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CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Part One

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Part Two

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Part Three

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Keep Reading

Copyright

About the Publisher

PART ONE

CHAPTER 1

Kate props an elbow on the ledge above the hand-basin and concentrates on drawing a steady line around her mouth with her new rust-coloured lip pencil. She’s slapping on the face she chooses to wear, as opposed to the one dumped on her by the arbitrariness of genes, for a rendezvous with Jack. And lip-liner is integral to the operation. She snapped up three pencils when she spotted them in Clery’s – plums are in vogue and you can’t find autumn shades to save your life. Not that lip-liner is technically a life-saver, but it comes a close second. It’s certainly giving her mouth the kiss of life.

Kate is preparing for her farewell to Jack’s arms, as well as the rest of him, and she can’t apply herself to the task until she applies her make-up. A woman has to look her best to do her worst to a man; imagine if he went home relieved. Like a lemming that couldn’t find a cliff.

Her lips are within half an inch of perfection when the phone rings, causing a painted-on wobble instead of a pout. She contemplates ignoring the source of the interruption, reconsiders when it strikes her the caller might be Jack changing the time they’re to meet, and bolts from the bathroom before the answering machine gobbles any message.

The caller is Mick, her friend Gloria’s husband, and he’s virtually incoherent. Kate has to make him repeat his story twice before she establishes that Gloria’s been rushed to hospital with a ruptured ectopic pregnancy. Whatever that is. It must have required the full ER team from Mick’s garble. Thirty-six hours without sleep are taking their toll on him. Kate, only barely assimilating the news, realises she’s still clutching her new lip-liner and grinding the pencil tip against the body of the phone. Bronze Babe is smeared between redial button and microphone. She and Gloria have been intimates for a million years, since they were cast as two of the three wise men in the Primary Two nativity play; another friend, Eimear, was the third.

‘Which hospital is Gloria in? I’ll go straight in to see her,’ she offers.

Mick advises against it, to Kate’s relief when she remembers her only way of contacting Jack to cancel is by catching him in the office – a call to his home is never an option. Not unless she’s intent on setting out the welcome mat for trouble.

‘Leave it for now, she’s still not able to have visitors: the tears start tripping her as soon as she lays eyes on me,’ says Mick. ‘They operated on her in the middle of the night and it’s been a massive shock. We didn’t even realise she was pregnant. I was too shaken to let you know sooner but Gloria’s just asked me to give you and Eimear a ring – I’ve already told her family. Eimear’s my last call, then I suppose I’ll head off and find something to eat. I haven’t much of an appetite, to be honest. You’ve no idea what a jolt this has been; it’s the first time I’ve had to phone an ambulance.’

Guilt pricks at Kate. She ought to volunteer to meet Mick for a drink, she’s known him even longer than Gloria and he sounds in a state, but she’s psyched up for her parting is such sweet sorrow number with Jack. And even if she doesn’t pull it off tonight she can plant the seeds … drop hints about how the end of the line is only a few stops away. In the meantime she can’t bring herself to renounce the euphoria of an evening spent in her lover’s company. Mick must have other friends who can keep an eye on him.

‘I’ll drop in to see Gloria before work tomorrow,’ she promises; and conscience salved after a few consolatory truisms, returns to her dating ritual preparations. Game on.

Kate knows she should feel restrained by Gloria’s hospitalisation but decency is purged by jubilation at the prospect of Jack’s undivided attention. Her reflection smiles giddily at her as a wave of exultation bubbles up from her diaphragm and catches in her throat. He drenches her with gladness, simply the thought of him makes her laugh aloud. It’s enough to be able to look at Jack, she wouldn’t object if there was never any touching. Actually, that’s a fib; she adores the stroking, but it’s not the alpha and the omega.

‘Listen to me with my Latin tags. I should forget about being a lawyer and think about being a friend,’ she reminds herself.

Kate’s aware – and only hazily concerned by the realisation – that she’s dwelling on the anticipatory pleasure of being with Jack without sparing a thought for Gloria, comatose and attached to a drip. She’ll make it up to her tomorrow; she’ll transform Gloria’s room into a bower. Meanwhile she should be plotting the direction her tryst with Jack will take.

She’s decided to end their affair, although not because it’s turned stale – a flashback of Jack’s lean brown fingers cupping her cheek swims before her eyes and she tingles with anticipation, losing her train of thought. ‘Concentrate,’ she wills herself, a woman needs to be rehearsed before an encounter with Jack. He has a propensity for bringing the curtain down on the rational processes. Jack O’Brien tends to make you feel more and think less.

That’s why she’s wearing her dating underwear. Kate has no intention of ending up in bed with him but to be on the safe side she slipped on a particularly sheer matching set after showering. Jack always notices and comments as he eases them off, it’s worth occasionally imagining you’ve stumbled into playing the leading lady in a porn movie for the pleasure he takes in it.

