Three Wise Men

Although they’re a trio, she and Gloria have always been closer. There’s an imbalance in friendships where one of the members is drop-dead gorgeous and the others are drop-dead ordinary. They didn’t feel jealous of the chosen one but they were aware she was different. Different as in better, different as in luckier: she had an edge. Eimear was allowed to get away with murder all her life and simply accepted it as her due.

She and Gloria rolled their eyes as Eimear sailed through a potential crisis, blithely unaware of the possibilities for disaster, while they doggy-paddled in her wake. Sometimes benefiting, it has to be conceded, from knowing this exquisite creature. Fellows would talk to them in the hopes of an introduction, they were guaranteed a certain level of popularity on her account.

That’s why the trio never extended to a foursome or beyond – Gloria and Kate were always suspicious that people wanted to be their friends as an entrée to Eimear and Eimear herself was serenely indifferent. She has the two of them, that’s friendship sorted.

Her attitude to Jack is the same: she married him, what more could he ask for? ‘She’s never spontaneously affectionate,’ he complains. ‘If you suggest a cuddle she weighs up the consequences of whether or not it will crush her blouse.’

Kate savours it when he’s mean about Eimear, his complaints help justify her disloyalty.

She flicks her intercom switch to ‘off and pretends to speak to her secretary.

‘Could you make a note of this please, Bridie. Eimear brings out the best in people but she doesn’t have that effect on me. I’m adept at dissembling but I hate her – I’ve loathed her for years.’

CHAPTER 9

‘Gloria on line one for you, will you take the call?’

Bridie’s voice buzzes in and frog-marches her back to reality.

‘Glo, how’s life?’

‘Same as ever.’ Her voice sounds quavery, like someone who’s been crying.

‘Mick all right?’

‘Same as ever.’

Kate’s suspicions are confirmed, there is a wobble, tears have recently been shed.

‘That bad?’ she jokes, but Gloria doesn’t manage even a pretend giggle.

‘Eimear tells me she invited you and Pearse to dinner tonight but you won’t come.’

There’s accusation now, as well as a tremor.

‘This is supposed to be a democracy, it’s not mandatory to accept dinner invitations. Anyway it’s not a case of won’t, it’s can’t. Pearse has a work party on and I promised I’d turn up and lend him some immoral support.’

‘Oh.’ Gloria sounds mollified. ‘Why didn’t you tell Eimear that, she says you just snapped a refusal and claimed you were dashing out and couldn’t talk.’

‘What’s so terrible about that? I was in a rush. Eimear’s being awkward, you know how she likes everything her own way. She probably decided on this dinner weeks ago but never bothered checking with either of us because she assumed we’d drop everything for her.’

‘I have no everything to drop, I’m only too pleased to escape the house,’ responds Gloria. ‘Are you sure there’s no way you can avoid this work do? I promised Eimear I’d try and persuade you to change your mind.’

‘I’ve been neglecting Pearse lately, I want to try and make it up to him,’ Kate lies slickly. At least the first half is true. She lowers her voice conspiratorially. ‘You know what I mean, I can’t go into details over the phone.’

‘Right, of course, I’m glad to hear you and Pearse are getting along better. Why don’t you come over tomorrow afternoon, Mick’s at a match and we’ll have the house to ourselves.’

‘Why not,’ agrees Kate. ‘You can tell me why you’ve been crying while you’re at it.’

‘Just the usual baby blues.’

Kate hesitates, it’s difficult to know how to comfort her. She tries flippancy.

‘Time to switch to baby pinks, those blues are too depressing.’

Gloria rewards her feeble attempt at humour with a chuckle. Then she adds: ‘You’ll never guess who my mother was talking to in the supermarket the other day – Miss McGinn.’

‘Amo-Amas-Amat McGinn?’

‘The same. She was asking after Eimear,’ says Gloria.

‘Naturally, she was her pet. I was the one who ponged out her class.’

Kate has three older sisters and became selective about perfumes from an early age, there were always crates of the stuff lying around. She’d wear nothing but Channel 5, as they called it, at a time when most girls her age were still squirting on the Parma Violet scents. It didn’t render her any more seductive, but it gave her a certain cachet in school.

‘Remember how she’d say, “Would the child who smells like a city tart’s boudoir kindly go to the lavatory and scrub herself down,”’ recalls Gloria.

