The Valentine's Card (17 page)

Orla peeled the valentine from her cheek, confronted it.

‘Listen, we have to talk about Marek. I know you think I fancy him. Well, I do.’ Orla cleared her throat. ‘But it’s not just about that. Marek’s a good person. Strong. He allows things to have meaning. I feel he might honour what we had. Oh God, Sim, I’m getting hopelessly wanky here. Do you understand what I’m trying to say?’

Lately it took more effort to conjure up the valentine’s retorts. The card was quiet. Sullen perhaps, even disapproving:
just a piece of paper
, she thought with terrible clarity. Orla worked her finger under the flap at one end of the envelope and pushed it across. The edge was ragged now, like a wound.

‘Excuse me? Hello?’ It was a different voice this time. Male. The estuary girls had fetched help. ‘Is everything OK?’

Before the disembodied voice got any closer, Orla stuffed the card back into her bag, unlocked the door and pushed through the little crowd on the other side of it. On the far side of the room she saw Marek stepping in from the garden. Orla took a pace towards him, then paused and observed.

He fitted right in. His tuxedo was as
black as his hair and as elegant, its cut emphasizing the emphatically male proportions of his shoulders and the length of his legs. Yet his mascu linity wasn’t bullish: there was a grace to Marek that was all of a piece with his colouring.
He’s a panther
, thought Orla, surprising herself with such a simile at a time like this,
and he’s perfectly at home here, just like he’s perfectly at home in Maude’s Books or a café that smells of cabbage
.

The girl talking to him was familiar. Hair a paint-box red, breasts surely not as God made them, she was a soap opera stalwart. She was laughing immoderately, and Marek was grinning back.

Orla felt jealous. She didn’t like that, stowed it discreetly away. After her insistence that this wasn’t a date, it was absurd to be possessive.
All the same
, she thought, squaring her shoulders,
I’ll see off that pile of fillers and botox.

‘There you are.’ Reece put a hand on her arm before she could move. ‘It’s been an hour. Are you standing me up?’

‘No, not at all.’ Orla lifted her chin. ‘I’m ready.’

The phrase landed between them.

‘I didn’t think I’d ever hear you say that.’

‘You’re not the only one.’ Orla took a deep breath. ‘Let’s do this, Reece, before I change my mind.’ She let Reece take her hand but dug her heels in as he dragged her away. ‘Hold on. Marek.’ She pointed at him. God, he was laughing loudly with that girl. What was so feckin’ funny?

‘No. Never mind old
Dracula. We’ll do this together.’

‘Don’t call him that.’

Reece, shouldering through the crowds, ducking from puckered lips and outstretched hands, didn’t catch her tone, and laughed.

‘Really, don’t.’ She wasn’t Oirish and Marek wasn’t Dracula.

‘Through here.’

A heavy door swung shut behind them and the party was on mute. The walls of the darkened room shivered as if they were alive, abstract blue ribbons snaking up and down them.

‘I’ve made this off limits after Sim’s party piece last year.’ Reece led her along the side of the pool, through the pearly blue in the gloaming, past ferns and grasses in pots, to a small round table with two café-style chairs. ‘Sit, darling. Gather yourself.’

The air was sticky and tropical, cut with the discordant tang of chlorine.

‘Let’s see it,’ said Reece.

Fumbling in the bag beneath the table, Orla was conflicted at this eleventh hour. A surge of certainty galvanised her into a decision and she put the envelope on the table. ‘There.’

Reece bent down and took a ceramic plate from beneath a potted plant with fat succulent leaves. ‘This’ll do,’ he said.

Inert, sitting back, Orla was grateful for his forward motion. She was tired of the endless advice about the valentine, weary of sifting through muddy motives and loaded comments. She sat up again when Reece produced a lighter. Platinum and yellow gold, it was very slim, very Reece.

‘Put the card in the saucer,’ said Reece.

Doing as she was told, Orla
put the pink envelope on the plate. She nodded to Reece and he lowered the lighter until the flame lapped at one corner. They watched, their faces golden, as the blaze drew a black swath across the pink. Ash drifted on the drugged air.

‘It’s done.’ Reece’s face was bluish again as the tiny bonfire subsided. He was whispering, as though they were in church. ‘Are you OK?’

‘I am.’

‘Sure?’

‘Sure. Thank you. For being with me.’

