The Valentine's Card

by Juliet Ashton

  ‘Perhaps I should …’ George motioned at the door with his cap.

  ‘Perhaps you should,’ agreed Maude. After the bell’s hollow laugh she headed for the back of the shop, saying over her shoulder, ‘I don’t want to hear a word, not one word, about that ever again.’

  Maude roughly pushed apart the beaded curtain and lingered in the back room for the rest of the morning. And Orla went upstairs, to seek out her iPad and her laptop.

  ‘Is it your dream, to be a teacher?’ Perhaps it was because English was Marek’s second language that he could say stuff like that without it seeming pompous. Or perhaps it was because he spoke as if he’d weighed the words and found just the right amount. He was naked, unconcerned about it, sitting up in Orla’s bed and eating grapes. They popped and died between his teeth.

  ‘Dream? Don’t know about that.’

  Why was she denying it?

  ‘It’s one of the most important jobs in the world,’ said Marek, perfectly serious. ‘When you have very little, education is riches. You’re responsible for little minds, Orla. Well, not so little minds in your present job. But you’ll go back to little minds one day.’

  That was insightful. Until he’d said it, Orla hadn’t quite realised it herself, but yes, she would return to the bizarre world of interfacing with seven-year-olds. If he could see that, perhaps he could see other things. Orla stood and pulled her dressing gown tighter around her: she didn’t care to be transparent this morning, not when she’d risen early to trawl Sleb Snap while he was still asleep.

  ‘No, don’t.’ Marek pulled at the cord of her wrap and it opened. He moved and tugged her to him, so that his arms were on her skin beneath the dressing gown. His head nuzzled her stomach.

  Orla put her hands in his hair: she felt invested with power as if she’d tamed a lion and made it come to her. She was tearful, unexpectedly. A great surge of tangled emotions rose in her. She wanted to speak but she didn’t know what she wanted to say. Anybody who has ever kept a secret would recognise the ‘stoppered up’ sensation that kept her mute.

  ‘Christmas.’ Marek let go, flopping back on to the bed, arms over his head. ‘What are we doing?’

  Letting her hair fall over her face as she reknotted her dressing gown cord, Orla said archly, ‘We?’

  ‘Yes, hard-to-get bloody Irish, we. I know. I’ll cook a traditional English turkey for you and Maude. And Bogna. Unfortunately. Here. Yes?’

  ‘Yes please.’ Orla felt a jigsaw piece click into its place.

  ‘And let’s plan New Year’s Eve too,’ said Marek, patting the bedclothes beside him. He patted harder when she ignored him. ‘Come here, woman.’

  Woman came there, settling her face into his chest. ‘I’m not a fan of New Year,’ she said. ‘It’s maudlin.’

  ‘I’ve never been to Trafalgar Square at New Year,’ mused Marek, as if she hadn’t spoken. ‘Always looks crazy on TV.’

  ‘Oh Jaysus, Trafalgar Square!’ Orla shuddered. ‘Imagine it. Surrounded by drunks, freezing cold, everybody roaring, and then a schlep home in the small hours.’

  ‘In short, something you’d never dream of doing?’

  ‘No siree.’

  ‘But it kind of excites you?’

  ‘Sort of. In a thank Gawd I’ll never have to do that way.’

  ‘That’s decided, then. We’ll kiss at midnight in Trafalgar Square.’

  ‘No way, Rabbit!’

  ‘It’s perfect. A new experience for both of us to kick off the new year. Our new year. I’ll do this to you at midnight.’ His pout found her lips and flirted with them a little.

  ‘If you do that,’ whispered Orla, ‘I’ll have to do this.’ Marek’s eyes widened. ‘And in the middle of Trafalgar Square, that’ll get us arrested.’

  Marek moved on top of her. ‘Worth it, though.’

  *

  Abena was out of breath. Her face, peeping around the classroom door, glowed with excitement. ‘It is a man for you!’ she gasped, euphoric. ‘He is handsome!’ she added throatily, her face promptly disappearing.

  Glad to escape the smell of fresh paint in their patched-up room, Orla gathered together her books and pads, aware that her cachet among her students had just rocketed. She tugged on her coat, glad that Marek had turned up, as if he knew she needed him.

