The Valentine's Card

by Juliet Ashton

  ‘My friend’s fine,’ lied Orla, knowing he’d watched their halting progress over the few feet from hall door to kerb, knowing he’d been reluctant to take them at all.

  The car smelled of jockstraps. Belted in on the back seat, Maude kept her eyes closed. Both hands, like little paws, clasped her handbag, the fingertips white with pressure. She was quiet now, her bombast replaced with an urgent tension that leaked all over the car.

  ‘You all right?’ whispered Orla. ‘We can turn back.’ All other considerations, even the journal, shrank against the horrible change in the Maude she relied on, took care of, loved.

  They bumped over a pothole and Maude’s head trembled on her thin neck like a Christmas bauble.

  ‘She’s sick, is she?’ A flickering glance from the front as the cab rounded a corner like a runaway stagecoach.

  ‘We don’t turn back!’ Maude smuggled the words past clenched teeth. ‘We get the journal.’

  The driver said, ‘Is extra if she throw up.’

  Directing him through Primrose Hill, Orla frowned at the change in Maude’s breathing. Loud and shushing, like the sea, it was a parody of her yoga breaths. ‘We’re here.’ Orla leaned forwards to guide the driver. ‘Could you pull in by that lamppost?’ Orla put a hand on Maude’s knee. Her friend was shuddering. ‘We’ll just sit here for a while.’ There was no way Orla could leave Maude marooned in the big bad outdoors she so dreaded. ‘You know it’s a wait and return, right?’ she queried the driver.

  ‘Yes. Double rate,’ said the driver, his charm equal to his road skills.

  Across the road, number forty-nine was festooned with coloured lanterns, its curtains helpfully drawn back on an archetype of festive bonhomie. Pretty, happy people, having just the greatest time, threw back their heads to laugh at each other in a room made peachy by fairy lights. Against the window a table bowed in the middle beneath a still life of catered food. Champagne bottles stood to attention, ready to give their all, the popping of their corks a counterpoint to the Prokofiev, tasteful and unobtrusive, seeping out onto the street.

  A far cry, thought Orla, from the soundtrack of last New Year – the latest boy band, traditional ballads, Niamh’s squeaky recorder.

  ‘Leave me,’ said Maude, listing to one side and apparently unaware of it.

  Orla put her arm around her, righted her. It beggared belief that they were here, that Maude was putting herself through this. She cursed herself for going along with it in the first place. She should have withstood Maude. Hindsight again, her smug companion.

  A taxi disgorged more guests. The door was opened by a tall man whose name flittered at the edge of Orla’s mind. He had an open, fleshy face with a big, well-made nose. Tom Best! That was right. Anthea’s co-star in her upcoming role, Macbeth to her Lady Macbeth. Greetings and compliments drifted over the road on the frigid air. He was doing Sim’s job: if Sim hadn’t died he’d be on door duty for his lover. The door closed, keeping the heat in, keeping the life in.

  Maude stretched her torso, as if trying to clamber on top of her breaths, tame them. ‘Go get the journal,’ she croaked, the words eked out like a miser’s loose change.

  ‘I won’t leave you, Maudie.’ Orla took one of her hands, unhooking it from the handbag and wincing as Maude’s hand closed over hers like a clamp.

  The driver sank in his seat, broiling with animosity. ‘She doesn’t look right,’ he said.

  Newcomers scaled the steps and this time the hostess herself answered the door, in floor-length green velvet. Even from this distance, Orla could tell Anthea smelled delicious, as she theatrically embraced the chicly dressed older couple, even dropping a cute, ironic curtsey to the white-haired man.

  The couple were almost through the door before Orla recognised Lucy and the senator. She recalled their Christmas card. Regards, Lucy and Paul Quinn.

  How fitting that they should migrate towards Anthea, show her the cordiality always carefully denied Orla. She had always been an interloper. Orla shut her eyes against the rush of pain. Not posh enough for his parents, nor cool enough for his actor friends. Just a primary school teacher.

  Lucy appeared at the window, her hand hovering above the modish titbits. Orla blushed at the memory of the tacky New Year’s party she’d subjected her son to last year.

  The sitting room knee-deep in Quality Street wrappers, a sleeping infant on every lap, somebody scraping a fiddle, the kids Riverdancing, the dog darting out from under the sofa to snaffle stray After Eights. Everybody being exuberantly themselves. Orla remembered Sim’s appalled groan when Deirdre lifted her skirt to showcase her new Christmas knickers.

