but she can’t imagine many other women panting to grapple with him.
He has a faintly seedy air, not the academic dishevelment of Jack, the ‘I’m so engrossed in intellectual matters I can’t remember to push a comb through my hair’ approach; Mick’s is the ‘What’s a comb anyway?’ outlook. And he’s put weight on – there’s a perfectly formed pot belly wobbling over his trouserband – with more to come, she suspects.
‘Would you listen to me, and I’m supposed to be his nearest and dearest,’ she scolds herself.
There’s another reason why she doesn’t tell Mick about Kate: he grew up next door to her, he’d never want to believe ill of Kate, he thinks she’s the bee’s knees.
‘I must stop using Mick’s expressions.’ Gloria is alarmed at the thought of becoming a Tweedledee/Tweedledum version of her husband. The entire Tyrone Gaelic football team (their home squad) are also the bee’s knees, except when he loses money on them; Gloria hasn’t felt she’s the bee’s knees in Mick’s eyes for the longest time.
They met through Kate, who revealed the impossibly exciting news that he fancied her long before he had the nerve to say so himself. They had their first kiss when she was sixteen and sex on his twenty-first birthday. That was a mistake, he was too fluthered to know his lad from his big toe but she felt she owed it to him. Her gift-wrapped body to unpeel. Except he treated it the way most people behave with wrapping paper. Nevertheless they became engaged a couple of years later and Gloria was the first of the trio to wed, at twenty-four.
That’s a slice of the reason why she’s jealous of Kate, she’s put it about and Gloria hasn’t used it half enough. She wishes she’d tripped the light fantastic with a few more partners when she had the chance, but Mick was always there in the background and before she knew it she was parading down the aisle in white. Not exactly a virgin but not what you’d call experienced either.
Mick wants kids too. He and Gloria delayed it because of careers and buying houses but when she turned thirty they decided the time had come.
‘The time has come, the walrus said, to talk of many things,’ whispers Gloria.
She and Mick don’t talk of many things any more, especially not of cabbages and kings. Still they’re unanimous it’s time now. Except, instead of pregnancy, they had a puzzled year of trying and failing, of buying ovulation kits, of tracking her cycle like it held the answer to the Third Secret of Fatima. Which, as everyone now knew, was an overrated secret anyway.
Gloria frowns. You spend your twenties frantically trying to avoid pregnancy and your thirties even more frenziedly trying to engineer it. Somebody up there’s having a belly laugh at the lot of them. Who’d have guessed the only sure-fire way to get pregnant was by being a teenager in the back of a borrowed car.
Mick and she thought they’d cracked it last month when no period came for almost two weeks after it was due – but then she had a bleed, ten days of feeling sorry for herself, followed by an emergency admission to hospital a few days ago with her ectopic pregnancy. The surgeon explained about ectopic pregnancies to Gloria, the one who removed a vital section of her right fallopian tube and a minuscule foetus with it. The surgeon held up his baby fingernail to show her its size.
Even after his explanation Gloria felt she needed clarification. Mick brought in a dictionary so they could look up what had happened to them.
It said, ‘Ectopia: condition in which the foetus is outside the womb.’
Gloria reflects on this bald definition, pondering its accuracy and inaccuracy. It doesn’t say anything about bleeding internally as you lie beside your husband, thinking your neck and shoulder aches are caused by the awkward position you’ve adopted all day in bed to accommodate stomach cramps – pains caused by the blood saturating your insides and being forced up your body.
It doesn’t say anything about trying to wake your husband, who sleeps like the dead, about not being able to move until finally by some atavistic spark for survival you crawl to the edge of the bed, topple out and your husband starts up and calls an ambulance.
It doesn’t say anything about the visitors who blithely assume you can press ahead and have another baby when you’re feeling better, because you still have one fallopian tube, or about the nurses who hug you and show they understand your world has juddered to a standstill, even as they charge about running a hectic ward.
Definitions lull you into a false sense that things are explicable. But maybe the older nurse who suggested she plant something to remember her baby by was right. A holly bush to rhyme with Molly – that’s the name she’d have chosen for a girl. She senses she was a girl, her fingernail-sized nearly life.
Eimear 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
