Three Wise Men, page 6
Jack: ‘I haven’t loaded you yet, for that matter, not since this morning.’
Eimear: ‘Jack! You never used to be so crude.’
Jack: ‘You know you like it.’
Eimear: ‘Well maybe I’ll step in and scrub your back when I’m finished in the kitchen.’
Jack: ‘Make sure you do or I’ll be down to find you, dripping water all over the hall carpet and exposing my virile body to the neighbours opposite.’
Eimear visits Gloria, convinced there can be no doubt she and Jack have made a child because she’s six days late and her period is never overdue. But her inner complacency – she attributes it to the premature onset of maternal serenity – is pockmarked by Mick and Gloria snapping at each other about trivia. It’s embarrassing being in the same room as them.
Mick has a habit of displaying a foot of lower calf when he sits down, his trousers ride up abnormally high. Today it seems to infuriate Gloria disproportionately, she’s forever telling him to pull them down.
‘Eimear doesn’t want to look at your hairy legs,’ she complains, and he hitches them down but up they creep again. After two or three times Gloria loses it.
‘Mick, would you ever put your legs away,’ she all but screams and he yells at her to have a bit of manners and then she really screeches, saying he’s not the man to teach her because he wouldn’t know manners if they stepped up and bid him good day. Back and forth they go, totally oblivious to Eimear.
They really are on the skids, thinks Eimear, they can’t even be bothered to hide their fights. Mick and Gloria are niggled by everything the other does. He pretends not to hear her and makes her repeat every request twice, while the box of Maltesers Eimear brings as a gift is material for a jibe from Gloria about his weight.
‘We’ll have to ration you to just a few of those, Michael, the bathroom scales can’t take much more abuse. You’ll be had up for cruelty to household appliances.’
Marriage can have a bizarre effect on love, shudders Eimear. Still, she’s not looking for romance, Jack’s sperm are enough and they’ve done their job. Thank heavens for athletic sperm and priapic husbands. Now what are the chances of her being able to slip out quietly and leave Mick and Gloria slinging insults like rocks?
Eimear’s period arrives on day eight. She’s awakened by the sensation of blood trickling down her leg and knows even before she’s conscious there’s a reason she should stay cocooned in sleep – her brain is telling her to enjoy her pregnancy a few minutes longer. Except it isn’t a pregnancy, it’s simply wistful thinking. She held off the bleeding for a week, that’s how determined she was, but she couldn’t postpone it forever. The period can’t be thwarted when there’s no baby to dam the flow and the blood comes slithering and blobbing. It repulses her, some of it smears on her hands and leaves a stale smell as though it were penned up too long in her body. She rummages for tampons but discovers her supplies have run out.
When her stomach cramps ease she phones in a sick call to Mrs Hardiman, the head librarian. It’s a mental health day, not one for lying in bed, so she catches a bus into town (when one finally arrives – Dublin Bus doesn’t believe in pampering its passengers with a regular service) and heads straight for the shopping mecca of Grafton Street and Brown Thomas.
Its basement houses her favourite lingerie department. She fondles the teddies and baby dolls – such innocuous names for such seriously wicked underwear – and holds them along her body to judge their impact. She’s determined to choose the wispiest silks and silkiest wisps she can lay her hands on, even some provocative cutaway pieces she’d normally dismiss as too high on the slagheap index to consider. She wants to be ready for Jack when her period’s over. Stripped for action. Eimear’s mouth twists as she reflects on Jack’s predilections. Nothing too tasteful, he’s indifferent to her café-au-lait camisoles. He prefers them red and lacy or black and sheer.
Brevity is the soul of underwear, he continually tells her; it’s not his rule of thumb in life, however, because his poetry rambles on interminably. Still, at least she knows how to press his buttons.
‘I’d almost despise you for being predictable if it weren’t so useful, Jack O’Brien,’ she remarks.
A middle-aged woman a few feet away starts putting considerably more distance between them. Steady, thinks Eimear, she’s speaking out loud again – it can only be a matter of time before the men in white coats arrive.
