MARTINA DEVLIN
THREE WISE MEN

DEDICATION

For my parents, Frank and Bridie Devlin, who always make me feel the centre of their universe

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Part One

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Part Two

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Part Three

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Keep Reading

Copyright

About the Publisher

PART ONE

CHAPTER 1

Kate props an elbow on the ledge above the hand-basin and concentrates on drawing a steady line around her mouth with her new rust-coloured lip pencil. She’s slapping on the face she chooses to wear, as opposed to the one dumped on her by the arbitrariness of genes, for a rendezvous with Jack. And lip-liner is integral to the operation. She snapped up three pencils when she spotted them in Clery’s – plums are in vogue and you can’t find autumn shades to save your life. Not that lip-liner is technically a life-saver, but it comes a close second. It’s certainly giving her mouth the kiss of life.

Kate is preparing for her farewell to Jack’s arms, as well as the rest of him, and she can’t apply herself to the task until she applies her make-up. A woman has to look her best to do her worst to a man; imagine if he went home relieved. Like a lemming that couldn’t find a cliff.

Her lips are within half an inch of perfection when the phone rings, causing a painted-on wobble instead of a pout. She contemplates ignoring the source of the interruption, reconsiders when it strikes her the caller might be Jack changing the time they’re to meet, and bolts from the bathroom before the answering machine gobbles any message.

The caller is Mick, her friend Gloria’s husband, and he’s virtually incoherent. Kate has to make him repeat his story twice before she establishes that Gloria’s been rushed to hospital with a ruptured ectopic pregnancy. Whatever that is. It must have required the full ER team from Mick’s garble. Thirty-six hours without sleep are taking their toll on him. Kate, only barely assimilating the news, realises she’s still clutching her new lip-liner and grinding the pencil tip against the body of the phone. Bronze Babe is smeared between redial button and microphone. She and Gloria have been intimates for a million years, since they were cast as two of the three wise men in the Primary Two nativity play; another friend, Eimear, was the third.

‘Which hospital is Gloria in? I’ll go straight in to see her,’ she offers.

Mick advises against it, to Kate’s relief when she remembers her only way of contacting Jack to cancel is by catching him in the office – a call to his home is never an option. Not unless she’s intent on setting out the welcome mat for trouble.

‘Leave it for now, she’s still not able to have visitors: the tears start tripping her as soon as she lays eyes on me,’ says Mick. ‘They operated on her in the middle of the night and it’s been a massive shock. We didn’t even realise she was pregnant. I was too shaken to let you know sooner but Gloria’s just asked me to give you and Eimear a ring – I’ve already told her family. Eimear’s my last call, then I suppose I’ll head off and find something to eat. I haven’t much of an appetite, to be honest. You’ve no idea what a jolt this has been; it’s the first time I’ve had to phone an ambulance.’

Guilt pricks at Kate. She ought to volunteer to meet Mick for a drink, she’s known him even longer than Gloria and he sounds in a state, but she’s psyched up for her parting is such sweet sorrow number with Jack. And even if she doesn’t pull it off tonight she can plant the seeds … drop hints about how the end of the line is only a few stops away. In the meantime she can’t bring herself to renounce the euphoria of an evening spent in her lover’s company. Mick must have other friends who can keep an eye on him.

‘I’ll drop in to see Gloria before work tomorrow,’ she promises; and conscience salved after a few consolatory truisms, returns to her dating ritual preparations. Game on.

Kate knows she should feel restrained by Gloria’s hospitalisation but decency is purged by jubilation at the prospect of Jack’s undivided attention. Her reflection smiles giddily at her as a wave of exultation bubbles up from her diaphragm and catches in her throat. He drenches her with gladness, simply the thought of him makes her laugh aloud. It’s enough to be able to look at Jack, she wouldn’t object if there was never any touching. Actually, that’s a fib; she adores the stroking, but it’s not the alpha and the omega.

‘Listen to me with my Latin tags. I should forget about being a lawyer and think about being a friend,’ she reminds herself.

Kate’s aware – and only hazily concerned by the realisation – that she’s dwelling on the anticipatory pleasure of being with Jack without sparing a thought for Gloria, comatose and attached to a drip. She’ll make it up to her tomorrow; she’ll transform Gloria’s room into a bower. Meanwhile she should be plotting the direction her tryst with Jack will take.

She’s decided to end their affair, although not because it’s turned stale – a flashback of Jack’s lean brown fingers cupping her cheek swims before her eyes and she tingles with anticipation, losing her train of thought. ‘Concentrate,’ she wills herself, a woman needs to be rehearsed before an encounter with Jack. He has a propensity for bringing the curtain down on the rational processes. Jack O’Brien tends to make you feel more and think less.

That’s why she’s wearing her dating underwear. Kate has no intention of ending up in bed with him but to be on the safe side she slipped on a particularly sheer matching set after showering. Jack always notices and comments as he eases them off, it’s worth occasionally imagining you’ve stumbled into playing the leading lady in a porn movie for the pleasure he takes in it.

On Jackless days she slings on whatever comes to hand – even her boyfriend Pearse’s boxer shorts when she’s cold – but if Jack’s in the vicinity Kate prefers the comfort of the uncomfortable. Style over substance is the coda, which is just as well because there’s virtually no substance to what she’s wearing.

But back to the task ahead. She daubs at the shaky patch on the lip-line front and contemplates options in the staple declarations department. There’s that threadbare standby, ‘Let’s agree to say goodbye now before anyone gets hurt,’ closely followed by, ‘We owe it to our partners to call it a day.’ She has a sneaking fondness for ‘We both knew this liaison had built-in obsolescence’ but is wary of fielding it in case Jack accuses her of pomposity.

Kate giggles. ‘The sure-fire way to scare a man off is to tell him you’re ready to have his baby.’

But carrying his child – or anyone else’s – is unimaginable. Besides, she doesn’t want to put the wind up Jack so thoroughly that he’s caught in a typhoon; what’s required here is a regretful parting of the ways potholed with might-have-beens.

Even as she rehearses, Kate instinctively recognises her chances of pulling off a dignified exit-stage-left are on a par with the likelihood of nomination for a Nobel Prize. Jack only permits disengagement when he’s ready; anyone else’s requirements do not compute. He confessed once that he ended or engineered the conclusion of every single relationship he embarked on. Apart from his marriage, which still purports to be watertight in Jack’s version of his first-class cruise through life.

This time she’s going to take the initiative, vows Kate, scrutinising her face and deciding it will pass muster. God, but it’s time-consuming, this business of packaging yourself for an affair. The rules preclude turning up in mangy jeans and a windcheater, it has to be glamour every time. As sound a reason for bailing out as any dilatory – but better late than never – notions about loyalty or morality. She could have waded through Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy with all the hours lavished on blending, shading and defining a face that would never, not ever, earn a second glance when Jack’s wife was in the vicinity.

She’ll call a halt tonight for sure. Fortified with this sense of clambering a few rungs up the moral ladder, Kate activates the burglar alarm and closes the front door behind her. Then she has to de-activate it to retrieve a coat – in her exhilaration at knowing she’ll be within Jack’s ambit in ten minutes, less if she trots, she forgets that she needs another layer. He might proclaim himself enthralled by her skinny freckled arms but he won’t be quite so smitten by goosebumps lurching upon them.

That’s a characteristic of Jack, she thinks as she hurtles down the stairs. He fosters oblivion. Which just about sums up her attitude to Pearse. She has a disgraceful capacity for amnesia where he’s concerned. Make that mental obliteration.

Her boyfriend – although Kate doubts Pearse was ever a boy because he was born middle-aged – is currently visiting his mother in Roscommon. This has allowed her the luxury of an hour in the bathroom reinventing her appearance for Jack’s delectation, allied to the elimination of any obligation to construct a plausible excuse for heading out dressed like a slut on a week night. Thank heavens for Pearse’s mother’s unsteady turn the other day propelling him westwards.

Jack isn’t in The Odeon when Kate arrives; she’s disappointed, searching the bar decorated with a nod in the direction of a thirties theme. Then again, Jack is never there first. She always forgives him because she doesn’t want to sound girlie about having reservations at hovering in a pub on her own. The Odeon is more central than the places they usually meet but Jack calculated it was safe because it attracts a young clientele, plus the lighting is so subdued you need a torch to find the marbled bar. And there’s a sea of bodies bobbing around Kate so unless Moses shows up to part them, the chances of someone recognising her are remote to zero.

Kate is swirling the dregs of her red wine with burgeoning discontentment when Jack strolls in.

‘You look gorgeous.’ He unleashes his most intimate smile.

Her resentment evaporates.

‘Let me order you a refill,’ he adds, stroking her back lightly with circular movements. ‘Is that a new lipstick? Have I told you yet how sensational you look? How come you look extra fabulous tonight?’

