Gloria’s speciality ginger cake, perhaps some mind-numbing drivel about babies and a few snide remarks about Mick but nothing Kate couldn’t handle.
‘Fine, Gloria, have it your way, I’m the wicked witch from the west. Just because I fell in love.’
Gloria is savaging her about pretending she was trying to smooth everything over with Pearse yesterday. Serves her right for confessing that she’s going to ask him to move out, acknowledges Kate – whoever said confession is good for the soul was on the wrong track. It’s bad for the eardrums; Gloria’s complaints are giving her a headache. But she can’t carry on juggling Pearse and Jack any longer, the affair has taken such a grip she can’t conceive of it as an adjunct to her life any longer. Jack has become her centre of gravity.
Gloria’s unimpressed. But who’s Miss Moral Majority to criticise her when she’s leading Mick McDermott a dog’s life? And he was her friend before he was Gloria’s poodle, she needn’t think Kate’s automatically going to take her side.
‘You promised me you’d call a halt, Kate, you agreed you were being stupid.’
‘I don’t want to call a halt, it’s gone too far for us to casually break it off.’
‘You don’t think you’re being selfish, rating your own happiness above Eimear’s?’
‘She’ll find someone else, with her face she’ll be fighting them off. But I only have one chance at a Jack, don’t you see that, Glo? We’re in love.’
Kate’s begging her to understand but she turns her face away.
‘Love,’ Gloria spits the word out. ‘It makes me sick. People say they’re in love as though that excuses everything. “I’m about to wreck your marriage but don’t blame me, it’s love.” “I’m about to set your life on its heels but don’t blame me, it’s love.” Love doesn’t give you the right to turn your back on your friends or to please yourself at somebody else’s expense. Remember Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard in Brief Encounter? They didn’t run away to start a new life together, they looked each other fair and square in the eye, remembered their obligations and said their farewells. They didn’t even have a ride.’
‘More fool them,’ Kate fights back. ‘Happiness has to be seized and clung on to for dear life and defended against all comers. You don’t feel cosily self-righteous for doing the proper thing, you feel abandoned and depressed and an idealistic fool. Anyway, what’s brought on this sudden flurry of interest in my affairs, or more specifically my affair? You haven’t wanted to hear a word about it since I talked to you at the hospital.’
‘It’s Eimear,’ sighs Gloria. ‘I’m concerned about her.’
Kate is unrepentant. ‘She’s a big girl, she can fend for herself. All her life people have been doing her worrying for her, they can’t resist that translucent appeal she exudes.’
‘You never used to be so unyielding,’ snaps Gloria. ‘If this is love it doesn’t suit you. Eimear’s our friend and she needs us. She was there for you when you were desperately hunting for your first tenancy, holding your hand when you were knee-deep in rejection letters and convinced no one would give you a chance. And she’s been there for me through this fertility misery, although I know she’s at her wits’ end with anxiety about Jack’s womanising.’
‘What womanising? There’s only me,’ Kate objects but Gloria pulls a face and she falls silent. Gloria takes up the cudgels again.
‘I don’t see how you can live with yourself knowing you’re the reason for that strained look on her face. She’s up to forty cigarettes a day now and I doubt she’s eaten a meal in a month, I haven’t seen her with anything more substantial than a sandwich. You’ve put me in an impossible position, telling me about you and Jack, I’m Eimear’s friend as much as yours.’
Kate sighs heavily: ‘Look, can we drop this, it’s been a long week and I’m tired. Why don’t you dig us out a Hollywood musical for the video – something with Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly in it.’
Her olive branch is rejected. Gloria looks earnestly at her troublesome friend, misery spilling from her eyes. Kate has always envied her those eyes – they’re colleen-in-a-film-script green, not the muddy hazel that passes for it with some people. Kate wishes for the zillionth time that she wasn’t stuck with blue ones. Eimear’s are blue too but they’re dazzle-you-at-ten-paces azure, hers are standard issue, no embellishments.
‘Kate, even if you and Jack do gallop off into the sunset together, do you honestly think he’ll be any more faithful to you?’
Kate laughs. ‘Well of course he will, you sap. For starters we have a great sex life and Eimear’s the original cold fish, you should hear …’
‘Spare me the details, at least extend that much loyalty to Eimear.’
‘Look, Glo, I don’t know where you stumbled across this superior attitude. 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