When she’s upset she comforts herself by shopping. Admittedly that’s her response to boredom or depression too. The best therapy is retail, she’s fond of saying – a new pair of shoes are cheaper than a visit to the shrink and you have something to show for your money to boot.
‘Can I help you, madam?’
An assistant with purple lips and matching nails interrupts Eimear’s meditation, she rouses herself and finds she’s wringing a push-up bra between her hands. No wonder the girl intervened, there’s a madwoman damaging the stock.
‘Yes, do you have this in any other colours?’ She makes an effort to seem normal.
‘No, only black. It comes with a choice of French knickers or a thong to match.’ She gestures to the alternatives.
Eimear looks at them. Very Jack. ‘I’ll take both.’
In for a penny, in for a pound.
Eimear catches sight of the swimwear as she pays at the till. A wave of nostalgia engulfs her for the cheap holiday packages to Corfu and Menorca she took with Gloria and Kate, before she and Jack discovered Tuscany and the South of France. The three girls used to scorch themselves on the beach by day and sizzle at waiters as they drank themselves senseless by night. Sublime holidays.
She’s suffused by a longing so acute, it’s akin to grief, for the days when boyfriends were temporary arrangements, babies were something they popped pills to avoid and all they wanted out of life was a doss of a job that paid megabucks. And maybe a ride from Aidan Quinn – all of them worshipped him.
‘He’s the only male the three of us fancied simultaneously,’ murmurs Eimear. ‘None of us has the same taste in fellows, it’s probably what’s kept us friends for so long.’
That’s one certainty: Gloria, Kate and herself will never fall out over a man.
CHAPTER 7
‘Have you heard about hyacinth bulbs in olive oil – they’re supposed to be the ultimate aphrodisiac.’ Gloria is poking at her fettuccine.
‘Can’t say I have,’ replies Eimear. ‘But surely the best place for hyacinths is the flower-bed. What are you supposed to do, eat them? Rub them over your body? Over your lover’s?’
‘The article didn’t specify,’ admits Gloria. ‘Perhaps you chop them up and sneak them into his salad.’
‘Another wizard wheeze bites the dust. Jack never touches salad, he calls it rabbit food.’
Besides, thinks a gratified Eimear, he’s ardent enough as it is, she doesn’t need love potions to lure her man to bed. ‘I can’t see Mick smacking his lips over hyacinth bulbs,’ she adds. ‘He seems more your meat-and-two-veg character.’
‘He won’t slip on the nosebag unless there’s spuds on the table,’ confirms Gloria. ‘And nobody can cook them like the real Mrs McDermott. Mick and she belong to a mutual admiration society. He even notices when she has a different coloured rinse in her hair – I could get a skinhead crop and it wouldn’t register, but she slams in some lowlights and it’s: “Mammy, all the fellows at the bank will be asking for an introduction to my good-looking sister.”’
She stabs at the pasta.
‘They say a man who’s kind to his mother will be kind to his wife.’ Eimear essays diplomacy.
‘Who’s “they”?’ demands Gloria. ‘They’ve obviously never been married.’
The pair are having lunch in an Italian restaurant opposite the library where Eimear works, to cheer Gloria up – Mick’s mother’s been staying for the weekend and she needs to let off steam. It’s not that she dislikes her mother-in-law but she resents the way Mick behaves around her. Every visit is marked by an incident; this time it centred around a takeaway fish supper Gloria fed her the first night she arrived.
‘I was only back teaching a week and I could just about manage that, I wasn’t able to face the supermarket as well so there was no food in the house to cook,’ wails Gloria. ‘The real Mrs McDermott didn’t mind, she said it made a change from proper food. But Mick claimed it was an insult to his mother to serve a carry-out and he sulked at me all weekend.’
Pig, thinks Eimear.
‘He only wants the best for his mother,’ says Eimear.
‘If that wasn’t bad enough, the real Mrs McDermott insisted on going out into the front garden every time she wanted a cigarette. I kept telling her I didn’t mind if she smoked in the house but she said my lovely home would reek for days afterwards. She stood on the doorstep in full view of the neighbours puffing away. It made me look like a house-proud harridan.’
‘You used to like her.’
‘I used to like Mick,’ responds Gloria.
