The Valentine's Card (22 page)

A commotion outside distracted her. The dark
wintry street turned to apocalyptic day as a battery of lights snapped on. Parting fronds of plastic ivy Orla peered through the window.

‘What is it?’ Marek rose in his seat to look over the dusty greenery. ‘They’re filming something. Look, there’s a guy with a camera on a sort of trolley thing.’

‘Those lights are dazzling.’ Large globes on a high scaffold lit the street like a stadium, illuminating a beetling herd of purposeful figures in padded body-warmers jabbering into walkie-talkies. It was as if a small army had laid claim to the parade of shops opposite.

‘Do you think it’s a film?’ Marek sat down again, not as interested as the waiters who all gravitated to the windows, arms crossed, mouths open.

‘Could be.’ Orla wondered if she looked shifty.

Concentrating on his lamb, Marek said, ‘Or a commercial maybe.’

‘Yes, I think it’s a commercial,’ said Orla carefully, on boggy ground. Her raised fork empty, she held open a peephole in the ivy with her other hand.

‘Commercials these days,’ said Marek, ‘seem to be in one of two camps. Either they’re shouting
buy this cheap sofa!
or they’re sophisticated mini movies.’

‘Hmm.’ A small trailer, parked a little way down the road, had become an object of interest for the body-warmer pack. It exuded a pregnant sense of something imminent, as individuals hurried towards it and away again, vaulting up the steps to knock on the door, conversing with the unseen occupants, pressing their earpieces, talking into their handsets, making hand gestures at colleagues nearer the cameras. The stark lights were trained on the window of a café, but Orla could sense that the small utilitarian trailer was about to burp out something important.

‘You don’t like your main?’

‘No, I do, I just …’ Orla
smiled mechanically, then her eyes slid back to the trailer as the door opened and Anthea Blake emerged on the top step. ‘I’m just distracted, that’s all,’ she said thinly, as a solicitous hand shot out to guide Anthea down three steps.

‘Is it
that
fascinating out there?’ Marek seemed bemused by his date’s inability to focus.

‘Kind of.’

Orla’s breath was trapped somewhere deep in her diaphragm. Like a doting lover, she couldn’t look away from Anthea’s progress towards the spot-lit café, the crew parting for her as if her charisma walked two steps ahead clearing the way. Dressed in nondescript bourgeois style for her role in the coffee commercial, Anthea nevertheless gleamed with the result of professional attention to her hair, her face, her outfit. Her benevolent smiles for the worker ants seemed assumed to Orla, the tic of a person who knows they’re the centre of attention.

Marek, seeing Orla’s mouth fall open, half stood to look out. ‘Ah,’ he said in a chalky resigned voice. ‘I see.’

The spell broken – Orla had been unprepared for the physical effect of seeing her nemesis – Orla belatedly set about her food. ‘Fancy seeing her here.’

The attempt at wryness fell on stony ground. ‘You planned this.’

For the briefest of moments, Orla considered a wide-eyed rebuttal. Ashamed of the impulse, she laid down her cutlery. ‘I did,’ she conceded, bowing her head but keeping her eyes left; Anthea was being positioned in the café’s pseudo daylight at a window table. The cynosure of many eyes, the actress was a petite monarch accustomed to her power and casual about it.

‘I’m over here, Orla.’

‘Sorry.’ Orla tore
her eyes away to focus on Marek. ‘Don’t look at me like that!’ Orla hoped the protest was playful. She didn’t like his frank disquiet, nor his disappointment.

‘Anthea Blake is why you chose this restaurant. Why you changed tables.’ Marek balled his napkin and dropped it on the remains of his meal, nodding at a waiter who hurried over. ‘Did you want to see me at all?’

‘Of course.’ Orla realised, a little late, how this looked. ‘I did, I mean, I do. Honestly. But I need to see
her
and it seemed obvious to, like, dovetail the two.’

Orla wasn’t entirely certain she could explain it to herself.

‘Why do you need to see her? Surely she’s the last woman on earth you want to be near!’

Marek’s brief interchange with the waiter asking for the bill, immediately, gave Orla time to formulate a reason that didn’t reflect disastrously on her judgement, her state of mind, her manners. She couldn’t.

‘I’m sorry, Marek. It’s hard to explain.’

‘Look at you!’ Marek’s voice rose. ‘Even while we’re arguing about it you can’t keep your eyes off the street!’ Marek stood, his chair falling back.