‘I had an early night last night,’ laughs Kate, warmed by his main-beam attention. ‘It’s down to sleep, the ultimate beauty aid. No, come to think of it that’s plastic surgery. But sleep must run the scalpel a close second.’

Jack looks faintly bemused as he leans an elbow on the bar and asks for two glasses of red wine. They arrive in miniature bottles and he carries them to a pair of curving cream leather armchairs which miraculously disgorge their occupants just as he searches for a place to sit. Life operates that way for Jack, reflects Kate, as he touches his glass to hers.

‘Here’s to wine and women, we’ll pass on the song,’ he says.

‘To wine and men,’ she responds. ‘Although a man is only a man but a good glass of wine is a drink.’

‘You purloined that from somewhere,’ he accuses her lightly.

‘Cannibalised it,’ she shrugs. ‘That’s as acceptable as invention.’

Time to play the goodbye girl, she reminds herself minutes later as he crowds her, leaning across the table and gazing at her lips so intently she starts to wonder if she has a red wine rim around them. Covertly she rubs between nose and upper lip while pretending to adjust her ankle boot, then prepares to extract one of her guillotine lines from the ready-prepared store. But Jack distracts her by lifting her hand and running his thumb against her inner wrist.

‘Feck it,’ she decides, ‘I’ll tell him we’re finished after we have sex. No point in ruining the evening.’

It seems churlish to raise the subject in the languorous afterglow of their lovemaking, especially when they have unfettered access to her apartment with Pearse’s absence. Instead of biting the bullet Kate swallows it, along with her good intentions, and snuggles up to Jack who’s radiator warm.

She’s slumbering contentedly when he leaps up, dislodging her head from its perch on his shoulder and complaining she should have kept an eye on the time.

‘Eimear will go ballistic if I wake her arriving home at 2 a.m.,’ Jack whines, looking considerably less alluring with a crossly furrowed forehead and one foot in his underpants than he did a few hours earlier.

Kate regards him with a distinctly unenamoured expression as he cannonballs around her bedroom scooping up articles of clothing. She thought men were supposed to fall asleep after climaxing, not trash your room. Right, this is it, he’s brought it on himself – she’s ready for endgame. But Jack isn’t.

‘Listen, we have to talk,’ she begins.

‘Not now, baby girl; order me a cab, would you. And, um, you couldn’t lend me a couple of notes to pay for it – I forgot to hit the hole-in-the-wall machine today.’

Automatically she dials up one of the local firms and hands him the price of his fare. By which stage Jack is dressed, prepared for flight and has regained his grip on the sixth-sense charm he operates.

He bends over the bed, cooing: ‘What did you want to talk about, Katie-Kate?’ and covers her face with feathered kisses which completely divert her from following her own advice delivered in front of the bathroom mirror. Oscar Wilde had the right idea about good advice: Pass it on. As precipitately as possible.

‘Share the joke, baby girl,’ murmurs Jack, by now licking her inner ear.

But before she responds the front-door buzzer sounds the taxi’s arrival and he bounds away like a greyhound out of the trap.

Kate scowls, punching the pillows, and contemplates having that chat with Jack over the telephone. He can’t trickle exactly the optimum quantity of saliva into her ear over the phone. Honeyed words are as much as he can manage there. She’ll call him tomorrow.

The last conscious thought to strike Kate, as she nods off, renders that phone call unlikely.

‘I don’t honestly want to end this affair with Jack, that’s why I’m having such trouble doing it. Just because Jack belongs to Eimear doesn’t mean I can’t share him – if we’re discreet.’

CHAPTER 2

‘I’m having an affair.’

The words dangle in the air, flaunting as temptingly as a Christmas bauble. Gloria’s instinct is to take them down and examine them, just as she always longs to handle glittery tree decorations – touch them to check if they’re real. She’s lying in a hospital bed, a captive audience. If in doubt say nothing: that’s her mother’s advice. Gloria ignores it.

‘Who with?’ she asks Kate.

‘With Jack,’ responds Kate, feigning interest in the wilting floral arrangement on Gloria’s locker.

The news is so startling it almost – almost – distracts Gloria from her own problems. Now she does take her mother’s recommendation to heart, although only because she’s too dumbstruck to speak. Kate glances at her covertly as she strips expiring foliage from the vase of moon daisies and seizes the silence as an invitation to elaborate.

‘We’re in love, Gloria. Neither of us planned it but it happened and now’ – she blushes – ‘we find we can’t live without one another.’

‘And love invents its own laws?’ Gloria’s tone is caustic; she’s regained her power of speech and a sense of outrage along with it.

The stain on Kate’s cheeks deepens, clashing spectacularly with her red hair. ‘We know we’re doing wrong,’ she admits. ‘This is such agony, ecstasy too, but agony. I can’t erase Eimear from my mind.’

‘You managed very nicely when you leapt into bed with her husband.’

‘Oh, Glo, don’t be angry with me, I know I’m a wicked temptress who deserves to be ducked in the village pond.’

Kate beats her chest in such mock-pious atonement that Gloria can’t help but smile. Just for a nano-second; this is no laughing matter. She hurriedly resumes her stern expression.

‘What were you thinking of, Kate McGlade, taking up with your best friend’s husband and you with a man of your own at home?’

Kate bows her head in comic humility, hoping for an encore of the smile, but Gloria is relentless now, appalled at the impact her deviancy will wreak on their triumvirate.

‘This is serious, Kate; this is beyond serious, you have to stop seeing him immediately.’

‘I can’t,’ she wails, rumpling her hair until it’s standing in peaks. ‘It’s the real thing, he’s my Coca Cola lover.’

‘Well then,’ forecasts Gloria, ‘prepare for Armageddon. And you’ll probably have your cornflake-box crown confiscated.’

They each wore one, sprayed gold and decorated with fruit gums, twenty-six years ago as the Three Wise Men. Trouble is, they grew up to be Three Unwise Women.

But Gloria’s losing sight of her own troubles with Kate and she’s not ready to shed that comforting blanket of misery just yet – especially not to tackle a situation as explosive as this. A dear little nun who calls for an uninvited visit is just about to remind her of them. The sister totters into the room, sees another figure by the bedside and starts backing out, but Kate (natural born coward that she is, thinks Gloria) insists she has errands to run and she’ll call by later.

‘There’s no need,’ Gloria tells her.

‘Holles Street Hospital is only around the corner from me, it’s no bother, Glo. I’ll bring you some flowers – these ones need urgent medical attention,’ Kate bribes her.

‘Make it freesias,’ she barters. ‘And don’t think I’ve finished with you yet, you’ve a shopping trolley full of explaining to do.’

Kate settles the nun in a chair by Gloria’s bedside and scuttles off, pulling faces at her behind the tiny sister’s back. Gloria shakes her head: The woman’s beyond redemption – one minute she’s chanting mea culpas, the next she’s behaving like a skit of a schoolgirl.

However she has a guest to take her mind off Kate’s bombshell, one who looks like she’s been paying hospital visits since the days of dancing at the crossroads. Not that nuns went in for much of that, unless of course they were late vocations. Gloria studies her covertly as she speaks: integrity and sincerity shine from the nun’s eyes; she’s in her mid-seventies, no veil, neatly cropped hair, silver band on her wedding ring finger, mysterious stain on the front of her black dress. Gin or vodka?

As she listens she stems a rising impulse to slap her visitor – a sting to shock her into silence. Gloria looks at her clasped hands on the bedspread and concentrates on controlling them. The nun is talking about God’s will and how he moves in mysterious ways; Gloria nods whenever she looks directly at her and wraps fingers around fingers, pressing until white blotches spread across the surface of the skin.

‘There’s a reason for everything, even if we can’t yet see it,’ explains the visitor in tones Gloria hopes to be conclusive.

‘Indeed there is, sister,’ she agrees dully.

Fourteen years of convent education are no preparation for forcibly ejecting elderly nuns from your hospital room. Besides she’s leaving now – no, it’s a false alarm. The nun lifts her bag from the floor but instead of standing up she’s rooting around for something.

Amazing, notes Gloria. You can spend a lifetime in a convent, devoting yourself to God and good works, but there are certain female traits that can never be sublimated and the instinct to cram handbags to the hilt is one of them.

The nun tracks down what she’s searching for and produces it with a magician’s flourish: a holy picture showing the Madonna and Child. Gloria holds it limply. Our Lady is wearing her usual impractical blue nightdress – who decided the poor woman always has to be kitted out in bedclothes anyway? The small blond toddler in Mary’s arms looks like a right handful, no chance of persuading him to eat his greens if he doesn’t feel like it.