‘She’s gone now.’
‘Mick isn’t.’ Gloria beheads a mushroom.
Eimear pushes away her spaghetti carbonara and lights up a cigarette.
‘You could try lingerie,’ she suggests. ‘Hyacinth bulbs in olive oil sound like a long shot but satin works every time for me.’
She pictures, with satisfaction, the keyhole-cut number she has lined up for active service that night.
‘Sounds like you and Jack are enjoying a second honeymoon.’ Gloria looks wistfully across the table, her pallor pronounced against the dark shoulder-length hair.
‘He’s being very … attentive.’ Eimear tries not to smile like a cat at the cream.
Gloria wants to say something but has trouble finding the words, all she manages is a lame, ‘Just don’t take him for granted, Eimear.’
Eimear is flippant, remembering their passion last night – and the night before that.
‘He’s putty in my hands, Glo. You want to get yourself up to Brown Thomas, they’ve slinky numbers there that Saint Patrick himself couldn’t resist. He’d be inviting back all the snakes to Ireland as the lesser of two evils.’
‘Can’t be bothered. I couldn’t care less if Mick never laid a finger on me again. I used to be mad for it but now I’d rather take Hello! magazine to bed – who needs jiggery pokery with all those celebrity home interiors to drool over.’
‘We must mention it to their marketing people,’ suggests Eimear. ‘They can emblazon “Better Than Sex” across the cover, it should double their sales. And on that high note I must clock back in at the salt mines. Michelle can’t go off on her lunch break until I’m back from mine.’
‘Is that the Michelle who always has a copy of Wuthering Heights in her bag?’
‘The same. She says Emily Brontë’s characters are so wretched they cheer her up – her own life seems blessed by comparison. Any time she feels depressed she takes out the novel and dips into Heathcliffe and Cathy’s gaping voids instead.’
As they leave the restaurant, Eimear sees a bus that passes by Trinity College. Impulsively she decides to skip work for the afternoon – she’ll ring in with an imaginary migraine – and boards the bus, deciding to surprise Jack. She’s spurred by the thought of Heathcliff and Cathy; there’s no need for her and Jack to behave like star-crossed lovers over one lapse.
Dodging the traffic, she crosses College Green and heads in through the front arch, past the inevitable knots of students and tourists congregated there. By the porter’s office she almost collides with Kate.
‘Eimear, what are you doing here?’
‘Snap.’
Kate shuffles her feet shiftily and Eimear notices she’s perched on high heels – self-conscious about her height, she usually wears loafers.
‘I wanted to buy some Book of Kells postcards in the shop – I thought I’d frame them and hang them in the hallway of the flat,’ says Kate finally.
‘In your monument to minimalism?’
Well might she look evasive.
‘Give us a look at them,’ prods Eimear.
‘Wait till they’re framed, you’ll see the full effect then,’ promises Kate. ‘You should stop by the shop and have a look at their Book of Kells computer mouse-pads – talk about the ninth century colliding with the twenty-first. I nearly bought one just for the heck of it. But then I thought better not – it’ll only encourage their suppliers. Next they’ll be flogging us video games with Vikings attacking monasteries and the scribes scrambling to find hidey-holes for their manuscripts.’
Eimear purses her lips. ‘Works for me. Do you fancy grabbing a coffee and we can plan the game out and try to patent the rights?’
‘No time, Mulligan, I’m late for a meeting.’ And Kate blows a kiss and bolts.
Eimear clatters across the cobblestones, towards the campanile under which Jack proposed to her one star-strewn night after a ball at the college. He looked like a matinee idol in his dinner suit and she hired a silver dress with a fishtail train that tripped her up when they danced. Jack told her she shimmered like a nereid in the moonlight and produced from his pocket a diamond solitaire that fitted her ring finger to perfection.
She’s suffused by a rush of joy as she passes their bell-tower and veers right towards the English department.