Other diners looked over and at each other, covertly curious.

‘She has something that belongs to me!’ hissed Orla, aware that they were the floor show.

His wallet wouldn’t cooperate, refusing to emerge from his breast pocket. Marek swore under his breath, yanked out the little leather envelope and plucked a fan of notes. Flinging them on the table without counting them, he headed for the exit.

After a second’s shocked
inaction, Orla rose and followed him, gathering her jacket and bag with hunched speed as if fleeing a burning building.

Across the road, Ant sat at a table, serene in the midst of industry. A man in a baseball cap perched on the table, talking to her, eliciting nods and a tinkling laugh that Orla believed she could discern through the noise of the crew, a gathering crowd and Marek’s hasty footfall as he stalked to the corner. He stopped dead a little way ahead of her, shoulders suddenly falling, and wheeled to face her.

‘We’ll go home,’ he said calmly. ‘Start again. Yes?’

Orla relaxed a little: she hadn’t scared him off utterly. When Marek held out his hand she took it eagerly, enjoying its warm strength in the cold night air.

Her outstretched hand in his outstretched hand, Orla was dimly aware that the dynamic between her dawdling self and the brisker Marek was that of busy parent and reluctant toddler. She looked back at the surreal hub of light and purpose about to be eclipsed by the corner they were turning.

Craning her neck, unwilling to lose sight of it, she stopped dead, resisting the tug of Marek’s grasp. The journal might be back there, in the Portakabin.

She has everything
, thought Orla.

‘Oh no no
no
.’ Marek sounded exasperated. His fingers closed tighter around hers. ‘Look at yourself, woman.’

He didn’t say it unkindly. In fact, he said it with compassion. And Orla looked at herself.

She saw a woman who
shouldn’t give Anthea Blake and her latest romantic scalp another thought but who nonetheless longed to stride across the road, elbow through the guardians assigned to exclude mere mortals from the filming of such a holy thing as a coffee ad and confront Anthea about theft, about love, about right and wrong.

Marek kept his hand in hers and when her body lost its readiness to spring his grip relaxed, and he closed his eyes with relief when finally Orla turned around and said, ‘Let’s go home.’

‘Would you have stopped me if I’d pulled away? Physically stopped me, I mean.’ Orla looked down at the arm wrapped around her, its dark hairs vivid against the snowy chaos of the bedclothes.

‘No. You’re a big girl. You can do what you want.’

Marek and she were entwined, pretzel-like, a Siamese twin fashioned by a mutual need for skin against skin. He kissed the top of her head, squeezing her as he did so, and she enjoyed how virile his body felt against hers, full of male strength and potential.

And she enjoyed that she enjoyed it, without checking first with the dead to see if they minded.

‘Wouldn’t you even have stopped me a little bit?’ Orla was disappointed. Never prone to Tarzan and Jane fantasies, she nonetheless found the image of Marek throwing her over his shoulder a provocative one.

‘No.’ Marek was on to her. ‘Perhaps you’d like me to wear a fireman’s helmet next time we make love? Or I could pretend to arrest you.’

‘I love your house.’ Orla changed topic, her mind pleasantly at ease after a prolonged period of kissing and stroking and charging around each other’s erogenous zones like delighted tourists newly arrived in a resort.

‘You said that.’

‘I know. But I do. I
love
your
house.’ Mews buildings had always fascinated her, commanding huge fees for what was essentially a horse’s dormitory. In this squat, compact space tucked in behind an august Chelsea street, Orla finally grasped the point. It was cosy and it was luxurious, but it was playful too: Marek had inserted a high-end kitchen in a stable. The juxtaposition of exposed brick and chrome pleased her, as if she’d stepped into a magazine article about how the other half, the half with all the taste, live. And the spiral staircase delighted her with its whimsy, although she could attest to how uncomfortable it was as a venue for lovemaking. ‘You’ve got lots of books.’

‘You approve.’

‘I do.’ Orla unapologetically judged people by their bookshelves. Juno was still in the naughty corner for a Jeffrey Archer compendium, and Sim’s meagre library – Orla’s thoughts skidded to a halt, shook themselves and changed direction.

It didn’t matter what Sim had or hadn’t read.

‘I’m getting to know your body,’ said Orla shyly, picking up the arm that lay across her and brushing it with her lips.