On Jackless days she slings on whatever comes to hand – even her boyfriend Pearse’s boxer shorts when she’s cold – but if Jack’s in the vicinity Kate prefers the comfort of the uncomfortable. Style over substance is the coda, which is just as well because there’s virtually no substance to what she’s wearing.

But back to the task ahead. She daubs at the shaky patch on the lip-line front and contemplates options in the staple declarations department. There’s that threadbare standby, ‘Let’s agree to say goodbye now before anyone gets hurt,’ closely followed by, ‘We owe it to our partners to call it a day.’ She has a sneaking fondness for ‘We both knew this liaison had built-in obsolescence’ but is wary of fielding it in case Jack accuses her of pomposity.

Kate giggles. ‘The sure-fire way to scare a man off is to tell him you’re ready to have his baby.’

But carrying his child – or anyone else’s – is unimaginable. Besides, she doesn’t want to put the wind up Jack so thoroughly that he’s caught in a typhoon; what’s required here is a regretful parting of the ways potholed with might-have-beens.

Even as she rehearses, Kate instinctively recognises her chances of pulling off a dignified exit-stage-left are on a par with the likelihood of nomination for a Nobel Prize. Jack only permits disengagement when he’s ready; anyone else’s requirements do not compute. He confessed once that he ended or engineered the conclusion of every single relationship he embarked on. Apart from his marriage, which still purports to be watertight in Jack’s version of his first-class cruise through life.

This time she’s going to take the initiative, vows Kate, scrutinising her face and deciding it will pass muster. God, but it’s time-consuming, this business of packaging yourself for an affair. The rules preclude turning up in mangy jeans and a windcheater, it has to be glamour every time. As sound a reason for bailing out as any dilatory – but better late than never – notions about loyalty or morality. She could have waded through Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy with all the hours lavished on blending, shading and defining a face that would never, not ever, earn a second glance when Jack’s wife was in the vicinity.

She’ll call a halt tonight for sure. Fortified with this sense of clambering a few rungs up the moral ladder, Kate activates the burglar alarm and closes the front door behind her. Then she has to de-activate it to retrieve a coat – in her exhilaration at knowing she’ll be within Jack’s ambit in ten minutes, less if she trots, she forgets that she needs another layer. He might proclaim himself enthralled by her skinny freckled arms but he won’t be quite so smitten by goosebumps lurching upon them.

That’s a characteristic of Jack, she thinks as she hurtles down the stairs. He fosters oblivion. Which just about sums up her attitude to Pearse. She has a disgraceful capacity for amnesia where he’s concerned. Make that mental obliteration.

Her boyfriend – although Kate doubts Pearse was ever a boy because he was born middle-aged – is currently visiting his mother in Roscommon. This has allowed her the luxury of an hour in the bathroom reinventing her appearance for Jack’s delectation, allied to the elimination of any obligation to construct a plausible excuse for heading out dressed like a slut on a week night. Thank heavens for Pearse’s mother’s unsteady turn the other day propelling him westwards.

Jack isn’t in The Odeon when Kate arrives; she’s disappointed, searching the bar decorated with a nod in the direction of a thirties theme. Then again, Jack is never there first. She always forgives him because she doesn’t want to sound girlie about having reservations at hovering in a pub on her own. The Odeon is more central than the places they usually meet but Jack calculated it was safe because it attracts a young clientele, plus the lighting is so subdued you need a torch to find the marbled bar. And there’s a sea of bodies bobbing around Kate so unless Moses shows up to part them, the chances of someone recognising her are remote to zero.

Kate is swirling the dregs of her red wine with burgeoning discontentment when Jack strolls in.

‘You look gorgeous.’ He unleashes his most intimate smile.

Her resentment evaporates.

‘Let me order you a refill,’ he adds, stroking her back lightly with circular movements. ‘Is that a new lipstick? Have I told you yet how sensational you look? How come you look extra fabulous tonight?’

‘I had an early night last night,’ laughs Kate, warmed by his main-beam attention. ‘It’s down to sleep, the ultimate beauty aid. No, come to think of it that’s plastic surgery. But sleep must run the scalpel a close second.’

Jack looks faintly bemused as he leans an elbow on the bar and asks for two glasses of red wine. They arrive in miniature bottles and he carries them to a pair of curving cream leather armchairs which miraculously disgorge their occupants just as he searches for a place to sit. Life operates that way for Jack, reflects Kate, as he touches his glass to hers.

‘Here’s to wine and women, we’ll pass on the song,’ he says.

‘To wine and men,’ she responds. ‘Although a man is only a man but a good glass of wine is a drink.’

‘You purloined that from somewhere,’ he accuses her lightly.

‘Cannibalised it,’ she shrugs. ‘That’s as acceptable as invention.’

Time to play the goodbye girl, she reminds herself minutes later as he crowds her, leaning across the table and gazing at her lips so intently she starts to wonder if she has a red wine rim around them. Covertly she rubs between nose and upper lip while pretending to adjust her ankle boot, then prepares to extract one of her guillotine lines from the ready-prepared store. But Jack distracts her by lifting her hand and running his thumb against her inner wrist.