Mother and tearaway have their hands joined in prayer peaks and at the bottom of the card is an invocation, ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners.’

Even the Virgin Mary has a baby, Gloria thinks sourly. The nun settles herself back in the chair and she stares at her mouth as it opens and closes, opens and closes.

Can the nun direct her to where the Holy Spirit will impregnate her? Otherwise she may as well leave. It doesn’t even have to be a child of God, an ordinary one will do.

A nurse’s head appears around the door. It’s Imelda, Gloria’s favourite one. She and her boyfriend are saving up to emigrate to Australia but they keep having to postpone the departure date because of sessions. Either it’s a session for a brother’s birthday or a session for a friend’s wedding (that can run into week-long celebrations) or a session for their engagement. Sessions are what make life worth living for Imelda but they don’t help her and Gerry the Guard save for their Outback Odyssey.

‘Doctor Hughes is about to make his rounds,’ she announces, a prim figure in her nurse’s white. You’d never think this was the girl who bartered a pint of Guinness and her uniform badge for the male stripper’s lurex thong at a hen party last week, claiming she wanted Gerry the Guard to try it for size. Gloria looks hopefully at her but is unable to signal the necessary distress flare.

Fortunately Imelda’s talents don’t begin and end with partying like there’s no Gomorrah. A glance at the patient’s face shows an unnatural brightness in the eyes. Instead of bustling off, Imelda comes into the room and helps the nun to her feet:

‘I think it’s time we gave you a drop of tea, sister, we’ll have you worn out with all the visits you’re paying.’

No wonder they call nurses angels, thinks Gloria. If Imelda weren’t engaged she’d marry the girl herself. Of course she’s married already, and the wrong sex to pledge herself to someone called Imelda – at least here in Ireland. Still, she feels a rush of love for the nurse in that instant.

‘Here we go, sister.’ Imelda beams down into the older woman’s face as she lifts her bag and attaches it to the bent arm.

‘Well, maybe a cup of something would be pleasant,’ concedes the nun, allowing herself to be led.

She hobbles to a halt as she passes Gloria’s bedside and pats a hand, not noticing the bone poking through the knuckles.

‘I hope I’ve helped you, dear. It’s good of you to let me talk to you. You’d be surprised how many people don’t want to be bothered these days. They tell me they’ve lost their faith, as though they could misplace it like a spool of thread.’

‘Thank you for your trouble, sister,’ whispers Gloria as she potters off.

‘I’m the world’s biggest hypocrite,’ Gloria wails to the empty room.

She buries her face in the pillow, not knowing if she hates this inoffensive nun or herself more. The misery wells up and splashes down her cheeks. It’s not fair, she sobs against the starch. The worst sort of pillow talk. But even weeping requires energy that she can’t muster – the tears peter out and she’s left with a thumping headache.

Imelda lands back with the doctor, who glances at her blotchy face and decides to jolly her along. Gloria imagines him dressed like Ronald McDonald handing out balloons.

‘Now, now, we can’t have this moping, there’ll be plenty more babies,’ he booms.

Imelda sits beside Gloria and holds her fingers in her capable, calloused nurse’s hand – Gloria is amazed at how needily she clings to it.

‘This is only a temporary setback, you’ll be pregnant again in no time,’ insists Dr Hughes.

Feck off, you quack, she says, but only inside her head. She feels better and a twitch that could pass for a half-hearted smile chases across her face. The doctor is delighted with himself.

‘Sensible girl,’ he nods, flicking through her notes.

He’s headmasterly, jowly and heavy-handed with the aftershave. A few checks and he’s on his way.

‘I’ll be seeing you in the maternity ward one of these days,’ he calls from the door.

Not if I see you first, you scut, she says, but naturally it’s only inside her head again.

Kate and Eimear arrive simultaneously: Kate is weighed down with bribes – a stack of magazines in her arms as well as flowers – while Eimear proffers a box of chocolates so large she should have applied for planning permission.

‘God love you, Gloria, you’ve been through the wars. How many pints of blood did they pump you full of? I wonder whose blood it was? I hadn’t a notion ectopic pregnancies were so serious – that you can actually die from them. You’re not going to die on us now, are you, break up the trio?’

Kate rattles through this without so much as drawing breath, she always did take life at the gallop. Eimear is quieter, she perches on the edge of the bed and looks steadily at her friend’s wan face.

Gloria sees Kate’s game, she’s trying to pretend she didn’t visit her earlier. While Eimear struggles to open the window – it’s painted shut – Kate gives Gloria a cautionary look, taps her finger against her lips and says loudly, ‘Mulligan here and I bumped into each other by the front desk.’

As she gushes on about what a fright they’ve had, Eimear leans across, whispers, ‘Poor you,’ and touches the invalid’s hair. It’s exactly what she needs. The stroking soothes her, she has a little wallow, then, when Eimear murmurs, ‘Such bad luck,’ she’s ready to be brave.

‘Good luck, bad luck, who knows?’ Gloria gives an elaborate shrug.

They stare at her a moment before laughing aloud – nervous peals, admittedly, but better than none at all.

‘Good luck, bad luck, who knows?’ they repeat, mimicking the shrug.

It’s their mantra, the three have parroted it for years when one of them has a setback. Unbelievably it does cheer them up.

Gloria is almost enjoying their visit. Perhaps that’s an over-statement, since she’ll never rejoice in anything again, but they do distract her from her misery – and from Kate’s atomic conversational gambit of a few hours earlier.

‘How’d you end up with a private room?’ asks Kate, as she rips the cover off Eimear’s chocolates. ‘You could fly from Dublin to Florida and back for the price of a couple of nights.’

‘Mick’s job at the bank gives us free health cover.’

Gloria is vague, she’s scrutinising the contents with the due gravity such an outsized package of cocoa solids deserves. Chinese farmers could probably grow enough rice to feed a family of eight on a patch of land the size of this box. The chocolates are called Inspirational Irish Women and they make their selection from such luminaries of Hibernian womanhood as Lady Gregory and Countess Markievicz. Kate chooses Maud Gonne so she can tell her Belfast hospital story again.

‘Remember the summer you worked as a domestic in the Royal?’ Gloria prompts her and she’s in like Flynn with the rest of the story.

‘One of the regular domestics was called Maud and if anyone asked for her when her shift was finished, I used to tell them, “Maud’s gone,” and then double over,’ she recalls. ‘None of them ever seemed to get the joke, they just thought it was a mistake to take on light-headed students.’

‘Which it was,’ interjects Eimear.

‘Which it was,’ agrees Kate. ‘The amount of pinching that went on was serious. I still have a conscience about the breast pump I stuffed into my holdall – I didn’t even know anyone who was breastfeeding. I ended up dumping it in the Lagan one night.’

‘You were young and stupid,’ consoles Eimear. ‘Weren’t we all.’

‘What’s my excuse now,’ Kate responds.

It jolts Gloria back into a recollection of her friend’s transgression. How can she giggle with Eimear about student high-jinks when she’s behaving like a low life with her husband? This needs sorting – only not just yet. She aches too much to concentrate on anything but her own hurt.

She watches her friends as they chatter, flicking through magazines and reading her get-well cards. Kate’s guessing who they’re from by the pictures on the front. She lifts one that reads ‘To My Darling Wife’ in gold lettering and says: ‘Next-door neighbour? The boss? No, it has to be from the cat.’

‘You fool,’ Eimear slaps her playfully.

If only she knew, frowns Gloria, there’d be nothing light-hearted about that blow. But she can’t be the one to tell her. Can she? She sucks on a ragged fingernail and tunes out of their conversation, content simply to have them there in the room with her. Her two best friends. They interpreted it as a sign when they were chosen for the nativity play: they’d been singled out to become a troika.

Ostensibly the roles went to the girls because they were the tallest in the class and the likeliest males, providing curls and dimples could be overlooked. But they knew better – it was meant to be. When three girls have been through the Loreto Convent school play together, wearing scratchy cotton-wool beards, it forms a bond. How they swanned about in their cornflake-box crowns.

Gloria is six again and decked out in her mother’s ruby quilted dressing gown, trailing sleeves and trailing hem. Eimear was the black wise man and wore not just a crown but a turban too. Of course you’re only meant to have one or the other but when Eimear saw her friends’ gilded concoctions she threw a tantrum until the nuns gave in to her. And that took some scene because nuns aren’t ones for giving in: it sets a damaging precedent.

Eimear carried the gold, Kate the frankincense and she had the mirror. That’s what they called it, initially by mistake and then as their first private joke. Gloria still has a photo of the three of them, looking bashfully exotic in their cobbled together finery, with Sister Thaddeus – the play’s director, casting manager and costumier – exposing an excessive quantity of gum alongside. She came from Dublin, the finest city in the world she claimed, and none of them could contradict her. At six you don’t tend to be well-travelled.