  Awful.

  Although … Ma had made the stuffing with red onions because she knew Sim liked it that way. Ma had hidden a selection box under the spare bed for Orla to find (and keep to herself). The man next door who’d lost his wife ten years ago was there as he was every year, and was welcomed, and given the best chair, even though he smelled of cats.

  It was bright, suddenly, this vision of Ma’s party. If Orla held it the right way up its lustre vied with the glitter ball across the road.

  I like Quality Street, thought Orla. And I like hearing Niamh demolish a tune. And I like the sticky weight of somebody tiny I’m related to asleep on my knees.

  ‘Twelve! Eleven!’ The sash windows were thrown up in Anthea’s house. Orla could hear kazoos.

  A rasping sound escaped Maude.

  The front door banged open and Anthea led a conga line of chanting revellers down the steps. She waved a champagne bottle, and there was an inaccuracy to her steps and a wildness to her hair that gave the game away about how much she’d drunk.

  ‘Nine! Eight!’

  The unruly line snaked uproariously along the pavement. Anthea veered into the road, bringing them all with her on a collision course with the stationary cab.

  Maude was having trouble swallowing. Orla scrabbled for the bottle of water in her bag, shrinking down in the seat as the counting, whooping conga line approached the car on her side.

  ‘Five! Four!’

  ‘You!’ bayed Anthea, squatting suddenly in her finery a few feet away and throwing out her arm to point the champagne bottle through the cab window at Orla. Partygoers piled up behind her, bumping against one another, screaming and tittering.

  ‘Right. Bloody troublemakers.’ The driver revved the engine. ‘Out!’

  Anthea scuttled towards them and squinted in at Orla. ‘It was you, wasn’t it? Outside my house?’

  The laughter tapered off. Her guests looked at each other for enlightenment.

  ‘Get out!’ yelled the driver, one beefy arm across the back of the passenger seat.

  ‘It’s all right, Maude,’ said Orla, trying to hold Maude’s head up. It was slipping back, making her choke as if she were drowning.

  ‘That’s my stalker!’ Anthea stumbled and shrugged off a woman attempting to put her arms around her.

  ‘OUT! OUT!’ The driver bared his teeth and banged on the back of the passenger seat with a balled fist.

  ‘Nonononono,’ chanted Maude, eyes still shut, her body straightening out like a plank in the confined space.

  ‘We can’t, this lady is, she’s not well,’ Orla coughed out words, unable to string a sentence together.

  ‘Leave me alone!’ screamed Anthea, thumping the car roof to an affronted and girly shriek from the driver. Tom Best tugged at her elbow as she bawled, ‘I’ll call the fucking police if I see you round here again!’

  The word ‘police’ galvanised the driver. He jumped out of the car, barged Anthea out of his way and pulled open the back door. ‘Out. Both of you. Now.’

  Tom leaned in to help Maude. He was strong and decisive, and between them, he and Orla manoeuvred her on to the pavement, where she stood like a puppet whose strings have been chopped. The look in her eyes, open at last, was fearful.

  ‘What’s the matter with her?’ Tom asked Orla, both awkwardly supporting Maude. Their whispered conversation had
to compete with the squeal of the cab’s tyres and Anthea’s ongoing diatribe.

  ‘Of all the people! Orla thingy! You mad bitch! Tonight of all nights!’

  Focusing on Tom, Orla said tearfully, ‘She’s agoraphobic. She should be at home.’ She was good in a crisis, but this one was beyond her: Maude was too precious for Orla to think straight. ‘We have to get her indoors, please.’

  Without a word, Tom lifted Maude into his arms and strode back across the road. The guests tailed him, watching him ignore Anthea who beetled alongside, insisting, ‘She’s not coming into my house! Put her down! I will not let you—’

  ‘I have a sick old lady here,’ hissed Tom. To Maude he said, ‘We’ll soon be indoors. Everything’s OK. Hang on, love.’ He threw a beseeching look at Orla over Maude’s head.

  ‘Please, Anthea,’ said Orla, from the other side of Tom’s bulk, as they reached the front door.

  Entranced by these developments, the guests looked from Anthea to Orla and back again, as if watching a Wimbledon final.

  Anthea glared at Orla, then something seemed to fall away and she said quietly, as if bowing to the obvious need to have this out in private, away from their audience, ‘Oh, bring her up to my room.’