‘Feck it,’ she decides, ‘I’ll tell him we’re finished after we have sex. No point in ruining the evening.’

It seems churlish to raise the subject in the languorous afterglow of their lovemaking, especially when they have unfettered access to her apartment with Pearse’s absence. Instead of biting the bullet Kate swallows it, along with her good intentions, and snuggles up to Jack who’s radiator warm.

She’s slumbering contentedly when he leaps up, dislodging her head from its perch on his shoulder and complaining she should have kept an eye on the time.

‘Eimear will go ballistic if I wake her arriving home at 2 a.m.,’ Jack whines, looking considerably less alluring with a crossly furrowed forehead and one foot in his underpants than he did a few hours earlier.

Kate regards him with a distinctly unenamoured expression as he cannonballs around her bedroom scooping up articles of clothing. She thought men were supposed to fall asleep after climaxing, not trash your room. Right, this is it, he’s brought it on himself – she’s ready for endgame. But Jack isn’t.

‘Listen, we have to talk,’ she begins.

‘Not now, baby girl; order me a cab, would you. And, um, you couldn’t lend me a couple of notes to pay for it – I forgot to hit the hole-in-the-wall machine today.’

Automatically she dials up one of the local firms and hands him the price of his fare. By which stage Jack is dressed, prepared for flight and has regained his grip on the sixth-sense charm he operates.

He bends over the bed, cooing: ‘What did you want to talk about, Katie-Kate?’ and covers her face with feathered kisses which completely divert her from following her own advice delivered in front of the bathroom mirror. Oscar Wilde had the right idea about good advice: Pass it on. As precipitately as possible.

‘Share the joke, baby girl,’ murmurs Jack, by now licking her inner ear.

But before she responds the front-door buzzer sounds the taxi’s arrival and he bounds away like a greyhound out of the trap.

Kate scowls, punching the pillows, and contemplates having that chat with Jack over the telephone. He can’t trickle exactly the optimum quantity of saliva into her ear over the phone. Honeyed words are as much as he can manage there. She’ll call him tomorrow.

The last conscious thought to strike Kate, as she nods off, renders that phone call unlikely.

‘I don’t honestly want to end this affair with Jack, that’s why I’m having such trouble doing it. Just because Jack belongs to Eimear doesn’t mean I can’t share him – if we’re discreet.’

CHAPTER 2

‘I’m having an affair.’

The words dangle in the air, flaunting as temptingly as a Christmas bauble. Gloria’s instinct is to take them down and examine them, just as she always longs to handle glittery tree decorations – touch them to check if they’re real. She’s lying in a hospital bed, a captive audience. If in doubt say nothing: that’s her mother’s advice. Gloria ignores it.

‘Who with?’ she asks Kate.

‘With Jack,’ responds Kate, feigning interest in the wilting floral arrangement on Gloria’s locker.

The news is so startling it almost – almost – distracts Gloria from her own problems. Now she does take her mother’s recommendation to heart, although only because she’s too dumbstruck to speak. Kate glances at her covertly as she strips expiring foliage from the vase of moon daisies and seizes the silence as an invitation to elaborate.

‘We’re in love, Gloria. Neither of us planned it but it happened and now’ – she blushes – ‘we find we can’t live without one another.’

‘And love invents its own laws?’ Gloria’s tone is caustic; she’s regained her power of speech and a sense of outrage along with it.

The stain on Kate’s cheeks deepens, clashing spectacularly with her red hair. ‘We know we’re doing wrong,’ she admits. ‘This is such agony, ecstasy too, but agony. I can’t erase Eimear from my mind.’

‘You managed very nicely when you leapt into bed with her husband.’

‘Oh, Glo, don’t be angry with me, I know I’m a wicked temptress who deserves to be ducked in the village pond.’

Kate beats her chest in such mock-pious atonement that Gloria can’t help but smile. Just for a nano-second; this is no laughing matter. She hurriedly resumes her stern expression.

‘What were you thinking of, Kate McGlade, taking up with your best friend’s husband and you with a man of your own at home?’

Kate bows her head in comic humility, hoping for an encore of the smile, but Gloria is relentless now, appalled at the impact her deviancy will wreak on their triumvirate.

‘This is serious, Kate; this is beyond serious, you have to stop seeing him immediately.’

‘I can’t,’ she wails, rumpling her hair until it’s standing in peaks. ‘It’s the real thing, he’s my Coca Cola lover.’

‘Well then,’ forecasts Gloria, ‘prepare for Armageddon. And you’ll probably have your cornflake-box crown confiscated.’

They each wore one, sprayed gold and decorated with fruit gums, twenty-six years ago as the Three Wise Men. Trouble is, they grew up to be Three Unwise Women.