‘Is she still seeing Ronan Donnelly the estate agent?’ Kate quizzes Gloria.

‘So my mother says, and still no sign of a ring. That makes it a thirty-five-year courtship, give or take a year.’

He was a source of fascinated speculation, this man licensed to snog their Latin teacher. He’d take her to the pictures on Friday nights; her hair always had that just-shampooed sheen on Fridays. They used to imagine their encounters. Eimear was best at imitating them.

‘I love you, Maura,’ she’d proclaim ardently in her Mr Donnelly voice and then she’d hold up a warning hand in Miss McGinn guise, as he reached to embrace her.

‘First you must decline love,’ she’d command, putting him through his amo-amas-amats. His reward would be a juicy smooch. They all made kissy-kissy noises at Eimear before collapsing in fits of giggles.

‘Of course with the benefit of experience we know now that a permanent courtship doesn’t make Miss McGinn odd in the least, it leaves her one of the sanest women in Ireland,’ says Kate. ‘It gives her all the advantages of a man in her life without any of the disadvantages. The only mystery is why more women don’t do a Miss McGinn.’

Gloria is unconvinced. ‘If life was so wonderful, how come she was always in a grump?’

‘Speaking of wonderful lives, I have to get back to my enthralling job. See you tomorrow, Glo.’

As she replaces the receiver, Kate spies an Evening Herald folded on a corner of her desk. She flicks straight to the star signs and reads Libra. There’s some space-filling drivel about Saturn in ascendant then it cuts to the chase:

‘A day to tread warily because nasty surprises are possible,’ she reads aloud.

She doesn’t like the sound of that, but before gloom settles she spots the date on the paper – it’s yesterday’s. Good, she’s off the hook for today. Now she really must get on with the Toner conveyancing.

Chance would be a fine thing. Kate’s concentration lasts all of sixty seconds before paralysis of the little grey cells sets in. The Toners may be champing at the bit to move but they won’t be any nearer completion today. Kate resigns herself to the inevitable, picks up a pencil and starts doodling.

Eimear Mulligan, she’s writing – not Eimear O’Brien, her friend’s married name. Her insides are churning as she thinks of Eimear, she may hate her but she loves her too.

She loves her when they’re together but hates her when she’s with Jack, maybe that’s partly guilt, her mother says you always detest the person you’ve wronged.

‘Between my mother and Gloria, I’m knee-deep in this bloody homespun wisdom,’ she chafes.

When she was six there was none of this equivocation: she’d have given Eimear her cornflake-box crown if she asked for it. Kate draws spiky crowns across her doodle pad, then tears the page up.

She took Jack from her friend because she could. Jack the blue-eyed boy, Jack the white-headed man, Jack the ace, Eimear’s Jack.

It was meant to be a fling, she was never supposed to find out. Of course Eimear still doesn’t know – but the game has changed and the rules along with it. She believed she could hug to herself the secret glee of Jack’s defection. Kate and Pearse would be invited to Donnybrook as usual, she’d see Jack pouring drinks, complimenting his wife on a delicious meal, resting his arm lightly around her shoulders as they described holidays and discussed kitchen extensions. They’d look the perfect couple and Kate would know, and exult in her knowledge, that Eimear’s life had the potential to be as miserable as anyone else’s for all her Barbie charm.

Her watertight scheme sprang a leak when she and Jack fell in love. Kate found it just about believable that Eimear’s Jack would fancy her, men were always calling her sexy, but beyond comprehension that he’d insist he wanted her for longer than a night or two. That he’d insist he needed her from here to eternity.

‘Eimear’s everything I’m not,’ she protested one night as they lay in a tangle of sheets and limbs.

‘Exactly,’ he agreed, nuzzling her instep. Her instep! Pearse probably wouldn’t know how to find it let alone kiss it.

‘But she’s exquisite and talented and as flawless as …’ Kate gabbled.

‘As flawless as a marble statue and twice as cold,’ Jack finished her sentence. ‘She goes to bed with me as a favour, not because she can’t help herself. I want a woman who’s real, who has scars’ – he traced a thin line along her chin, the legacy of riding a bicycle without brakes – ‘who has a stomach and lips and breasts’ – he licked each part of her anatomy as he itemised it – ‘a woman who’s not afraid to eat and drink and enjoy life.’

Kate hugs the intoxicating memory to herself. But another call comes in and Bridie doesn’t even go through the motions of asking her if she’s free to take it, she slams it through.