  With a heavy angry tread she led the way.

  Watched by the multitude, Orla kept her eyes front as she climbed the stairs, aware that the Quinns were part of her audience. The wallpaper on the stairs was familiar from the article she’d bookmarked and she recognised the wide bed under a tented ceiling dotted with stars where Tom laid Maude as gently as if he were putting a baby down for the night.

  ‘I don’t like her colour,’ he said to Orla.

  There was a tentative knock at the door and a plump woman with an up-do peeked her head around the door and said mildly, ‘Tom, darling, what’s—’

  ‘For God’s sake, Ann,’ snapped Tom. ‘Wait for me downstairs.’

  The face receded, cheeks red, lips pursed.

  Anthea prowled in and out of the en suite. ‘What’s the matter with her? Who the hell is she? Why’d you drag old ladies along on your fucking demented hobby?’

  The bedroom was smaller in the flesh and as untidy as a teenager’s.

  ‘Twice I’ve seen you out there, madam. Twice. Never recognised you until just now.’ She shook her head like a hanging judge.

  ‘This lady needs water.’ Tom, ignoring Anthea as profoundly as if she were a ghost only Orla could see, found a mohair blanket and draped it over Maude as Orla removed her shoes.

  They should never have come, but now that they had and the escapade had taken such a terrible toll on the woman, Maude was Orla’s priority. She rubbed life into her freezing hands with her own. I’ll die my thousand deaths later, she thought.

  Maude revived a little, her face warming up. ‘Tell her,’ she commanded in a weak facsimile of her usual voice. ‘Tell her why you’re here.’

  ‘Yes, do.’ Anthea’s hands went to her hips. Her arms were sticks, like a child’s drawing. ‘I’m all fucking ears, darling.’ She shook herself free of Tom’s restraining hand. ‘Fuck off, Tom, this is none of your business.’ The tall actor recoiled, wounded, and left the room. Anthea looked at the floor for a moment then dashed after him, hobbling, one shoe off, one shoe on.

  There was a hissed argument on the stair. Orla ignored it, fussing over Maude who, if not herself, had at least reached a plateau where her breathing was normal and her eyes open. ‘Soon be home,’ said Orla, adding a whispered, ‘I know, I know, I get it, not without the journal,’ when Maude stirred.

  The overheated room was sluggish. When camera-ready, it was a harem of dreams, but tonight it was a mess. Hair extensions hung like roadkill on the outside of the wardrobe door. An open sachet of low-calorie cup-a-soup lay on the carpet, its dusty innards trodden into the pile, in vivid contrast to the feast downstairs. Dresses, some with labels still attached, were strewn on the floor like mating eels: Orla recognised the aftermath of a wardrobe crisis when she saw one. And who, she thought, keeps a weighing scales centre stage on a priceless rug?

  Anthea did. This room told many tales about her and, for a stalker, was the holy of holies. So why did Orla feel nothing? No curiosity, no satisfaction. I’ll get this over with as quickly as I can, nab the journal, spirit Maude out of here.

  Anthea returned. She’d sobered up a little. Pulling off her other shoe she stood in a pile of cracker crumbs and said, ‘Explain yourself. And then I’ll call the police.’

  The police were an insignificant threat to Orla. Orla ate worst-case scenarios for breakfast. Flustered, abashed by Ant’s ferocious gaze, Orla cleared her throat. ‘Right.’ The dressing table momentarily distracted her. Anthea’s arsenal of miracle skin cream had a value of hundreds of pounds. Orla always turned the page on the absurd anti-ageing claims of the glossy ads, but Anthea bought every snake oil on the market. Orla marshalled her thoughts, galled by her compassion for Anthea’s desperate credulity. This was no time to understand the woman.

  ‘I didn’t mean to frighten you, Anthea. I thought I was being discreet.’

  ‘Ten out of ten on that score,’ snorted Anthea. With her shoes off she was minuscule. ‘My neighbour told me about the freak standing in the hedge.’

  ‘Oh God,’ mewled Orla, mortified at her dirty washing being passed from hand to hand. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said abjectly. This wasn’t panning out well: who apologises to the bitch who stole their lover? ‘Knowing about you and Sim drove me a bit loopy.’

  Anthea teased a hairpiece from the back of her russet mane. ‘Christ, that thing itches.’ She tossed it to the floor. ‘Is she going to conk out?’ Scratching her scalp maniacally, like a chicly dressed Bedlamite, Anthea nodded at Maude.