But Gloria’s losing sight of her own troubles with Kate and she’s not ready to shed that comforting blanket of misery just yet – especially not to tackle a situation as explosive as this. A dear little nun who calls for an uninvited visit is just about to remind her of them. The sister totters into the room, sees another figure by the bedside and starts backing out, but Kate (natural born coward that she is, thinks Gloria) insists she has errands to run and she’ll call by later.

‘There’s no need,’ Gloria tells her.

‘Holles Street Hospital is only around the corner from me, it’s no bother, Glo. I’ll bring you some flowers – these ones need urgent medical attention,’ Kate bribes her.

‘Make it freesias,’ she barters. ‘And don’t think I’ve finished with you yet, you’ve a shopping trolley full of explaining to do.’

Kate settles the nun in a chair by Gloria’s bedside and scuttles off, pulling faces at her behind the tiny sister’s back. Gloria shakes her head: The woman’s beyond redemption – one minute she’s chanting mea culpas, the next she’s behaving like a skit of a schoolgirl.

However she has a guest to take her mind off Kate’s bombshell, one who looks like she’s been paying hospital visits since the days of dancing at the crossroads. Not that nuns went in for much of that, unless of course they were late vocations. Gloria studies her covertly as she speaks: integrity and sincerity shine from the nun’s eyes; she’s in her mid-seventies, no veil, neatly cropped hair, silver band on her wedding ring finger, mysterious stain on the front of her black dress. Gin or vodka?

As she listens she stems a rising impulse to slap her visitor – a sting to shock her into silence. Gloria looks at her clasped hands on the bedspread and concentrates on controlling them. The nun is talking about God’s will and how he moves in mysterious ways; Gloria nods whenever she looks directly at her and wraps fingers around fingers, pressing until white blotches spread across the surface of the skin.

‘There’s a reason for everything, even if we can’t yet see it,’ explains the visitor in tones Gloria hopes to be conclusive.

‘Indeed there is, sister,’ she agrees dully.

Fourteen years of convent education are no preparation for forcibly ejecting elderly nuns from your hospital room. Besides she’s leaving now – no, it’s a false alarm. The nun lifts her bag from the floor but instead of standing up she’s rooting around for something.

Amazing, notes Gloria. You can spend a lifetime in a convent, devoting yourself to God and good works, but there are certain female traits that can never be sublimated and the instinct to cram handbags to the hilt is one of them.

The nun tracks down what she’s searching for and produces it with a magician’s flourish: a holy picture showing the Madonna and Child. Gloria holds it limply. Our Lady is wearing her usual impractical blue nightdress – who decided the poor woman always has to be kitted out in bedclothes anyway? The small blond toddler in Mary’s arms looks like a right handful, no chance of persuading him to eat his greens if he doesn’t feel like it.

Mother and tearaway have their hands joined in prayer peaks and at the bottom of the card is an invocation, ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners.’

Even the Virgin Mary has a baby, Gloria thinks sourly. The nun settles herself back in the chair and she stares at her mouth as it opens and closes, opens and closes.

Can the nun direct her to where the Holy Spirit will impregnate her? Otherwise she may as well leave. It doesn’t even have to be a child of God, an ordinary one will do.

A nurse’s head appears around the door. It’s Imelda, Gloria’s favourite one. She and her boyfriend are saving up to emigrate to Australia but they keep having to postpone the departure date because of sessions. Either it’s a session for a brother’s birthday or a session for a friend’s wedding (that can run into week-long celebrations) or a session for their engagement. Sessions are what make life worth living for Imelda but they don’t help her and Gerry the Guard save for their Outback Odyssey.

‘Doctor Hughes is about to make his rounds,’ she announces, a prim figure in her nurse’s white. You’d never think this was the girl who bartered a pint of Guinness and her uniform badge for the male stripper’s lurex thong at a hen party last week, claiming she wanted Gerry the Guard to try it for size. Gloria looks hopefully at her but is unable to signal the necessary distress flare.

Fortunately Imelda’s talents don’t begin and end with partying like there’s no Gomorrah. A glance at the patient’s face shows an unnatural brightness in the eyes. Instead of bustling off, Imelda comes into the room and helps the nun to her feet:

‘I think it’s time we gave you a drop of tea, sister, we’ll have you worn out with all the visits you’re paying.’

No wonder they call nurses angels, thinks Gloria. If Imelda weren’t engaged she’d marry the girl herself. Of course she’s married already, and the wrong sex to pledge herself to someone called Imelda – at least here in Ireland. Still, she feels a rush of love for the nurse in that instant.

‘Here we go, sister.’ Imelda beams down into the older woman’s face as she lifts her bag and attaches it to the bent arm.

‘Well, maybe a cup of something would be pleasant,’ concedes the nun, allowing herself to be led.

She hobbles to a halt as she passes Gloria’s bedside and pats a hand, not noticing the bone poking through the knuckles.

‘I hope I’ve helped you, dear. It’s good of you to let me talk to you. You’d be surprised how many people don’t want to be bothered these days. They tell me they’ve lost their faith, as though they could misplace it like a spool of thread.’

‘Thank you for your trouble, sister,’ whispers Gloria as she potters off.

