Three Wise Men, page 5
‘She lives for work that one, I don’t know how Pearse puts up with it,’ Eimear frowns.
Yet he worships Kate, he’d pluck the moon out of the sky if she asked for it. Still, even for a workaholic she’s been hard to pin down. Which is why Gloria has to bear the brunt.
‘Glo, I shouldn’t have come over here to whine at you, it’s your bad luck I’m not the bottled-up bottle blonde I usually pride myself on being.’ Eimear is apologetic.
‘Good luck, bad luck, who knows?’ responds Gloria, more from a sense of duty than fun. ‘Anyway, you’re not really a bottle blonde: you were fair as a child.’
‘I’m behaving like an egotistical child talking about me, me, me when you’ve more than enough to contend with yourself right now – Kate told me … I’m so sorry, I know how much you wanted a baby. How’s Mick taking it?’
Gloria shrugs. ‘Other people’s difficulties are great for distracting you from your own.’
Eimear’s embarrassed she was tasteless enough to reveal her master plan to make Jack a father – time enough for revelations when she has a stomach that wobbles like Mick’s.
‘It’s just I’ve no one else to turn to, that’s why you’re taking the brunt of this, Glo. I’ve tried talking to Kate but she seems alarmed when I raise the subject,’ sighs Eimear.
‘Does she indeed,’ responds Gloria.
‘Funnily enough I first mentioned it on the same night you were rushed to hospital with your ectopic pregnancy. No, not funnily enough, there’s nothing amusing about almost losing one of your oldest friends.’
Eimear leans across the breakfast counter and rests her forehead against Gloria’s for a few seconds. Gloria feels so many conflicting emotions that she’s grateful for the momentary respite of that caress: self-pity at her own plight, sympathy for Eimear’s, fury at Kate.
Both are lost in thought. Gloria surrenders herself to self-commiseration; she’s convinced it’s better than occupational therapy in limited doses. Eimear drifts back in time to the trendy wine bar with Kate where they shredded reputations along with beer mats over luke-warm Chardonnay. They were waiting for Gloria but on the night her ectopic pregnancy screamed for attention, she wasn’t able to make it out of bed, never mind to Dame Street.
‘Can you believe the name of this place? The Put A Cork In It,’ asked Kate. ‘Why do wine bars always have ridiculous punning names – is it written into their leases?’
Eimear shrugged. ‘You’re the legal expert. Hair salons are just as guilty if you’re thinking of reporting anyone to the taste police. Any sign of Glo? It’s not like her to be late.’
‘She could be caught in a logjam if she’s coming by bus; at this stage of the evening the lanes are no use and it’s access-all-areas for traffic,’ said Kate. ‘How many bottles of wine do you reckon it will take tonight before our tights spontaneously self-ladder?’
Eimear laughed and suggested they order another in the interests of scientific experiment. However she hadn’t eaten properly all day and the wine shot straight to her tongue. The words hurtled out of her before she realised she was about to utter them.
‘Noticed anything unusual about Jack lately, Kate?’
Kate was laughing so hard at the dismal efforts of a couple of suits at the next table to attract their attention that it took a few seconds for the question to register. Immediately it did, she placed her glass carefully on the table and gave Eimear one of her headgirl looks. Despite her freewheeling single-mingle reputation, Kate’s conservative streak meant she occasionally played shocked when Eimear and Gloria least expected it.
‘Unusual as in …?’ she asked.
‘Shifty, shady, up to no good. Developing a touch of the Mike Baldwins.’
Kate picked up her glass, brought it to her mouth and set it down untasted. Eimear sensed panic. Maybe Kate had her suspicions about Jack and never mentioned them on the shoot-the-messenger principle; perhaps she had even seen him with someone else. Possibilities whirled in Eimear’s mind – there had to be a reason for the persistent claim that the wife was usually the last to know.
Eimear tugged so hard at a strand of blonde hair that Kate expected to see a clump detach itself from her scalp. ‘Kate, I must know. Have you seen him with anyone?’
