a potential threat. Fact two: Jack loses interest in an easy victory – it’s the thrill of the chase as far as the bedroom door that he enjoys, what happens on the mattress is neither here nor there to him. So whoever he’s seeing shouldn’t feel too confident: the relationship has a built-in self-destruct factor. As soon as she said yes to him he was hunting for the parachute string. Fact three: Jack has to be punished for humiliating me. I’m doing that now by treating him like a flatmate who’s reneged on his share of the rent money one month too many. By being civilised but remote – actually withdrawal of affection isn’t very civilised but it’s only temporary. And it achieves results.’
Gloria touches her elbow and guides her unobtrusively to the breakfast bar, pushing her gently on to a stool. Eimear doesn’t pause as she counts off her list on the fingers of one hand, an over-wound clockwork toy.
‘Fact four: I can’t keep up this war of attrition forever because it’s damaging the marriage. Not as much as he harmed it with his runaway willy but enough to dent the bodywork. And it’s misery to keep it going, he hates it but I detest it too – you automatically open your mouth to say, “You’ll never guess what happened to me today –” and it’s an effort to clamp it shut again. Fact five: I have to make him think he’s won me over against my better judgement, that I’ve caved in to his blandishments. Jack believes in the myth of his charm, he probably can’t understand how I’ve held out so long against him.’
Her fingers curl automatically around the china sunflower mug Gloria slides into her hand, she swallows a sip of tea and the camomile seems to halt her manic inventory, even before it hits her bloodstream. Gloria heaves a sigh of relief but it’s premature.
‘Fact six: A baby would be useful at this point both to shore up the marriage and confirm my status – he can cavort with as many floozies in as many jacuzzis as he likes but the mother of his children is a woman apart. That will always be my ace of hearts.’
Gloria’s own heart shrivels at the mention of babies, her loss palpates within her, but Eimear doesn’t notice – her eyes are fixed sightlessly on the pottery fish mobile dangling from the shelf stacked with cookery books.
Eimear’s mouth curls with distaste. ‘My Clinique total skincare package can only keep me competitive for so long against the under-graduates. I know I have looks but other women have them too – girls ten years younger than me now but who’ll one day be twenty and thirty years younger. Fresher and softer and easier on the eye, breathless when he notices them and grateful when he beds them. Bastard.’
She hunches over her tea while Gloria silently curses Kate and wonders what to say that won’t provoke Eimear into another frenzied bout of itemising. She may find it therapeutic but it’s not doing much for Gloria’s emotional state. What Eimear needs is reassurance, with her cover-girl looks she’s probably never been upstaged by another woman before. So tentatively she tells Eimear that Jack has probably learned his lesson and advises her to forgive and forget.
‘Whoever he was seeing is probably ancient history now,’ says Gloria.
(I’ll make sure she is.)
Eimear listens, sipping her tea. Gloria’s such an innocent, she thinks, she believes in happy-ever-afters. She can’t accept that men and women shaft each other, especially men, who apply the shafting literally.
Already she’s feeling guilty at having steamed over to Ranelagh to confide in Gloria. Especially when she belatedly recalls something Kate mentioned on the phone the other night: there’s a chance Gloria’s completely infertile.
‘Apparently her other fallopian tube is kinked and those winsome little sperm can’t paddle their way around tricky bends,’ Kate told her.
Eimear wishes she’d gone to St Stephen’s Green to confide in Kate instead of blurting all this out to Gloria; but even in her distraught state she instinctively realised she stood a better chance of catching up with Gloria than Kate. Kate’s been avoiding Eimear lately, the phone call featuring Gloria’s faulty fallopians (shame you can’t return them to the manufacturer) turned out to be five minutes snatched between meetings instead of the meandering dialogue Eimear was anticipating.
