Three Wise Men. Martina Devlin

more exciting than whoever’s waiting at home.’

      Eimear prepares to abandon herself to the luxury of tears, but realises within seconds that her turquoise silk tunic is in danger of being dripped on and sniffs to a halt. Instead she decides to go and talk to Gloria, she’s always to be relied on for tea and sympathy.

      She throws on a coat, lifts her favourite umbrella, painted with cats and dogs plummeting from the sky, and is soon striding along Herbert Park towards Ranelagh. Eimear realises she should have phoned first but she can’t bear the idea of the bell pealing out, unanswered, in Gloria’s redbrick terrace – at least walking there is using up some of the nervous energy agitating within her.

      ‘Of course I knew he was a flirt when I married him, it’s something he can’t help,’ she tells Gloria while they’re waiting for the kettle to boil.

      Eimear intended to restrain herself until they were sitting down with a teapot in front of them but she can’t hold her tongue.

      ‘Put him in a room with a waxwork of a woman and he’ll still try to chat her up. Mostly he isn’t even conscious of it. I never found it threatening in the early days – I used to treat it as a lark, you marry a character and how can you complain when he behaves like one, but I don’t feel so tolerant any more.’

      ‘Maybe you’ve been too patient,’ suggests Gloria guardedly, elbows on the kitchen worktop, green eyes clouded with concern as she watches her friend.

      ‘Exactly!’ Eimear sounds over-excited. ‘It’s time to make a stand, lay down some ground rules I should have made sure he was clear on from the start. I’m facing facts now. I listed them at the back of that Medieval Women at Work diary you bought me for Christmas, Glo. Shall I run through my checklist?’

      ‘You brought it with you?’

      ‘No, I know it off by heart.’ Eimear paces as she reels it off:

      ‘Fact one: There’s no woman Jack wouldn’t shag, apart from you and Kate. He’d never have the nerve to approach you two because you’d give him his marching orders and fill me in on his manoeuvres. Dear God, why am I thinking in military metaphors? Maybe I’m watching too much M*A*S*H, you see what marital discord visits upon a woman.’

      ‘Eimear, come and sit down, the kitchen isn’t big enough for prowling. I’ll wet the tea and then we can discuss it calmly. Would you like some camomile? It’s calming.’

      Eimear ignores her, up and down the galley kitchen she parades, wheeling sharply left by the broom cupboard and back to the marble wall-clock above the door.

      ‘So you and Kate are out of the loop – a twenty-six-year friendship matters to women, thank heavens for some constants. But every woman apart from you is a potential threat. Fact two: Jack loses interest in an easy victory – it’s the thrill of the chase as far as the bedroom door that he enjoys, what happens on the mattress is neither here nor there to him. So whoever he’s seeing shouldn’t feel too confident: the relationship has a built-in self-destruct factor. As soon as she said yes to him he was hunting for the parachute string. Fact three: Jack has to be punished for humiliating me. I’m doing that now by treating him like a flatmate who’s reneged on his share of the rent money one month too many. By being civilised but remote – actually withdrawal of affection isn’t very civilised but it’s only temporary. And it achieves results.’

      Gloria touches her elbow and guides her unobtrusively to the breakfast bar, pushing her gently on to a stool. Eimear doesn’t pause as she counts off her list on the fingers of one hand, an over-wound clockwork toy.

      ‘Fact four: I can’t keep up this war of attrition forever because it’s damaging the marriage. Not as much as he harmed it with his runaway willy but enough to dent the bodywork. And it’s misery to keep it going, he hates it but I detest it too – you automatically open your mouth to say, “You’ll never guess what happened to me today –” and it’s an effort to clamp it shut again. Fact five: I have to make him think he’s won me over against my better judgement, that I’ve caved in to his blandishments. Jack believes in the myth of his charm, he probably can’t understand how I’ve held out so long against him.’

      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