The Valentine's Card

by Juliet Ashton

  Only too well. ‘Yup.’ Tartly, Orla zipped up her jeans.

  ‘I restrained myself. Spilt milk and all that. What could she say to me that wouldn’t hurt me more?’

  ‘I guess.’ Orla’s face was in shadow as she reached into the wardrobe for a blouse patterned with swallows.

  ‘And now I suspect you’ve moved on to the next phase – deep deep sadness. Am I right?’ Maude’s voice was liquid with compassion.

  ‘Yes,’ said Orla briskly, pulling on the blouse, before bleakness overwhelmed her and she froze in scarecrow pose, arms stretched through the sleeves. ‘Tell me how I get past this, Maude.’

  Maude considered for a moment, eyes on the worn rug. ‘I know each generation thinks they invented the idea, but probably I loved Arthur just as much as you love Sim.’

  ‘Loved!’ snapped Orla, all action again, attacking the fiddly buttons.

  ‘Well, I used the past tense as I swept up the Meissen shards, but I found my way back to loving him. It was tricky, but I did it for my sake as much as his.’

  ‘I don’t want to love him. Only a fool would love a man who did that to her. If I’m to survive, I have to hate him,’ said Orla miserably. ‘How can they do it, these men?’

  ‘Couples are cruel to each other. Arthur and Simeon weren’t the worst. We loved them and that love had meaning. Ring fence it. They can’t defend or explain their actions in life from beyond the grave. We have to find our own way back to loving them, and leaving them behind.’

  ‘What did you do?’ Orla hoped for a map, with explicit instructions. The route she was planning was not sensible.

  With a sigh and a creaky readjustment of her legs, Maude said, ‘I started again from scratch. It wasn’t just Arthur who’d lied to me. My family knew. As I hadn’t been able to fulfil my side of the contract, they understood that Arthur must have an heir. I found myself looking at my mother and wondering how many times she’d sat with me, chatting about this and that, choosing not to warn me about the great calamity in my life. No, I didn’t understand and I still don’t. Love has certain rules. I don’t mean morals, the made-up sexual dos and don’ts. I mean things such as treating each other with respect, telling each other the truth, whether it’s a marriage or mother and child.’

  Maude slapped her lap, happy to have reached the turning point in her tale.

  ‘But you asked, what did I do. I sold up, lock stock and barrel, and walked away. All the way to London, where it’s noisy and modern. I had friends here but I didn’t look them up. The puzzle of working out who knew and who didn’t was too painful. Simpler to sever all ties.’

  ‘Your mother?’ asked Orla, watching Maude’s childishly slight seated figure in the wardrobe mirror as she tucked in the blouse and pivoted to check out her back view.

  ‘We never spoke again. She died in 1999.’ Maude’s hands moved, one over the other, over and over, as if she were washing them.

  ‘I immersed myself in a new kind of life, among all kinds of people. I went into business – not the done thing in my circle, I assure you. I was my own woman, rather late in life, and it felt marvellous, Orla, like taking off one’s corsets after a ball.’

  Never having worn corsets, and certain that the Tobercree Church Hall Disco didn’t qualify as a ball, Orla smiled.

  ‘I fitted in, snug as a bug in a rug, as Nanny would say. Who’d have thought?’

  ‘Me,’ smiled Orla. ‘I’d have thought. You’d fit in anywhere.’

  ‘I wish I could offer you a helping hand through the sadness, dear, but it’s something you have to face, endure, and then let go.’

  ‘I know.’ Trouble was, Orla was on her second lap. She was trapped in an emotional Groundhog Day, facing, enduring, letting go and then meeting the same old feelings again.

  ‘Trust me, child. This is the worst of it. When it clears you’ll be filled with energy and you’ll break into a run. That’s when I opened the shop. If I can do it …’ Maude left that lingering in the air as she stood, with some effort, and advised, ‘Perfume, dear, on your hair. That gets a chap going.’

  Chapter Nineteen

  The meze kept coming. One smiling moustachioed man after another approached their table to deposit platters of hummus, feta, mushrooms and stuffed vine leaves.

  ‘I hope you’re hungry,’ said Marek, sitting back, surveying the feast.