Kate had never heard this pleading note in Eimear’s voice before. Guilt overwhelmed her and she exploded. Tearing strips from the wine bottle label, she hissed: ‘Isn’t it time you took a reality check, Eimear? You’ve the perfect marriage, remember, no one can touch you.’
Eimear was dumbfounded but the rage evaporated as quickly as it materialised and Kate continued, more moderately: ‘Don’t start imagining problems, Mulligan; your life is the stuff of colour supplements.’
Turning playful, she topped up Eimear’s glass and said, ‘Let’s see, you’ve vacant possession of a husband so handsome he should be slapped with a government health warning: Admiring Jack O’Brien For Too Long Can Seriously Damage Your Opinion Of Other Men. You own a des res in leafy Donnybrook …’
‘Leaky Donnybrook – all those trees plus the Irish climate add up to drips every time you walk down the street.’
‘There’s your fulfilling job tending to books at Rathmines library’ – Eimear hazarded an unconvincing gargoyle impression – ‘a mother-in-law safely relocated to Youghal and beyond casual visits, no children to leave chocolate fingerprints on your off-white matching sofas –’
‘Vanilla matching sofas,’ Eimear interrupted.
‘If your interior designer says so. Any more blessings? There’s the hair, of course; as nearly natural as anyone born outside of Scandinavia can expect, the toe-curling tribute from hubby on his last book of poetry, dedicated to “My inspiration, my life, my wife” and, um, I’m running out of ideas. Mulligan, you’ve been short-changed.’
‘I surrender,’ giggled Eimear, misgivings about Jack allayed. ‘I admit it, I’m a woman beloved of the fates, no one could ask for more than I have.’
I’d like that in writing.’ Kate signalled for more wine before the bottle was halfway drained.
‘Reinforcements,’ said Eimear.
‘Send reinforcements, we’re going to advance,’ responded Kate.
‘Send three and fourpence, we’re going to a dance,’ Eimear finished the joke for her.
‘That’s the trouble with knowing people for twenty-something years: there’s no secrets left, even your quips are shared. But it’s comforting too.’
‘Anyway,’ said Kate, ‘moonlight and roses have to turn into overcast skies and decaying flowers sometimes. If only to relieve the monotony.’
‘I suppose,’ admitted Eimear, although mentally chafing against it.
‘And isn’t Jack up against a deadline on his new collection? Doesn’t he develop a furtive streak, sloping around at all hours of the day and night when he’s hunting his muse?’
Eimear reflected. It was true; only a few days earlier Jack had sharpened half a dozen pencils and retired to the study with the determined air of a man about to grab creativity by the throat and shake a sonnet or two out of it. But a jarring thought intruded. Jack never talked about work in progress, so how did Kate know …
‘Kate, how on earth are you aware that Jack only has a few weeks left before he must hand in his manuscript to the publishers? I wouldn’t have mentioned that to you; he has it drilled into me never, not ever, to discuss unfinished work.’
Kate radiated ridicule. ‘So Jack’s made you take a vow of silence, signed you up for a contemplative order? Or has he had your lips stapled together? Something must’ve slipped out, you know the loosening effect the demon drink has on an old alcofrolic like you. Anyway, men are off the agenda, this is supposed to be a testosterone-free zone. You know, Gloria is more than just unfashionably late. I’m going outside to ring her on my mobile and demand an explanation for her no-show.’
Kate rummaged in her bag for a fluorescent yellow phone – bought, she claimed, because it made her imagine she was sitting under a coconut tree drinking daiquiris – and slipped off her stool.
‘Don’t empty the bottle while I’m gone, you lush. And don’t accept any drinks from strange men unless they’re buying champagne.’
Eimear hauls her mind back to Gloria’s kitchen. ‘It makes me shiver remembering it, Glo. There we were, joking about conning drinks out of flash guys who leave their credit cards behind the bar, while you were lying in a pool of blood not able to reach the phone.’
‘The bleeding was internal, Eimear. And at that stage I wasn’t in a life-threatening condition – serious to critical, possibly.’
Eimear cringes at the caustic undertone.
