Читать книгу Three Wise Men - Martina Devlin - Страница 8

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.