The Valentine's Card

by Juliet Ashton

  Orla looked at the phone, hating it more than the carpet. Marek thought in straight lines. She thought in woozy circles. It was clear cut, his solution, and it would work.

  But she couldn’t do it. It was terrifying to even consider it. She’d built Anthea into a monstrous, fabulous creature, far larger than her outline, superhuman and worth a hundred Orlas.

  Marek threw the phone to the bed with force, so it bounced. ‘You won’t talk to Anthea. You enjoy the process. You’re locked into an insane relationship with her that she doesn’t even know you’re having.’ As Orla shaped her lips for a protest, he barked, exasperated, ‘I’ve seen the spreadsheets!’ He hung his head.

  Orla covered her face with her hands. She knew he was big-hearted. She knew he was a man who would always want to do the right thing. If she could throw herself on his mercy, he wouldn’t walk away. But throwing herself on anybody’s mercy was alien to Orla’s self-sufficient nature. She waited for his next move.

  ‘I don’t want to fight with you,’ murmured Marek.

  ‘Me neither, oh, me neither.’ Orla grasped at the lifeline.

  ‘Are you still in love with Sim?’ Marek glared at the threadbare carpet, as if trying to see past it and down to the book shop.

  ‘What? No.’

  Orla hadn’t examined her feelings for Sim in a long while. If she was frank then, yes, there was still love. There always would be: she saw the truth of Maude’s analysis back when she’d opened the valentine. But she didn’t love him in the way Marek feared.

  ‘It’s not about him.’ Marek’s head remained down, but his eyes raised and met hers sardonically. ‘I know that sounds unbelievable, topsy-turvy, but it’s not about Sim. It’s about me. And how I didn’t see what was happening. And why he should prefer her to me.’

  Orla stabbed at her eyes with blunt knuckles, appalled at displaying her pitiful fears in public. She sensed an irresolute movement from Marek: she knew his instinct was to comfort her. She sighed, a ghastly groaning wheeze, when he didn’t approach her. I’ve lost him, she thought, and an ache like a ravenous mouth began in her stomach.

  ‘You humiliate me,’ said Marek. He was quiet, controlled. ‘I was second best. I put my pride to one side. I told myself that this woman is worth it, is worth anything. I told you I love you. You didn’t hear me, Orla. Instead you moved me back, not to second but to third place behind some actress.’

  ‘I did hear you.’

  ‘Then why …’ the sudden increase in volume shocked them both. Marek snapped his mouth shut, and turned away as if he couldn’t bear the sight of her. ‘I am straight with you and you make fun of me.’ He whirled to face her and closed the gap between them. They were close, nose to nose, but he didn’t tone it down. ‘I don’t have to stay.’

  ‘Go then!’ Orla could shout too. ‘Go on, disappear at the first sign of trouble!’

  Shaking, their breath mingling, their faces almost touching, this would be the moment in a movie where they would kiss passionately, and have explosive sex.

  It wasn’t a movie.

  ‘I have never,’ said Marek deliberately, ‘known anybody as infuriating as you. You hold me at arm’s length and beckon over your shoulder. And I know that’s a mixed metaphor. I’m Polish, for Christ’s sake. And you lie to me. You keep me in the dark. You are not a good person to have a relationship with.’

  Eastern European candour again. Orla couldn’t argue: he was the second man to feel that way. ‘If I’m so horrible,’ she said, suddenly sixteen, ‘why not dump me?’

  ‘Dump you?’ Marek stalked away, hands on his hips. Orla missed the closeness of his face, angry though it was. Now he was on the other side of the room, looking as though the expression she used had exploded, stink-bomb-like, under his nose. ‘I’m a grown man, I do not dump. I think love is precious, even if you do not.’

  That incendiary word again shining in the midst of all the ugliness. Orla became very still. They were nearing the apex of the argument. What Marek said next, what she said next, would be very important.

  ‘You have to choose, Orla. You should choose life. You should choose me,’ was what Marek said next.

  And Orla said nothing.

  This was a crossroads in a dark wood. How she wished that Marek could see through the gloom how she needed and admired him. And loved him.

  Why had she never told him? She’d never even used the word in her own thoughts. Yet it was the only word that did justice to the complex way Orla felt about him. What would it have cost me to tell Marek I loved him?