Reece’s face looked full, as if crammed with feeling. ‘This is such a relief. I don’t want you to go under, Orla. Sim really loved you, you know,’ he said, with a downward inflection.

‘I know he did.’ Orla allowed the past tense to sit, uncorrected
. ‘
D’you know what, I think I’ll go now. I’m whacked.’

‘Of course.’ Reece stood, took her hand unselfconsciously as if she were a child. ‘Did you find Ant?’ he asked.

‘Unfortunately, yes.’

‘Why so?’ Reece stopped, his face alert in the glitter-ball shimmer of the pool.

‘She was odd. Kind of aggressive. I thought I liked her but tonight she was, well, she was bitchy, actually. No other word for it.’

‘It’s not you.’ Reece seemed keen to impress this on Orla. ‘It’s fashionable to have demons these days and Ant has more than most. She drinks a little too much, partakes of Columbian marching powder a little too much. And she doesn’t get enough love, if you want my opinion. Ignore her, really. Just ignore her.’

‘There are bigger things
going on in my head, to be honest.’

‘Good. Stay away from Ant. She’s not your type.’ Reece opened the door back to Narnia. ‘Wait outside with Dracula and a car will whisk you off to the hotel just up the road. Separate rooms, as sternly requested.’

‘Why do you call him Dracula?’ Orla had spotted Marek’s dark head among the mob and, as if he’d felt her gaze alight on him, he’d turned and was making his way over.

‘Just a nickname. You know, he’s pale and intense, with that rumbling Transylvanian kind of voice.’ Reece saw Orla’s expression, looked chastened. ‘Sorry. I’m still a public school boy at heart.’

‘You look washed out,’ said Marek, before he even reached her. ‘Are you all right?’ He put a hand to her brow, an oddly mammy-ish gesture from a tall dark handsome man in a dinner jacket.

‘I’m fabulous,’ smiled Orla, taking his arm. She telescoped out, saw a fetching couple, the woman casually taking the man’s arm. ‘Thank you again,’ she said to Reece, ‘for having me.’

Chapter Fourteen

The view was, deservedly,
the hotel’s pride and joy.

Slowly, shyly, an untidy line of trees had emerged in the deep trench of the valley as the night drained away. After some hours in the cane lounger, bundled up in a hotel dressing gown, Orla was as familiar with the trees’ outline as she was with the view from her Tobercree bedroom.

The veranda served the back of the inn, a communal space on to which all the ground floor rooms opened. The adjacent pair of French windows were Marek’s. The light around the edges of his curtains had clicked off about 2 a.m. An invisible thread between the figure in the lounger and the doors, until then quite tense, had slackened.

The purplish mist was dissipating: today would be bright and clear.

They hadn’t spoken on the ride to the hotel, looking obdurately out of opposite windows as the taxi bumped over potholes. Her hand had lain curled on the seat beside her and Marek had put his hand on top of it, gently, like the mist landing on the trees. Orla remembered looking down at the strong fingers, the splash of dark hair on milky skin, the blue slender ropes of veins over finger bones.

The air in the cab had become denser as she sensed him playing chicken with her, waiting to see whether she would pull away. Or not. Orla had chosen to leave her hand beneath Marek’s, drawing comfort from it, feeling safe the way she’d used to when her father took her little paw in his bigger one on the way to Mass, letting her know she was his favourite.

The other hand,
however, she’d kept on the valentine.

It had been easy enough. She had already opened the envelope, so when she realised at the party, with absolute clarity, that she did want to read the card – and she wanted to read it alone – she had simply removed it from its pink carcass under the table. Only the trappings had gone up in flames.

As lies went, she hoped it was a white one.

In the hotel corridor, outside her door, Marek had broken the silence to wish her a polite goodnight. He walked to his own room, then strode back and kissed her, very hard, on the lips. This was not the gentle caress of mist on tree: when Marek pulled away his face was so troubled that he looked almost angry.

‘I had to do that,’ he told her before marching to his own room and slamming the door behind him.

Orla hoped he was asleep by now. She hoped everybody in this corner of England was asleep. She was about to have her last conversation with Sim.

No drum roll. No Master of Ceremonies calling
pray silence ladies and gentlemen
. Just the surround-sound of waking birds for the moment when all the speculation would end and she would hear him ask, and she would give him her response.