‘How far is Dublin from Omagh?’ they asked.

‘A hundred and twelve miles,’ she said – an immeasurable distance.

After the nativity play they became a trinity. Three was their lucky number: there were three of them, that’s one trio; they were the three wise men, that’s another; each of them was six, that’s two threes; and they were all born in September, the ninth month, three threes.

As teenagers they fantasised about forming one of those all-girl singing trios and taking on the pop world: Eimear as their lead singer, the blonde one that everyone could fancy. Kate and Gloria mopping up the stragglers – Kate with her copper hair and Gloria with her nearly black. Something for everyone in the audience. It never went beyond a few rehearsals of ‘Leader of the Pack’, with the girls cooing about meeting a biker in the candy store in dire American accents. Everyone sings in brutal American accents in Irish country towns, it’s the rule. They had their name picked out before the first rehearsal: The Unholy Trinity.

They were inseparable all through school, then diverged to colleges in Belfast, Dublin and London – but it was only a trial separation because they all ended up together in Dublin. That was down to Eimear’s machinations because she kept sending the others ads for jobs cut out of the Dublin papers.

‘We might as well have conceded defeat the first time she mentioned us moving to Dublin because Eimear always gets what she wants, she’s one of life’s winners,’ reflects Gloria. ‘I’m one of life’s runners-up and Kate doesn’t even bother going under starter’s orders because she’s not in the same race.’

Being stuck in hospital is an example of how she always falls at some hurdle or other. She wants a baby and becomes pregnant – so far so good. But it’s not a viable pregnancy, to use that delightful medical term fielded by Dr Hughes, so instead of a baby she ends up with an ambulance ride at 3 a.m., an operation and a chunk out of a fallopian tube. She thinks she’ll have a slash of a scar too, from the peek she took when Imelda was changing her dressing, although she doesn’t like looking at it. The place where they cut her baby out.

Mick was throwing up while they operated on her. Hospitals have that effect on him.

Mick’s her husband of eight years, the man she’s loved since a teenager. Wouldn’t you think they could take Dr Hughes’ advice, crassly expressed though it is, and push on with rupturing her other fallopian tube or planting a baby in the right spot? Not if her Michael has anything to do with it. He’s saying they have to take a break from babymaking, a proper break, until she mends – and Gloria has the distinct impression he means from sex as well as procreation. Not that she necessarily wants him to climb on her here and now in the hospital bed but she’d like to think there’d be some cavorting this side of the menopause.

‘The trouble is,’ she broods, I’m dealing with a man who looks relieved at the idea he’s under doctor’s orders to tuck his wife into the far end of the bed and drop a chaste kiss on her forehead.’

To add insult to injury she has a nun who tells her what’s happened is God’s will, a doctor who predicts she’ll go on to produce a brood of seven and, the final ignominy, a bedpan below her backside. Which she’s actually grateful for. But at least the nurses are human and there’s always Kate and Eimear to bring her chocolates and set her laughing. Although it hurts her right side when she does, the missing-tube side where her baby clung fleetingly to life.

CHAPTER 3

Kate visits Gloria, whispering that she’s ducked out of work for the afternoon. An undertone implies a sense of guilt but it’s obviously not an emotion she’s familiar with.

Look at her, she can hardly wait to talk about The Revelation – Gloria’s already labelling it with capitals because it’s so sensational. She’s seething with Kate, partly because she senses a furtive glee, even as Kate claims to feel like Judas.

Kate can’t stop mentioning Jack’s name, she breathes the word lingeringly, describing the affair in bodice ripper-speak – her heart skips a beat when she sees him and her legs buckle beneath his kisses. Gloria thinks she might at least make an effort to avoid clichés if she’s determined to force her to sit through this. As far as she knows, Kate’s never read a Thrills and Swoon in her life but you’d swear she was reared on them from her engorged prose. Anyway, between the irregular heartbeats and unreliable legs, the crux of the matter is that Kate’s conscience is interfering with her big clinch close-ups.

‘I don’t want to hurt Eimear,’ Kate sighs.

‘Should’ve thought about that before you played Open Sesame with her husband,’ Gloria remarks.

Kate turns a reproachful gaze on her. ‘I didn’t come here for a lecture, Gloria.’

‘I hope you didn’t come for absolution either.’

She’s becoming increasingly incensed by Kate – she’s risking the triumvirate, measuring a fling with Jack above more than twenty-five years of friendship. And in a dark recess, a part of her consciousness she can scarcely bring herself to acknowledge, Gloria is jealous. Jack’s so glamorous: a lecturer at Trinity College, a published poet, a regular on chat shows, and to cap it all he looks like Aidan Quinn. The first time she saw him her pulse kept time with the Riverdance score but she’d never dream of casting a glad eye in his direction, not only because he belongs to her friend but because he’s too dazzling to be interested in her.

Yet here he is having it away with Kate who’s no better looking than herself. Of course Kate has the red hair, some men are pushovers for that, usually dodgy ones, Kate claims. Gloria supposes it has to be the intellectual appeal, she’s a lawyer and witty in a flippant way, with brains to burn. Mind you, Kate’s obviously set fire to more brain cells than she can spare if this stupid adventure is anything to judge by. But since when did intelligence stop people making complete eejits of themselves.

‘They don’t have kids, it’s not as if I’d be breaking up a family home,’ Kate justifies herself.

‘So you’re thinking of galloping off into the wide blue yonder with him.’

Kate drops her eyes before Gloria’s challenge and a pause drags into a silence.

‘Not really,’ she sighs finally. ‘I know it has to end but I feel as if I’ve wandered into a room with no doors marked exit. I’m fond of Pearse, it’s just that Jack is so irresistible.’

‘Pearse. I wondered how long it would take before we got around to Pearse,’ Gloria yells.

He’s the man Kate lives with, an old dear who’s knocking on a bit, but she knew that when she moved in with him. Or rather, invited him to move in with her. He lived some miles outside the city in Skerries, a seaside spot favoured by families but not much use to party animals, according to Kate. Gloria feels her friend is getting a bit long in the tooth for this goodtime girl malarkey but Kate turns huffy if she intimates as much.

The night is young and so am I,’ Kate insists after an evening out, when the others are desperate for their beds. She makes them feel like social outcasts if they attempt to slope off home at midnight.

‘Don’t worry, pumpkins are in this season,’ is her rallying cry as she tries to reconvene the team at some drinking den where staff reverse the Wedding Feast of Cana miracle with the wine served.

But back to Pearse.

‘I’d prefer to leave Pearse out of this,’ says Kate.

‘I’m sure you would but he’s part of your life,’ Gloria snaps.

‘My insignificant other.’ Kate pulls a face.

‘Behave yourself, Kate, you’re living with him, he deserves better.’

‘I know, he deserves a wonderful woman who’ll make him delirious with joy for a lifetime and I can’t do that. Even without Jack in the frame I couldn’t do it. But with Jack …’

Gloria meditates. There’s nothing romantic about Kate and Jack betraying Eimear because they’ve fallen in lust and confused it with love. However she raises the white flag.

‘Look Kate, I haven’t the energy for this, I haven’t the strength for my own problems let alone yours. Since you’re determined to confess, why don’t you get your completely insincere act of contrition off your chest as quickly as possible and give me some peace. How did you and Jack discover it was your life’s mission to have two hearts beating as one?’

‘Initially I was flattered by his interest – I’d never have imagined I could be Jack O’Brien’s type. I decided he was having a rush of blood to the head and it would simmer down but it’s been three months now and we’re still crazy about each other. Let’s face it, he could have anyone he likes,’ Kate concludes in that pathetic, tremulous voice Gloria finds so out-of-character – and so infuriating, ‘and he chose me.’

‘Come on, Kate, you can do better than that,’ she admonishes.

Kate expels air noisily. ‘I suppose Jack winkled his way into my affections at a vulnerable time. Pearse was hammering away about how we ought to get married, since we’ve been living together for four years and how he’d like to have a few kids. I said where’s your hurry, sure men can have prostate operations and hip replacements and still produce babies. But Pearse said fathering them was all very well but being able to bend over and pick them up was another matter entirely.

‘Jaysus, Glo, it was babies, babies and more babies with the man, he was obsessed. He couldn’t understand why my biological clock wasn’t ticking, like most women’s over thirty, and I said if I heard it ticking wasn’t I bloody well able to tell it to shut up. I … oh God, I’m so sorry, Gloria, I was forgetting about you – talk about insensitive.’

Gloria shrugs. ‘People can’t tiptoe around me forever,’ she manages, although a few more days of fancy footwork would be welcome.