  To say it now would be cheap, as if she were desperately lobbing everything that came to hand to make him stay. It was too late to tell him and, besides, this was patently, obviously over.

  Because he was an honest man and she tried to be an honest woman and any promise she made would be false. Orla couldn’t just abandon a quest that had come to define her. She couldn’t promise not to pursue the journal.

  Orla knew that, deep in her bones, as certainly as she knew she loved him.

  ‘That’s my answer?’ Marek’s voice bled out of him. ‘Silence?’

  Orla shut her eyes. He was her favourite thing to look at but she couldn’t bear the wounded astonishment on his face.

  ‘I thought you were a woman. But you are a child.’

  Marek left.

  Orla had a shower and went to bed.

  Chapter Thirty

  Maude had heard the raised voices, she said, cutting off Orla’s tearful reportage the next morning. ‘I heard the door bang behind him. If he’s got any sense, he’ll be back.’

  Beyond the sitting room windows, Ladbroke Grove was back to noisy normality, as if keen to underline that no piffling Messiah’s birth could interfere with its mojo for long. Within the flat, yesterday’s sparkle had dissolved, supplanted by a funereal hush as if some person, not just a love affair, had died.

  Despite her dejection, despite the acid burn of regret in her stomach, Orla found a strange relief in her dilemma.

  It was out in the open. Her darkest secret had been shoved, blinking, into the light and along with the expected shame there was a sensation of something suffocatingly tight being unlaced. Orla could breathe out at last. Marek knew: what happened now had a momentum all of its own, but at least he knew and there was no further need to lie.

  ‘It’s a tradition!’

  ‘I never heard of such a tradition,’ scoffed Maude. ‘The Boxing Day walk? It doesn’t exist.’

  ‘OK, I admit, it’s a brand-new tradition. But I need some air, Maude. I’m stale. I’m going off, like that fudge Sheraz gave us yesterday. Please.’

  ‘No, no, no. I’ll take my rotten meds, and I’ll practise my yoga breathing but I’m not putting my nose outside. Soon, dear, I promise, but not yet.’ Maude returned to her book, glasses high on her nose, with finality.

  By nightfall, Orla had stowed the phone on a high shelf where she couldn’t see it. It was too painful to continually check its little screen for a light, for his name, for rescue. She placed the bangle beside it, back in its box. It was impossible to wear it now that the pact implicit in its perfect circle was null and void.

  Anaesthetising herself with Boxing Day television, glad of the tiptapping tread of Maude overhead, Orla had a bizarre revelation.

  Bereft of Marek, far from home, still denied the journal and its cruel comforts, she was, somehow, immune to the call of the iPad.

  She examined that word: no, not immune. She could sense it teetering just outside the glow from the campfire of her consciousness. But she could withstand it.

  There was barbarous irony here. Before the argument, the addiction had brought a double pressure to bear on Orla: not only had she to withstand the lure of her fix but she’d had to hide her withstanding of it from Marek.

  A hope flickered valiantly, a candle in the arctic of her new situation. I can do this, she realised, giving herself the assurance she hadn’t felt able to offer Marek last night. If she ditched the unhealthy hab
its, if she deserved him, then maybe Marek would come back.

  New Year’s Eve was key. She’d work towards that. With his usual sensitivity Marek had divined that it was a time heavy with significance: Orla knew this had prompted his elaborate plans for their first New Year as a couple. He wasn’t the sort to let her down. If she could hang on until then, keep her fingers from tapping that dire name into a search engine, keep away from Primrose Hill, Marek would come back.

  He wouldn’t let her down.

  ‘Simple things,’ was Maude’s prescription. They would apply themselves to simple pleasures, unfussy and modest in scale. This would nibble up the days, help them to pass, as the future unrolled in its relentless way. ‘We’ll get through it,’ she said briskly, as she settled down on Orla’s sofa, fussing with a fluffy shawl around her shoulders. She groaned as Orla unwrapped the boxed DVDs. ‘This is not a simple thing, Orla. I want it minuted that I consider this to be a bad idea.’

  ‘Whisht.’ Orla threw her a Terry’s Chocolate Orange. ‘And have you taken your tablets? All of them?’

  ‘Yes. You whisht.’ Maude mispronounced it, neglecting to prolong the sh.

