The Valentine's Card (18 page)

I wonder if you know what I’m about to say? I wonder if you’ve guessed what I’m about to ask? I wonder I wonder I wonder I wonder if I should just kill myself now and be done with it because I can’t bear to say it but I HAVE TO.

You always say I’m selfish and, well, here is your proof: I want you to let me go. I’m in love.

You know the woman I’m talking about, but you don’t
know
her. She’s not like you. Your lives are as different as can be, one lived in the glare of showbiz, one lived in the back of beyond. Let me go to her, and live that other life, because oh God forgive me, darling, I am not in love with you. And I don’t think I ever was.

Chapter Fifteen

The high hedges flashing
past the car were twiggy and bare, all their summer pomp dissolved. Orla stared out at them, low in the seat like a child. Beside her Marek shook his head wryly, his grin confirming that he too was experiencing flashbacks of the night before. He turned and caught her eye, letting out a muted ‘
aww
’ when Orla dropped her chin. Reaching out, he playfully nudged her nose with his knuckles, as if he found her modesty adorable.

He misread her reticence, just as he had on waking, during breakfast and as they checked out.

The car was luxurious, a Jaguar. ‘Not new,’ Marek had been at pains to point out. He was proud of its sleek silhouette, its period sophistication. Carefully chosen, it suited him, in much the same way as his worn-in velvet jackets.

Stopping at a petrol station, Marek smiled at her as he returned across the forecourt. Orla smiled back: even from her vantage point at the bottom of a deep dark well it was a smile that deserved an answer. Clambering into the driver’s seat, Marek tossed a Crunchie bar into her lap with a wink. Grateful, Orla undressed her snack. She believed that all men should know to bring back sweets to the car after paying for petrol. Da had always done so, and so had Sim. Although Sim had known to bring a Bounty.

As their tyres spat pebbles
and rejoined the A3, Orla clamped down on that thought. So Sim had known which chocolate bar she preferred. So what? The time for comparisons had passed.

It was so obvious, falling for your co-star. Orla suppressed a shudder, closing her eyes tight shut against the desire to howl. She’d promised herself to keep it all in until she was back in the flat.

Marek whistled along to the radio. He tapped his hand on the steering wheel, not a care in the world, a perfect picture of the post-orgasmic male.

Orla urged the car on, as if it were a horse she could gallop to safety. She scrunched up the Crunchie wrapper and poked it into her bag. Earlier she’d scrunched up the card, ripping it into confetti and leaving it in the wastepaper basket of her hotel room. One reading had consigned the whole passage to memory.

I am not in love with you. And I don’t think I ever was.

It was that final jab, almost an afterthought, which tormented her.

What a Judas the card had been, squatting on her mantelpiece, listening to her prattling on, clutching its sour message to its bosom all this time.

Humming along to an inane R&B track, Marek swung them round a roundabout. He drove suavely, with a light touch, as if the Jag were an extension of his personality. Orla studied him. He was a catch. Other women’s reaction to him at Reece’s party had proved that. Only a Teflon coating of grief could have blinded her to his allure.

Sensing her gaze, Marek’s pout deepened as he tried not to smile.
He’s so happy
, thought Orla, both envious and nervous. Only feet apart, their morning-after-the-night-before experiences were very different.

A wash of heat
warmed Orla’s limbs as she remembered their lovemaking. It had been wild and even magical and she had wanted him.

That wasn’t the reason she went to his room, though. Not the main one. Reading the valentine had provoked a sensation of dropping over a precipice. The instant she’d read,
I don’t think I ever was
, Orla was in freefall.

She had gone to Marek because she needed a soft landing. And because, in that moment, all sense of
shouldn’t
and
can’t
had vanished. Orla had given herself permission to touch Marek.

Marek was strong but he had been so gentle with her. She remembered his long lean legs, so well defined, and the rude sudden curve of his buttocks. He was beautiful. And Orla had responded like a wild thing.

It had been so different to sex with Sim.

Again, she clamped down on the comparison.

Marek had stopped whistling.

The landscape had changed, hedgerows giving way to gum-spattered pavements and rows and rows of windows. ‘London,’ murmured Orla, sitting up.

‘Are you OK?’

‘Yup. Yeah. Of course.’

Marek turned the wheel, turning abruptly off the main drag. He scanned the clogged side road for a space and parked the car. He turned to her, taking his seat belt off, the venerable leather of the seat creaking musically. ‘What’s up?’

