The Valentine's Card

by Juliet Ashton

  ‘It’s a one-off, dear.’ Maude sounded confident as she tucked a pen into the cottage loaf of her hair. ‘No wonder you’re looking a little washed out. That new job of yours is demanding.’

  ‘But I love the demands.’ Being needed was one of the things she missed most. ‘Most of my class plan to live here, get a job, so they need to brush up their language skills double quick. One of the Russian girls – Jaysus, what’s her name? Tasha, I think, she’s from Georgia – is struggling. I stayed behind, gave her a leg up. Because not everybody has a Maude to look out for them.’

  Deep in the lower strata of Orla’s bag, her mobile cheeped. They exchanged glances.

  ‘Wednesday night,’ Maude checked her delicate gold wristwatch, ‘eight p.m. Bang on time.’

  ‘I’ll see you up there.’ Orla wandered to the back of the darkened shop, digging out her phone.

  ‘I’ll have the wine open.’ Maude retreated.

  ‘Orla? It’s Ma. Can you talk?

  ‘Ma. Howaya?’

  ‘I’m grand. Mustn’t complain. Awful quiet here today. I was just thinking of how you used to drop in some days on your way home from work. But, sure, amn’t I an old, old woman and haven’t you youngsters lives of your own?’

  ‘Deirdre texted me this morning.’

  ‘She did, did she? Oh, she’s gone very technological since she got that new Blackcurrant.’

  ‘She texted me just after she left your house. She said she passed Hugh on the doorstep.’

  ‘He painted me shed. A horrible colour, but what can you do?’

  ‘Not so lonely after all, for an old, old forgotten woman, eh, Ma?’

  ‘You’d make a grand detective. For your information I am lonely for my youngest child. When are you coming home?’

  ‘Soon.’

  ‘Still on the trail of the long-lost journal?’

  ‘I’ve more or less given up. Unless he plastered it into the walls, it’s not here.’

  ‘They won’t keep your job at the school open forever.’

  ‘Ma, I feel bad enough about leaving my class to end the school year without me, don’t pile on the guilt. There’s a bigger picture. Sim’s death threw all the cards in the air. I love Tobercree Primary but now … Anyway, they’ve given me one more month to decide.’

  ‘What’s to decide? You were only meant to be gone for two feckin’ days! It’s time to get back to normal life. I don’t want you to screw your life up because you’re upset over Sim.’

  ‘I’m not upset, Ma. I’m altered. Listen, any goss?’

  ‘Hasn’t her next door got herself a new fella? And him a big bald bastard with a beer gut you could trampoline on!’

  ‘Ma!’

  ‘Musha?’

  ‘I do miss you, you know.’

  ‘She’s wrong about screwing my life up,’ Orla told the valentine as she towelled herself off after her shower. ‘And yes, before you say it, Ma’s wrong about a lot of things. She was right about you, though.’

  Ma Cassidy had developed a soft spot for Sim. She’d sat him down in her dead husband’s chair, plied him with sweet tea and homemade cake, cackled like waterfowl at his every joke. Quality, she’d pronounced him, marvelling that a senator’s son should be sitting in her conservatory eating her éclairs just like a normal fella.

  ‘You always said I was too close to Ma. She feels threatened by my independence, I guess. Hey, Sim, lookie here. My bum’s back!’ Orla dropped the towel to show off her newly reclaimed asset. She wiggled it. The valentine remained silent.

  ‘Please yourself.’ Orla pulled on a pair of large white knickers that Sim would have reviled. ‘I know, I know; Bridget Jones pants. But men have no idea how excruciating thongs are.’

  Padding up the stairs, Orla wondered if she’d simply exchanged one old lady for another. Maude’s point of view was more worldly, less Tobercree-centric than Ma’s. Perhaps that was why Orla had listened when Maude had exhorted her to stay all those months ago.

  Orla had been keen to fly back to her coop. ‘I’m not up to London,’ she’d told Maude, tearful yet again. ‘I’m a small-town person. I thought a change of scene would help but all it’s done is prove that nothing can help. I mean, look at me!’ She’d dabbed her eyes with an exhausted tissue. ‘I keep thinking, surely that’s all the tears one woman can drum up, but somehow I produce more.’

  ‘Such impatience,’ Maude had said and produced a linen hanky. ‘Did you really expect London to be a magic cure? Where’s your courage, woman? Sim faced his own challenges here, remember. Yes, it was his dream come true, but it was a mountain to climb as well.’