‘I’m the world’s biggest hypocrite,’ Gloria wails to the empty room.

She buries her face in the pillow, not knowing if she hates this inoffensive nun or herself more. The misery wells up and splashes down her cheeks. It’s not fair, she sobs against the starch. The worst sort of pillow talk. But even weeping requires energy that she can’t muster – the tears peter out and she’s left with a thumping headache.

Imelda lands back with the doctor, who glances at her blotchy face and decides to jolly her along. Gloria imagines him dressed like Ronald McDonald handing out balloons.

‘Now, now, we can’t have this moping, there’ll be plenty more babies,’ he booms.

Imelda sits beside Gloria and holds her fingers in her capable, calloused nurse’s hand – Gloria is amazed at how needily she clings to it.

‘This is only a temporary setback, you’ll be pregnant again in no time,’ insists Dr Hughes.

Feck off, you quack, she says, but only inside her head. She feels better and a twitch that could pass for a half-hearted smile chases across her face. The doctor is delighted with himself.

‘Sensible girl,’ he nods, flicking through her notes.

He’s headmasterly, jowly and heavy-handed with the aftershave. A few checks and he’s on his way.

‘I’ll be seeing you in the maternity ward one of these days,’ he calls from the door.

Not if I see you first, you scut, she says, but naturally it’s only inside her head again.

Kate and Eimear arrive simultaneously: Kate is weighed down with bribes – a stack of magazines in her arms as well as flowers – while Eimear proffers a box of chocolates so large she should have applied for planning permission.

‘God love you, Gloria, you’ve been through the wars. How many pints of blood did they pump you full of? I wonder whose blood it was? I hadn’t a notion ectopic pregnancies were so serious – that you can actually die from them. You’re not going to die on us now, are you, break up the trio?’

Kate rattles through this without so much as drawing breath, she always did take life at the gallop. Eimear is quieter, she perches on the edge of the bed and looks steadily at her friend’s wan face.

Gloria sees Kate’s game, she’s trying to pretend she didn’t visit her earlier. While Eimear struggles to open the window – it’s painted shut – Kate gives Gloria a cautionary look, taps her finger against her lips and says loudly, ‘Mulligan here and I bumped into each other by the front desk.’

As she gushes on about what a fright they’ve had, Eimear leans across, whispers, ‘Poor you,’ and touches the invalid’s hair. It’s exactly what she needs. The stroking soothes her, she has a little wallow, then, when Eimear murmurs, ‘Such bad luck,’ she’s ready to be brave.

‘Good luck, bad luck, who knows?’ Gloria gives an elaborate shrug.

They stare at her a moment before laughing aloud – nervous peals, admittedly, but better than none at all.

‘Good luck, bad luck, who knows?’ they repeat, mimicking the shrug.

It’s their mantra, the three have parroted it for years when one of them has a setback. Unbelievably it does cheer them up.

Gloria is almost enjoying their visit. Perhaps that’s an over-statement, since she’ll never rejoice in anything again, but they do distract her from her misery – and from Kate’s atomic conversational gambit of a few hours earlier.

‘How’d you end up with a private room?’ asks Kate, as she rips the cover off Eimear’s chocolates. ‘You could fly from Dublin to Florida and back for the price of a couple of nights.’

‘Mick’s job at the bank gives us free health cover.’

Gloria is vague, she’s scrutinising the contents with the due gravity such an outsized package of cocoa solids deserves. Chinese farmers could probably grow enough rice to feed a family of eight on a patch of land the size of this box. The chocolates are called Inspirational Irish Women and they make their selection from such luminaries of Hibernian womanhood as Lady Gregory and Countess Markievicz. Kate chooses Maud Gonne so she can tell her Belfast hospital story again.

‘Remember the summer you worked as a domestic in the Royal?’ Gloria prompts her and she’s in like Flynn with the rest of the story.

‘One of the regular domestics was called Maud and if anyone asked for her when her shift was finished, I used to tell them, “Maud’s gone,” and then double over,’ she recalls. ‘None of them ever seemed to get the joke, they just thought it was a mistake to take on light-headed students.’

‘Which it was,’ interjects Eimear.

‘Which it was,’ agrees Kate. ‘The amount of pinching that went on was serious. I still have a conscience about the breast pump I stuffed into my holdall – I didn’t even know anyone who was breastfeeding. I ended up dumping it in the Lagan one night.’

‘You were young and stupid,’ consoles Eimear. ‘Weren’t we all.’

‘What’s my excuse now,’ Kate responds.

It jolts Gloria back into a recollection of her friend’s transgression. How can she giggle with Eimear about student high-jinks when she’s behaving like a low life with her husband? This needs sorting – only not just yet. She aches too much to concentrate on anything but her own hurt.

She watches her friends as they chatter, flicking through magazines and reading her get-well cards. Kate’s guessing who they’re from by the pictures on the front. She lifts one that reads ‘To My Darling Wife’ in gold lettering and says: ‘Next-door neighbour? The boss? No, it has to be from the cat.’

