The Valentine's Card (27 page)

Orla didn’t want to discuss this with Reece. The scales had fallen – or been ripped – from her eyes. She missed her old confidant. ‘Don’t get overexcited. I’m not in love.’ Some where a fairy fell down dead; there’d been no need to say that.

‘It’ll be ten months this day next week.’ Reece turned his cup round and round on the saucer.

‘I know.’ Orla always noted the fourteenth. ‘A long ten months.’

‘An age,’ agreed Reece.

They sat quietly for a while, companionable but absorbed in private thoughts. Reece bent to extract something from his briefcase and when he spoke it was impersonal, and rehearsed. ‘Take a look at this still, Orla.’

He watched Orla lean over the A4 print-out. ‘Would you say that woman looks like you?’ In grainy black and white, a blurred figure filled almost the entire page. ‘It was taken by Ant’s security camera. Spooked her. I didn’t say so to Ant, but I thought it looks a bit like you.’ He watched Orla scrutinise the picture. ‘Can’t be you though, can it?’

Orla stared at herself,
captured in the eerie palette of a night lens, sodden, shoulders slumped, zombie-eyed. ‘No,’ said Orla slowly, sitting back, facing Reece squarely. ‘It can’t be me.’

Not really a lie: Orla
didn’t
recognise the desperate woman in the picture.

‘Good,’ said Reece deliberately, crumpling the picture. ‘Because if it were I’d be worried.’

Clever, how he wedded warning and solicitude like that.

Chapter Twenty-Five

‘Hi, it’s me! How’s Whitstable?
I looked it up after you told me you were going there and did you know it’s where Dracula arrived in England after his voyage from Transylvania? Well, of course you did. You’re the clever one in our set-up. Guess you’re busy with your pupils or whatever you call them. Call me when you’re home and you have a minute. I want to run something by you. And I don’t want you to judge me, Orla. OK? Bye. Ooh, and watch out for tall dark strangers in capes.’

‘This is nice,’ said Marek, in a murmuring voice she loved, barely moving his lips, as if too sledgehammered by bliss to speak.

Orla, lying back against him on the sofa, her head on his shoulder, their hair mingling, every limb heavy, agreed. The film was almost over and she dreaded having to shift; the position they’d found was as perfect as that position she always found in bed just before the alarm sounded.

‘I’m going to Poland on Friday,’ said Marek, in the same low honeyed tone. ‘The fourteenth.’

‘What? No!’ Orla sat up. ‘Oh Rabbit, for how long?’

A laugh was startled out of Marek by her distress. There was pleasure, too, at this little proof of her attachment to him. His eyebrows moved together in a V of kind concern. ‘Darling, I won’t be long. It’s business, family stuff. My stepmother likes to make a fuss. I have to go.’

‘Yes, of
course.’ Orla, with some effort, reset her expression. Panic ticked in her chest, though, and it coloured her next question. ‘How long will you be gone, exactly?’

‘Two days. Three at the most.’

‘Three. That’s not long, is it?’

‘It’s seventy-two hours. I’m flattered. You’re going to miss me, aren’t you,
moje ztotko
?’ He held her tightly to him, his chest firm against her bouncier one and Orla keenly felt how perfectly their differences complemented each other. When he let her go, she dipped her head but he dipped his too to look at her face. ‘Tears? No! Orla, is something wrong?’

‘Something’s
right
,’ mewled Orla, glad to feel this way, glad to have pushed through the dam of debris between her and Marek.

‘I should have asked you to come with me.’ Marek scooped her up so she was sitting on his lap. He kissed her, laughed, and said, ‘I was scared to ask in case you pulled a face.’

‘Me?’ said Orla in mock amazement. How could she have such power over such a man, yet fail to make an idiot like Sim happy? She kissed Marek, enjoying her right of way over his sculpted lips.

‘Well?’ Marek shrugged a question. ‘Why not? Come. Meet my family. See Skwierzyna.’

‘But …’

‘You and your buts,’ roared Marek, suddenly loud and exasperated.

‘But
, college,
Marek! I have to be there in front of the class when they all shuffle in.’

She remembered Sim’s
you’re just a primary school teacher!
when she’d cited her job as reason not to come to London.

‘Then fly out after me and come for the Saturday and Sunday.’

‘I don’t know …’ Orla
did
know. A weekend without him would give her time with the other towering figure in her life. As was her habit these days, she expertly smothered the thought. ‘It’s a bit … soon.’