On the ramp outside the door, where the students throng for cigarettes between lectures, she spies Jack’s distinctive tall frame. He doesn’t see her – he’s short-sighted but too vain to wear glasses. Eimear is about to call his name when she notices he’s deep in conversation with a petite dark girl of maybe twenty with a nose stud. She’s wearing an ankle-length Indian dress and the mirrors sewn into the lavender cloth sparkle in the sunshine. Books are clutched against her chest and she’s so dainty she has to bend her head back at an awkward angle to gaze into his face.
Eimear watches them. She could simply be one of his students and yet there’s an intimacy in their stance, as bodies surge around them, that disquietens her. Jack lifts one of her arms away from the books, pushes up the loose sleeve and checks her watch. Eimear’s stomach somersaults: it’s a meaningless gesture and yet eloquent. He holds on to the wrist, stroking it gently, smiling down at the chest-high dark head.
Eimear wheels around and tramps away, past the campanile, past the porter’s office, past the bus stop. Walking, walking, walking.
CHAPTER 8
Jack’s lying so still, Kate panics and lowers her cheek to his mouth for reassurance. False alarm: his breath rustles against her skin. He’s sprawled diagonally across the bed, one arm outstretched, hair plastered into tufts, enveloped in the sleep of the unjust. He always naps in the aftermath of their lovemaking; sometimes his eyelids droop with indecent haste immediately after he’s quivered, gasped and rolled over on to his side, sweat-coated body slithering from her grasp. Kate doesn’t object to his withdrawal, although she misses the reassurance of contact, because it offers a chance to study him.
She never tires of admiring her lover, although he doesn’t look his best unconscious. His face needs its eyes open, brown eyes gleaming roguishly or swimming with invitation or pleading like a small boy’s. As if aware of her scrutiny, he turns his face towards the pillows and burrows in.
She transfers her gaze to the bedroom of her flat, blinds drawn against the afternoon sun, a trail of jackets, shirts and socks leading from door to bed. Pearse is in Limerick on business today and won’t be back until the last train – she must clear up their lovemaking debris before then. Kate’s attention is caught by Jack’s striped boxer shorts dangling from the lower bedpost; she fantasises about washing them and storing them in a drawer with her own underwear but regretfully abandons the idea. She can’t send him home knickerless to Eimear.
‘Baby girl.’
One brown eye is glinting. Jack’s awake. He shields the other eye against a dust mote-peppered ray of sunshine that’s sneaked through the curtains, the gesture lending him a raffish air. She ruffles his hair, quoting: ‘One-eyed Jack the pirate chief/was a terrible fearsome ocean thief/he wore a hook and a dirty look …’
Jack interrupts before she can finish the verse, learned for the town feis at eight and all but forgotten until now.
‘Hey, I’m the poet around here, remember.’
He wags his finger, then pulls her close for a kiss. He’s less than keen on ditties – poetry should be treated reverently, not dashed off in a fit of merriment.
‘Got to run, baby girl.’
Jack is already hunting for his boxers, while Kate is still in post-kissing swoon.
When he first called her baby girl, she cringed – wouldn’t you think a poet could come up with something more original. Dean Swift invented a new name, Vanessa, for his lady-love. But baby girl’s grown on her now.
Jack is talking as he steps into his trousers.
‘Have to shoot back to Trinity for a meeting and I promised Eimear I’d be home early, she needs a hand with something or other.’
‘A dinner party?’
‘That’s it, a dinner party. Did she mention it to you?’
‘She invited me – Pearse too, obviously – but I declined.’
‘Why don’t you come, baby girl?’ Jack breaks off from buttoning his shirt. His voice dips huskily: ‘We could play footsie under the table, I could give you a quick grope on the pretext of leaning over to refill your glass, we could volunteer for washing-up duty and go a-courting in the kitchen.’
‘No Jack, it’s bad enough we’re doing this to Eimear in hotels, borrowed apartments and offices the length and breadth of Ireland without taking it right into her home,’ protests Kate.
‘You’ve developed a conscience all of a sudden.’ He tucks his shirt into his trousers with impatient movements.
‘Not all of a sudden. I’ve always had a conscience about what we’re doing. You help me ignore it most of the time.’
‘Come here and let me help you forget again,’ he coaxes, arms wide open, and before she know it she’s flat on her back with Jack on top and Eimear shoved to the dimmest recess of her mind.