  ‘Ooh, ow, the peppers are hot,’ Orla fanned her mouth, regretting her bravado. She was hungry: she’d forgotten to eat. This was yet another symptom of her return to the recent bad old days and she determined to do the starter justice. ‘Do you like Greek food? I should have checked.’

  ‘I like food. I am a Polish man. We don’t turn anything down. But yes, I love Greek food. Have you ever been to Greece?’

  ‘Never.’ She had hardly been anywhere. Orla was a champion of the staycation long before desperate tourist boards coined the term.

  ‘Then I must take you,’ said Marek. ‘I’ve been to Santorini, and the mainland. We could explore the islands together.’ Without looking at her, concentrating instead on marrying up a pitta and a meatball, he asked, ‘Would you like that?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, rather enjoying the subjugation of being ‘taken’ somewhere. She wouldn’t, she knew, have to look up deals or organise passports for a trip with Marek. ‘You have excellent meze manners.’ She steered the conversation away from a putative trip, shy of projecting their rickety partnership into the future.

  Marek questioned the phrase with a look.

  ‘Some people have the worst meze manners. They just dive in and vandalise the hummus, drop feta in the olives. You’re approaching things calmly, you’re not double dipping, you’re not nicking all the best bits.’ Orla enjoyed the glimmer of enjoyment in Marek’s dark foreign eyes, and warmed to her playful theme. ‘And you haven’t tried to feed me. That always ends badly, usually with taramasalata in my eyebrows.’ His hiccupped laugh rewarded her. ‘My friend Juno – I’ve mentioned her before – almost gave up on the man she married during their first date because of his meze manners. He tried to feed her.’

  ‘I would never dare.’

  ‘Good. It’s a messy old business and neither side really enjoys themselves.’ Orla refilled Marek’s glass and her own from the bottle he’d chosen. He’d eschewed both the straw-covered house carafe and the ouzo, promising her that the lemony notes of the chenin blanc would complement their food perfectly.

  ‘This wine is nice. I mean, memorably nice,’ said Orla. Left to her own devices she ordered the cheapest, and left to his, Sim had ordered the most costly. They’d mocked wine buffs. Mmm! A fine bouquet with hints of dirty knicker and the merest whisper of Formica! ‘It actually tastes like you said, as if we’re on a summer beach, and not in rainy November London.’

  ‘I’m glad you like it. I’ll remember that.’

  From somebody else that could sound suave, part of a trite seduction, but Marek meant it. Orla’s hand hovered over the food. She knew Marek was watching her, had been since the moment she’d arrived, as if he were at an invalid’s bedside. He was watching for signs of relapse.

  Sim hadn’t come up in conversation. There was no mention of the valentine and no solicitous enquiry about how she felt. Sensing this was a plan, and not an empathy deficit, Orla applauded Marek’s tact.

  He was happy. Orla made him happy. She didn’t need to be witty or profound or even, Lord knew, well coiffed; Orla made Marek happy by sitting opposite him and sharing a meal. This was empowering stuff for a spirit as gaga as Orla’s. And, in the middle of a main course of unctuous lamb, she realised she was happy, too – and her happiness wasn’t to do with the meat. It was to do with Marek.

  ‘To us!’ she said suddenly, holding up her glass, going with it, being, as Marek had optimistically described them, normal.

  ‘To us!’ Marek’s glass shot up with alacrity. ‘To Orla and Marek,’ he said, more quietly, lowering his chin so that his upturned eyes were trained on hers.

 
‘To Orla and—’

  A commotion outside distracted her. The dark wintry street turned to apocalyptic day as a battery of lights snapped on. Parting fronds of plastic ivy Orla peered through the window.

  ‘What is it?’ Marek rose in his seat to look over the dusty greenery. ‘They’re filming something. Look, there’s a guy with a camera on a sort of trolley thing.’

  ‘Those lights are dazzling.’ Large globes on a high scaffold lit the street like a stadium, illuminating a beetling herd of purposeful figures in padded body-warmers jabbering into walkie-talkies. It was as if a small army had laid claim to the parade of shops opposite.

  ‘Do you think it’s a film?’ Marek sat down again, not as interested as the waiters who all gravitated to the windows, arms crossed, mouths open.

  ‘Could be.’ Orla wondered if she looked shifty.

  Concentrating on his lamb, Marek said, ‘Or a commercial maybe.’

