Three Wise Men. Martina Devlin

is slumped at the bottom of Gloria’s hospital bed and it doesn’t take a Sam Spade to detect she’s been crying. On anyone else it would look blotchy and unappealing, on Eimear it’s tragic and captivating.

      ‘I know you have your own troubles, Glo,’ her voice is brittle, ‘but I have to turn to someone and telling you is like keeping it in the family. Jack is seeing someone else.’

      Gloria is alarmed. ‘Eimear, I find that hard to believe, isn’t the man besotted with you.’

      ‘Jack’s the kind of man who can love you to bits but still shag other women.’

      ‘And have you any idea who she might be?’ Gloria enquires cautiously.

      ‘Probably one of his students or maybe a colleague, I don’t care a great deal who she is to tell you the truth. It’s not the woman but the deed that bothers me.’

      ‘Have you tackled him about it?’

      ‘No, I’m planning to do it tonight.’ Eimear’s expression is sullen. ‘I’ve had my suspicions for a while but no proof. Then this morning I opened his credit-card statement and found he’d spent the night in a Dublin hotel when he told me he was in Cork at a poetry festival.’

      Eimear slings her bag on the floor with the degree of venom usually reserved for skirts with broken zips and continues: ‘I rang the hotel and they confirmed it was a double room. Clumsy of him, wasn’t it? I thought adulterers were supposed to cover their tracks by using cash. Maybe he wants me to find out, save him the nuisance of confessing.’

      She mopes while Gloria tries to think of something positive. Before she can dish up the platitude of the day, Eimear adds: ‘I know he’s been with a woman for some time – there’s a smell about him that’s different and he’s paying me more attention than he’s ever bothered to before, showing me his poems and asking what I think of them. Of course I always say they’re magnificent, isn’t that what he wants to hear, where’s the point in suggesting he lob in a rhyme once in a while. It only gets him all het up and exasperated.’

      Eimear has never been a fan of Jack O’Brien’s work. His brooding looks, yes, his earning power, yes, his television appearances, yes, his ability to make every woman feel she’s the most fascinating creature he’s met, yes – his poetry, ho hum.

      ‘So you’re definitely going to thrash it out with him tonight,’ asks Gloria.

      ‘Don’t you think I should?’

      ‘Not necessarily. What if it’s a fling that’s been flung? What if he was just getting something out of his system, or it was a one-off aberration, or a drunken mistake he’s trying to put behind him?’

      ‘You mean let sleeping dogs lie?’

      ‘Exactly!’

      ‘Or lying dogs sleep easy,’ mutters Eimear, but the venom has ebbed from her voice.

      She doesn’t want a scene, she prefers everything serene and ordered. The three of them do, they’re Librans after all.

      ‘I brought you the Irish Times.’ Eimear ransacks her bag, just like the nun. The paper is located under a can of hair mousse and she reaches it over, then heads immediately for the sink in the corner of the room to scrub her hands.

      ‘Newsprint everywhere,’ complains Eimear.

      After she leaves Gloria checks the date on the front of the paper: excellent, it’s a Saturday (you lose track of days in a hospital) so there’ll be birth announcements. She turns to them at once.

      Two Clares, an Aoife and twins Gemma and Joseph. Hmm. Aoife has potential. There’s also a brace of Seans, a Patrick and a Sarah. Patrick’s lovely but he’d end up a Paddy. She scans the list of parents’ names and is relieved to find she doesn’t know any of them.

      Another set of twins, Richard and Alison, catches her eye.

      ‘Good God above,’ she rants, ‘it’s bad enough other women having babies without managing two at once; no wonder there aren’t enough to go around for the rest of us.’

      She’s still wading through birth weights and welcomes from brothers and sisters when Mick walks in.

      ‘Eimear phoned last night and said she’d be in this morning,’ he tells her.

      ‘Been and gone,’ replies Gloria as he leans over to kiss her. On the forehead again. Does the man think she’s had her lips amputated?

      Gloria surreptitiously turns the page so he can’t see Birth Announcements but Mick isn’t fooled.

      ‘I don’t believe it, you’re not at that again, Gloria, you’ll do your head in.’

      She toys with the idea of tears but hasn’t the heart for them.

      ‘I was only taking a quick look at some names.’ She smiles brightly. ‘What do you think of Aoife?’

      ‘I think you should have your head examined putting us both through this. What are you doing, picking out names for babies after what’s happened to the two of us.’

      His tone is so vexed she feels aggrieved.

      ‘You’re not the one who needed a massive blood transfusion, you’re just the one who snored like a pig until I was knocking on death’s door.’

      He throws her a reproachful glance. ‘It’s mentally unbalanced, reading up on baby names at a time like this. You’ll push yourself over the edge and I’ll be left to gather up the pieces.’

      She realises it’s madness but she can’t help herself, it’s like picking a scab – she knows it won’t help the healing process but there it is on her knee insisting on being fiddled with.

      Perhaps if she could say this to Mick it would help but she doesn’t, she rolls over and faces the door, her back towards him. Lunch arrives and she leaves the tray untouched.

      ‘You must eat,’ he insists, ‘you’ll never get well otherwise.’

      ‘I’m not hungry,’ she pouts.

      ‘Force yourself.’

      ‘No.’

      ‘It’s criminal to waste food like that.’

      ‘You eat it if you’re so concerned.’

      ‘I didn’t come to hospital to eat your lunch,’ he objects.

      ‘Well what did you come for? It certainly wasn’t to cheer me up or distract me with news or keep me company – from what I can see you came to lecture me and order me about.’

      Mick lifts his coat. ‘I’ll call back later when you’re feeling calmer; this is a difficult time for me too you know.’

      He compresses his lips into a paving crack and stalks off.

      Gloria removes the cover from the lunch plate – vegetable curry. Trifle to follow. She leaves the curry, eats half the trifle – ‘A drop of sherry would work wonders for you,’ she addresses the bowl – and switches on the television. Imelda calls by with some medication and mentions that she’ll be discharged on Monday. She also reveals that the Australia fund is seriously depleted as a result of last night’s session.

      ‘Another hen party?’ asks Gloria.

      ‘No, leaving do for one of Gerry the Guard’s schoolfriends New York-bound to make his fortune.’

      ‘So you gave it some welly.’

      ‘I gave it some shoe – I lost one, don’t ask me how, and Gerry the Guard had to piggyback me up the garden path but he slipped on ice and we ended up skittering about all over the place – he got me there in the end though it was more of a slither than a manly stride. They don’t have that snake on the Garda Siochana crest for nothing.’

      Imelda bounces away, fresh-faced, but reappears within seconds.