  ‘It’s starting.’ Orla turned up the volume.

  The irony of standing over Maude to ensure she took her medication wasn’t lost on Orla. Her own mind played tricks on her every bit as elaborate as Maude’s did. As they sat like bookends on the sofa, Orla could, if she chose, see them as two loony old dears walled up in this house, but such tabloid reduction was too broad: we’re two complicated, troubled women doing our shambolic best.

  ‘Oh, there he is,’ breathed Maude.

  Sim was in the very first scene of The Courtesan. They saw his back as he strode the length of a gilded corridor, his buckled shoes noisy on the wooden floor. He rapped at an ornate door, twelve feet high, and it opened on to a pistachio green and sorbet pink salon. It was ravishing, and when Sim turned to face the viewer, so was he.

  Oh Sim, thought Orla with that old inflexion she’d abandoned with the valentine. He was half smiling, his eyes knowing.

  He was alive.

  Orla wanted to throw up. She felt Maude’s eyes on her and made sure nothing of her turmoil was visible. It was close to unbearable to see Sim and yet she devoured him, reminded of the heft of his shoulders, the lilt of his walk, and, when he spoke, the playfulness of his voice.

  ‘Mother!’ he shouted. ‘Don’t you have a kiss for your son?’

  And again Maude’s eyes bored into the side of Orla’s head as the camera pivoted to find Anthea emerging from behind a screen, fastening a diamond bracelet about her wrist. ‘My precious boy, you’re home,’ she said, in a voice that slithered and rustled like her silk gown. ‘I’ve missed you.’

  ‘This is too much,’ muttered Maude, reaching for the remote control.

  ‘No!’ Seeing Maude jump, Orla repeated the word more gently, took the heat out of it. ‘No, Maudie. Let’s keep watching.’

  Not up to the marathon of a whole series in one slab, Maude fell asleep during episode three.

  Four hours in, Orla was drunk on Sim. Denied the journal, his performance was all that was left of him that was new: after the final credits rolled there’d be nothing more. That would be it. Resurrected on her screen, he walked and talked and laughed … and kissed.

  Sim kissed almost every female in the cast. He kissed them like he’d kissed Orla: with plump greedy lips, a palm either side of her face, a swooning noise deep in his throat.

  Some of the girls were recognisable – one Orla recalled from the Dublin fringe scene – and all were striking, in that changeling way of actresses. Orla fidgeted, enduring a physical flashback of how plain she’d felt among Sim’s theatre gang. Frothy, mercurial, they were women who could rock a scarf as a bandeau top, wear a top hat wittily to dinner. Orla knew they gossiped about Sim’s little country mouse, wondering at the mismatch. Orla had never fitted in.

  I never brought that up with him. How odd that felt at this remove. Why hadn’t she? Because he’d pretend it wasn’t so. The answer was immediate.

  The production made a dress-up doll of the Comte: See Sim in powder blue riding gear! See Sim in a brocade dressing gown! Once an episode, without fail, it was See Sim in the nude!

  His bottom, his legs, the powerful muscles of his back such a surprise after the clean lines of his clothed torso, were all too familiar to Orla. She squirmed slightly at the unexpected nip of desire. Post valentine, Orla had carefully neutered Sim. On television, condensed, posed, bright, he was ravishing.

  The infamous, shocking love scene between the Comte de Caylus and his mother led to a riot in Orla’s mind. As if her head were held in place by a torturer’s vice she watched Anthea bite Sim’s shoulder as she bucked in orgasm.

  It was obscene. No other viewer would share her opinion; the scene was tasteful and erotic. But for Orla it was pornography, their sex tape.

  While they filmed, Orla had been miles away, complacently preparing herself for a proposal. She half expected the camera to pan to her, in Tobercree, going about her dull business as the village idiot.

  The critical acclaim, hysterical though it was thanks to the glamour of his early death, was deserved. He was compelling, intriguing, and a beauty to boot. Sim – and Orla had never truly appreciated this – was a good actor.

  But that was all he was.

  Orla recognised each gesture, each glance, each tic. When the Comte walked by the river, stripping a flower of petals and dashing them into the water, he was her Sim, insofar as he could be called that now.

