Three Wise Men. Martina Devlin
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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.
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