  An urge had been tugging at her hem all afternoon, like a precocious child. There was no need to go to Beatrice Gardens now that Orla had proved she couldn’t follow through and liberate the journal, but her subconscious disagreed. Orla was struggling to resist a pull she didn’t understand, the pull to stand and watch Anthea’s house, even if Anthea wasn’t in it.

  And now here was Marek, saving her from herself.

  A pack of students clustered around Abena. They straightened up and attempted to act normal as Orla’s heels rang on the tiles of the entrance hall. Abena pointed through the door marked ADMIN where a man lounged on an office chair, watching her approach. He stood, pulled at his lapel, shrugged his shoulders into position.

  ‘Hello you.’ Orla’s greeting stood firmly in the featureless no-man’s-land between friendly and unfriendly.

  ‘Time for a coffee?’

  ‘Sure.’ Orla threw a disapproving look at Abena’s gang, but the kissy noises only got louder, following her and Reece out of the building.

  *

  At a table of a family-run Italian café which took its coffee seriously and sprinkled oregano on the all-day breakfast, Orla defrosted slightly.

  ‘You and I had a deal,’ said Reece, sad and disapproving. ‘Still mates, we said. Keep in touch, we said. But you never pick up my calls. And you never get back to me.’

  ‘I’ve been busy.’ Orla waited a moment, sipped her coffee. It was hot and thick and strident. ‘I’m seeing somebody.’

  ‘Marek? It’s …’ Reece cast about for language that would be acceptable to her. ‘It’s going somewhere, then?’

  ‘It might. It’s good. He’s nice.’ Marek would smile, she hoped, at such understatement. Marek knew how she felt about him … didn’t he?

  ‘That’s so good.’ Reece smiled indulgently. ‘You deserve it.’

  Orla didn’t want to discuss this with Reece. The scales had fallen – or been ripped – from her eyes. She missed her old confidant. ‘Don’t get overexcited. I’m not in love.’ Some where a fairy fell down dead; there’d been no need to say that.

  ‘It’ll be ten months this day next week.’ Reece turned his cup round and round on the saucer.

  ‘I know.’ Orla always noted the fourteenth. ‘A long ten months.’

  ‘An age,’ agreed Reece.

  They sat quietly for a while, companionable but absorbed in private thoughts. Reece bent to extract something from his briefcase and when he spoke it was impersonal, and rehearsed. ‘Take a look at this still, Orla.’

  He watched Orla lean over the A4 print-out. ‘Would you say that woman looks like you?’ In grainy black and white, a blurred figure filled almost the entire page. ‘It was taken by Ant’s security camera. Spooked her. I didn’t say so to Ant, but I thought it looks a bit like you.’ He watched Orla scrutinise the picture. ‘Can’t be you though, can it?’

  Orla stared at herself, captured in the eerie palette of a night lens, sodden, shoulders slumped, zombie-eyed. ‘No,’ said Orla slowly, sitting back, facing Reece squarely. ‘It can’t be me.’

  Not really a lie: Orla didn’t recognise the desperate woman in the picture.

  ‘Good,’ said Reece deliberately, crumpling the picture. ‘Because if it were I’d be worried.’

  Clever, how he wedded warning and solicitude like that.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  ‘Hi, it’s me! How’s Whitstable? I looked it up after you told me you were going there and did you know it’s where Dracula arrived in England after his voyage from Transylvania? Well, of course you did. You’re the clever one in our set-up. Guess you’re busy with your pupils or whatever you call them. Call me when you’re home and you ha
ve a minute. I want to run something by you. And I don’t want you to judge me, Orla. OK? Bye. Ooh, and watch out for tall dark strangers in capes.’

  ‘This is nice,’ said Marek, in a murmuring voice she loved, barely moving his lips, as if too sledgehammered by bliss to speak.

  Orla, lying back against him on the sofa, her head on his shoulder, their hair mingling, every limb heavy, agreed. The film was almost over and she dreaded having to shift; the position they’d found was as perfect as that position she always found in bed just before the alarm sounded.

  ‘I’m going to Poland on Friday,’ said Marek, in the same low honeyed tone. ‘The fourteenth.’

  ‘What? No!’ Orla sat up. ‘Oh Rabbit, for how long?’

  A laugh was startled out of Marek by her distress. There was pleasure, too, at this little proof of her attachment to him. His eyebrows moved together in a V of kind concern. ‘Darling, I won’t be long. It’s business, family stuff. My stepmother likes to make a fuss. I have to go.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Orla, with some effort, reset her expression. Panic ticked in her chest, though, and it coloured her next question. ‘How long will you be gone, exactly?’