She returns home from Gloria’s in a happier frame of mind, persuaded that she’s overreacting to Jack’s trademark flakiness. It’s a little more pronounced than usual but not excessively so, surely. But the next day he mentions that he needs to call by college for an hour or two although it’s a Sunday, and her misgivings are back, multiplied like weeds during an absence. She pulls out the incriminating credit-card statement and stares at it. The transaction listed beneath his hotel room rental catches her eye. Drat, she was hoping the Fiorucci T-shirt mightn’t appear until next month – Jack would explode when he saw the price.
‘You paid HOW much for a T-shirt? I don’t care if there are cherubs on the front, there’d need to be the complete heavenly choir of angels for that price.’
Wait a minute, Eimear checks herself, she doesn’t need to take abuse about overspending from a man tasteless enough to use their credit card to fund his slap and tickle. This bill’s as damning an indictment of her husband as finding a used condom under the bed. Now why did she have to think of bed, it’s a tiny step to the mental picture of Jack in bed with another woman. The permutations whirl around in her brain.
‘So much for “with my body I thee worship”!’ She crumples the statement and flings it on the floor. ‘He’s on his knees to more than me, that’s for sure.’
Eimear half-heartedly peels potatoes for Sunday dinner. She wishes she were more like Kate, who insists she’ll live and die a spinster of this parish; Eimear used to think spinsterhood was a shameful fate, something that stamped you with a big red reject sign. Now she can see there’s a lot to be said for the single life. At least if she were unmarried, Eimear wouldn’t lie in the bath torturing herself with images of her husband splashing in the suds with someone else or sharing her toothbrush or shaving so he doesn’t rasp her when they kiss. Or brushing her hair, his seduction speciality.
It’s not the sex she minds it’s the intimacy. That’s a lie, she objects to the sex too. When the pictures of him with this faceless woman – she’s always featureless, but with long, sit-upon hair as blue-black as the feathers on a crow – become too detailed she slides under the bath water and hums until the rush of blood to the head blocks everything out.
The potatoes are boiling in a saucepan, waiting to be mashed within an inch of their lives, and Eimear is still brooding on Jack’s affair. Now she’s wondering where he goes to shag them – hotel rooms, maybe? No, that would show up on his credit card and there’s been just the one hotel so far. Obviously he only chats up women with their own flat. She imagines the conversation:
‘Excuse me, you tantalising creature, do you live at home, share with friends or are you self-sufficient? Because there’s something about an independent woman I find irresistible …’
The potatoes are boiling over; she doesn’t notice as the water sizzles around the electric ring and the saucepan lid rattles a tetchy tune. Maybe she’s partly to blame for the way Jack is, perhaps there’s something missing in her that he has to search for elsewhere. Some womanly component that the great geneticist in the sky left out:
‘Let’s see, Eimear Mulligan, she’s getting the face, the size 10 body and the lifelong friends. That doesn’t leave room for much else – fair’s fair, it’ll have to do her.’
Eimear realises she’s being inconsistent, in one breath wishing she’d never married anyone, let alone Jack, and in another hating every woman he’s ever spared a glance for, from under those heavy black brows of his.
‘He plucks grey hairs out of them, that’s how conceited he is.’ She drags a hand through her neck-length bob. ‘I do it for him, that’s how feeble I am.’
But she doesn’t want to be consistent, she wants to feel secure again.
She even tried going to church last Sunday, something she hasn’t bothered with regularly since she was a teenager. She sat there for almost an hour and let the words wash over her without listening to their meaning, but there was a comforting sense of familiarity. Eimear thought about Mass again this morning but decided against it – she’d feel hypocritical. She bums to punish Jack, not hear a Christian message: forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. Screw that. She wants him to suffer. To fall down and break his crown and then she’ll be the one to bathe it with vinegar and brown paper. She’ll be the one he needs.
CHAPTER 6
Eimear studies herself in the mirror and acknowledges her face is different, it’s definitely changed. It looks like a pregnant face to her. She knows that’s technically impossible, since his sperm won’t have collided with her egg yet, but she and Jack made love last night without using protection and she instinctively feels there’ll be a baby. It’s just waiting to be conceived. Everything was perfect: she was mid-cycle, she lay quietly for twenty minutes afterwards – Jack thought she’d nodded off – and she willed her body to be fertile. She’s still concentrating on it, thinking fecund thoughts.
