Three Wise Men - Martina Devlin

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TWO

      ‘House sharing at thirty-odd is no joke. Here I am in my thirty-third year and I can’t even call the roof over my head my own. It’s unnatural. By this age you’ve developed your little oddities, hence the name. You’re not thirty-even, as in living on an even keel, you’re thirty-odd as in just plain set in your ways and getting more solidified by the week.’

      Gloria pauses to draw breath and Kate hastily rearranges her face into a sympathetic expression.

      ‘I have a theory about thirty-odd,’ continues Gloria, with the determination of someone who’s saved up a week’s worth of resentments and is determined to off-load them. ‘By this stage you’ve taken out a mortgage on a house or flat you can’t abide any more, bought matching pottery jars marked tea, coffee and sugar, as though you’re so mentally deficient you can’t remember which container is used for what, had passionate debates about colour schemes in some desolate warehouse of a DIY centre … turned into somebody you were mocking only a few years earlier. And what’s worse, you like it. You parade your eccentricities with pride, talk about them in the third person, lend them genetic credibility by tracing them back to grandparents.’

      Gloria adopts a Tipperary accent, for no other reason than it’s the only rural one she can manage: ‘“I’m a divil in the morning, you can’t hold a conversation with me till I’m on my second cup of coffee – my mother was the same.” “The house can go to rack and ruin just so long as I’m able to keep the garden looking tidy – my grandfather spent every spare second outdoors himself.”

      ‘Now here I am, suddenly required to house-share. Pitched back into buying small loaves of bread because a large one goes stale before you can finish it. Back in the dark days of noticing and objecting (but detesting myself for it) when your friend drinks all the milk and never replaces it. Complaining, too, but feeling like a wrinkly, at her habit of playing the radio at full blast as she showers in the morning.’

      Kate decides it’s time to intervene. ‘Call this a wild guess but are you finding life as Eimear’s lodger the teensiest bit stressful?’

      Gloria nods and bites savagely into the cheese-on-toast lunch Kate has rustled up for both of them – it’s her stock in trade, her cooking doesn’t run to anything else apart from scrambled eggs. Solidified to concrete consistency in the microwave.

      ‘Mind you,’ Gloria carries on more moderately, ‘I can’t seem to please Eimear either. I daren’t set anything down, it’s “Don’t leave your mug on the cream carpet – if it spills I’ll never erase the stains.” So I tell her, fairly mildly considering the decibel level I’ve been subjected to, that if there was any space at all on the table I’d use it.

      ‘She chooses to interpret this as criticism of her plants – and while it’s true, as you know, Kate, she has foliage clambering over every available surface, spilling from ceramic strawberry pots and terracotta troughs, on their own they wouldn’t be so bad. The melee is compounded by the bowls of potpourri, the vases of flowers, both dried and fresh, the candlesticks with candles she never lights because wax is so messy and the coffee-table books she never opens in case she creases the pages. But try telling Eimear this, she’s in full flow about the therapeutic value of greenery.’

      Gloria subsides, Kate heaves a sigh of relief, but then Gloria recollects another grievance.

      ‘And don’t get me started on Eimear’s feng shui fixation: she shrieks if you leave the bathroom door open – apparently it means your money will trickle away. Or does that happen when you forget to close the l00 seat? – I end up so confused.’

      ‘I wish I had a spare room to offer you, Glo,’ says Kate, wishing nothing of the kind because she doesn’t want her friend’s disapproving features on hand when Jack’s in the vicinity.

      ‘Wearing ear plugs to block out the noise as you and your fancy man cavort about the flat? Do me a favour, Kate. Just because I’m keeping your grimy secret doesn’t mean I approve of you two. Although I’m starting to see that Jack may have some justification in kicking up his heels, life with Eimear is so regimented.

      ‘I can’t even talk to her about it. The trouble is, it’s her house and that gives her the upper hand. Unspoken, but hanging in the air, every time you handle a plate cavalierly or leave footprints on the kitchen floor, is the reproach that it’s her china you’re risking and her floor you’re muddying. I can’t leave a scum ring on the side of the bath overnight any more, even when fully intending to clean it in the morning. I’ll find her on her knees with the Jif in her hand and a martyred look on her face. I can’t dump a few dishes in the sink or a pile of ironing in the utility room, everything has to be done at once. It’s her religion. Tomorrow is never another day.’

      Kate is delighted to hear Gloria wade into Eimear, it makes her feel even more justified in pursuing this relationship with Jack. But Gloria’s resentment is already ebbing.

      ‘Then again, Eimear gave me a home when Mick and I decided we needed time out. Actually it was me who decided it, Mick was opposed to the idea – he said couples who separate never solve their differences. They just find they can live without each other. I suppose he’s right: even if you return to the marital home there’s a sense in which something has been smashed.

      ‘You’ve acknowledged the reality that the marriage might not be permanent, that maybe you won’t live happily ever after, and the genie is out of the bottle. Marriage starts on the basis of two people saying they want to be together always, right? Now one or both of them are prevaricating: “Wait a minute, I need to think about this again.’”

      Gloria’s head sinks on to her hand. What a shambles their lives are reduced to; she suspects Eimear’s glad of the company, despite chafing at her untidiness. Eimear’s been rattling around in her show-house since she and Jack had the mother, father and second-cousin-once-removed of all bust-ups when she discovered a packet of condoms in his wallet. He moved into rooms at Trinity College; he wanted to rush straight over to Kate’s but for once the woman showed a smidgen of sense and suggested they let the dust settle first.

      Gloria looks Kate in the face. ‘Eimear misses Jack, you know.’

      Kate immediately turns defensive. ‘I didn’t ask him to move out – we’re not even living together. His decision to leave Eimear had nothing to do with me.’

      Gloria sighs. It’s a pickle fit to make your heart break – if it wasn’t already cracked between the jigs and the reels. She half-smiles, that’s a saying of her father’s.

      ‘Would you give my head peace, it’s turned with the lot of you between the jigs and the reels. I’m off to Mulholland’s for a bit of peace and quiet,’ he’d complain.

      Their mother rounded on the children when that happened.

      ‘You see what you’ve driven your poor father to? Sending him out on a night like this to a public house, when he has a decent fireside of his own to sit at.’

      They never dared point out it was her nagging he was running from, not their cowboy and indian shoot-outs.

      It was her father who insisted she should be called Gloria. That’s a Protestant name in her part of the country – it doesn’t take a fidget out of them in Dublin where nobody worries if you’re from one side or the other unless it’s northside/southside of the city. The only sides now are financial … tiocfaidh ar bank balance. But names are logos in Tyrone, markers of identity; of division too. Eimear and Kate – safe choices, no problem working them out, but Gloria’s a puzzle. Mallon says something and Gloria contradicts it. It’s not clearcut, people feel uneasy.

      Gloria’s father named her after Gloria Swanson and her sister Marlene was named for Marlene Dietrich – he loved those old Hollywood black and whites. There’s also a brother called Rudolph and it has nothing to do with being

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