Martina Devlin - Three Wise Men

‘Leaky Donnybrook – all those trees plus the Irish climate add up to drips every time you walk down the street.’

‘There’s your fulfilling job tending to books at Rathmines library’ – Eimear hazarded an unconvincing gargoyle impression – ‘a mother-in-law safely relocated to Youghal and beyond casual visits, no children to leave chocolate fingerprints on your off-white matching sofas –’

‘Vanilla matching sofas,’ Eimear interrupted.

‘If your interior designer says so. Any more blessings? There’s the hair, of course; as nearly natural as anyone born outside of Scandinavia can expect, the toe-curling tribute from hubby on his last book of poetry, dedicated to “My inspiration, my life, my wife” and, um, I’m running out of ideas. Mulligan, you’ve been short-changed.’

‘I surrender,’ giggled Eimear, misgivings about Jack allayed. ‘I admit it, I’m a woman beloved of the fates, no one could ask for more than I have.’

I’d like that in writing.’ Kate signalled for more wine before the bottle was halfway drained.

‘Reinforcements,’ said Eimear.

‘Send reinforcements, we’re going to advance,’ responded Kate.

‘Send three and fourpence, we’re going to a dance,’ Eimear finished the joke for her.

‘That’s the trouble with knowing people for twenty-something years: there’s no secrets left, even your quips are shared. But it’s comforting too.’

‘Anyway,’ said Kate, ‘moonlight and roses have to turn into overcast skies and decaying flowers sometimes. If only to relieve the monotony.’

‘I suppose,’ admitted Eimear, although mentally chafing against it.

‘And isn’t Jack up against a deadline on his new collection? Doesn’t he develop a furtive streak, sloping around at all hours of the day and night when he’s hunting his muse?’

Eimear reflected. It was true; only a few days earlier Jack had sharpened half a dozen pencils and retired to the study with the determined air of a man about to grab creativity by the throat and shake a sonnet or two out of it. But a jarring thought intruded. Jack never talked about work in progress, so how did Kate know …

‘Kate, how on earth are you aware that Jack only has a few weeks left before he must hand in his manuscript to the publishers? I wouldn’t have mentioned that to you; he has it drilled into me never, not ever, to discuss unfinished work.’

Kate radiated ridicule. ‘So Jack’s made you take a vow of silence, signed you up for a contemplative order? Or has he had your lips stapled together? Something must’ve slipped out, you know the loosening effect the demon drink has on an old alcofrolic like you. Anyway, men are off the agenda, this is supposed to be a testosterone-free zone. You know, Gloria is more than just unfashionably late. I’m going outside to ring her on my mobile and demand an explanation for her no-show.’

Kate rummaged in her bag for a fluorescent yellow phone – bought, she claimed, because it made her imagine she was sitting under a coconut tree drinking daiquiris – and slipped off her stool.

‘Don’t empty the bottle while I’m gone, you lush. And don’t accept any drinks from strange men unless they’re buying champagne.’

Eimear hauls her mind back to Gloria’s kitchen. ‘It makes me shiver remembering it, Glo. There we were, joking about conning drinks out of flash guys who leave their credit cards behind the bar, while you were lying in a pool of blood not able to reach the phone.’

‘The bleeding was internal, Eimear. And at that stage I wasn’t in a life-threatening condition – serious to critical, possibly.’

Eimear cringes at the caustic undertone.

She returns home from Gloria’s in a happier frame of mind, persuaded that she’s overreacting to Jack’s trademark flakiness. It’s a little more pronounced than usual but not excessively so, surely. But the next day he mentions that he needs to call by college for an hour or two although it’s a Sunday, and her misgivings are back, multiplied like weeds during an absence. She pulls out the incriminating credit-card statement and stares at it. The transaction listed beneath his hotel room rental catches her eye. Drat, she was hoping the Fiorucci T-shirt mightn’t appear until next month – Jack would explode when he saw the price.

‘You paid HOW much for a T-shirt? I don’t care if there are cherubs on the front, there’d need to be the complete heavenly choir of angels for that price.’

Wait a minute, Eimear checks herself, she doesn’t need to take abuse about overspending from a man tasteless enough to use their credit card to fund his slap and tickle. This bill’s as damning an indictment of her husband as finding a used condom under the bed. Now why did she have to think of bed, it’s a tiny step to the mental picture of Jack in bed with another woman. The permutations whirl around in her brain.

‘So much for “with my body I thee worship”!’ She crumples the statement and flings it on the floor. ‘He’s on his knees to more than me, that’s for sure.’

Eimear half-heartedly peels potatoes for Sunday dinner. She wishes she were more like Kate, who insists she’ll live and die a spinster of this parish; Eimear used to think spinsterhood was a shameful fate, something that stamped you with a big red reject sign. Now she can see there’s a lot to be said for the single life. At least if she were unmarried, Eimear wouldn’t lie in the bath torturing herself with images of her husband splashing in the suds with someone else or sharing her toothbrush or shaving so he doesn’t rasp her when they kiss. Or brushing her hair, his seduction speciality.

It’s not the sex she minds it’s the intimacy. That’s a lie, she objects to the sex too. When the pictures of him with this faceless woman – she’s always featureless, but with long, sit-upon hair as blue-black as the feathers on a crow – become too detailed she slides under the bath water and hums until the rush of blood to the head blocks everything out.

The potatoes are boiling in a saucepan, waiting to be mashed within an inch of their lives, and Eimear is still brooding on Jack’s affair. Now she’s wondering where he goes to shag them – hotel rooms, maybe? No, that would show up on his credit card and there’s been just the one hotel so far. Obviously he only chats up women with their own flat. She imagines the conversation:

‘Excuse me, you tantalising creature, do you live at home, share with friends or are you self-sufficient? Because there’s something about an independent woman I find irresistible …’

The potatoes are boiling over; she doesn’t notice as the water sizzles around the electric ring and the saucepan lid rattles a tetchy tune. Maybe she’s partly to blame for the way Jack is, perhaps there’s something missing in her that he has to search for elsewhere. Some womanly component that the great geneticist in the sky left out:

‘Let’s see, Eimear Mulligan, she’s getting the face, the size 10 body and the lifelong friends. That doesn’t leave room for much else – fair’s fair, it’ll have to do her.’

Eimear realises she’s being inconsistent, in one breath wishing she’d never married anyone, let alone Jack, and in another hating every woman he’s ever spared a glance for, from under those heavy black brows of his.

‘He plucks grey hairs out of them, that’s how conceited he is.’ She drags a hand through her neck-length bob. ‘I do it for him, that’s how feeble I am.’

But she doesn’t want to be consistent, she wants to feel secure again.

She even tried going to church last Sunday, something she hasn’t bothered with regularly since she was a teenager. She sat there for almost an hour and let the words wash over her without listening to their meaning, but there was a comforting sense of familiarity. Eimear thought about Mass again this morning but decided against it – she’d feel hypocritical. She bums to punish Jack, not hear a Christian message: forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. Screw that. She wants him to suffer. To fall down and break his crown and then she’ll be the one to bathe it with vinegar and brown paper. She’ll be the one he needs.