  ‘His big break.’ Orla had found the ironed hanky comforting.

  When I get my big break, so do you, Sim had told her countless times. I’ll be my own man then. And you, Fairy, will be my woman. All legal and above board.

  ‘But, Maude,’ Orla had parried, ‘my job. My house.’

  ‘If your employers value you they’ll hold your job. If they run out of patience, there are other jobs. That big family of yours can pitch in and store your personal belongings and advertise for a short-term tenant.’

  ‘I suppose …’ Unbidden, a memory emerged of Sim’s reaction when she’d put in an offer on the little home Orla was so proud of.

  What are you trying to say? He’d struck postures from his Richard III. That you don’t see a future for us? Or you don’t think I can get a mortgage? Why not cut off my balls and be done with it? The location of the house had perplexed him. Why buy out in the bloody sticks?

  Explaining to a man who lived rent-free on Poshington Square that the sticks was all she could afford had taken a while. The cottage was an investment in their future, she told him. She needed a toe on the property ladder, needed a room of her own; she did not intend to be a kept woman, flashing a film star boyfriend’s Platinum card.

  More easily dealt with was the issue of his balls: she was far too fond of them to chop them off.

  She thought of her cottage often, on its lane where the woods met the edge of town. She thought of Sim’s strop less often: it still provoked a sensation of being stifled. Posthumously she could admit how disappointed she’d been that he didn’t try to understand.

  ‘Fear is something quite separate from what frightens you,’ Maude had said, as Orla wept, irresolute, over a half-packed suitcase. ‘It’s a distorting mirror, Orla. Why not face down dirty old London and try to discover what Sim saw in it?’

  ‘Perhaps the journal will turn up,’ Orla had said, ‘if I stay.’

  Orla knocked on Maude’s door and let herself in.

  ‘Come in, come in, it’s wine o’clock,’ laughed Maude.

  Orla was glad she’d taken Maude’s advice. Across the divide of death she and Sim shared the thrill of re-invention in a new city.

  And London is the perfect place to be lonely.

  Chapter Eight

  Bogna shrugged. ‘Sometimes, yes, people make joke about seaside when they hear name, but I don’t give toss.’

  ‘I bet you don’t!’ Sunshine bounced happily off the shop’s white walls. Maude, standing on a box behind her counter, was entranced by the self-confidence of the skinny-jeaned, stud-nosed nineteen-year-old job applicant. ‘Orla says you’re a lively addition to her class.’

  ‘That’s not what I said,’ said Orla, leaning against some bookshelves where she was pretending to read Mansfield Park. ‘I said she spent all yesterday morning throwing Polo mints at Ning’s head.’

  The dark-haired man on the shop sofa gave a strangled laugh, verifying Orla’s suspicion that he wasn’t engrossed in his book but eavesdropping.

  ‘Orla was saying boring things,’ Bogna appealed to Maude. ‘And Ning has big head, so …’

  ‘I’m sure I can trust you not to throw sweets at the customers.’ Maude was indulgent: the job was already Bogna’s, much to Orla’s dismay.

  ‘Who’s your favourite author?’ asked Orla, putting aside Mansfield Park and all pretence of uninterest.
She saw nothing in Bogna to suggest she’d make a shop assistant. Orla felt responsible: she’d offered the job to Tasha, and Bogna had overheard the Russian girl’s niet.

  With a withering look Orla recognised from class, Bogna said, ‘I don’t need job, you know.’

  There was a growl from the sofa, making Orla jump. The dark man turned the page of his book like a cracked whip.

  ‘OK, I do need job,’ snapped Bogna. ‘Because mean brother makes me pay rent for apartment he bloody owns. Me. His sister.’ She unleashed another withering look, this time aimed at the sofa. ‘He is beast.’

  The beast shifted, head still bowed over his book.

  ‘He looks rather nice to me,’ said Maude mildly. ‘Now, can you do Wednesday evening five to eight p.m. and all day Saturday?’ Maude, mistress of snap decisions, crumpled up the list of questions Orla had written.

  ‘Hmm.’ Bogna turned her mouth down. ‘All day Saturday? I like to have big bath and get ready for night out.’

  Another, louder, growl from the sofa. ‘Bogna …’

  With a martyred air, Bogna conceded that yes, she supposed she could do all day Saturday. ‘How much you pay me?’

