Martina Devlin - Three Wise Men

It’s a week later. Jack and Kate meet in a pub in Upper Leeson Street and he says two words even more overwhelming than the ‘I love you’ words she still finds incredible to believe.

‘Eimear knows.’

Kate is simultaneously delirious and devastated. She wants Eimear to know, it’s a relief she does, but now she’ll think ill of her and that takes some living with. Not impossible, but it’s tough. Formidable for Jack too, he looks like such a bewildered boy that Kate wants to hug him and reassure him. The pub’s more full than they expected so she’s only able to hold his hand discreetly under the table. No point in half of Dublin knowing along with Eimear.

At least she doesn’t have to try and comfort him over the phone. It’s their life-line, their love-line, the phone. The mobile phone anyway, they never dare rely on land lines – too easy to check calls. The thought of last number redial propels Kate’s heart halfway up her throat.

But Jack’s admission isn’t as damning as she fears – or as heavenly as she hopes – Jack’s a drama queen at times. Eimear doesn’t know the identity of the other woman, just that there is someone else. He claims he wanted to acknowledge Kate, fling her in Eimear’s face to wipe the self-righteous smirk off it, but he didn’t feel he had the right to name names without consulting her first.

Kate’s puzzled. ‘But she knew you were seeing someone before, when she made you eat dinner on your own and deliberately ironed the front creases out of all your trousers. You know, around the time when Gloria was in hospital.’

‘True, but she thought that was just a fling with a student and we could put it behind us – she lavished attention on me for a while, as though she’d been consulting one of those “How to Tease, Squeeze and Above All Please Your Husband” manuals. Now she’s convinced I’m having a proper affair’ – Doesn’t he mean ‘improper’? thinks Kate – ‘and she’s turning malicious on me.’

His brown eyes glint appealingly and Kate murmurs the sympathetic words he expects. She ignores a twinge – Jack is her reward for these tortures of betrayal that prick her when she remembers how ill-served Eimear is.

Kate knows she sounds like a lovesick teen when she talks about him but she can’t help it, that’s exactly what she is: lovesick. She has an ache inside her when she’s not with him. It’s a sharper pain than the one she feels when she thinks of Eimear.

‘Same again?’

A suddenly cheerful Jack goes to the bar for another round of drinks, all he wanted was a little sympathy but Kate can’t brighten up so quickly. She sees Eimear in the bottom of her glass, she’s looking reproachfully at her. Kate shifts the slice of lemon so it’s covering her face. She’ll lose Eimear when she goes off with Jack, she’s resigned to that. It’s not easy to turn your back on a lifetime’s friendship but anyone would if they could exchange it for a lifetime’s love. Wouldn’t they?

At least she’ll still have Gloria. Sort of. Not that she’s too enamoured of Kate but she’s still talking to her, which counts for a lot at the moment. Pearse is gone, he packed up all his possessions into two or three boxes and left her his pasta maker. She’ll never use it but where’s the point in flinging kindness back into his face. Gloria claims he overlooked it instinctively – she believes if you leave something after you, then you’ll always return to that place. In which case Kate is due back in half the airports and train stations she ever passed through, but there’s no quibbling with Gloria when she spouts her folklore. For a townie she’s remarkably rural.

She wishes Eimear knew about her and Jack, the same way you long for a visit to the accountant to be finished with. You recognise you’ll feel better after you’ve sorted out your taxes but there’s still the receipts and invoices to wade through and your teeth grind at the prospect.

She half-thought Gloria might have told Eimear all those months ago in hospital but she never said a word. Maybe she respected it as a confidence but Kate wouldn’t have minded if she squealed.

The worst part of this affair – even the word makes her feel soiled – has been the furtive sneaking around. Some people find that exciting; she’s well informed on the subject because she buys every magazine which promises to lift the lid on affairs: ‘Tears Before Bedtime – And Afterwards Too’ or ‘Top Ten Have-It-Away Hideaways’ or ‘Other Women: A Breed Apart’. Or the scariest one of all: ‘We Cheated On His Wife, Now He’s Cheating On Me’.

Kate feels sinful in a way she thought she’d put behind her; sin’s a state of mind, or more specifically a state of not minding, she reasons. But she feels like a Magdalene when she remembers Eimear. Except she manages not to think of her too much. If she strays into Kate’s consciousness she pours a glass of wine or switches on a television soap. Nothing like TV Land doom and gloom for distracting you from real life.

‘Love makes you selfish, Gloria’s right about that,’ whispers Kate. ‘Someone always gets hurt and it’s not going to be me.’

‘House sharing at thirty-odd is no joke. Here I am in my thirty-third year and I can’t even call the roof over my head my own. It’s unnatural. By this age you’ve developed your little oddities, hence the name. You’re not thirty-even, as in living on an even keel, you’re thirty-odd as in just plain set in your ways and getting more solidified by the week.’

Gloria pauses to draw breath and Kate hastily rearranges her face into a sympathetic expression.

‘I have a theory about thirty-odd,’ continues Gloria, with the determination of someone who’s saved up a week’s worth of resentments and is determined to off-load them. ‘By this stage you’ve taken out a mortgage on a house or flat you can’t abide any more, bought matching pottery jars marked tea, coffee and sugar, as though you’re so mentally deficient you can’t remember which container is used for what, had passionate debates about colour schemes in some desolate warehouse of a DIY centre … turned into somebody you were mocking only a few years earlier. And what’s worse, you like it. You parade your eccentricities with pride, talk about them in the third person, lend them genetic credibility by tracing them back to grandparents.’

Gloria adopts a Tipperary accent, for no other reason than it’s the only rural one she can manage: ‘“I’m a divil in the morning, you can’t hold a conversation with me till I’m on my second cup of coffee – my mother was the same.” “The house can go to rack and ruin just so long as I’m able to keep the garden looking tidy – my grandfather spent every spare second outdoors himself.”

‘Now here I am, suddenly required to house-share. Pitched back into buying small loaves of bread because a large one goes stale before you can finish it. Back in the dark days of noticing and objecting (but detesting myself for it) when your friend drinks all the milk and never replaces it. Complaining, too, but feeling like a wrinkly, at her habit of playing the radio at full blast as she showers in the morning.’

Kate decides it’s time to intervene. ‘Call this a wild guess but are you finding life as Eimear’s lodger the teensiest bit stressful?’

Gloria nods and bites savagely into the cheese-on-toast lunch Kate has rustled up for both of them – it’s her stock in trade, her cooking doesn’t run to anything else apart from scrambled eggs. Solidified to concrete consistency in the microwave.

‘Mind you,’ Gloria carries on more moderately, ‘I can’t seem to please Eimear either. I daren’t set anything down, it’s “Don’t leave your mug on the cream carpet – if it spills I’ll never erase the stains.” So I tell her, fairly mildly considering the decibel level I’ve been subjected to, that if there was any space at all on the table I’d use it.