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CHAPTER 5

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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.

Three Wise Men

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