‘Isabel Eccles on line two,’ she snaps.

When Kate lifts the receiver she hears a burst of Waterloo – she’s been put on hold.

‘Abba as elevator muzak – whatever happened to “Greensleeves”?’ Kate wonders aloud.

Abba reminds her of being a teenager with the three of them locked in Eimear’s bedroom, experimenting with glitter eyeshadow and ransacking the wardrobe. It was there they had their first puffs on a cigarette, menthol, because Eimear reasoned the minty taste wouldn’t leave them with bad breath. Eimear acquired the knack of smoking without turning the butt soggy almost immediately but Kate and Gloria were slower on the uptake. Eimear told them they shouldn’t get hooked because women who smoke have wrinklier skin.

‘She’s a twenty-a-day girl herself while Glo and I never did acquire the habit,’ says Kate, severing the connection while Abba’s vocal cords are still in full throttle. ‘And naturally, her complexion is still as clear as a morning in May.’

Kate taps on the intercom, intent on currying favour.

‘Why don’t you head for the hills now, Bridie, you’ve put in some late nights recently.’

Bridie doesn’t need telling twice, the extra half-hour will give her a head start on the other working mothers in the supermarket queue.

‘I do have to nip into Dunnes for tonight’s dinner,’ she admits, although her enthusiasm is deliberately muted so that Kate needn’t imagine she’s won over. Kate’s been slacking for the past few months and Bridie is exasperated at covering up for her.

Jack’s face swims into Kate’s mind again; until he came along she was feeling disillusioned by her countrymen’s amorous technique.

‘Mind you,’ she acknowledges, ‘they can talk any girl into a bedroom, I’ll grant our lads that, they have the gab. But then they want to race through all the heave-ho part as though their time is precious and it’s being frittered away. You might squeeze a little post-coital sweet talk out of them if they imagine they’re in love but, smitten or not, before long they’re thirsting for a pint of draught. Preferably in male-only company.’

Jack’s Irish but she excludes him from the herd. He’s not so much attached to the sod as to behaving like a sod, even Kate recognises that – still, it makes him all the more seductive when he sets out to seduce. He’s an incomparable lover, he has the soul of a poet. Of course it’s for his body she goes to bed with him, she giggles.

But Eimear’s jingle-jangling inside their triangle and Kate knows she can’t keep out of her way forever, just like she can’t keep her secret indefinitely. She’s longing for it to be out in the open. And dreading it.

CHAPTER 10

Kate has never seen Gloria so angry, not even in hospital when she confided about her Jack-attack. Kate knows why she’s doing it, Gloria’s focusing on her misdeeds as a distraction from her troubles with Mick, but Gloria wallops into her so viciously that she goes on the defensive. So much for the girlie afternoon she thought was lined up: gallons of tea, a slice or two of Gloria’s speciality ginger cake, perhaps some mind-numbing drivel about babies and a few snide remarks about Mick but nothing Kate couldn’t handle.

‘Fine, Gloria, have it your way, I’m the wicked witch from the west. Just because I fell in love.’

Gloria is savaging her about pretending she was trying to smooth everything over with Pearse yesterday. Serves her right for confessing that she’s going to ask him to move out, acknowledges Kate – whoever said confession is good for the soul was on the wrong track. It’s bad for the eardrums; Gloria’s complaints are giving her a headache. But she can’t carry on juggling Pearse and Jack any longer, the affair has taken such a grip she can’t conceive of it as an adjunct to her life any longer. Jack has become her centre of gravity.

Gloria’s unimpressed. But who’s Miss Moral Majority to criticise her when she’s leading Mick McDermott a dog’s life? And he was her friend before he was Gloria’s poodle, she needn’t think Kate’s automatically going to take her side.

‘You promised me you’d call a halt, Kate, you agreed you were being stupid.’

‘I don’t want to call a halt, it’s gone too far for us to casually break it off.’

‘You don’t think you’re being selfish, rating your own happiness above Eimear’s?’

‘She’ll find someone else, with her face she’ll be fighting them off. But I only have one chance at a Jack, don’t you see that, Glo? We’re in love.’

Kate’s begging her to understand but she turns her face away.