‘If you think so.’ Marek budged Orla off his lap. ‘Film’s over.’ He nodded at the screen and stood up. ‘I’ve got calls to make.’

If the mews had a cave Marek would have retreated to it, but he had to make do with his office. Orla heard the door click shut and aimed the remote control at the screen, bouncing from shopping channel to panel games to sitcom.

It would be easy to go with him. Just go and, maybe – crazy idea, this –
enjoy herself
. But the other Orla, that selfish greedy twin with an appetite for voyeurism and self-flagellation, couldn’t pass up such an opportunity. Perhaps it would all go her way. Perhaps the internet would roll her straight sixes and deliver not only an opportunity to face Anthea but the courage to go through with it.

Orla could read the journal while Marek was away. She could be a fresh clean new person when he returned.

An old
Antiques Roadshow
flashed past. The next channel offered her a documentary about New York. From inlaid writing desks to skyscrapers to, bang, Anthea Blake with a heart-shaped beauty spot and foot-high white hair. Orla had stumbled on a repeat of
The Courtesan
.

Finger frozen, Orla watched
Anthea, her powdered face and sly eyes part visible behind a fan. Anthea snapped the fan shut with a flourish and Orla jumped.

‘Madame, do not cross swords with me.’ Anthea advanced on the camera, her lips a bloody red. ‘I eat pretty upstarts like you for breakfast.’

‘Isn’t that …’ Marek was behind her.

‘Yes, it is.’ Orla pushed buttons at random, muting Ant and reducing her in size before finally managing to banish her.

Marek said nothing.

Rather loudly.

It gave Orla pleasure to creep to the glacial outer reaches of Marek’s bed, shiver there for a moment, then shimmy back to his side and arrange her limbs over him, feeling the warmth he radiated. Marek was easy-going about her tendency to treat him as a climbing frame, happy in her koala-grip. Naked, they’d drawn a line under the grotty atmosphere that had lingered until bedtime.

Now Marek shifted in his sleep, a dozy mumble on his lips. Suspended between sleep and wakefulness beside him, super-comfortable and about to dribble, Orla’s thoughts roamed in a non-linear fashion, alighting in no particular order on Juno’s peculiar defensiveness, her own need for a new bag, whether to have porridge for breakfast. And then Maude popped into her dozy head.

I’ll treat Maude to something nice while Marek’s away
, she decided.
A nice meal in town, maybe?

Orla’s sleepy brain discovered something that had been hidden in plain sight all along. It raced along a trail of breadcrumbs and reached a conclusion that jolted her into a sitting position.

‘
Kochanie, jestes OK?’
Marek sat up with her, but his spine was still asleep and he collapsed back on to the pillows, pulling her with him. As he burrowed back into sleep, his head on her shoulder and his hair tickling her neck, Orla burned holes in the ceiling with her eyes.

It was so obvious, she chided herself. So bloody obvious.

‘Orla? It’s Ma. Can you talk?’

‘Howaya Ma. Actually, I’m just about to—’

‘Listen, there was a murder! An actual murder in Tobercree!’

‘No! Who was murdered?’

‘Well, they didn’t die. The man who runs the electrical—’

‘If he didn’t die it’s not a murder, Ma.’

‘Don’t spoil it!’

‘Ma, can we talk another time? I was just about to—’

‘The eejit who lives over the chip shop is
helping police with their inquiries
. It’s the best thing that’s happened in Tobercree since – ever!’

‘Ma, I have something important to do, so I’ll—’

‘Young lady, what’s so important that it can’t wait until after the one conversation I have with me daughter every week?’

‘Sorry, Ma. Ma?’

‘Yes, musha?’

‘Was I a coward when I was a kid?’

‘You were lovely. The easiest one of the lot. Never a frown. A breath of sunshine.’

‘But did I run from things? Was I a sissy?’

‘Are you kidding
me or what? You were my little tigress.’

‘That’s the word Juno used.’

‘If you were in the right, you’d stand up to anybody.’

‘Ah. Listen, Ma, I really do have to go.’

Orla cut off her mother’s splutters and dashed out to the hallway, apprehending Maude on her way to the top floor after shutting up shop. ‘May I have a mo? It’s important.’

‘Of course,’ said Maude immediately. She preceded Orla back into the flat, tinsel fragments in her bun: Christmas decorations had gone up that day. Ordnance Survey lines zigzagging beneath her eyes gave the game away about Maude’s age in a way her steady blue gaze never would. ‘What’s wrong, dear?’