  ‘Yes, I think it’s a commercial,’ said Orla carefully, on boggy ground. Her raised fork empty, she held open a peephole in the ivy with her other hand.

  ‘Commercials these days,’ said Marek, ‘seem to be in one of two camps. Either they’re shouting buy this cheap sofa! or they’re sophisticated mini movies.’

  ‘Hmm.’ A small trailer, parked a little way down the road, had become an object of interest for the body-warmer pack. It exuded a pregnant sense of something imminent, as individuals hurried towards it and away again, vaulting up the steps to knock on the door, conversing with the unseen occupants, pressing their earpieces, talking into their handsets, making hand gestures at colleagues nearer the cameras. The stark lights were trained on the window of a café, but Orla could sense that the small utilitarian trailer was about to burp out something important.

  ‘You don’t like your main?’

  ‘No, I do, I just …’ Orla smiled mechanically, then her eyes slid back to the trailer as the door opened and Anthea Blake emerged on the top step. ‘I’m just distracted, that’s all,’ she said thinly, as a solicitous hand shot out to guide Anthea down three steps.

  ‘Is it that fascinating out there?’ Marek seemed bemused by his date’s inability to focus.

  ‘Kind of.’

  Orla’s breath was trapped somewhere deep in her diaphragm. Like a doting lover, she couldn’t look away from Anthea’s progress towards the spot-lit café, the crew parting for her as if her charisma walked two steps ahead clearing the way. Dressed in nondescript bourgeois style for her role in the coffee commercial, Anthea nevertheless gleamed with the result of professional attention to her hair, her face, her outfit. Her benevolent smiles for the worker ants seemed assumed to Orla, the tic of a person who knows they’re the centre of attention.

  Marek, seeing Orla’s mouth fall open, half stood to look out. ‘Ah,’ he said in a chalky resigned voice. ‘I see.’

  The spell broken – Orla had been unprepared for the physical effect of seeing her nemesis – Orla belatedly set about her food. ‘Fancy seeing her here.’

  The attempt at wryness fell on stony ground. ‘You planned this.’

  For the briefest of moments, Orla considered a wide-eyed rebuttal. Ashamed of the impulse, she laid down her cutlery. ‘I did,’ she conceded, bowing her head but keeping her eyes left; Anthea was being positioned in the café’s pseudo daylight at a window table. The cynosure of many eyes, the actress was a petite monarch accustomed to her power and casual about it.

  ‘I’m over here, Orla.’

  ‘Sorry.’ Orla tore her eyes away to focus on Marek. ‘Don’t look at me like that!’ Orla hoped the protest was playful. She didn’t like his frank disquiet, nor his disappointment.

  ‘Anthea Blake is why you chose this restaurant. Why you changed tables.’ Marek balled his napkin and dropped it on the remains of his meal, nodding at a waiter who hurried over. ‘Did you want to see me at all?’

  ‘Of course.’ Orla realised, a little late, how this looked. ‘I did, I mean, I do. Honestly. But I need to see her and it seemed obvious to, like, dovetail the two.’

  Orla wasn’t entirely certain she could explain it to herself.

  ‘Why do you need to see her? Surely she’s the last woman on earth you want to be near!’

  Marek’s brief interchange with the waiter asking for the bill, immediately, gave Orla time to formulate a reason that didn’t reflect disastrously on her judgement, her state of mind, her manners. She couldn’t.

  ‘I’m sorry, Marek. It’s hard to explain.’

  ‘Look at you!’ Marek’s voice rose. ‘Even while we’re arguing about it you can’t keep your eyes off the street!’ Marek stood, his chair falling back.

  Other diners looked over and at each other, covertly curious.

  ‘She has something that belongs to me!’ hissed Orla, aware that they were the floor show.

  His wallet wouldn’t cooperate, refusing to emerge from his breast pocket. Marek swore under his breath, yanked out the little leather envelope and plucked a fan of notes. Flinging them on the table without counting them, he headed for the exit.

  After a second’s shocked inaction, Orla rose and followed him, gathering her jacket and bag with hunched speed as if fleeing a burning building.

  Across the road, Ant sat at a table, serene in the midst of industry. A man in a baseball cap perched on the table, talking to her, eliciting nods and a tinkling laugh that Orla believed she could discern through the noise of the crew, a gathering crowd and Marek’s hasty footfall as he stalked to the corner. He stopped dead a little way ahead of her, shoulders suddenly falling, and wheeled to face her.