  Why didn’t I know he was always acting? Sim was a ragbag of learned mannerisms. There was nothing organic about him. How hard he’d worked on himself, on the creature that was Sim Quinn, always self-aware, always an eye on the mirror. He’d put all his energy into this creation and it had worked perfectly: Sim was envied, adored, lusted after, just as he’d wanted.

  But that was all he wanted.

  There was no core to him. No real Sim. Left to his own devices by self-regarding and ambitious parents, Sim had constructed himself out of pretty odds and ends he’d found. No wonder he betrayed her: he had no idea that he shouldn’t.

  Orla cried for the little Dublin boy who’d surmised that the way he was wasn’t good enough.

  I loved you, she told the screen. You could have been real with me.

  To live and die without ever being known seemed to Orla like the saddest prank life could play on a person.

  It was light when the final credits, with their RIP dedication, rolled. Orla had been quite wrong to mourn the end of her relationship with Sim. There had been one twist left in their road.

  She pitied him.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Climbing the ladder, Bogna was in vintage form. ‘Up bloody ladder to put tinsel up, then up bloody ladder to pull tinsel down. And no overtime for working Saturday after Christ mas. You are bloody slave pusher, Maude.’

  ‘Slave driver, dear,’ said Maude, holding the ladder while Bogna groped at the decorations.

  Orla stayed out of Bogna’s gravitational pull. Any innocuous snippet about Marek could wound: best to avoid the subject even though she longed to ask how is he?

  Eventually, Bogna mentioned him quite naturally. ‘At least coming to work gets me away from bad-tempered sod of brother,’ she muttered, buttering herself a piece of toast.

  Maude and Orla exchanged looks. ‘Is he a bear with a sore bum?’ asked Maude, hyper-casual, placing a guide to Oslo on the shelf upside down. She often recycled Bogna’s more colourful gaffes.

  ‘No. He is bear with yeast infection,’ scowled Bogna, throwing herself full length on the sofa with her snack. ‘Try and cheer him up when you see him, Orla. Give him ten out of ten blow job or something.’

  ‘Lovely,’ whispered Maude with a frown.

  ‘Just off upstairs for a sec.’ Orla flew to her flat, emboldened by Bogna’s vivid scene-setting of a miserable Marek who hadn’t mentioned the break-up. Maybe it wasn�
�t a break-up. Maybe it was a break.

  It felt like a break-up.

  Not stopping to examine that, Orla scooped up her mobile and called Marek’s number. She sucked her lips until they disappeared, not thinking, putting off any such common-sense activity until he picked up.

  There was a heartless click and the outgoing message told her Marek was busy and invited her to leave her name and number. Many times he’d picked up halfway through and she’d smiled at the contrast between the curt recording and the big cat purr of his real-time ‘Moje złotko!’ Now she wondered if he’d seen her name and diverted the call.

  ‘Um, hi, how’s, you know, things? Er, yeah, so this is strange, isn’t it? Us not, you know, speaking. Just wondered if you’re OK, but you probably are. Probably better off without me! Ha! I’m fine. Well, not fine. No, not fine. I’m, well, I’m a bit, you know and oh yes! Actually, yes. My stuff, Marek! You’ve still got some bits and pieces of mine. I could drop round to collect it, no fuss, just a quick hello and I’ll be off, ’cos I, you know, need them and—’

  Another click cut her off.

  ‘YOU FECKIN’ IDIOT!’ Orla roared at herself, flinging away the phone, clamping both hands to her head. My stuff? The ‘stuff’ she’d left at the mews amounted to a toothbrush, some shampoo and a paperback: that call had made it sound like insulin and a fortune in Nazi gold.

  Perhaps he’d smile. Perhaps he’d understand.

  And then what? Back to square one? Marek was too sensible a man to visit square one more than once.

  ‘Poppy was the worst. I mean, I felt worst about her. Rob’s her Daddy, after all, and I’m her Aunty. She was so cute all day, playing with the wrapping paper instead of the presents. She made me feel sick with guilt.’

  ‘Did Jack like my pressie?’

  ‘The, let me see, what was it? Oh! Yeah! The painting kit. He loved it, Orla. He’s already painted you a thank you card with it. And I couldn’t even look at Himself. Or Fionnuala. She was making cow eyes at Rob all day. Desperate, feckin’ desperate for a reunion.’