The Valentine's Card (35 page)

There will be more calls, and they won’t really be Reece either. Orla knows it’s over but she doesn’t have the courage to say it out loud.

Orla blinked, and set to with the lip-liner. She was done. She moved her head from left to right, unable to judge how she looked.

Half an hour to go until nine. The
full-skirted black dress was fitted over her bust and upper arms: she felt held in, supported but elegant. She’d piled up her hair, and could feel it rebelling. She unleashed a tempest of Elnett, and could imagine Marek wrinkling his nose at the smell of hair spray. Orla hoped she’d get to shake it out for him.

Her reflection was a little funereal: it needed something. She wondered if she should tempt fate and wear the bangle.

After all, she’d been ‘good’. No internet searches. No late-night surveillance missions.

The moronic peep of her mobile stopped Orla mid-reach. Counselling calm, she extracted it from her bag. The screen told her, dispassionately,
Marek.
She grasped it hard, afraid to drop it, and pressed the button as carefully as if she were defusing a bomb. She felt sick to her stomach and as strong as an ox. ‘Hello?’

‘No, not you,’ said a nasal female voice. ‘Maude, please. I want to say Happy New Year.’

‘Bogna? You’re using your brother’s phone,’ said Orla, accusingly.

‘Mine does not work here. Maude? Please? Chop-chop.’

‘Here? Where’s
here
?’

‘Bloody Chamonix,’ said Bogna bitterly. ‘Bloody Marek make me ski with him. I miss all best parties at home. I hate snow. I think I have crab from barman. Now get Maude thank you.’

‘Maude!’ called Orla, laying down the phone and racing to the bedroom. ‘Call for you!’

As Maude’s murmured words drifted through the door – ‘And Happy New Year to you too, Bogna dear. How about we make 2013 the year of no swearing?’ – Orla clawed off her dress. Roughly wiping off her
careful make-up, Orla didn’t see her reflection. She saw instead Marek flying down a white mountainside, like a bird.

There would be no kissing in Trafalgar Square for them. He hadn’t considered their arrangement significant enough to need a specific cancellation; ending the relationship had covered it, evidently.

Foolish!
Orla chastised herself for feeling that his ski trip was somehow an insult to her; Marek owed her nothing and could do what he liked.

And so can I.

A shadow, like a bird of prey, fell across her. Orla rubbed viciously at her face. She knew what was coming to get her.

To imagine she could magic Marek back to her side by being ‘good’ was superstitious folly worthy of Ma. A new plan, direct and clean, arrived in her mind fully formed.

The bird of prey might well be swooping towards her, but she could struggle in its talons.

Maude, phone dead in her hand, came to the door and watched with a closed expression as her lodger pushed her feet into trainers and pulled on an old and well-loved hand-knit.

Moving fast, Orla put no effort into her cover story. ‘A crowd from college are meeting in a pub in, um, Hammersmith.’ She rifled a drawer for gloves. ‘Don’t wait up.’

Maude was already out of the door, and on the way to her own flat. ‘Whatever you say, dear.’

‘See you next year!’ yelled Orla, winding a long soft scarf around her neck. It was Marek’s: she’d never given it back.

Rushing down the stairs as if
fleeing a forest fire, Orla exhilarated in the fresh, forgotten feeling of power.
How did I imagine that sitting passively in a cell of my own making would win Marek?
She stooped to knot a trailing lace, impatient at the delay to her flight out of the door on winged heels.

Orla was at the door now, a tingling anticipation surfing her blood. She paused to imagine the scene where she went to Marek and said,
see, this is what I did for you. I whupped my demons, faced Anthea, read the journal.

The tingling sensation intensified, but it wasn’t positive and pastel any more. The door remained closed.

As she’d urged Maude to do so many times, Orla was visualising. She saw herself at Anthea’s illustrious New Year’s Eve party, a guttersnipe attempting to scale the ramparts of a vast glittering palace.

She couldn’t trump Anthea. Anthea beat Orla effortlessly, pilfering her boyfriend and trashing her next relationship without even being aware of it.

The door was as much a barrier to Orla as it was to Maude. Beyond it lay proof of her own inadequacy. She turned to slink away but jumped instead at the sight of a figure on the stairs.

Maude in a hat and coat was as unexpected as Maude in a spacesuit. Tugging on her gloves, her face sharp, Maude said, ‘We need to be quick, dear, so why don’t I answer the questions whizzing around your head before you ask them. Yes, I
do
know about the stalking. Marek rang me. He felt somebody close to you should know.’

Shame boiled briefly in Orla’s chest. Marek had squealed.
No
, she corrected herself.
He passed on the baton.
Very ‘him’, very decent, and not the action of a man planning to return.

‘And yes, I guessed that silly Bogna’s call on Marek’s phone would spark another sortie
and, yes, because I know you rather well by now, I guessed that you’d run out of steam.’ Maude, stiff in her outdoor clothes, looked bemused. ‘That journal must be terribly important to you. I’m unsure about the wisdom of all this but you’re your own woman. So, yes, I’m preparing to leave the house on the thirteenth anniversary of the last time I managed it because I think it’s an excellent idea to challenge Anthea and put an end to this once and for all. There isn’t another person on earth I’d do this for. Now. Have I covered everything? May we go?’

Even in the dim light of the hall’s eco-bulb Orla saw the pall of stress on Maude’s china-white face. ‘Maude, the house rule is that only one of us goes bonkers at any given time so
whisht
and come upstairs.’

‘Look at us!’ Maude slapped the sides of her coat in exasperation. ‘One woman who can’t go out and one who can’t stay in. If you truly, really want to have this journal in your hands and ask it these damn questions, then get on with it. Do it. Tonight.’

‘You’re angry.’

‘I’m furious. Do you think life is so long that it doesn’t matter if you waste some of it? I’m telling you, dear, from the other end of it, that life goes by in the blink of an eye. One moment you’re playing hopscotch, the next you’re married, then whoosh!’ Maude clapped her gloved hands, her fine-boned face ardent. ‘You’re burying him. These years when your body works perfectly and your skin is like taut cotton don’t last for ever and to waste them is blasphemous.’

‘I won’t let you do this.’

‘
Let
me?’ Maude skewered Orla with
a blue eye. ‘What gives you the impression I’m asking your permission?’

Chapter Thirty-Three

Their driver, his eyes superstitious dots either side of a bread-knife nose, was the runt of Kwikkie Kabs’ litter. It was, according to the uninterested controller, the busiest night of the year and Orla and Maude had waited two hours for even this substandard banger of a car to turn up. ‘She OK?’ the driver asked roughly at a traffic lights, in an accent even Orla couldn’t place.

‘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.