Martina Devlin - Three Wise Men

Eimear studies herself in the mirror and acknowledges her face is different, it’s definitely changed. It looks like a pregnant face to her. She knows that’s technically impossible, since his sperm won’t have collided with her egg yet, but she and Jack made love last night without using protection and she instinctively feels there’ll be a baby. It’s just waiting to be conceived. Everything was perfect: she was mid-cycle, she lay quietly for twenty minutes afterwards – Jack thought she’d nodded off – and she willed her body to be fertile. She’s still concentrating on it, thinking fecund thoughts.

She intended sulking for longer with Jack but she read her Every Woman to bring herself up-to-date on babymaking techniques, she knows there’s more to it than some soggy collision between the sheets once you’re past thirty – Gloria’s experiences have taught her that. The section on contraception reminded her how to count up her ovulation cycle and it emerged last night was peak practice time so Jack was off the hook. Saturday night fervour was required.

Eimear allowed him to believe he was being masterful when he swept her off to bed and demonstrated how apologetic he was. He wanted to show her a second time but she was concerned he’d jiggle the sperm already despatched and send them off-course so she persuaded him to save his ardour for this morning. Which he did. Now she’s securely aware of a back-up convoy of sperm trekking after the advance guard.

‘Hope they’ve a decent sense of direction.’ She smiles secretively.

Babies remind her of Gloria. Not only are her fallopians officially kaput, there’s a chance Mick has a low sperm count. The great geneticist in the sky is trying to tell them something, thinks Eimear, then immediately feels churlish. She’ll call by to Gloria’s tomorrow, cheer her up. Kate seems too busy to do it, she’s behaving oddly, even by her own erratic standards. She’s obviously having problems with Pearse, it must be the age gap rearing its head: Pearse is a good fifteen years older than Kate – his exact age is shrouded in mystery, Gloria and Eimear routinely quip they’ll have to read his date of birth off his gravestone.

Eimear’s noticed that Kate has taken to referring to Pearse as ‘the oul’ fellow’, as if he were her father or some ancient neighbour. A few years ago she was singing the praises of the more mature man, now you’d swear he was too decrepit to put one foot in front of the other. Let alone manage a bit of the other.

Eimear rings Gloria with her latest theory, which emerged fully formed ten minutes earlier. Gloria is attempting to mark some exam papers and isn’t in the humour for speculation but Eimear cajoles her into listening.

‘Really, Glo, it makes perfect sense when you think about it. Kate’s manoeuvring Pearse into a marriage proposal.’

‘Kate doesn’t believe in marriage,’ Gloria objects.

‘Flamboyant militant talk, all very well in your twenties but you march to a different tune in your thirties. We both know she presents herself as this free spirit who’s escaped matrimonial shackles – we’re the stereotypes who sold out for a day in a princess frock – but I suspect she’s ready to settle down now. She’s just not sure how to admit she wants to belong to an institution she’s spent the past decade deriding as outmoded and degrading.’

‘It’s a theory,’ agrees Gloria. ‘An unconvincing one but a theory nevertheless.’

‘How can you write it off?’

‘Look, Eimear, remember how she wouldn’t even stand bridesmaid for either of us? That’s how anti-marriage she’s always been. She said it gave the best man the notion he had a right to snog you and the father of the groom would lose his head completely and try to feel you up.’

Eimear shudders, recalling several slow dances in a dress-to-suppress with Mick McDermott’s appalling brother Johnno. All in the name of friendship. Kate, meanwhile, was free to swan about in an elegant two-piece with a hat and crocodile heels instead of specially dyed pumps. ‘Then when it was my turn three years ago, and you were my maid of honour –’

‘Oh yes, the bold Kate, allegedly so insulted at the idea of an off-the-shoulder bridesmaid’s flounce or two, jam-tarted up in a black-and-white dress that was completely strapless. Talk about double standards – hers are positively double-jointed.’

‘That’s why it will be quite a laugh when Kate caves in and has a wedding day of her own with Pearse in tow,’ insists Eimear.

‘You’re mental, I’m going back to my exam papers.’

Kate’s a puzzle with her bouts of secretiveness and her offhand moods, thinks Eimear, as she drags out the vacuum cleaner to give her stair carpet the once-over. She’s never been as reliable as Gloria, as keen to maintain the threesome. Sometimes she seems to buck against their friendship.

Jack arrives home early as she’s replacing the machine in the cupboard and sets about persuading Eimear to take a shower with him.

Jack, in a bog accent: ‘Ah go on, go on, go on.’

Eimear: ‘I haven’t loaded the dishwasher yet.’

Jack: ‘I haven’t loaded you yet, for that matter, not since this morning.’

Eimear: ‘Jack! You never used to be so crude.’

Jack: ‘You know you like it.’

Eimear: ‘Well maybe I’ll step in and scrub your back when I’m finished in the kitchen.’

Jack: ‘Make sure you do or I’ll be down to find you, dripping water all over the hall carpet and exposing my virile body to the neighbours opposite.’

Eimear visits Gloria, convinced there can be no doubt she and Jack have made a child because she’s six days late and her period is never overdue. But her inner complacency – she attributes it to the premature onset of maternal serenity – is pockmarked by Mick and Gloria snapping at each other about trivia. It’s embarrassing being in the same room as them.

Mick has a habit of displaying a foot of lower calf when he sits down, his trousers ride up abnormally high. Today it seems to infuriate Gloria disproportionately, she’s forever telling him to pull them down.

‘Eimear doesn’t want to look at your hairy legs,’ she complains, and he hitches them down but up they creep again. After two or three times Gloria loses it.

‘Mick, would you ever put your legs away,’ she all but screams and he yells at her to have a bit of manners and then she really screeches, saying he’s not the man to teach her because he wouldn’t know manners if they stepped up and bid him good day. Back and forth they go, totally oblivious to Eimear.

They really are on the skids, thinks Eimear, they can’t even be bothered to hide their fights. Mick and Gloria are niggled by everything the other does. He pretends not to hear her and makes her repeat every request twice, while the box of Maltesers Eimear brings as a gift is material for a jibe from Gloria about his weight.

‘We’ll have to ration you to just a few of those, Michael, the bathroom scales can’t take much more abuse. You’ll be had up for cruelty to household appliances.’

Marriage can have a bizarre effect on love, shudders Eimear. Still, she’s not looking for romance, Jack’s sperm are enough and they’ve done their job. Thank heavens for athletic sperm and priapic husbands. Now what are the chances of her being able to slip out quietly and leave Mick and Gloria slinging insults like rocks?

Eimear’s period arrives on day eight. She’s awakened by the sensation of blood trickling down her leg and knows even before she’s conscious there’s a reason she should stay cocooned in sleep – her brain is telling her to enjoy her pregnancy a few minutes longer. Except it isn’t a pregnancy, it’s simply wistful thinking. She held off the bleeding for a week, that’s how determined she was, but she couldn’t postpone it forever. The period can’t be thwarted when there’s no baby to dam the flow and the blood comes slithering and blobbing. It repulses her, some of it smears on her hands and leaves a stale smell as though it were penned up too long in her body. She rummages for tampons but discovers her supplies have run out.