Yes.

Orla turned the valentine over on her lap. The image on the front of the card was a line drawing. A simple, fuzzy charcoal heart, black on white. Very simple. Quite unlike anything he’d sent before.

‘Still surprising
me,’ she said fondly. ‘Sorry about that business back at the party. I felt as if I needed to satisfy Reece. He’s been so involved, so worried. Plus I needed to get him off my back. Oh, I know you loved him, Sim, I do too, but if he knew I’d decided to read this he’d have been all over me for details.

‘You remember you used to say he was like a mother hen? Well, I don’t need a mother hen for this. This is between you and me. You and me,’ she repeated. She liked how it sounded.

She opened the valentine.

So. There you are. My darling, my beauty, my beloved, the sun, the moon, all the poetry in my ugly world, certainly all the cleverness. I imagine you reading this (I imagine you a lot when we’re apart, as you well know, some of it X-rated …) and I imagine your face concentrating as you take in what I’m saying.

You’ve been with me forever. Or that’s how it feels. You know every nook and cranny of me, physically and mentally. Especially emotionally. Very quickly, and rather late, I grew up with you, in you. I’m the man you made.

You know me so well. I wonder if you know what I’m about to say? I wonder if you’ve guessed what I’m about to ask?

Orla paused for a while, collecting herself. Here was the authentic voice of a Simeon Quinn card, that careful, honest gravitas so unlike his scattergun conversation. It was all so precious to her. Each new word glittered, making her so happy that she hated the thought of reaching the end, even though she yearned to gobble it up.

Taking up the card
again, Orla read on, then leant back on the lounger, eyes closed, as quiet and as still as a stone martyr on a tomb. She stayed that way for some time, before leaping up, all action. She strode, bare feet slapping on the wooden decking, towards her French windows. Ajar, they showed her a glimpse of her room lit by lamps whose efforts were becoming redundant in the dawn light. She paused, her hand on the handle, then turned and closed the space between her windows and Marek’s in three strides, tearing off her dressing gown as she went. Naked, she rapped urgently on the glass.

‘Marek! It’s me!’

He opened the door, his sleepy gaze sweeping up and down her. The sight of Orla’s pale body woke him like a sentry startled out of rest by an alarm.

‘Orla?’ he whispered.

‘Please kiss me again.’ Her voice was choked, but had a rising undercurrent of heat, that Marek immediately responded to.

His arms went around her, pulling her body close to his and away from the veranda. Marek kissed her, as ordered. His pout was a cushion against her lips, moving then to her throat.

‘You’re so white,’ he said, wonderingly.

‘Marek,’ she said. It was a plea of some sort. Orla kissed the top of his ruffled head as he bent, dragging his lips across her breasts, holding her close with the strong splay of his fingers. ‘Is this real?’ she asked, knowing it to be an echo, knowing he wouldn’t recognise it.

Marek straightened up,
bending his face to hers. ‘This is real,
moje złotko
.’ He kissed her with an unexpected ferocity, like a cat making a sudden pounce.

And Orla responded, really responded, with all the pent-up energy of her grief. All the loneliness, all the fear, all the clenched attempts at coping motivated her body as it welded itself to Marek’s.

Mouths attached, they wheeled and whirled towards the bed. Marek whooped as they fell on to it and Orla tore at his striped boxers, forcing them down before returning her hands to his hair – so thick, so grabbable.

Avid, eager, they matched each other for passion. Orla, flung back in the disarray of smooth hotel sheets, felt his hands lock on her wrists, pinning her down. She wriggled, then stopped as she saw the glint of his eyes intent on hers from above.

‘Orla,’ he said, as if it were a new name, and the most beautiful name he’d ever heard.

‘Marek,’ she said, and gasped as he plunged into her. Her throat arched, her head was thrown back, she was overboard and falling and loving the fall, keenly alive to the ends of her fingertips. She screamed so loudly that he broke his rhythm, surprised, presumably by her abandonment.

She screamed again, like a feral girl. And then it was done, and they were both panting, astonished.

‘You’re amazing.’ Marek was half laughing. He covered her body with his own, kissed her forehead, her cheeks, her nose, then collapsed beside her. ‘You’re going to kill me. My God, Orla …’

She turned away from him,
waited for his breathing to subside into the shallow regularity of sleep and began to cry.