She intended sulking for longer with Jack but she read her Every Woman to bring herself up-to-date on babymaking techniques, she knows there’s more to it than some soggy collision between the sheets once you’re past thirty – Gloria’s experiences have taught her that. The section on contraception reminded her how to count up her ovulation cycle and it emerged last night was peak practice time so Jack was off the hook. Saturday night fervour was required.
Eimear allowed him to believe he was being masterful when he swept her off to bed and demonstrated how apologetic he was. He wanted to show her a second time but she was concerned he’d jiggle the sperm already despatched and send them off-course so she persuaded him to save his ardour for this morning. Which he did. Now she’s securely aware of a back-up convoy of sperm trekking after the advance guard.
‘Hope they’ve a decent sense of direction.’ She smiles secretively.
Babies remind her of Gloria. Not only are her fallopians officially kaput, there’s a chance Mick has a low sperm count. The great geneticist in the sky is trying to tell them something, thinks Eimear, then immediately feels churlish. She’ll call by to Gloria’s tomorrow, cheer her up. Kate seems too busy to do it, she’s behaving oddly, even by her own erratic standards. She’s obviously having problems with Pearse, it must be the age gap rearing its head: Pearse is a good fifteen years older than Kate – his exact age is shrouded in mystery, Gloria and Eimear routinely quip they’ll have to read his date of birth off his gravestone.
Eimear’s noticed that Kate has taken to referring to Pearse as ‘the oul’ fellow’, as if he were her father or some ancient neighbour. A few years ago she was singing the praises of the more mature man, now you’d swear he was too decrepit to put one foot in front of the other. Let alone manage a bit of the other.
Eimear rings Gloria with her latest theory, which emerged fully formed ten minutes earlier. Gloria is attempting to mark some exam papers and isn’t in the humour for speculation but Eimear cajoles her into listening.
‘Really, Glo, it makes perfect sense when you think about it. Kate’s manoeuvring Pearse into a marriage proposal.’
‘Kate doesn’t believe in marriage,’ Gloria objects.
‘Flamboyant militant talk, all very well in your twenties but you march to a different tune in your thirties. We both know she presents herself as this free spirit who’s escaped matrimonial shackles – we’re the stereotypes who sold out for a day in a princess frock – but I suspect she’s ready to settle down now. She’s just not sure how to admit she wants to belong to an institution she’s spent the past decade deriding as outmoded and degrading.’
‘It’s a theory,’ agrees Gloria. ‘An unconvincing one but a theory nevertheless.’
‘How can you write it off?’
‘Look, Eimear, remember how she wouldn’t even stand bridesmaid for either of us? That’s how anti-marriage she’s always been. She said it gave the best man the notion he had a right to snog you and the father of the groom would lose his head completely and try to feel you up.’
Eimear shudders, recalling several slow dances in a dress-to-suppress with Mick McDermott’s appalling brother Johnno. All in the name of friendship. Kate, meanwhile, was free to swan about in an elegant two-piece with a hat and crocodile heels instead of specially dyed pumps. ‘Then when it was my turn three years ago, and you were my maid of honour –’
‘Oh yes, the bold Kate, allegedly so insulted at the idea of an off-the-shoulder bridesmaid’s flounce or two, jam-tarted up in a black-and-white dress that was completely strapless. Talk about double standards – hers are positively double-jointed.’
‘That’s why it will be quite a laugh when Kate caves in and has a wedding day of her own with Pearse in tow,’ insists Eimear.
‘You’re mental, I’m going back to my exam papers.’
Kate’s a puzzle with her bouts of secretiveness and her offhand moods, thinks Eimear, as she drags out the vacuum cleaner to give her stair carpet the once-over. She’s never been as reliable as Gloria, as keen to maintain the threesome. Sometimes she seems to buck against their friendship.
Jack arrives home early as she’s replacing the machine in the cupboard and sets about persuading Eimear to take a shower with him.
Jack, in a bog accent: ‘Ah go on, go on, go on.’
Eimear: ‘I haven’t loaded the dishwasher yet.’