In response, one part of that body perked up a little, bumping the top of Orla’s thigh like an insistent Labrador angling for walkies.

‘Ooh,’ she laughed.

‘Sorry,’ said Marek, not sounding in the least penitent. ‘Your body is like …’

‘Steady.’ Orla had received many clumsy compliments and didn’t want the moment tarnished.

‘Like an ice-cream. Like
a big sweetie just for me. Like a bank holiday.’

‘O
kay
.’

‘Oh God.’ Marek, who seemed to like ice-cream, sweeties and bank holidays a
lot
, groaned as he nuzzled her closer, that Labrador becoming more insistent. ‘You’ve bewitched me, Irish.’

This soppiness, allied as it was to his need to feel her naked against him, to touch her breasts wonderingly with his strong hands, to feel her bottom as though he were blind and the meaning of life were written on her buttocks in Braille, thrilled Orla. Particularly as she could answer it with equal portions of desire and interest.

In one respect, however, they were mismatched.

Orla wasn’t as crazy about Marek as he was about her.

After years of being the catcher, she was suddenly the catch. It was exhilarating: had Sim felt like this? She reversed up that dead end abruptly, chiding his ghost for intruding yet again. She doubted, anyway, that their reactions would match; Sim had felt entitled to admiration, whereas his legacy had left Orla grateful for it.

Marek’s guileless honesty about just how much he liked Orla was at odds with his measured, adult, alpha male approach to life. She made a kid of him, bouncy with happiness; he was, she’d found, an enthusiastic flinger of ladies across beds. He made her feel young in return, if optimism and glee and belief in good things finally happening to good people can be said to be young.

But these feelings were finite, trapped
within the walls of his stylish mews house, or at least the walls of their togetherness. Orla couldn’t immerse herself the way he did; there was unfinished business elsewhere, and it was tacky stuff, gum on her shoe, and on her soul.

When Marek leaned across to kiss her as he dropped her outside Maude’s Books at a bleached and early hour, he said, ‘So. No Googling you-know-who. Yes?’

‘No Googling you-know-who.’

‘What time tonight?’

‘
Tonight
?’ Ignoring the insolent parps of impatient drivers trying to manoeuvre past the Jag, Orla paused, one foot on the pavement. ‘You crazy fool!’ she laughed.

‘I can’t wait any longer than that!’ Marek said it as if it was obvious. ‘I’ll cook for you. Get to mine for eight.’

‘Yessir.’ Orla blew
a kiss to the departing car, liking the swathe it cut through the traffic.

Sim’s journal

28 October 2011

I used the word ‘love’ today. I said, ‘If you lined up all the people in the world in order of who I thought I would or should fall in love with, you’d be at the end of the line. O wouldn’t even believe me if I told her I was in love with you.’

But here we are. In love.

Chapter Twenty

Pushing away her plate, Orla stretched her arms above her head. ‘That’s the third meal you’ve cooked for me now,’ she said.

‘And?’

‘Yum.’ She looked longingly at the remains of the roast chicken over on the worktop. ‘Seconds?’

‘Where does it go?’ asked Marek, rising to persuade another plateful out of the carcass, its bare ribs sticking up like the remains of a bombed-out cathedral.

‘No mystery about that.’ Orla slapped her thighs, which were becoming more slappable by the day. ‘Right here.’

‘Then have thirds,’ said Marek, his deep voice colluding with his accent to render the suggestion naughty as he set down a chicken leg in front of her. He watched her eat, chin on his hands, ignoring her ‘
Marek!
Get off!’ until he stood and began to load the dishwasher.

‘I’ll do that.’

‘You’re my guest.’

Orla wondered when she’d be
elevated (or would it be relegated?) to non-guest status and permitted to do something, anything, for herself. She was growing accustomed to his house, could bend the sound system to her will, knew which cupboard door hid the fridge, but Marek’s notion of hospitality was courtly: he topped up her glass, brought her food, passed her a towel after her shower with the swift discretion of a valet. None of this dented his manliness; if anything it enhanced it. He was exciting to be with, smelling of a citrus aftershave and prone to spinning her into his arms as she passed.

‘This kitchen is lit like an old Hollywood movie.’ There wasn’t a mirror in the house which Orla had to approach sideways. It was the most thought about, considered property she’d ever been in. ‘Even the dirty pots by the sink look like a renaissance painting.’