Three Wise Men. Martina Devlin

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.

CHAPTER 6

      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 –’