  ‘Two days. Three at the most.’

  ‘Three. That’s not long, is it?’

  ‘It’s seventy-two hours. I’m flattered. You’re going to miss me, aren’t you, moje ztotko?’ He held her tightly to him, his chest firm against her bouncier one and Orla keenly felt how perfectly their differences complemented each other. When he let her go, she dipped her head but he dipped his too to look at her face. ‘Tears? No! Orla, is something wrong?’

  ‘Something’s right,’ mewled Orla, glad to feel this way, glad to have pushed through the dam of debris between her and Marek.

  ‘I should have asked you to come with me.’ Marek scooped her up so she was sitting on his lap. He kissed her, laughed, and said, ‘I was scared to ask in case you pulled a face.’

  ‘Me?’ said Orla in mock amazement. How could she have such power over such a man, yet fail to make an idiot like Sim happy? She kissed Marek, enjoying her right of way over his sculpted lips.

  ‘Well?’ Marek shrugged a question. ‘Why not? Come. Meet my family. See Skwierzyna.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘You and your buts,’ roared Marek, suddenly loud and exasperated.

  ‘But, college, Marek! I have to be there in front of the class when they all shuffle in.’

  She remembered Sim’s you’re just a primary school teacher! when she’d cited her job as reason not to come to London.

  ‘Then fly out after me and come for the Saturday and Sunday.’

  ‘I don’t know …’ Orla did know. A weekend without him would give her time with the other towering figure in her life. As was her habit these days, she expertly smothered the thought. ‘It’s a bit … soon.’

  ‘If you think so.’ Marek budged Orla off his lap. ‘Film’s over.’ He nodded at the screen and stood up. ‘I’ve got calls to make.’

  If the mews had a cave Marek would have retreated to it, but he had to make do with his office. Orla heard the door click shut and aimed the remote control at the screen, bouncing from shopping channel to panel games to sitcom.

  It would be easy to go with him. Just go and, maybe – crazy idea, this – enjoy herself. But the other Orla, that selfish greedy twin with an appetite for voyeurism and self-flagellation, couldn’t pass up such an opportunity. Perhaps it would all go her way. Perhaps the internet would roll her straight sixes and deliver not only an opportunity to face Anthea but the courage to go through with it.

  Orla could read the journal while Marek was away. She could be a fresh clean new person when he returned.

  An old Antiques Roadshow flashed past. The next channel offered her a documentary about New York. From inlaid writing desks to skyscrapers to, bang, Anthea Blake with a heart-shaped beauty spot and foot-high white hair. Orla had stumbled on a repeat of The Courtesan.

  Finger frozen, Orla watched Anthea, her powdered face and sly eyes part visible behind a fan. Anthea snapped the fan shut with a flourish and Orla jumped.

  ‘Madame, do not cross swords with me.’ Anthea advanced on the camera, her lips a bloody red. ‘I eat pretty upstarts like you for breakfast.’

  ‘Isn’t that …’ Marek was behind her.

  ‘Yes, it is.’ Orla pushed buttons at random, muting Ant and reducing her in size before finally managing to banish her.

  Marek said nothing.

  Rather loudly.

  It gave Orla pleasure to creep to the glacial outer reaches of Marek’s bed, shiver there for a moment, then shimmy back to his side and arrange her limbs over him, feeling the warmth he radiated. Marek was easy-going about her tendency to treat him as a climbing frame, happy in her koala-grip. Naked, they’d drawn a line under the grotty atmosphere that had lingered until bedtime.

  Now Marek shifted in his sleep, a dozy mumble on his lips. Suspended between sleep and wakefulness beside him, super-comfortable and about to dribble, Orla’s thoughts roamed in a non-linear fashion, alighting in no particular order on Juno’s peculiar defensiveness, her own need for a new bag, whether to have porridge for breakfast. And then Maude popped into her dozy head.

  I’ll treat Maude to something nice while Marek’s away, she decided. A nice meal in town, maybe?

  Orla’s sleepy brain discovered something that had been hidden in plain sight all along. It raced along a trail of breadcrumbs and reached a conclusion that jolted her into a sitting position.