‘Love,’ Gloria spits the word out. ‘It makes me sick. People say they’re in love as though that excuses everything. “I’m about to wreck your marriage but don’t blame me, it’s love.” “I’m about to set your life on its heels but don’t blame me, it’s love.” Love doesn’t give you the right to turn your back on your friends or to please yourself at somebody else’s expense. Remember Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard in Brief Encounter? They didn’t run away to start a new life together, they looked each other fair and square in the eye, remembered their obligations and said their farewells. They didn’t even have a ride.’

‘More fool them,’ Kate fights back. ‘Happiness has to be seized and clung on to for dear life and defended against all comers. You don’t feel cosily self-righteous for doing the proper thing, you feel abandoned and depressed and an idealistic fool. Anyway, what’s brought on this sudden flurry of interest in my affairs, or more specifically my affair? You haven’t wanted to hear a word about it since I talked to you at the hospital.’

‘It’s Eimear,’ sighs Gloria. ‘I’m concerned about her.’

Kate is unrepentant. ‘She’s a big girl, she can fend for herself. All her life people have been doing her worrying for her, they can’t resist that translucent appeal she exudes.’

‘You never used to be so unyielding,’ snaps Gloria. ‘If this is love it doesn’t suit you. Eimear’s our friend and she needs us. She was there for you when you were desperately hunting for your first tenancy, holding your hand when you were knee-deep in rejection letters and convinced no one would give you a chance. And she’s been there for me through this fertility misery, although I know she’s at her wits’ end with anxiety about Jack’s womanising.’

‘What womanising? There’s only me,’ Kate objects but Gloria pulls a face and she falls silent. Gloria takes up the cudgels again.

‘I don’t see how you can live with yourself knowing you’re the reason for that strained look on her face. She’s up to forty cigarettes a day now and I doubt she’s eaten a meal in a month, I haven’t seen her with anything more substantial than a sandwich. You’ve put me in an impossible position, telling me about you and Jack, I’m Eimear’s friend as much as yours.’

Kate sighs heavily: ‘Look, can we drop this, it’s been a long week and I’m tired. Why don’t you dig us out a Hollywood musical for the video – something with Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly in it.’

Her olive branch is rejected. Gloria looks earnestly at her troublesome friend, misery spilling from her eyes. Kate has always envied her those eyes – they’re colleen-in-a-film-script green, not the muddy hazel that passes for it with some people. Kate wishes for the zillionth time that she wasn’t stuck with blue ones. Eimear’s are blue too but they’re dazzle-you-at-ten-paces azure, hers are standard issue, no embellishments.

‘Kate, even if you and Jack do gallop off into the sunset together, do you honestly think he’ll be any more faithful to you?’

Kate laughs. ‘Well of course he will, you sap. For starters we have a great sex life and Eimear’s the original cold fish, you should hear …’

‘Spare me the details, at least extend that much loyalty to Eimear.’

‘Look, Glo, I don’t know where you stumbled across this superior attitude. I don’t accept I’m ruining Eimear’s life, her marriage is in the Rocky Mountains anyway – I’m simply the catalyst.’

‘Delusional as well,’ mutters Gloria but Kate ignores her.

‘Don’t you think your time would be better spent trying to paper over some of the cracks in your own marriage instead of interfering in Eimear’s? Mick’s a grand lad, as happy-go-lucky as they come, but you’ve reduced him to a study in melancholy. His family are worried about him, or so his mother told mine during a lull in one of their over-the-fence offensives on Mrs Regan’s good name. The McDermotts are convinced he’s caught some disease because he’s lost so much weight and …’

‘He has a pot belly,’ yells Gloria.

‘… he’s become withdrawn and incommunicative which isn’t the Mick McDermott we all know and love.’

‘Speak for yourself,’ she responds.

‘That much is obvious,’ says Kate. ‘Clearly there’s no love lost between the two of you, so how you can even contemplate going for test-tube babies is beyond me.’

‘Why do you insist on calling them test-tube babies, like something from the seventies? It’s IVF treatment, in vitro fertilisation, assisted reproduction, a little medical intervention; nothing sinister, nothing miraculous, just modern medicine doing its job.’ Gloria’s face colours like a strawberry cone with outrage.

‘Still,’ Kate points out, ‘a couple who can’t sit in the same room together for more than five minutes without bickering aren’t the most obvious candidates for babies. It strikes me that you’re focusing on me because you can’t bear to look at your own problems, which are, I don’t mind telling you, my sweet, pretty bloody serious.’