‘Nothing. Honest.’ Orla
shrugged, with a smile she was sure was horrible. ‘Let’s get back.’

Marek switched off the radio. ‘This is Sim, yes?’

‘No. Well, yes.’ She looked down at her lap.

‘Darling,’ said Marek, and the word blazed in Orla’s head. ‘I understand. Or I try to, you know that. Listen, listen to me.’ He tugged her chin up, pointed her gaze towards him. ‘You burned the card. That’s a chapter closed. Not forgotten, of course not. But—’

‘I didn’t, Marek. Burn it, I mean … I read it.’

Marek, mouth still open to continue his previous thought, stared.

‘I read it and it wasn’t a proposal.’ Orla heard tears thicken her voice and blinked. She mustn’t cry in front of Marek. The poor man didn’t need that. ‘He told me he was leaving me for Anthea Blake. And he said he didn’t love me. He never had.’

Like ripping the plaster off a scab, admitting it left Orla gasping.

‘Oh God,’ murmured Marek. He put his face in his hands.

‘It’s better to know.’

Through his fingers, one brown eye looked her way. ‘Really?’

‘Well, no, not really.’ Orla’s laugh was dry as a dead leaf. ‘It’s all horrific, whatever way I look at it.’

Marek recovered. ‘When did you read the card?’

Orla hesitated. ‘On the veranda. After you went to bed.’

‘Ah.’ Marek’s face altered, hardening into a likeness of itself. ‘So, last night, that was, what? Rebound sex?’

‘No, of course not.’

Gripping the wheel, Marek stared straight ahead.

‘But I’m confused,
Marek, I—’

‘I am here,’ he interrupted. ‘I am alive. I won’t let a dead man order me about and neither should you. I never met this Sim.’ He thumped the wheel with a closed fist and Orla jumped. ‘This is about you and me!’ Marek turned the key, and pulled out as if getting away from a bank heist.

They didn’t speak the rest of the way home. As Marek fetched her overnight bag from the boot, he said, ‘When a man and woman lie down together it means something, or it means nothing. I don’t believe last night meant nothing.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

‘Is that a goodbye?’ Marek held on to the bag, wouldn’t let her take it.

‘No, it’s a sorry. I’m leading you a right old dance.’

‘I like dancing.’ Marek held out the bag. ‘Actually,’ he reconsidered, ‘I don’t. But, you know, I’ll dance with you if I have to.’

Orla waved him off, grateful he hadn’t asked to come in, sorry to see him go.

Tiny though she was, Maude held on to Orla with remarkable strength as Orla sobbed and gulped out her story on the sofa.

‘There, there.’ Maude rocked to and fro, and Sunday afternoon crept past as her lodger snivelled and raged and finally subsided.

Lighting lamps, Maude prescribed wine and food and brought both, laying it out on the coffee table.

‘I’ve got no appetite,’ said Orla, cramming a bacon sandwich into her mouth.

‘Just when you’d turned
a corner …’ muttered Maude. ‘Wish I could get my hands on the boy.’

‘He wasn’t a boy, he was a grown man.’ Orla talked with her mouth full: legions of Cassidy women spun in their graves.

‘I still can’t believe he’d—’

‘Believe it, Maude.’ Orla crashed through her landlady’s attempts to rewrite the past. ‘He dumped me. With a valentine’s card.’

‘I knew he had his faults but—’

Interrupting again, Orla voiced a sudden sharp and unwelcome apprehension. ‘Did you know, Maude? That he was seeing somebody else?’ Orla quivered with the need for Maude to shake her head.

But Maude was taking a deep breath in, carefully composing herself before saying, ‘I knew something peculiar was going on but I didn’t know it was
this
. He became secretive. Closed off. And the drinking …’

‘But you didn’t know about
her?
’

‘No, dear, I didn’t know about this hussy, whoever she is.’ Maude was definite. She tucked an escaped tendril of white hair behind her ear, and Orla noticed how her earlobe sagged. She loathed spotting new signs of old age in Maude. Maude must live forever.

‘Are you kidding? You don’t know who …’ Orla spluttered into her wine. ‘It was Anthea. He left me for Anthea Blake. The bitch. The fucking bitch.’ She closed her eyes and groaned, her hand to her forehead.