  ‘Kochanie, jestes OK?’ Marek sat up with her, but his spine was still asleep and he collapsed back on to the pillows, pulling her with him. As he burrowed back into sleep, his head on her shoulder and his hair tickling her neck, Orla burned holes in the ceiling with her eyes.

  It was so obvious, she chided herself. So bloody obvious.

  ‘Orla? It’s Ma. Can you talk?’

  ‘Howaya Ma. Actually, I’m just about to—’

  ‘Listen, there was a murder! An actual murder in Tobercree!’

  ‘No! Who was murdered?’

  ‘Well, they didn’t die. The man who runs the electrical—’

  ‘If he didn’t die it’s not a murder, Ma.’

  ‘Don’t spoil it!’

  ‘Ma, can we talk another time? I was just about to—’

  ‘The eejit who lives over the chip shop is helping police with their inquiries. It’s the best thing that’s happened in Tobercree since – ever!’

  ‘Ma, I have something important to do, so I’ll—’

  ‘Young lady, what’s so important that it can’t wait until after the one conversation I have with me daughter every week?’

  ‘Sorry, Ma. Ma?’

  ‘Yes, musha?’

  ‘Was I a coward when I was a kid?’

  ‘You were lovely. The easiest one of the lot. Never a frown. A breath of sunshine.’

  ‘But did I run from things? Was I a sissy?’

  ‘Are you kidding me or what? You were my little tigress.’

  ‘That’s the word Juno used.’

  ‘If you were in the right, you’d stand up to anybody.’

  ‘Ah. Listen, Ma, I really do have to go.’

  Orla cut off her mother’s splutters and dashed out to the hallway, apprehending Maude on her way to the top floor after shutting up shop. ‘May I have a mo? It’s important.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Maude immediately. She preceded Orla back into the flat, tinsel fragments in her bun: Christmas decorations had gone up that day. Ordnance Survey lines zigzagging beneath her eyes gave the game away about Maude’s age in a way her steady blue gaze never would. ‘What’s wrong, dear?’

  ‘Nothing. Not with me. Well, no more than the usual.’ Orla’s light-hearted grin came out as a death’s head grimace and she saw Maude recoil as they seated themselves at the small square kitchen table.

  ‘I can sense you working out how to begin. Just talk to me.’

  ‘I was going to ask you som
ething.’ Orla forced herself to sit. Her legs wanted to stride, but she must rein herself in, keep this small. ‘But that would be false, because I know the answer. I’ve done a little research, I’ve thought very hard and I know, Maude, that you’re agoraphobic.’

  Maude went very still, the only movement a tightening of her lips that sent a sunburst of lines radiating outwards.

  Orla carried on. ‘You haven’t stepped outside the door since I arrived in London ten months ago. All your groceries are delivered. You shop online. The only times you ever lose your good humour – your lovely humour,’ she amended, in hopes of softening Maude’s facial expression which ossified with each word, ‘is when somebody badgers you to go out. You won’t come shopping with me, you turned poor George away with a flea in his ear. So I looked up agoraphobia on the internet and you’re a classic case, Maudie.’

  It felt important to keep Maude’s eye: the old lady seemed determined to stare her out. Eventually it was Maude who looked away, and stood up, patting inconsequentially at her dress, angling her body towards the door.

  ‘You have no notion of what is your business and what isn’t, do you, Orla?’

  Refusing to be stung, Orla stayed clamped to her seat and said, ‘Maude, we know each other too well for that to wash. You made me your business the moment I appeared on your doorstep. I drew boundaries and you stepped regally over them. You have stuck your admittedly very elegant nose into my every nook and cranny, and I didn’t hear you say “please”. Now it’s my turn. Sit down, Maude.’

  When Maude scowled her face lost all its whimsy. ‘Don’t boss me about. Arthur was the last person ever to do that and now I allow nobody the right.’ She trotted to the door, yanked it open.

  Hoping to pin Maude to the spot with her words, Orla rattled through them. ‘I have every right, because I love you, Maude, and because I need to repay you. Now,’ she said, more calmly, glad that Maude’s hand had paused on the doorknob, ‘I hope you’ll find it a relief to sit and talk about it. Because whether or not you like it, I know.’

  ‘You weren’t the first to rumble me.’ Maude spoke low and ruefully, as she slowly closed the door and turned to face Orla, her face her own once more. ‘Sim tried what he called an intervention.’