  ‘We’ll go home,’ he said calmly. ‘Start again. Yes?’

  Orla relaxed a little: she hadn’t scared him off utterly. When Marek held out his hand she took it eagerly, enjoying its warm strength in the cold night air.

  Her outstretched hand in his outstretched hand, Orla was dimly aware that the dynamic between her dawdling self and the brisker Marek was that of busy parent and reluctant toddler. She looked back at the surreal hub of light and purpose about to be eclipsed by the corner they were turning.

  Craning her neck, unwilling to lose sight of it, she stopped dead, resisting the tug of Marek’s grasp. The journal might be back there, in the Portakabin.

  She has everything, thought Orla.

  ‘Oh no no no.’ Marek sounded exasperated. His fingers closed tighter around hers. ‘Look at yourself, woman.’

  He didn’t say it unkindly. In fact, he said it with compassion. And Orla looked at herself.

  She saw a woman who shouldn’t give Anthea Blake and her latest romantic scalp another thought but who nonetheless longed to stride across the road, elbow through the guardians assigned to exclude mere mortals from the filming of such a holy thing as a coffee ad and confront Anthea about theft, about love, about right and wrong.

  Marek kept his hand in hers and when her body lost its readiness to spring his grip relaxed, and he closed his eyes with relief when finally Orla turned around and said, ‘Let’s go home.’

  ‘Would you have stopped me if I’d pulled away? Physically stopped me, I mean.’ Orla looked down at the arm wrapped around her, its dark hairs vivid against the snowy chaos of the bedclothes.

  ‘No. You’re a big girl. You can do what you want.’

  Marek and she were entwined, pretzel-like, a Siamese twin fashioned by a mutual need for skin against skin. He kissed the top of her head, squeezing her as he did so, and she enjoyed how virile his body felt against hers, full of male strength and potential.

  And she enjoyed that she enjoyed it, without checking first with the dead to see if they minded.

  ‘Wouldn’t you even have stopped me a little bit?’ Orla was disappointed. Never prone to Tarzan and Jane fantasies, she nonetheless found the image of Marek throwing her over his shoulder a provocative one.

  ‘No.’ Marek was on to her. ‘Perhaps you’d like me to wear a fireman’s helmet next time we make love? Or I could pretend to arrest you.’

 
; ‘I love your house.’ Orla changed topic, her mind pleasantly at ease after a prolonged period of kissing and stroking and charging around each other’s erogenous zones like delighted tourists newly arrived in a resort.

  ‘You said that.’

  ‘I know. But I do. I love your house.’ Mews buildings had always fascinated her, commanding huge fees for what was essentially a horse’s dormitory. In this squat, compact space tucked in behind an august Chelsea street, Orla finally grasped the point. It was cosy and it was luxurious, but it was playful too: Marek had inserted a high-end kitchen in a stable. The juxtaposition of exposed brick and chrome pleased her, as if she’d stepped into a magazine article about how the other half, the half with all the taste, live. And the spiral staircase delighted her with its whimsy, although she could attest to how uncomfortable it was as a venue for lovemaking. ‘You’ve got lots of books.’

  ‘You approve.’

  ‘I do.’ Orla unapologetically judged people by their bookshelves. Juno was still in the naughty corner for a Jeffrey Archer compendium, and Sim’s meagre library – Orla’s thoughts skidded to a halt, shook themselves and changed direction.

  It didn’t matter what Sim had or hadn’t read.

  ‘I’m getting to know your body,’ said Orla shyly, picking up the arm that lay across her and brushing it with her lips.

  In response, one part of that body perked up a little, bumping the top of Orla’s thigh like an insistent Labrador angling for walkies.

  ‘Ooh,’ she laughed.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Marek, not sounding in the least penitent. ‘Your body is like …’

  ‘Steady.’ Orla had received many clumsy compliments and didn’t want the moment tarnished.

  ‘Like an ice-cream. Like a big sweetie just for me. Like a bank holiday.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Oh God.’ Marek, who seemed to like ice-cream, sweeties and bank holidays a lot, groaned as he nuzzled her closer, that Labrador becoming more insistent. ‘You’ve bewitched me, Irish.’