‘We’ll allow you one
fucking
and that’s it,’ said Maude evenly, patting Orla’s lap. ‘Early bed or sit up all night? Your choice, dear.’

One look at the tartan criss-crossing of veins in the whites of Maude’s eyes meant Orla could make only one answer. ‘Early night, please, Maudie.’

Sleeplessness, her old foe,
made its triumphal return. Orla saw a future of tormenting wakefulness, of twenty-four-hour days spent contemplating the squalid truth. Laid out on the sofa, she stared at the muted early-hours television and chased her thoughts round a circular track.

She had been wrong. The central certainty in her life was a lie. She had believed in Sim’s love the way she believed in two plus two making four – it just
was
. The belief had sustained her, and only now was she realising just how much – even after his death.

Lucy had been right to exclude her at the funeral. Orla wasn’t Sim’s girl. Death hadn’t been the thing that tore Orla and Sim apart: it was another woman.

Some calamities diminish as they sink in.
Everything looks better in the morning
, Ma used to say, but the more Orla dwelt on the confession, the worse it got. Her feelings had to execute an about turn in a cramped space. Loving Sim was redundant now.

There were huge gaps in her knowledge. Blanks that bugged her. When had it started? Had it been a bit of fun that snowballed? Or was it a
grande amour
, unstoppable, such as she’d thought their own had been? Times, places, dates. Orla was rabid for detail. But there was nobody to ask.

The room grew cold and Orla dragged herself off to bed, stopping for a peek between her curtains at the poster. An advertisement for Fiat, its colours dulled by the cold early hour, towered above the street. Sim had gone.

Sim’s journal

17 October 2011

I turned, and saw a look. It was a secret look, one I wasn’t meant to see.

I wish I could un-see it. All my future was mapped out in it. I saw the ruins of my present life in those expressive, lovely, lonely eyes.

In this business the people who are envied, who are adored and confident, can betray themselves with a look. Then they’re vulnerable. Then you’re drawn in.

I wish I hadn’t turned around.

Didn’t call O tonight.

Chapter Sixteen

The class was quiet. Their tutor
was in an odd mood. They felt abandoned, like motherless chicks, and didn’t stick up their hands to supply answers or ask playful questions.

Abena, the last to take her copy of their homework questions, asked in a husky undertone, ‘Did something bad happen in the weekend, Orla?’

The name sounded lovely in her sluggish accent. Slow moving, broken in the middle –
Or-la
.

‘No, nothing.’ Orla, by contrast, was brittle, like certain aunts back in Tobercree who sucked the oxygen out of family gatherings. ‘Just a bit under the weather. That means not feeling well, feeling low.’

‘Ah.’ Abena patted Orla’s shoulder maternally, even though she was a good ten years her junior. ‘Sanae say it is man trouble. But I know you are too smart for that.’ Her chuckle saw her to the door, and the classroom was quiet.

Orla’s feet walked her to the Piccadilly line, not the Hammersmith & City line, of their own accord. Soho’s tangle of streets was confounding and she was on the verge of giving up when she finally found the address, walked up the narrow stairs to a bright room above a restaurant and introduced herself to the receptionist as ‘a friend’.

‘Orla!’ Reece’s office was handsome, its panelled walls almost obscured by movie posters, theatrical playbills and a framed gallery of his clients. He stood up behind his desk, a wide blond wood trestle almost invisible beneath a landslide of paper: Orla guessed he knew the whereabouts of every document on it to the nearest centimetre. ‘Darling, how nice!’

‘You knew.’ Orla stood on the patterned rug in a superhero stance, feet apart and hands on hips.

‘About?’ Reece looked quizzical. By his expression he was holding out for this to be a prank.

‘About Sim and his affair.’

A brief war raged on Reece’s face before he jettisoned the look of incomprehension. Resigned, sad even, he moved to a chesterfield the colour of olives and dropped heavily on to it. ‘Sit with me, darling. Tell me what you’ve heard.’

‘What I’ve
read
.’ Her face was hot, but Orla’s words came out coolly. ‘I didn’t burn the valentine.’ She clocked Reece’s surprise and moved on before he could take her to task. ‘It’s all there in Sim’s own words. And you knew and you didn’t tell me.’

‘Whoa, Orla. Don’t go scattering accusations. Sit down.’ Reece patted the seat beside him. ‘Come on.’