Gloria reaches Kate her coat and walks pointedly to the front door. Kate longs to apologise abjectly, the best way to say sorry in her experience, and remind Gloria they always swore they’d never fall out over a man. But she walks past her without a word.

Jack’s worth it, he has to be worth it.

‘Anyway, Mick won’t let us have the treatment,’ Gloria whispers as Kate steps on to the path. ‘There’ll be no test-tube babies for me.’

Kate hesitates, turns back, but Gloria closes the door.

She sits in her car without turning the key in the ignition. She was never in love before Jack. The nineteen fellows, men, call them what you like, she slept with before him don’t count. She may have told one or two she loved them, she may possibly have meant it at the time, but it wasn’t love, nor a close second. Sometimes it wasn’t even lust, more a case of Kate exercising her right to have sex whether she wanted to or not.

It caught her by surprise, this falling in love with him. She didn’t realise she had, until Jack said it first. When he told her, it felt as though a thumping hangover had been wiped out, his words were a double dose of paracetamol. As for Pearse, well, she does have a conscience about him but he’s better off without her. He was her hedge against loneliness; he knew that because she was always honest with him, but it doesn’t reflect well on either of them. She glimpses Gloria’s strained face at the window as she drives off.

It’s a week later. Jack and Kate meet in a pub in Upper Leeson Street and he says two words even more overwhelming than the ‘I love you’ words she still finds incredible to believe.

‘Eimear knows.’

Kate is simultaneously delirious and devastated. She wants Eimear to know, it’s a relief she does, but now she’ll think ill of her and that takes some living with. Not impossible, but it’s tough. Formidable for Jack too, he looks like such a bewildered boy that Kate wants to hug him and reassure him. The pub’s more full than they expected so she’s only able to hold his hand discreetly under the table. No point in half of Dublin knowing along with Eimear.

At least she doesn’t have to try and comfort him over the phone. It’s their life-line, their love-line, the phone. The mobile phone anyway, they never dare rely on land lines – too easy to check calls. The thought of last number redial propels Kate’s heart halfway up her throat.

But Jack’s admission isn’t as damning as she fears – or as heavenly as she hopes – Jack’s a drama queen at times. Eimear doesn’t know the identity of the other woman, just that there is someone else. He claims he wanted to acknowledge Kate, fling her in Eimear’s face to wipe the self-righteous smirk off it, but he didn’t feel he had the right to name names without consulting her first.

Kate’s puzzled. ‘But she knew you were seeing someone before, when she made you eat dinner on your own and deliberately ironed the front creases out of all your trousers. You know, around the time when Gloria was in hospital.’

‘True, but she thought that was just a fling with a student and we could put it behind us – she lavished attention on me for a while, as though she’d been consulting one of those “How to Tease, Squeeze and Above All Please Your Husband” manuals. Now she’s convinced I’m having a proper affair’ – Doesn’t he mean ‘improper’? thinks Kate – ‘and she’s turning malicious on me.’

His brown eyes glint appealingly and Kate murmurs the sympathetic words he expects. She ignores a twinge – Jack is her reward for these tortures of betrayal that prick her when she remembers how ill-served Eimear is.

Kate knows she sounds like a lovesick teen when she talks about him but she can’t help it, that’s exactly what she is: lovesick. She has an ache inside her when she’s not with him. It’s a sharper pain than the one she feels when she thinks of Eimear.

‘Same again?’

A suddenly cheerful Jack goes to the bar for another round of drinks, all he wanted was a little sympathy but Kate can’t brighten up so quickly. She sees Eimear in the bottom of her glass, she’s looking reproachfully at her. Kate shifts the slice of lemon so it’s covering her face. She’ll lose Eimear when she goes off with Jack, she’s resigned to that. It’s not easy to turn your back on a lifetime’s friendship but anyone would if they could exchange it for a lifetime’s love. Wouldn’t they?

At least she’ll still have Gloria. Sort of. Not that she’s too enamoured of Kate but she’s still talking to her, which counts for a lot at the moment. Pearse is gone, he packed up all his possessions into two or three boxes and left her his pasta maker. She’ll never use it but where’s the point in flinging kindness back into his face. Gloria claims he overlooked it instinctively – she believes if you leave something after you, then you’ll always return to that place. In which case Kate is due back in half the airports and train stations she ever passed through, but there’s no quibbling with Gloria when she spouts her folklore. For a townie she’s remarkably rural.