‘Nothing. Not with me. Well, no more than the usual.’ Orla’s light-hearted grin came out as a death’s head grimace and she saw Maude recoil as they seated themselves at the small square kitchen table.

‘I can sense you working out how to begin. Just talk to me.’

‘I was going to ask you something.’ Orla forced herself to sit. Her legs wanted to stride, but she must rein herself in, keep this small. ‘But that would be false, because I know the answer. I’ve done a little research, I’ve thought very hard and I know, Maude, that you’re agoraphobic.’

Maude went very still, the only movement a tightening of her lips that sent a sunburst of lines radiating outwards.

Orla carried on. ‘You haven’t stepped outside the door since I arrived in London ten months ago. All your groceries are delivered. You shop online. The only times you ever lose your good humour – your
lovely
humour,’ she amended, in hopes of softening Maude’s facial expression which ossified with each word, ‘is when somebody badgers you to go out. You won’t come shopping with me, you turned poor George away with a flea in his ear. So I looked up agoraphobia on the internet and you’re a classic case, Maudie.’

It felt important to keep
Maude’s eye: the old lady seemed determined to stare her out. Eventually it was Maude who looked away, and stood up, patting inconsequentially at her dress, angling her body towards the door.

‘You have no notion of what is your business and what isn’t, do you, Orla?’

Refusing to be stung, Orla stayed clamped to her seat and said, ‘Maude, we know each other too well for that to wash. You made me your business the moment I appeared on your doorstep. I drew boundaries and you stepped regally over them. You have stuck your admittedly very elegant nose into my every nook and cranny, and I didn’t hear you say “please”. Now it’s my turn. Sit down, Maude.’

When Maude scowled her face lost all its whimsy. ‘Don’t boss me about. Arthur was the last person ever to do that and now I allow nobody the right.’ She trotted to the door, yanked it open.

Hoping to pin Maude to the spot with her words, Orla rattled through them. ‘I have every right, because I love you, Maude, and because I need to repay you. Now,’ she said, more calmly, glad that Maude’s hand had paused on the doorknob, ‘I hope you’ll find it a relief to sit and talk about it. Because whether or not you like it, I
know
.’

‘You weren’t the first to rumble me.’ Maude spoke low and ruefully, as she slowly closed the door and turned to face Orla, her face her own once more. ‘Sim tried what he called an intervention.’

‘Sim guessed?’ Sim,
so recently rebranded from Saint to Satan?

‘Yes.’ Maude sat down with the mien of a woman who didn’t expect to get up for some time. ‘I fobbed him off easily enough. He didn’t have your grit.’

‘Never mind Sim. This is about you.’ Orla’s mouth was dry. She didn’t feel qualified to tackle such a problem, but their mutual understanding was both exquisitely nuanced and light as air: only Orla could persuade Maude to open up. ‘Maude, you’re afraid to go out, aren’t you?’

Maude was silent. She stared at her fingers bent crabbily from the middle knuckle.

‘It’s a recognised condition. You can get help. I’ll be involved every step of the way. You’re not unique, you’re not alone. You have me, and we can call on a whole host of resources.’

Still nothing from Maude.

‘We can go as slowly as you like, so long as we make a start. These four walls aren’t big enough to contain the likes of you. Imagine, Maude, how it would be, if you could just walk out of the front door and—’ Orla halted as Maude’s hands balled into fists. ‘I won’t force you into anything. But it’s time you rejoined the messy old human race you’re so fond of.’

More silence. Orla was encouraged by the relaxing of Maude’s fingers. ‘Come on, Maudie. Don’t leave me to do all the work here!’

A wet blob appeared on the scrubbed wood of the table, followed by another. Maude’s head sank lower.

‘Oh Maude, no,’ whispered Orla,
bending her head so that it touched Maude’s. ‘I didn’t mean to make you cry. I want to help, that’s all. Maudie, please.’ That whining tone wouldn’t do. She sat up again. ‘Have a little weep. As you’ve told me many times, it helps. But then, Maude,
talk to me
.’

Still the flossy white head remained resolutely down. Orla crept her hand over, fearful of being brushed away, but when she cupped her fingers over Maude’s she felt the older woman’s resonate at the touch. ‘We’ll just sit here for a bit,’ she said.

Eventually Maude spoke, a mumble quite unlike her usual vocal authority.

‘What was that?’ Orla squinted as she strained to hear.