Three Wise Men

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.

‘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.’

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.