Three Wise Men. Martina Devlin

I don’t accept I’m ruining Eimear’s life, her marriage is in the Rocky Mountains anyway – I’m simply the catalyst.’

      ‘Delusional as well,’ mutters Gloria but Kate ignores her.

      ‘Don’t you think your time would be better spent trying to paper over some of the cracks in your own marriage instead of interfering in Eimear’s? Mick’s a grand lad, as happy-go-lucky as they come, but you’ve reduced him to a study in melancholy. His family are worried about him, or so his mother told mine during a lull in one of their over-the-fence offensives on Mrs Regan’s good name. The McDermotts are convinced he’s caught some disease because he’s lost so much weight and …’

      ‘He has a pot belly,’ yells Gloria.

      ‘… he’s become withdrawn and incommunicative which isn’t the Mick McDermott we all know and love.’

      ‘Speak for yourself,’ she responds.

      ‘That much is obvious,’ says Kate. ‘Clearly there’s no love lost between the two of you, so how you can even contemplate going for test-tube babies is beyond me.’

      ‘Why do you insist on calling them test-tube babies, like something from the seventies? It’s IVF treatment, in vitro fertilisation, assisted reproduction, a little medical intervention; nothing sinister, nothing miraculous, just modern medicine doing its job.’ Gloria’s face colours like a strawberry cone with outrage.

      ‘Still,’ Kate points out, ‘a couple who can’t sit in the same room together for more than five minutes without bickering aren’t the most obvious candidates for babies. It strikes me that you’re focusing on me because you can’t bear to look at your own problems, which are, I don’t mind telling you, my sweet, pretty bloody serious.’

      Gloria reaches Kate her coat and walks pointedly to the front door. Kate longs to apologise abjectly, the best way to say sorry in her experience, and remind Gloria they always swore they’d never fall out over a man. But she walks past her without a word.

      Jack’s worth it, he has to be worth it.

      ‘Anyway, Mick won’t let us have the treatment,’ Gloria whispers as Kate steps on to the path. ‘There’ll be no test-tube babies for me.’

      Kate hesitates, turns back, but Gloria closes the door.

      She sits in her car without turning the key in the ignition. She was never in love before Jack. The nineteen fellows, men, call them what you like, she slept with before him don’t count. She may have told one or two she loved them, she may possibly have meant it at the time, but it wasn’t love, nor a close second. Sometimes it wasn’t even lust, more a case of Kate exercising her right to have sex whether she wanted to or not.

      It caught her by surprise, this falling in love with him. She didn’t realise she had, until Jack said it first. When he told her, it felt as though a thumping hangover had been wiped out, his words were a double dose of paracetamol. As for Pearse, well, she does have a conscience about him but he’s better off without her. He was her hedge against loneliness; he knew that because she was always honest with him, but it doesn’t reflect well on either of them. She glimpses Gloria’s strained face at the window as she drives off.

      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