  ‘She has a name. Maude’ll be fine when I get her home.’

  ‘What do you mean you know about me and Sim? How could you possibly know?’

  ‘He told me.’

  ‘What?’ Anthea turned Neanderthal in her incomprehension. ‘He wouldn’t. Unless he was a bloody fool. Which, come to think of it, he was, so …’ Anthea threw up her arms in exasperation. ‘What can I say, kid? Welcome to the real world. I always take my leading man to bed. It makes the shoot easier.’

  ‘You stole him from me.’

  The platitude came out shakily. Orla held Maude’s hand tighter for courage. Maude had elbowed her way up to a half sitting position, but she looked awkward, as if she’d landed there from a great height.

  Speed this up. Get Maude home.

  ‘I want an apology but I recognise I can’t demand that from you. So, give me the journal, Anthea. I’m not leaving without it.’

  The weak squeeze from Maude’s fingers felt like a standing ovation.

  ‘You’re talking in riddles. Sim said you were off centre.’ Anthea sat on her dressing-table stool, hunched over, legs apart, an ungainly pose for a woman in couture. ‘I can apologise, if that’s what you want. I see how it looks but it’s just a bit of fun, shagging the co-star. A good clean fight and nobody gets any ideas. Sim certainly didn’t.’

  ‘He died loving you. His card said so. I know he was leaving me for you, Anthea, so please stop pretending.’

  Orla’s stomach lurched but she didn’t collapse, or want to cry: the truth wasn’t so towering any more.

  Anthea folded her skeletal arms. ‘Listen up, Tinkerbell. Sim did not die loving me. In fact, I was a pain in the ass. This is not a fair cop. So goodbye, and piss off back to whatever crappy postcode you came from.’

  This was the woman Orla had envied. Had aspired to.

  Her negotiating skills honed in Tobercree Primary, Orla’s first rule was Never back down. ‘I don’t believe you. And I’m not leaving without the journal. You don’t deserve it. This time last year you were on the phone to him. Sim’s reaction to me walking in was classic – he laughed to halt your conversation, let you know discreetly that I was in the room without saying so, there was even a me too when you said you loved him. Sim made out it was Reece b
ut only a lover calls at midnight on New Year. The entire trip he was cold and distant with me. I knew something was up. But I didn’t press him because that’s the way we rolled. Then he confessed all in the card, the one you advised me to burn.’

  ‘You did burn it,’ whispered Anthea.

  ‘Nope.’ Orla relished Anthea’s surprise, grateful to Reece for keeping one of her secrets for a change. ‘In it he told me he was in love with a woman I knew of, a sophisticated woman who could offer him the kind of life he wanted.’

  Anthea shook her head, her eyes large. ‘You poor little cow. Reading that after he died. That is cruel.’

  ‘Sim didn’t know he was about to die.’ Now I’m defending him? To Anthea? ‘Let’s cut to the chase. I won’t ever stare up at your windows in the middle of the night again. That’s over. Because I can see what I came here for.’ Orla pointed at the floor by Anthea’s stockinged foot.

  Beneath a knot of discarded and trampled Gucci and Prada and McQueen, a leather book cover peeped out.

  ‘This?’ Anthea tugged at it, and heaved it on to her lap. ‘You want this? Jesus, you’re petty.’ She threw it over to the bed. It landed, fat and heavy, beside Orla, who almost recoiled at Anthea’s instant capitulation.

  Reaching out a tentative hand, Orla touched the tan-coloured hide.

  Maude craned to look at it, then fell back.

  Pulling the journal on to her lap, Orla had to drag her attention back to what Anthea was saying.

  ‘Did he name me? Did he write down my name?’

  Orla trotted through the memorised text of the card. She blinked. ‘No, actually.’

  ‘D’you know why, Einstein? Because he wasn’t talking about me. I’m glad he confessed, though. I told him to. Yeah. Me. The whore of Babylon was on your side. Believe it or not, I don’t like to see relationships fall apart. When you see a showbiz marriage that’s lasted for decades, it means that both parties turn a blind eye to a little indiscretion here and there, but typically Sim had to take it further. He left his fingerprints on every bird in the production. That’s why Sim was so pissed off with me, because I threatened to tell you when you came over. I felt you should know what you were getting into, being with a famous man. Dear God, girl, didn’t you know your boyfriend was a tart?’