  ‘Eleven pounds an hour.’ Maude ignored the frustrated tsk from Orla, who’d suggested ten.

  ‘Not enough.’

  ‘Oh.’ Maude was flustered. ‘Well, I suppose I could—’

  ‘Wait, please.’

  The man stood up, wearily. In this feminine domain he was emphatically dark, in black jeans, black shirt, with black hair. His skin, however, was emphatically white, giving him the appearance of a fairy tale prince.

  ‘Bogna.’ He turned to her and spoke in a rapid undertone, his voice as dark as his clothing. ‘Musisz pracowac. Ta pani jest przyzwoita, dobra i bedzie ptacic uczciwe wynagrodzenie. Powiedz “dziekuje” iwnos sie stad.’

  With downturned mouth, Bogna said, ‘OK, Maude, eleven pounds is fine.’

  ‘Marvellous.’ Maude clapped her frail hands.

  ‘And?’ The man looked expectantly at Bogna.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Bogna robotically.

  ‘What did you say, just then, in that lovely language?’ Maude asked the man towering over her. He was un-summery, a bracing blast of East European winter, and Orla could tell that Maude had taken to him as much as to his sister.

  ‘Nothing. It doesn’t matter,’ he said.

  ‘My evil brother said,’ said Bogna, eager to go against his wishes, ‘that I need a job and you are decent and good and will pay a fair wage and I should say “yes” and we should get out of here and leave you to get on with your day.’

  ‘And does your evil brother have a name?’ Maude was coquettish. Orla turned away, keeping her smile a secret. Across a ravine of forty years, her landlady was flirting with the tall dark foreign stranger.

  ‘I’m Marek.’ He got there before Bogna: it was obvious they vied for the driving seat. ‘And we’re very grateful that you see potential in Bogna. She’ll work hard for you, I promise.’

  ‘It’s wonderful to see a family pull together.’ Maude’s wistfulness made Orla realise she had never met any of Maude’s family. It shocked her that it had taken months for this to register. Was she so wrapped up in her own grief that she had stopped noticing other people’s?

  ‘My sister enjoys your classes,’ Marek said to Orla, from the doorway. ‘She’d never admit it in front of you, but she talks about you.’

  ‘Oh dear …’

  ‘It sounds as if you don’t take any nonsense. I love the girl but I know what she’s like. Bogna’s much younger than me, she’s my half-sister, although we don’t talk about halves in our family. Now my father’s gone, she’s my responsibility, so thank you for taking an interest.’

  Maude had drifted off to the Romantics section and Bogna, hand on a car door handle, impatient.

  ‘You don’t need to thank me,’ said Orla. ‘She’s bright, she’s capable. And she’s a character,’ she added, carefully.

  ‘English understatement,’ said Marek. ‘It comes in so handy.’

  Orla laughed. ‘All right, she’s a nightmare, but there’s a sweetness there too.’ They both looked out at Bogna, rattling the car door and scowling. ‘Deep, but there. And it wasn’t English understatement. It was Irish understatement. They’re similar.’

  ‘Ah. I didn’t recognise the accent.’ Marek had eyes so brown they verged on black. They were intense: Orla felt scrutinised.

  ‘Your English is perfect,’ she said, taking a step back.

  ‘I’ve been here a long time.’ Marek looked off to the left, remembered. ‘Almost twenty years.’

  ‘You must like it here.’

  ‘Marek! Pospiesz sie!’ Bogna could growl as darkly as her brother.

  ‘Like?’ Marek considered, as he turned away. ‘London can be a lonely place.’ He threw his car keys into the air and caught them. Over his shoulder, his dark eyes met her blue ones. ‘But every so often, something happens. Yes, London is a place where things can happen.’

  Orla didn’t wait for them to drive off. She went to the sofa and reapplied herself to Mansfield Park.

  ‘Interesting chap,’ said Maude from the counter.

  ‘Hmm,’ said Orla. Later she’d tell the valentine about him. I met an ‘interesting chap’ today, she’d say. Or maybe she wouldn’t. She didn’t have to tell the valentine everything, after all. No need to bore it.

  The stationmaster’s clock above the bar, a quirky piece perfectly at home among the other quirky pieces dotted round the Soho members’ club (a headless gold statuette, a stuffed parrot, a kimono), showed Orla that Reece was forty-three minutes late.

  Again she consulted the menu, a list of twenty-first-century restaurant staples she could now recite by heart.

