Three Wise Men. Martina Devlin
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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.’