as ever.’ Her voice sounds quavery, like someone who’s been crying.
‘Mick all right?’
‘Same as ever.’
Kate’s suspicions are confirmed, there is a wobble, tears have recently been shed.
‘That bad?’ she jokes, but Gloria doesn’t manage even a pretend giggle.
‘Eimear tells me she invited you and Pearse to dinner tonight but you won’t come.’
There’s accusation now, as well as a tremor.
‘This is supposed to be a democracy, it’s not mandatory to accept dinner invitations. Anyway it’s not a case of won’t, it’s can’t. Pearse has a work party on and I promised I’d turn up and lend him some immoral support.’
‘Oh.’ Gloria sounds mollified. ‘Why didn’t you tell Eimear that, she says you just snapped a refusal and claimed you were dashing out and couldn’t talk.’
‘What’s so terrible about that? I was in a rush. Eimear’s being awkward, you know how she likes everything her own way. She probably decided on this dinner weeks ago but never bothered checking with either of us because she assumed we’d drop everything for her.’
‘I have no everything to drop, I’m only too pleased to escape the house,’ responds Gloria. ‘Are you sure there’s no way you can avoid this work do? I promised Eimear I’d try and persuade you to change your mind.’
‘I’ve been neglecting Pearse lately, I want to try and make it up to him,’ Kate lies slickly. At least the first half is true. She lowers her voice conspiratorially. ‘You know what I mean, I can’t go into details over the phone.’
‘Right, of course, I’m glad to hear you and Pearse are getting along better. Why don’t you come over tomorrow afternoon, Mick’s at a match and we’ll have the house to ourselves.’
‘Why not,’ agrees Kate. ‘You can tell me why you’ve been crying while you’re at it.’
‘Just the usual baby blues.’
Kate hesitates, it’s difficult to know how to comfort her. She tries flippancy.
‘Time to switch to baby pinks, those blues are too depressing.’
Gloria rewards her feeble attempt at humour with a chuckle. Then she adds: ‘You’ll never guess who my mother was talking to in the supermarket the other day – Miss McGinn.’
‘Amo-Amas-Amat McGinn?’
‘The same. She was asking after Eimear,’ says Gloria.
‘Naturally, she was her pet. I was the one who ponged out her class.’
Kate has three older sisters and became selective about perfumes from an early age, there were always crates of the stuff lying around. She’d wear nothing but Channel 5, as they called it, at a time when most girls her age were still squirting on the Parma Violet scents. It didn’t render her any more seductive, but it gave her a certain cachet in school.
‘Remember how she’d say, “Would the child who smells like a city tart’s boudoir kindly go to the lavatory and scrub herself down,”’ recalls Gloria.
‘Is she still seeing Ronan Donnelly the estate agent?’ Kate quizzes Gloria.
‘So my mother says, and still no sign of a ring. That makes it a thirty-five-year courtship, give or take a year.’
He was a source of fascinated speculation, this man licensed to snog their Latin teacher. He’d take her to the pictures on Friday nights; her hair always had that just-shampooed sheen on Fridays. They used to imagine their encounters. Eimear was best at imitating them.
‘I love you, Maura,’ she’d proclaim ardently in her Mr Donnelly voice and then she’d hold up a warning hand in Miss McGinn guise, as he reached to embrace her.
‘First you must decline love,’ she’d command, putting him through his amo-amas-amats. His reward would be a juicy smooch. They all made kissy-kissy noises at Eimear before collapsing in fits of giggles.
‘Of course with the benefit of experience we know now that a permanent courtship doesn’t make Miss McGinn odd in the least, it leaves her one of the sanest women in Ireland,’ says Kate. ‘It gives her all the advantages of a man in her life without any of the disadvantages. The only mystery is why more women don’t do a Miss McGinn.’
Gloria is unconvinced. ‘If life was so wonderful, how come she was always in a grump?’
‘Speaking of wonderful lives, I have to get back to my enthralling job. See you tomorrow, Glo.’
As she replaces the receiver, Kate spies an Evening Herald folded on a corner of her desk. She flicks straight to the star signs and reads Libra. There’s some space-filling drivel about Saturn in ascendant then it cuts to the chase:
‘A day to tread warily because nasty surprises are possible,’ she reads aloud.
She doesn’t like the sound of that, but before gloom settles she spots the date on the paper – it’s yesterday’s. Good, she’s off the hook for today. Now she really must get on with the Toner conveyancing.
Chance would be a fine thing. Kate’s concentration lasts all of sixty seconds before paralysis of the little grey cells sets in. The Toners may be champing at the bit to move but they won’t be any nearer completion today. Kate resigns herself to the inevitable, picks up a pencil and starts doodling.
Eimear Mulligan, she’s writing – not Eimear O’Brien, her friend’s married name. Her insides are churning as she thinks of Eimear, she may hate her but she loves her too.
She loves her when they’re together but hates her when she’s with Jack, maybe that’s partly guilt, her mother says you always detest the person you’ve wronged.
‘Between my mother and Gloria, I’m knee-deep in this bloody homespun wisdom,’ she chafes.
When she was six there was none of this equivocation: she’d have given Eimear her cornflake-box crown if she asked for it. Kate draws spiky crowns across her doodle pad, then tears the page up.
She took Jack from her friend because she could. Jack the blue-eyed boy, Jack the white-headed man, Jack the ace, Eimear’s Jack.
It was meant to be a fling, she was never supposed to find out. Of course Eimear still doesn’t know – but the game has changed and the rules along with it. She believed she could hug to herself the secret glee of Jack’s defection. Kate and Pearse would be invited to Donnybrook as usual, she’d see Jack pouring drinks, complimenting his wife on a delicious meal, resting his arm lightly around her shoulders as they described holidays and discussed kitchen extensions. They’d look the perfect couple and Kate would know, and exult in her knowledge, that Eimear’s life had the potential to be as miserable as anyone else’s for all her Barbie charm.
Her watertight scheme sprang a leak when she and Jack fell in love. Kate found it just about believable that Eimear’s Jack would fancy her, men were always calling her sexy, but beyond comprehension that he’d insist he wanted her for longer than a night or two. That he’d insist he needed her from here to eternity.
‘Eimear’s everything I’m not,’ she protested one night as they lay in a tangle of sheets and limbs.
‘Exactly,’ he agreed, nuzzling her instep. Her instep! Pearse probably wouldn’t know how to find it let alone kiss it.
‘But she’s exquisite and talented and as flawless as …’ Kate gabbled.
‘As flawless as a marble statue and twice as cold,’ Jack finished her sentence. ‘She goes to bed with me as a favour, not because she can’t help herself. I want a woman who’s real, who has scars’ – he traced a thin line along her chin, the legacy of riding a bicycle without brakes – ‘who has a stomach and lips and