Kate continues: ‘I was feeling harassed and then I bumped into Jack one day in Grafton Street and before I knew it we were in the Shelbourne with Irish coffees, gossiping and laughing about nothing in particular – and then all of a sudden he leaned over and pushed my hair out of my eyes and we both knew.’

‘Knew that you were about to cheat and lie and abandon a friend?’ demands Gloria. ‘You’re mad, you’re dealing with a man who thinks trust is only a word that applies to his pension plan, and you’re no better yourself, Kate McGlade.’

Gloria can’t mask her rage. How dare anyone else be happy when life has kicked her in the stomach and then aimed its Doc Marten at the side of her head for good measure.

Kate shrugs. ‘Since when did you turn judge and jury, Gloria? You must remember what it’s like to be in love. How the more you feel the world is against you, the more you cling to one another. Yes, I feel guilty, but I also feel I’m bursting with life.’

‘It’s a wonder you’ve never been caught out – people know each other’s business here, this is a city the size of a village,’ says Gloria.

‘We’re very careful,’ replies Kate, but Gloria arches a dubious eyebrow.

‘You’ll be walking up the street hand in hand one day when you’re supposed to be at a conference in Edinburgh and you’ll bump into Eimear or Pearse or both,’ she predicts.

Another silence falls between them, not the comfortable quietness among friends but a brooding stillness. Gloria ruptures it at last.

‘Why are you telling me all this, Kate? Eimear’s my friend as much as you are. Do you expect me to keep a secret like this from her?’

Kate twists her mouth – it could be a smile, it could be a grimace.

‘That’s your business, Glo. I confided in you but if you choose to go to her …’ her voice tails off.

Gloria is amazed. A thought is materialising in her dazed brain and she can’t quite acknowledge it: it’s as if Kate wants her to tell Eimear, then the decision will be out of her hands.

There’s a rattle at the door and the afternoon cup of tea and two dull-dull-dull digestives arrive (have they never heard of Mikado biscuits?) delivered by Mary, one of the domestics. Gloria has yet to catch her without a smile as wide as the street, despite the fact she has breast cancer – everyone has their story to tell and there are no secrets in a hospital. She winks and leaves a second cup for Kate, although she’s not supposed to supply visitors.

‘What should I do?’ asks Kate, as soon as they’re alone.

‘Break it off and keep your mouth shut, there’s no point in salving your conscience at the expense of Eimear’s peace of mind,’ Gloria orders. ‘Nor Pearse’s,’ is an afterthought.

‘You’re right.’ Kate nods, adding sugar to her tea, although she hasn’t taken it since she gave it up for Lent sixteen years ago. They all abandoned sugar at the same time to subjugate fleshly desires (Sister Xavier’s idea) and leave them as thin as rakes for Easter (Eimear’s contribution).

They chat desultorily for ten minutes more, then Kate lifts her coat. Impulsively Gloria delays her.

‘Tell me, Kate, is it worth it?’

Her face is radiant. ‘God, yes. I’m miserable and torn and full of self-loathing but I also feel extravagant, exhilarated, energised.’

‘Sounds as though you’re high on Es,’ Gloria puns – but Kate doesn’t notice.

‘I feel as though anything and everything’s possible. A kiss from Jack is a hundred times more exciting than full-blown rumpy bumpy with Pearse, though he’s the most loyal man a woman could ask for. He could find me spread-eagled in bed with Jack sweating on top and still he’d try to believe the best. Like Jack drugged me or he’d walked through the wrong front door and mistaken me for Eimear. I despise myself. But not enough to want to stop.’

‘You are going to stop, though, aren’t you?’ Gloria insists, more stridently than she intends, but here’s her own world knocked to kingdom come and Kate’s having sex with someone she shouldn’t be and relishing every humpingly fantastic minute of it.

‘I must stop, I know that,’ Kate agrees and, blowing a kiss, she’s gone.

Shortly after 5 p.m., Mick turns up. She contemplates telling him about Jack and Kate but dismisses it on the grounds that he might blurt something out or even turn whistle-blower deliberately. Men don’t feel the same way about keeping secrets as women do.

Instead she talks about the mastectomy faced by Mary, the cheerful trolley lady, and once he’s worked out which one she is he’s suitably interested. It’s astonishing how much you can know about a person you don’t know.

She watches him defy the shape of his mouth to decimate one of the digestives she saved for him in a single bite and wonders how she’d feel if he were having an affair.

Provided it wasn’t Kate or Eimear she could handle it. Of course, she acknowledges, she’s probably being complacent because she can’t actually picture it happening. She may fancy Mick (or at least she must have once), but she can’t imagine many other women panting to grapple with him.

He has a faintly seedy air, not the academic dishevelment of Jack, the ‘I’m so engrossed in intellectual matters I can’t remember to push a comb through my hair’ approach; Mick’s is the ‘What’s a comb anyway?’ outlook. And he’s put weight on – there’s a perfectly formed pot belly wobbling over his trouserband – with more to come, she suspects.

‘Would you listen to me, and I’m supposed to be his nearest and dearest,’ she scolds herself.

There’s another reason why she doesn’t tell Mick about Kate: he grew up next door to her, he’d never want to believe ill of Kate, he thinks she’s the bee’s knees.

‘I must stop using Mick’s expressions.’ Gloria is alarmed at the thought of becoming a Tweedledee/Tweedledum version of her husband. The entire Tyrone Gaelic football team (their home squad) are also the bee’s knees, except when he loses money on them; Gloria hasn’t felt she’s the bee’s knees in Mick’s eyes for the longest time.

They met through Kate, who revealed the impossibly exciting news that he fancied her long before he had the nerve to say so himself. They had their first kiss when she was sixteen and sex on his twenty-first birthday. That was a mistake, he was too fluthered to know his lad from his big toe but she felt she owed it to him. Her gift-wrapped body to unpeel. Except he treated it the way most people behave with wrapping paper. Nevertheless they became engaged a couple of years later and Gloria was the first of the trio to wed, at twenty-four.

That’s a slice of the reason why she’s jealous of Kate, she’s put it about and Gloria hasn’t used it half enough. She wishes she’d tripped the light fantastic with a few more partners when she had the chance, but Mick was always there in the background and before she knew it she was parading down the aisle in white. Not exactly a virgin but not what you’d call experienced either.

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.

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.

‘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.

Eimear. Kate considers her friend as she stares at the ravages that lovemaking has wreaked on her face. Obviously there’s the glow in her eyes that magazines always talk about when they write those ‘Sex – The Fun Alternative to Exercise’ articles but her skin is raw from Jack’s lunchtime stubble and a spot is threatening to erupt on her nose.

‘Of course, Eimear never gets pimples, her face is a no-go area,’ she mutters, debating whether to squeeze or simply use concealer on the intruder.

Her mind drifts back to the Eimear she first met. Some little girls are rosebuds, impossibly gorgeous from the tip of their long curling lashes to the top of their perfect patent pumps, forever looking like they’ve just been primped by the Mammy for a photograph. Eimear belonged to that variety.

Kate’s mother would tell her, ‘Beautiful children don’t end up beautiful adults.’

Mothers don’t have a clue, she couldn’t have been more wrong in Eimear’s case; she became more alluring, not less, the older they all grew.

Kate squeezes toothpaste on a brush and bares her gums for inspection. She and Gloria are attractive on a good day – that’s a word they have to describe girls with teeth that are white but crooked or hair that’s a pretty colour although it just hangs there. She slaps some concealer on her nose – this is ridiculous, she’s still getting freckles and spots at thirty-two.

Kate bangs the bathroom door after her; wouldn’t you think it could be one or the other at the very least. She thought she was finished with both by the time all three of them exited their teens on a flourish, vowing never to drink Snakebites again. At least not on the nights they’d be going on for a curry.

But you don’t become more grown-up in your twenties, all that happens is you’re better at masking the pimples. And in your thirties, well, then it’s major repair time – more than spots require masking; the lines and furrows are only the tip of the iceberg, you’ve secrets to hide as well. Kate takes the stairs down from her flat three at a time, in too much of a rush to wait for the lift to the ground floor.

She cuts through St Stephen’s Green, an oasis in the heart of the city centre, hands tunnelling into her pockets as she lectures herself.

‘I’m saying “you” but I mean me – you see how adept I’ve become at fooling myself. Me, I, is mise, moi, mio. I’m the one with secrets to hide. I have the trappings of adulthood: a partner-slash-lover, a mortgage, car loan, espresso machine, interest-free credit repayments on a dishwasher, wine in the rack that I leave there untasted for oh, weeks at a time. I’m kidding plenty of people with this mature adult pose but I’m not taken in myself.’