‘You fool,’ Eimear slaps her playfully.

If only she knew, frowns Gloria, there’d be nothing light-hearted about that blow. But she can’t be the one to tell her. Can she? She sucks on a ragged fingernail and tunes out of their conversation, content simply to have them there in the room with her. Her two best friends. They interpreted it as a sign when they were chosen for the nativity play: they’d been singled out to become a troika.

Ostensibly the roles went to the girls because they were the tallest in the class and the likeliest males, providing curls and dimples could be overlooked. But they knew better – it was meant to be. When three girls have been through the Loreto Convent school play together, wearing scratchy cotton-wool beards, it forms a bond. How they swanned about in their cornflake-box crowns.

Gloria is six again and decked out in her mother’s ruby quilted dressing gown, trailing sleeves and trailing hem. Eimear was the black wise man and wore not just a crown but a turban too. Of course you’re only meant to have one or the other but when Eimear saw her friends’ gilded concoctions she threw a tantrum until the nuns gave in to her. And that took some scene because nuns aren’t ones for giving in: it sets a damaging precedent.

Eimear carried the gold, Kate the frankincense and she had the mirror. That’s what they called it, initially by mistake and then as their first private joke. Gloria still has a photo of the three of them, looking bashfully exotic in their cobbled together finery, with Sister Thaddeus – the play’s director, casting manager and costumier – exposing an excessive quantity of gum alongside. She came from Dublin, the finest city in the world she claimed, and none of them could contradict her. At six you don’t tend to be well-travelled.

‘How far is Dublin from Omagh?’ they asked.

‘A hundred and twelve miles,’ she said – an immeasurable distance.

After the nativity play they became a trinity. Three was their lucky number: there were three of them, that’s one trio; they were the three wise men, that’s another; each of them was six, that’s two threes; and they were all born in September, the ninth month, three threes.

As teenagers they fantasised about forming one of those all-girl singing trios and taking on the pop world: Eimear as their lead singer, the blonde one that everyone could fancy. Kate and Gloria mopping up the stragglers – Kate with her copper hair and Gloria with her nearly black. Something for everyone in the audience. It never went beyond a few rehearsals of ‘Leader of the Pack’, with the girls cooing about meeting a biker in the candy store in dire American accents. Everyone sings in brutal American accents in Irish country towns, it’s the rule. They had their name picked out before the first rehearsal: The Unholy Trinity.

They were inseparable all through school, then diverged to colleges in Belfast, Dublin and London – but it was only a trial separation because they all ended up together in Dublin. That was down to Eimear’s machinations because she kept sending the others ads for jobs cut out of the Dublin papers.

‘We might as well have conceded defeat the first time she mentioned us moving to Dublin because Eimear always gets what she wants, she’s one of life’s winners,’ reflects Gloria. ‘I’m one of life’s runners-up and Kate doesn’t even bother going under starter’s orders because she’s not in the same race.’

Being stuck in hospital is an example of how she always falls at some hurdle or other. She wants a baby and becomes pregnant – so far so good. But it’s not a viable pregnancy, to use that delightful medical term fielded by Dr Hughes, so instead of a baby she ends up with an ambulance ride at 3 a.m., an operation and a chunk out of a fallopian tube. She thinks she’ll have a slash of a scar too, from the peek she took when Imelda was changing her dressing, although she doesn’t like looking at it. The place where they cut her baby out.

Mick was throwing up while they operated on her. Hospitals have that effect on him.

Mick’s her husband of eight years, the man she’s loved since a teenager. Wouldn’t you think they could take Dr Hughes’ advice, crassly expressed though it is, and push on with rupturing her other fallopian tube or planting a baby in the right spot? Not if her Michael has anything to do with it. He’s saying they have to take a break from babymaking, a proper break, until she mends – and Gloria has the distinct impression he means from sex as well as procreation. Not that she necessarily wants him to climb on her here and now in the hospital bed but she’d like to think there’d be some cavorting this side of the menopause.

‘The trouble is,’ she broods, I’m dealing with a man who looks relieved at the idea he’s under doctor’s orders to tuck his wife into the far end of the bed and drop a chaste kiss on her forehead.’

To add insult to injury she has a nun who tells her what’s happened is God’s will, a doctor who predicts she’ll go on to produce a brood of seven and, the final ignominy, a bedpan below her backside. Which she’s actually grateful for. But at least the nurses are human and there’s always Kate and Eimear to bring her chocolates and set her laughing. Although it hurts her right side when she does, the missing-tube side where her baby clung fleetingly to life.

CHAPTER 3

Kate visits Gloria, whispering that she’s ducked out of work for the afternoon. An undertone implies a sense of guilt but it’s obviously not an emotion she’s familiar with.

Look at her, she can hardly wait to talk about The Revelation – Gloria’s already labelling it with capitals because it’s so sensational. She’s seething with Kate, partly because she senses a furtive glee, even as Kate claims to feel like Judas.

