Three Wise Men. Martina Devlin
Читать онлайн книгу.
‘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