Inside, she’s sixteen again, gangly, spotty and ignored by boys, the one member of their troika with no dates and no prospect of any. Glo had her Mick and Eimear had anyone she liked but all Kate had was the two of them and they edged her out as soon as Mr Maybe came pounding up the path.

Kate dodges the tourists thronged around buskers on Grafton Street and quickens her pace towards her Dame Street office – her secretary Bridie will be nursing her fury at Kate for vanishing on a two-and-a-half-hour lunch-break. But Eimear continues to preoccupy her. Eimear was always special, a Charlie’s Angel. They were all three of them lanky for their age but tall on her was willowy, she was a gazelle.

‘My love is like a gazelle, see how he comes …’ Kate quotes.

Gloria chose that as a reading at her wedding and Kate and Eimear were doubled over trying to bank down the guffaws. Glo never was one for catching on to double entendres. That’s what you get for taking your inspiration from the Old Testament with all its begetting, they did nothing but rut. Mick may be a dear but he’s no gazelle.

Kate never understood why Eimear didn’t become a model instead of a librarian. Tall on her is frail; tall on Kate is a heifer. Kate’s father says she has solid child-bearing hips – to his generation that’s a compliment but she’d swap them gladly for a share in Eimear’s Waterford glass fragility.

Kate climbs the stairs to the reception at Reynolds, MacMahon and Reynolds, irritation welling up alongside a mental vision of Eimear’s swanlike appearance – even her neck is long and curved. Not that Eimear sets any store by it; she seems indifferent to her looks, she was always unimpressed by people who gushed about them. Maybe the reason they’ve been friends for so long is because they never flattered Eimear. Kate and Gloria simply acknowledged at the start that Eimear was sensational and then forgot about it, just as they recognised Kate would never pass O-level art and Gloria would never step out with anyone except Mick.

‘The Toners have been on the phone again about their house sale, Kate. That makes the third time today.’

Bridie regards her boss reproachfully over her half-moon spectacles. She’s extremely capable, has been with Reynolds, MacMahon and Reynolds for thirty years, and Kate worships her. But right now she’s making her feel like an errant schoolgirl.

‘I’ll get straight back to them,’ she promises, ‘would you dig out their file for me? And maybe, if it’s not too much trouble, a mug of coffee?’

Bridie tosses her head and grunts something Kate hopes to be an affirmative.

Bridie’s tetchy, as well she might be. She has to keep covering up for Kate when she slopes off to meet Jack, lying not just to the clients but to her partners as well. The conveyancing has gone to the dogs since she and Jack discovered horizontal lunches.

‘She can lump it,’ mutters Kate, closing the office door and dragging her mind from Jack to the Toners. Are they the Rathfarnham couple who’re selling up and moving to Greystones or the Glasnevin pair who’re cashing in on the Dublin property boom and moving back to the North?

Their file lands with a thump on the desk, followed by a mug of coffee – the one with a cracked handle. Bridie probably chose it deliberately in the hope she’d scald herself.

She opens the file industriously while her disapproving factotum adjusts the blinds but as soon as she retreats Kate’s mind drifts back to Jack, replaying their lunchtime encounter. She fills her senses with her lover, luxuriating in him.

A sliver of Kate that hasn’t yet strayed into the force field of Jack’s magnetism feels reservations about his casual infidelity: ‘If he can do it to Eimear he could do it to you,’ reasons an annoying voice she can’t still. But the inconvenient intrusion of common sense is ignored and the turmoil overlooked because her senses are intoxicated, she’s lolling in a languorous haze and she can’t think clearly beyond the next caress. She willingly subordinates herself to his hands, his lips, his weight – and for a woman raised on the premise of female independence, this abdication of responsibility is addictive.

Pearse materialises in her mind’s eye, souring Kate’s daydream. Not in a guilty way, she simply feels exasperated. She was the first to kiss him, for heaven’s sake. If they’d hung around waiting for him to take the initiative they’d still be at the hand-holding stage. They were seeing each other for a couple of weeks when she decided it was time he claimed her as his own. Fat chance. They saw a film (Pearse leaped like a cat when she brushed his thigh with her hand in the dark), then they had a few jars and went back to her place to drink the wine he bought over the counter at the pub.

They ended up on the sofa necking enthusiastically; still, when Kate stood up, adjusted her top and said it was time for bed he put his coat on and showed every sign of taking this as a dismissal. The sap. She had to throw modesty to the winds and say, ‘Hold your horses, big fellow, there’s room for two in there,’ before the penny dropped. Kate supposes she must have found it endearing once.

Now she’s bored with that diffidence – she’d like Pearse to be more assertive. But he wouldn’t know how to be masterful if his life – or his relationship – depended on it. She’s the one who always has to complain in restaurants if the food is cold, that’s the role she’s drifted into with him. It would be nice to be babied like Eimear for a change but that’ll never happen for her.

She’s not one of those women that men feel the need to pamper. One boyfriend told her he believed she’d be offended if he helped her into her coat, as though it implied she were incapable of looking after herself. He didn’t last long. Kate’s never been mollycoddled – that’s what comes of being a woman with hands and shoulders as wide as a man’s. She has neat little feet though, size four, which is tiny for her height (5 feet 10 inches), Pearse says it’s a wonder she doesn’t topple over because they’re hardly big enough to balance her. Eimear has size seven feet, hah!

Even Jack, who fetches and carries for Eimear as though she’d shatter like an eggshell if she so much as lifted a shopping bag, cheerfully tells Kate she’s a fine strapping armful of a lass.

‘Would you feck off, I’m only two inches taller than Eimear,’ she complains, but he treats it as a joke.

‘There’s a lot more of you to love,’ he laughs, grabbing her waist and massaging the excess flesh with a leer. Men think they’re flattering a woman when they’re sending her screaming for the nearest set of bathroom scales.

She’s never seen Eimear weigh herself, she wouldn’t give a second thought to the calorie-counting misery that consumes most women. Eimear has no appetite: the cigarettes help, but she’s never seen her study a cream bun with naked longing or work her way through a slab of chocolate as though rationing is about to be declared. Eimear is languid about food – she’ll take a biscuit if it’s offered but forget to finish it. Obviously Eimear’s the one with the food phobia, not Glo and herself, for all their stuffing and starving. But it takes more than a feeling of self-righteousness to squeeze a woman into a size 10.

‘No wonder Jack is straying,’ says Kate. (Oops. Is the intercom switched on or off?)

She can’t imagine Eimear wolfing into croissants dolloped with apricot jam in bed with Jack and deliberately dribbling some on to him so she has to lick it off. Not that Kate’s found an opportunity to do that with Jack yet but she has nothing against it in principle.

‘Admittedly I have no principles where Jack is concerned.’ She spins around in her adjustable chair for the pleasure of feeling light-headed. With Pearse she’d probably complain that they’d never wash the stains out of the sheets.

‘Shall I try to reach the Toners for you now, Kate?’ Bridie’s voice crackles over the intercom. (Rats, it was on.)

‘Not just yet thanks, Bridie; there are a few details in the deeds I have to sort out first.’

Kate is pseudo-businesslike. She shuffles the pages, determined to make the Toners and their seaside cottage her priority, but within moments she’s sunk in her reverie again.

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.

She wishes Eimear knew about her and Jack, the same way you long for a visit to the accountant to be finished with. You recognise you’ll feel better after you’ve sorted out your taxes but there’s still the receipts and invoices to wade through and your teeth grind at the prospect.

She half-thought Gloria might have told Eimear all those months ago in hospital but she never said a word. Maybe she respected it as a confidence but Kate wouldn’t have minded if she squealed.

The worst part of this affair – even the word makes her feel soiled – has been the furtive sneaking around. Some people find that exciting; she’s well informed on the subject because she buys every magazine which promises to lift the lid on affairs: ‘Tears Before Bedtime – And Afterwards Too’ or ‘Top Ten Have-It-Away Hideaways’ or ‘Other Women: A Breed Apart’. Or the scariest one of all: ‘We Cheated On His Wife, Now He’s Cheating On Me’.

Kate feels sinful in a way she thought she’d put behind her; sin’s a state of mind, or more specifically a state of not minding, she reasons. But she feels like a Magdalene when she remembers Eimear. Except she manages not to think of her too much. If she strays into Kate’s consciousness she pours a glass of wine or switches on a television soap. Nothing like TV Land doom and gloom for distracting you from real life.

‘Love makes you selfish, Gloria’s right about that,’ whispers Kate. ‘Someone always gets hurt and it’s not going to be me.’

PART TWO

CHAPTER 11

‘House sharing at thirty-odd is no joke. Here I am in my thirty-third year and I can’t even call the roof over my head my own. It’s unnatural. By this age you’ve developed your little oddities, hence the name. You’re not thirty-even, as in living on an even keel, you’re thirty-odd as in just plain set in your ways and getting more solidified by the week.’