Kate can’t stop mentioning Jack’s name, she breathes the word lingeringly, describing the affair in bodice ripper-speak – her heart skips a beat when she sees him and her legs buckle beneath his kisses. Gloria thinks she might at least make an effort to avoid clichés if she’s determined to force her to sit through this. As far as she knows, Kate’s never read a Thrills and Swoon in her life but you’d swear she was reared on them from her engorged prose. Anyway, between the irregular heartbeats and unreliable legs, the crux of the matter is that Kate’s conscience is interfering with her big clinch close-ups.

‘I don’t want to hurt Eimear,’ Kate sighs.

‘Should’ve thought about that before you played Open Sesame with her husband,’ Gloria remarks.

Kate turns a reproachful gaze on her. ‘I didn’t come here for a lecture, Gloria.’

‘I hope you didn’t come for absolution either.’

She’s becoming increasingly incensed by Kate – she’s risking the triumvirate, measuring a fling with Jack above more than twenty-five years of friendship. And in a dark recess, a part of her consciousness she can scarcely bring herself to acknowledge, Gloria is jealous. Jack’s so glamorous: a lecturer at Trinity College, a published poet, a regular on chat shows, and to cap it all he looks like Aidan Quinn. The first time she saw him her pulse kept time with the Riverdance score but she’d never dream of casting a glad eye in his direction, not only because he belongs to her friend but because he’s too dazzling to be interested in her.

Yet here he is having it away with Kate who’s no better looking than herself. Of course Kate has the red hair, some men are pushovers for that, usually dodgy ones, Kate claims. Gloria supposes it has to be the intellectual appeal, she’s a lawyer and witty in a flippant way, with brains to burn. Mind you, Kate’s obviously set fire to more brain cells than she can spare if this stupid adventure is anything to judge by. But since when did intelligence stop people making complete eejits of themselves.

‘They don’t have kids, it’s not as if I’d be breaking up a family home,’ Kate justifies herself.

‘So you’re thinking of galloping off into the wide blue yonder with him.’

Kate drops her eyes before Gloria’s challenge and a pause drags into a silence.

‘Not really,’ she sighs finally. ‘I know it has to end but I feel as if I’ve wandered into a room with no doors marked exit. I’m fond of Pearse, it’s just that Jack is so irresistible.’

‘Pearse. I wondered how long it would take before we got around to Pearse,’ Gloria yells.

He’s the man Kate lives with, an old dear who’s knocking on a bit, but she knew that when she moved in with him. Or rather, invited him to move in with her. He lived some miles outside the city in Skerries, a seaside spot favoured by families but not much use to party animals, according to Kate. Gloria feels her friend is getting a bit long in the tooth for this goodtime girl malarkey but Kate turns huffy if she intimates as much.

The night is young and so am I,’ Kate insists after an evening out, when the others are desperate for their beds. She makes them feel like social outcasts if they attempt to slope off home at midnight.

‘Don’t worry, pumpkins are in this season,’ is her rallying cry as she tries to reconvene the team at some drinking den where staff reverse the Wedding Feast of Cana miracle with the wine served.

But back to Pearse.

‘I’d prefer to leave Pearse out of this,’ says Kate.

‘I’m sure you would but he’s part of your life,’ Gloria snaps.

‘My insignificant other.’ Kate pulls a face.

‘Behave yourself, Kate, you’re living with him, he deserves better.’

‘I know, he deserves a wonderful woman who’ll make him delirious with joy for a lifetime and I can’t do that. Even without Jack in the frame I couldn’t do it. But with Jack …’

Gloria meditates. There’s nothing romantic about Kate and Jack betraying Eimear because they’ve fallen in lust and confused it with love. However she raises the white flag.

‘Look Kate, I haven’t the energy for this, I haven’t the strength for my own problems let alone yours. Since you’re determined to confess, why don’t you get your completely insincere act of contrition off your chest as quickly as possible and give me some peace. How did you and Jack discover it was your life’s mission to have two hearts beating as one?’

‘Initially I was flattered by his interest – I’d never have imagined I could be Jack O’Brien’s type. I decided he was having a rush of blood to the head and it would simmer down but it’s been three months now and we’re still crazy about each other. Let’s face it, he could have anyone he likes,’ Kate concludes in that pathetic, tremulous voice Gloria finds so out-of-character – and so infuriating, ‘and he chose me.’

‘Come on, Kate, you can do better than that,’ she admonishes.

Kate expels air noisily. ‘I suppose Jack winkled his way into my affections at a vulnerable time. Pearse was hammering away about how we ought to get married, since we’ve been living together for four years and how he’d like to have a few kids. I said where’s your hurry, sure men can have prostate operations and hip replacements and still produce babies. But Pearse said fathering them was all very well but being able to bend over and pick them up was another matter entirely.

