Three Wise Men

Mick wants kids too. He and Gloria delayed it because of careers and buying houses but when she turned thirty they decided the time had come.

‘The time has come, the walrus said, to talk of many things,’ whispers Gloria.

She and Mick don’t talk of many things any more, especially not of cabbages and kings. Still they’re unanimous it’s time now. Except, instead of pregnancy, they had a puzzled year of trying and failing, of buying ovulation kits, of tracking her cycle like it held the answer to the Third Secret of Fatima. Which, as everyone now knew, was an overrated secret anyway.

Gloria frowns. You spend your twenties frantically trying to avoid pregnancy and your thirties even more frenziedly trying to engineer it. Somebody up there’s having a belly laugh at the lot of them. Who’d have guessed the only sure-fire way to get pregnant was by being a teenager in the back of a borrowed car.

Mick and she thought they’d cracked it last month when no period came for almost two weeks after it was due – but then she had a bleed, ten days of feeling sorry for herself, followed by an emergency admission to hospital a few days ago with her ectopic pregnancy. The surgeon explained about ectopic pregnancies to Gloria, the one who removed a vital section of her right fallopian tube and a minuscule foetus with it. The surgeon held up his baby fingernail to show her its size.

Even after his explanation Gloria felt she needed clarification. Mick brought in a dictionary so they could look up what had happened to them.

It said, ‘Ectopia: condition in which the foetus is outside the womb.’

Gloria reflects on this bald definition, pondering its accuracy and inaccuracy. It doesn’t say anything about bleeding internally as you lie beside your husband, thinking your neck and shoulder aches are caused by the awkward position you’ve adopted all day in bed to accommodate stomach cramps – pains caused by the blood saturating your insides and being forced up your body.

It doesn’t say anything about trying to wake your husband, who sleeps like the dead, about not being able to move until finally by some atavistic spark for survival you crawl to the edge of the bed, topple out and your husband starts up and calls an ambulance.

It doesn’t say anything about the visitors who blithely assume you can press ahead and have another baby when you’re feeling better, because you still have one fallopian tube, or about the nurses who hug you and show they understand your world has juddered to a standstill, even as they charge about running a hectic ward.

Definitions lull you into a false sense that things are explicable. But maybe the older nurse who suggested she plant something to remember her baby by was right. A holly bush to rhyme with Molly – that’s the name she’d have chosen for a girl. She senses she was a girl, her fingernail-sized nearly life.

CHAPTER 4

Eimear is slumped at the bottom of Gloria’s hospital bed and it doesn’t take a Sam Spade to detect she’s been crying. On anyone else it would look blotchy and unappealing, on Eimear it’s tragic and captivating.

‘I know you have your own troubles, Glo,’ her voice is brittle, ‘but I have to turn to someone and telling you is like keeping it in the family. Jack is seeing someone else.’

Gloria is alarmed. ‘Eimear, I find that hard to believe, isn’t the man besotted with you.’

‘Jack’s the kind of man who can love you to bits but still shag other women.’

‘And have you any idea who she might be?’ Gloria enquires cautiously.

‘Probably one of his students or maybe a colleague, I don’t care a great deal who she is to tell you the truth. It’s not the woman but the deed that bothers me.’

‘Have you tackled him about it?’

‘No, I’m planning to do it tonight.’ Eimear’s expression is sullen. ‘I’ve had my suspicions for a while but no proof. Then this morning I opened his credit-card statement and found he’d spent the night in a Dublin hotel when he told me he was in Cork at a poetry festival.’

Eimear slings her bag on the floor with the degree of venom usually reserved for skirts with broken zips and continues: ‘I rang the hotel and they confirmed it was a double room. Clumsy of him, wasn’t it? I thought adulterers were supposed to cover their tracks by using cash. Maybe he wants me to find out, save him the nuisance of confessing.’

She mopes while Gloria tries to think of something positive. Before she can dish up the platitude of the day, Eimear adds: ‘I know he’s been with a woman for some time – there’s a smell about him that’s different and he’s paying me more attention than he’s ever bothered to before, showing me his poems and asking what I think of them. Of course I always say they’re magnificent, isn’t that what he wants to hear, where’s the point in suggesting he lob in a rhyme once in a while. It only gets him all het up and exasperated.’

Eimear has never been a fan of Jack O’Brien’s work. His brooding looks, yes, his earning power, yes, his television appearances, yes, his ability to make every woman feel she’s the most fascinating creature he’s met, yes – his poetry, ho hum.

‘So you’re definitely going to thrash it out with him tonight,’ asks Gloria.

‘Don’t you think I should?’

‘Not necessarily. What if it’s a fling that’s been flung? What if he was just getting something out of his system, or it was a one-off aberration, or a drunken mistake he’s trying to put behind him?’

‘You mean let sleeping dogs lie?’

‘Exactly!’

‘Or lying dogs sleep easy,’ mutters Eimear, but the venom has ebbed from her voice.

She doesn’t want a scene, she prefers everything serene and ordered. The three of them do, they’re Librans after all.

‘I brought you the Irish Times.’ Eimear ransacks her bag, just like the nun. The paper is located under a can of hair mousse and she reaches it over, then heads immediately for the sink in the corner of the room to scrub her hands.

‘Newsprint everywhere,’ complains Eimear.

After she leaves Gloria checks the date on the front of the paper: excellent, it’s a Saturday (you lose track of days in a hospital) so there’ll be birth announcements. She turns to them at once.

Two Clares, an Aoife and twins Gemma and Joseph. Hmm. Aoife has potential. There’s also a brace of Seans, a Patrick and a Sarah. Patrick’s lovely but he’d end up a Paddy. She scans the list of parents’ names and is relieved to find she doesn’t know any of them.

Another set of twins, Richard and Alison, catches her eye.

‘Good God above,’ she rants, ‘it’s bad enough other women having babies without managing two at once; no wonder there aren’t enough to go around for the rest of us.’

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.