Gloria pauses to draw breath and Kate hastily rearranges her face into a sympathetic expression.

‘I have a theory about thirty-odd,’ continues Gloria, with the determination of someone who’s saved up a week’s worth of resentments and is determined to off-load them. ‘By this stage you’ve taken out a mortgage on a house or flat you can’t abide any more, bought matching pottery jars marked tea, coffee and sugar, as though you’re so mentally deficient you can’t remember which container is used for what, had passionate debates about colour schemes in some desolate warehouse of a DIY centre … turned into somebody you were mocking only a few years earlier. And what’s worse, you like it. You parade your eccentricities with pride, talk about them in the third person, lend them genetic credibility by tracing them back to grandparents.’

Gloria adopts a Tipperary accent, for no other reason than it’s the only rural one she can manage: ‘“I’m a divil in the morning, you can’t hold a conversation with me till I’m on my second cup of coffee – my mother was the same.” “The house can go to rack and ruin just so long as I’m able to keep the garden looking tidy – my grandfather spent every spare second outdoors himself.”

‘Now here I am, suddenly required to house-share. Pitched back into buying small loaves of bread because a large one goes stale before you can finish it. Back in the dark days of noticing and objecting (but detesting myself for it) when your friend drinks all the milk and never replaces it. Complaining, too, but feeling like a wrinkly, at her habit of playing the radio at full blast as she showers in the morning.’

Kate decides it’s time to intervene. ‘Call this a wild guess but are you finding life as Eimear’s lodger the teensiest bit stressful?’

Gloria nods and bites savagely into the cheese-on-toast lunch Kate has rustled up for both of them – it’s her stock in trade, her cooking doesn’t run to anything else apart from scrambled eggs. Solidified to concrete consistency in the microwave.

‘Mind you,’ Gloria carries on more moderately, ‘I can’t seem to please Eimear either. I daren’t set anything down, it’s “Don’t leave your mug on the cream carpet – if it spills I’ll never erase the stains.” So I tell her, fairly mildly considering the decibel level I’ve been subjected to, that if there was any space at all on the table I’d use it.

‘She chooses to interpret this as criticism of her plants – and while it’s true, as you know, Kate, she has foliage clambering over every available surface, spilling from ceramic strawberry pots and terracotta troughs, on their own they wouldn’t be so bad. The melee is compounded by the bowls of potpourri, the vases of flowers, both dried and fresh, the candlesticks with candles she never lights because wax is so messy and the coffee-table books she never opens in case she creases the pages. But try telling Eimear this, she’s in full flow about the therapeutic value of greenery.’

Gloria subsides, Kate heaves a sigh of relief, but then Gloria recollects another grievance.

‘And don’t get me started on Eimear’s feng shui fixation: she shrieks if you leave the bathroom door open – apparently it means your money will trickle away. Or does that happen when you forget to close the l00 seat? – I end up so confused.’

‘I wish I had a spare room to offer you, Glo,’ says Kate, wishing nothing of the kind because she doesn’t want her friend’s disapproving features on hand when Jack’s in the vicinity.

‘Wearing ear plugs to block out the noise as you and your fancy man cavort about the flat? Do me a favour, Kate. Just because I’m keeping your grimy secret doesn’t mean I approve of you two. Although I’m starting to see that Jack may have some justification in kicking up his heels, life with Eimear is so regimented.

‘I can’t even talk to her about it. The trouble is, it’s her house and that gives her the upper hand. Unspoken, but hanging in the air, every time you handle a plate cavalierly or leave footprints on the kitchen floor, is the reproach that it’s her china you’re risking and her floor you’re muddying. I can’t leave a scum ring on the side of the bath overnight any more, even when fully intending to clean it in the morning. I’ll find her on her knees with the Jif in her hand and a martyred look on her face. I can’t dump a few dishes in the sink or a pile of ironing in the utility room, everything has to be done at once. It’s her religion. Tomorrow is never another day.’

Kate is delighted to hear Gloria wade into Eimear, it makes her feel even more justified in pursuing this relationship with Jack. But Gloria’s resentment is already ebbing.

‘Then again, Eimear gave me a home when Mick and I decided we needed time out. Actually it was me who decided it, Mick was opposed to the idea – he said couples who separate never solve their differences. They just find they can live without each other. I suppose he’s right: even if you return to the marital home there’s a sense in which something has been smashed.

‘You’ve acknowledged the reality that the marriage might not be permanent, that maybe you won’t live happily ever after, and the genie is out of the bottle. Marriage starts on the basis of two people saying they want to be together always, right? Now one or both of them are prevaricating: “Wait a minute, I need to think about this again.’”

Gloria’s head sinks on to her hand. What a shambles their lives are reduced to; she suspects Eimear’s glad of the company, despite chafing at her untidiness. Eimear’s been rattling around in her show-house since she and Jack had the mother, father and second-cousin-once-removed of all bust-ups when she discovered a packet of condoms in his wallet. He moved into rooms at Trinity College; he wanted to rush straight over to Kate’s but for once the woman showed a smidgen of sense and suggested they let the dust settle first.

Gloria looks Kate in the face. ‘Eimear misses Jack, you know.’

Kate immediately turns defensive. ‘I didn’t ask him to move out – we’re not even living together. His decision to leave Eimear had nothing to do with me.’

Gloria sighs. It’s a pickle fit to make your heart break – if it wasn’t already cracked between the jigs and the reels. She half-smiles, that’s a saying of her father’s.

‘Would you give my head peace, it’s turned with the lot of you between the jigs and the reels. I’m off to Mulholland’s for a bit of peace and quiet,’ he’d complain.

Their mother rounded on the children when that happened.

‘You see what you’ve driven your poor father to? Sending him out on a night like this to a public house, when he has a decent fireside of his own to sit at.’

They never dared point out it was her nagging he was running from, not their cowboy and indian shoot-outs.

It was her father who insisted she should be called Gloria. That’s a Protestant name in her part of the country – it doesn’t take a fidget out of them in Dublin where nobody worries if you’re from one side or the other unless it’s northside/southside of the city. The only sides now are financial … tiocfaidh ar bank balance. But names are logos in Tyrone, markers of identity; of division too. Eimear and Kate – safe choices, no problem working them out, but Gloria’s a puzzle. Mallon says something and Gloria contradicts it. It’s not clearcut, people feel uneasy.

Gloria’s father named her after Gloria Swanson and her sister Marlene was named for Marlene Dietrich – he loved those old Hollywood black and whites. There’s also a brother called Rudolph and it has nothing to do with being born at Christmas.

‘You may not grow up glamorous, girls, but at least your namesakes had it oozing from their fingertips,’ their father would tell Gloria and Marlene.

Not much of a vote of confidence from the man supposed to be your biggest admirer but he meant well.

Where’s the allure in names like Bernadette or Teresa or those other beacons of purity they were supposed to be modelling themselves on, Gloria wonders. Agnes was another name the nuns approved of – apparently Saint Agnes was stripped naked by her pagan jailers but God sent angels from heaven with a piece of cloth to preserve her modesty.

Agnes Kearney, who sat in front of Gloria, would cringe every time that story was mentioned. She counts back: there were two Teresas and three Bernadettes in her class, including Bernadette Lynn, who did everything humanly possible to prove she had no aspirations towards canonisation – to the delight of half the fellows in the youth club.

Gloria inspects Kate with heightened interest across the toasted cheese crumbs. There must be something magnetic about Jack to send Kate off her head like that. There has to be an overwhelming reason why she couldn’t retain herself, like her innate sensuality responding to his incessant demands and leaving her in a haze of intoxicated befuddlement.

‘Stop it, stop it, stop it,’ Gloria shrieks mentally, sidling off to use Kate’s bathroom. ‘I’m getting myself all worked up speculating about a friend’s love life, it’s indecent.’

Anyway, it’s all conjecture because she’s never encouraged Kate to discuss her sheetside shenanigans – but everyone who knows her agrees she’s a goer. ‘A ride and a half,’ as Mick puts it. Although how he’d know is beyond her.

Mick was only insistent about sex before they married. There was a noticeable sliding off after their grand day out and her ectopic pregnancy was the straw that broke the camel’s hard-on. Left it limp, anyway; it may not be permanently inactivated but she’s not the girl to fix it.

‘Woman,’ she corrects herself, leaning on the hand basin. ‘I must stop referring to myself as a girl, if only on the grounds of accuracy.’

They’ve made love four times since her ectopic; that’s four times in five-and-a-bit months. A rate of not even once a month. According to Gloria’s February issue of Image magazine, couples who’ve been together for a few years settle down to an average of twice a week. So someone, somewhere, is getting all her turns. She was never that bothered about jiggery pokery until she realised she wasn’t going to have it unless there were twenty-eight days in the month. ‘Enjoy this, my pet, it’ll have to keep you going for the rest of the year.’ The less she’s allowed her conjugal rights the more she feels entitled to them.