‘Jaysus, Glo, it was babies, babies and more babies with the man, he was obsessed. He couldn’t understand why my biological clock wasn’t ticking, like most women’s over thirty, and I said if I heard it ticking wasn’t I bloody well able to tell it to shut up. I … oh God, I’m so sorry, Gloria, I was forgetting about you – talk about insensitive.’

Gloria shrugs. ‘People can’t tiptoe around me forever,’ she manages, although a few more days of fancy footwork would be welcome.

Kate continues: ‘I was feeling harassed and then I bumped into Jack one day in Grafton Street and before I knew it we were in the Shelbourne with Irish coffees, gossiping and laughing about nothing in particular – and then all of a sudden he leaned over and pushed my hair out of my eyes and we both knew.’

‘Knew that you were about to cheat and lie and abandon a friend?’ demands Gloria. ‘You’re mad, you’re dealing with a man who thinks trust is only a word that applies to his pension plan, and you’re no better yourself, Kate McGlade.’

Gloria can’t mask her rage. How dare anyone else be happy when life has kicked her in the stomach and then aimed its Doc Marten at the side of her head for good measure.

Kate shrugs. ‘Since when did you turn judge and jury, Gloria? You must remember what it’s like to be in love. How the more you feel the world is against you, the more you cling to one another. Yes, I feel guilty, but I also feel I’m bursting with life.’

‘It’s a wonder you’ve never been caught out – people know each other’s business here, this is a city the size of a village,’ says Gloria.

‘We’re very careful,’ replies Kate, but Gloria arches a dubious eyebrow.

‘You’ll be walking up the street hand in hand one day when you’re supposed to be at a conference in Edinburgh and you’ll bump into Eimear or Pearse or both,’ she predicts.

Another silence falls between them, not the comfortable quietness among friends but a brooding stillness. Gloria ruptures it at last.

‘Why are you telling me all this, Kate? Eimear’s my friend as much as you are. Do you expect me to keep a secret like this from her?’

Kate twists her mouth – it could be a smile, it could be a grimace.

‘That’s your business, Glo. I confided in you but if you choose to go to her …’ her voice tails off.

Gloria is amazed. A thought is materialising in her dazed brain and she can’t quite acknowledge it: it’s as if Kate wants her to tell Eimear, then the decision will be out of her hands.

There’s a rattle at the door and the afternoon cup of tea and two dull-dull-dull digestives arrive (have they never heard of Mikado biscuits?) delivered by Mary, one of the domestics. Gloria has yet to catch her without a smile as wide as the street, despite the fact she has breast cancer – everyone has their story to tell and there are no secrets in a hospital. She winks and leaves a second cup for Kate, although she’s not supposed to supply visitors.

‘What should I do?’ asks Kate, as soon as they’re alone.

‘Break it off and keep your mouth shut, there’s no point in salving your conscience at the expense of Eimear’s peace of mind,’ Gloria orders. ‘Nor Pearse’s,’ is an afterthought.

‘You’re right.’ Kate nods, adding sugar to her tea, although she hasn’t taken it since she gave it up for Lent sixteen years ago. They all abandoned sugar at the same time to subjugate fleshly desires (Sister Xavier’s idea) and leave them as thin as rakes for Easter (Eimear’s contribution).

They chat desultorily for ten minutes more, then Kate lifts her coat. Impulsively Gloria delays her.

‘Tell me, Kate, is it worth it?’

Her face is radiant. ‘God, yes. I’m miserable and torn and full of self-loathing but I also feel extravagant, exhilarated, energised.’

‘Sounds as though you’re high on Es,’ Gloria puns – but Kate doesn’t notice.

‘I feel as though anything and everything’s possible. A kiss from Jack is a hundred times more exciting than full-blown rumpy bumpy with Pearse, though he’s the most loyal man a woman could ask for. He could find me spread-eagled in bed with Jack sweating on top and still he’d try to believe the best. Like Jack drugged me or he’d walked through the wrong front door and mistaken me for Eimear. I despise myself. But not enough to want to stop.’

‘You are going to stop, though, aren’t you?’ Gloria insists, more stridently than she intends, but here’s her own world knocked to kingdom come and Kate’s having sex with someone she shouldn’t be and relishing every humpingly fantastic minute of it.

‘I must stop, I know that,’ Kate agrees and, blowing a kiss, she’s gone.

Shortly after 5 p.m., Mick turns up. She contemplates telling him about Jack and Kate but dismisses it on the grounds that he might blurt something out or even turn whistle-blower deliberately. Men don’t feel the same way about keeping secrets as women do.

Instead she talks about the mastectomy faced by Mary, the cheerful trolley lady, and once he’s worked out which one she is he’s suitably interested. It’s astonishing how much you can know about a person you don’t know.

She watches him defy the shape of his mouth to decimate one of the digestives she saved for him in a single bite and wonders how she’d feel if he were having an affair.

Provided it wasn’t Kate or Eimear she could handle it. Of course, she acknowledges, she’s probably being complacent because she can’t actually picture it happening. She may fancy Mick (or at least she must have once), 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.