Martina Devlin - Three Wise Men

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 …’