She’s not even sure you can count all four sessions since he lost his erection halfway through the last effort. Effort was the operative word, his heart clearly wasn’t in it and neither, as it transpired, was his lad. She broods. It’s not a pleasant experience to find your husband has lost his erection halfway through work in progress. There you are, legs akimbo, having quite a nice time really, when you suddenly get that shrinking feeling followed by the sinking one. He pumps on for a while, as though neither of you have noticed anything unusual, but eventually he concedes defeat.

Then of course he’s desperately upset, manhood compromised, so you end up cuddling him and saying it doesn’t matter when it does. Especially as he doesn’t offer to distract you. Especially as you’re not convinced he’ll be ready to play house with you in the foreseeable future. Not on his track record.

After that, Mick seemed to operate a sexual shutdown. Gloria considers. It’s entirely possible he takes himself in hand after she’s fallen asleep but she’s discovered no evidence of it.

‘Let’s see a counsellor,’ she suggested.

He slammed the door on his way out.

‘Mick, we need expert help,’ she insisted.

He slammed the door on his way out.

‘I’m at my wits’ end,’ she pleaded.

He slammed the door on his way out.

‘I’m leaving you,’ she threatened.

He slammed the door on his way out.

So here she is in Donnybrook with Eimear, sleeping in her spare room on cream linen sheets and eating her meals off primrose pottery. Gloria misses her own embroidered duvet covers and her own willow-pattern plates. She ran away with nothing more than her make-up purse, some clothes and her pillow. She can’t sleep on any other pillow, this goes everywhere with her.

Gloria wanders back along the hall to Kate, stacking dishes in the kitchen sink.

‘Any word from Mick?’ Kate calls over her shoulder.

‘Not a dicky bird.’

She’s been staying with Eimear for a fortnight and Mick has only contacted her once. That was the night after she moved out, when he rang up and ordered her to get a grip, she was mentally unbalanced and she should come straight home and stop dragging friends into their problems. Now who could resist an invitation like that.

Kate turns around, drying her hands on a teacloth. ‘Maybe he feels contact should come from you, Glo – after all you’re the one who jumped ship.’

Gloria focuses on the jet earrings set dancing by the way Kate’s holding her head. She’s watching Gloria with an expression of affectionate concern but Gloria doesn’t notice as she ruminates on Kate’s suggestion. It’s forcing her to consider her motivation more narrowly than she’s allowed herself.

Does she genuinely want to save her marriage or is Eimear and Jack’s split the equivalent of the butterfly’s fluttering wings in Ballaghadreen that spark an earthquake in Bombay? Not to mention a marital severance in Ranelagh.

CHAPTER 12

‘I’ve thought it over, Mick, and it’s the only way I’ll come back to you,’ Gloria says levelly, bracing herself for a row. She’s not disappointed.

His face turns magenta as he yells: ‘It’s insulting, it’s degrading, it’s bestial, it’s treating me like a sperm bank.’

‘I don’t see that, it’s not as if I want to get pregnant by any piece of testosterone on legs, it’s not as if I’m walking down the street pointing to the first man I meet and saying, “You’ll do nicely, big boy.” It’s not as if I’m selecting a suitable sperm donor based on his IQ. I want your baby, Michael Patrick McDermott’s, my husband’s, the man I’ve loved since I was sixteen. I want us to be a family.’

‘But you’re telling me that the only way you’ll come home to me is if we shell out for fertility treatment,’ he protests.

‘So it’s the money that’s bothering you.’

‘No, it’s not the money, Gloria, it’s the way you’re going about this I don’t like. You’re doing it entirely back to front. Any sensible person would sort out their marriage before they’d ever contemplate something as drastic as intravenous fertilisation.’

‘You see, you know so little about it you can’t even be bothered to get the name right,’ she snorts. ‘What do you think I am, a druggie hooked on babies?’

So much for her mental promise not to lose her temper and descend to trading insults.

‘Don’t be so superior, Gloria, you knew what I meant. You’ve latched on to this treatment as though it’s the miracle cure but what happens if it doesn’t work, have you thought about that? Just because you empty your bank balance into the hands of some specialist doesn’t mean you’ll walk away with a baby.’

Gloria pauses before responding, determined to haul the conversation back on to an even keel. ‘Of course I know there’s only a one in four chance but why shouldn’t we take it, why shouldn’t we be among the lucky 25 per cent?’

Then irritation takes over: ‘You’re always so negative, Mick McDermott, you need to take a risk. We have no chance of a baby at the minute, at least this gives us something to hope for. Live dangerously for once, why don’t you. I’d have thought it would’ve suited you down to the ground, you don’t even have to kiss me this way, you get to be a father without any of the bother. And we all know what an effort it is for you.’

He leaps up, face contorted with rage. ‘I wondered how long it would take before you harped on about that. You’ve blown it out of proportion, just because I couldn’t perform to suit you that once when I was tired.’

‘Whatever. Now how about leaving your legendary caution to one side and taking a chance on medical science?’

Mick is still furious. ‘I don’t mind taking chances, it’s typical of you to paint me as some kind of tippy-toed big girl.’

‘The prudent virgin,’ Gloria muses. Mischievously of course.

There’s murder in his glance but he steadies himself visibly. ‘I’m not overly cautious, I just like to be aware of all the possibilities first. And you can wipe that supercilious smirk off your face, Gloria. What gives you the right to call me negative when you’re the one laying down all these conditions for continuing with our marriage?’

‘Sit down, Mick. It’s not conditions, just one.’

‘And a hefty condition it is. You’re blackmailing me into something I’m not sure I want to do,’ he hops from one foot to the next.

‘Well, let me know when you are sure, you know where I’ll be.’

‘Burying a knife between my shoulder blades with your friends from the sisterhood on hand to mark the spot.’

He flings himself into the sofa opposite rather than joining Gloria on the one she’s occupying in Eimear’s sitting room. Her friend has gone to an art exhibition to afford them a chance to ransack their relationship for a solution. Gloria refused Mick’s suggestion they meet in their own house – there’s no way she’s setting foot over that threshold until he agrees to try for a baby and she doesn’t mean by scrutinising thermometers and calendar dates. They’re way past that stage.

Gloria tries to reassure him but takes the wrong tack: ‘Why would the three of us waste our time gossiping about you? You’re developing a paranoia complex.’

‘No wonder, when I hear Eimear Mulligan or O’Brien or whatever she calls herself has been going around telling people I have a low sperm count,’ he splutters.

‘Of course she hasn’t, I don’t know where you get these notions from,’ she protests.

Mick pantomimes disbelief.

‘A neighbour commiserated with my mother about it, as it happens. The poor woman was mortified, being approached by a venomous old biddy agog to discuss the contents of her son’s testicles. So if it travelled all the way back up to Omagh then you can be sure tongues have been wagging freely in Dublin. And you’re the only one who knew about the sperm test so it’s a dead cert it went from you to Eimear and then she broadcast it on the RTE news bulletin.’

‘Mick,’ says Gloria as patiently as she can manage, ‘you know very well your sperm count was checked and found to be normal.’

The outrage level continues to soar.

‘I know that and you know that but someone’s got hold of the wrong end of the stick and my reputation is being smeared to hell and back and Eimear’s the odds-on favourite. Now that her marriage is over she’s trying to put the evil eye on yours.’

Gloria inhales deeply. ‘Mick, you’re being unjust – and what’s more you’re straying completely off the point. Now can you turn your attention to deciding if our marriage is worth enough to you – if I’m worth enough to you – to have a baby. That is,’ she corrects herself, ‘to allow medical science to help us have the baby I thought we both wanted.’

‘And if there’s no baby there’s no marriage, right?’ He folds his arms.

‘If you must put it that way.’

As he rocks back and forth on his sofa, Gloria is distracted by the sight of his stomach, still a pudding-sized hillock above his trouserband but no longer the mountain range it once was. Come to think of it, there are no fleshy gaps between his shirt buttons. Good God, has he lost weight? And how could he manage that when she’s certain he’s been living on takeaways since she left him? She realises she’s just accused him of changing the subject but she can’t help herself.

‘Mick, are you on a diet?’ she demands.

He looks smug. ‘No, the weight’s been peeling off me since you stormed off into the night. Granted, I don’t have as much of an appetite as I used to, I have a lot on my mind.’ He looks sanctimonious. ‘I may need to buy some new trousers soon.’ Sanctimony turns to triumph. ‘A size down,’ he adds, in case she hasn’t grasped the significance.

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