  Sustainable cod and chips.

  Pork belly.

  Classic burger.

  Reece could be stuck at work, under a train, or have plain forgotten about her. Essentially law abiding – a trait Sim had deplored – Orla didn’t feel bold enough to check her messages, because of the handwritten notice prohibiting the use of mobiles in the club.

  ‘More water? Or d’you want to start on the hard stuff?’ The waitress, mixed race with a buoyant Mohican, was chummy. All the staff were chummy but professional, as if your best mates had conspired to sit you down to a nice meal, but for their own reasons refused to sit down with you.

  ‘Umm.’ Orla wondered what the correct thing to do was. Her halter-neck sundress had felt ‘right’ in her room, but among the bordello reds and golds of this zeitgeist-nailing interior it felt ‘wrong’. ‘Maybe a glass of wine? The house red?’

  ‘Sure.’ Mohican crinkled her eyes. ‘Go mad.’

  The red was suavely smooth, but Orla refused a second. An hour late now. Perhaps Reece wasn’t coming? When should she leave? And then he was standing over her table, tie askew, pale face a portrait of grave dismay. ‘Orla. This is unforgiveable. I hope you ordered some – ah, yes, good, you did.’

  London people kissed. Orla had witnessed much kissing in the hour she’d waited. She stood just as he bent, and their kiss became a bruising collision of Reece’s teeth and the top of Orla’s head.

  ‘Sorry. Jaysus. I’m a klutz, Reece.’

  ‘You’re a vision.’ Reece sat down, leaned eagerly over the table, studied her. ‘Sim would love that dress.’ They shared a complicit look. The first mention was over. ‘Tonight you look just like he used to describe you. Black and white and pink, Sim said. With join-the-dots freckles and your own microclimate of fresh air and damp sunshine.’

  ‘He said all that?’ Orla laughed, shy in the face of Reece’s rugged handsomeness. His hair was a bright and roaring red, cut short and tufty, accentuating the fine design of his face. Everything about his face was lean – long slender nose with flaring nostrils, a wide thin mouth, and inquisitive, catlike blue eyes that creased to slits when he smiled.

  ‘Apologies for the formal attire. I lunched an LA lawyer. Those guys judge
a man by his suits.’ He loosened his tie. ‘That’s better. Are you starving? I am.’ He snatched up the menu. ‘Sim reckoned you were the only girlfriend he’d ever had who admitted to an appetite.’ He paused. ‘I’m letting him down, aren’t I? It’s weeks since we met. He’d want me to look after you.’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’ Orla hesitated, then put a hand over Reece’s. It was pale, red at the knuckle, a strong hand for a creature of business, raw looking. ‘You’ve been very kind to me.’ He was special. He’d seen a gaggle of people around a man lying on the pavement, sauntered over to investigate and found Sim dying. Reece had watched as Sim’s last breaths escaped from his body. Touching Reece’s hand was a bridge to that moment. He could have no idea how important he was to Orla. ‘I’m not a child. You don’t have to babysit me.’

  He looked down at Orla’s hand, then up into her eyes. She withdrew her fingers. ‘Fishcakes,’ said Reece, emphatically. ‘Hope they’re better than my old school dinner ones.’

  ‘Boarding school, I bet. No, public school.’

  ‘How’d you guess?’

  ‘Sim was exported to one in Yorkshire. Fishcakes loomed large when he banged on about the terrible deprivations of a ten-thousand-pounds-per-term education.’

  ‘Knowing Sim, he charmed the bloomers off Matron and had a whale of a time.’

  ‘The older ladies always fell for him.’

  ‘Actually …’ Reece pursed his lips, slowed right down. The red hair and scrubbed skin gave him a youthful burnished look which made him difficult to age accurately: Orla felt he could be her contemporary or twenty years her senior. ‘There’s something I need to ask you. To do with Sim and Courtesan.’

  ‘Oh?’ Sim’s posthumous success was a tricky subject for Orla. She sidled towards it, unsure. He would have been delirious at the wall to wall PR, but it made Orla feel hollow, as if she were at a surprise party where the guest of honour didn’t show.

  ‘Do you read OK! magazine?’

  ‘Officially? No. But truthfully? Yes, Reece, of course I read it. Cover to cover. Sim used to joke that one day they’d photograph us in our Malibu beach house. We planned what we’d say. He went for “this is my time to be me”, but I plumped for “we want to give something back to society”.’