The Valentine's Card (37 page)

Orla had built the last two months around her mistake, and sacrificed Marek on its altar. He was out of reach in the cold clean snow while she ploughed through all this mulch with a tipsy woman who fucked other people’s boyfriends for ‘a bit of fun’.

‘No, don’t cry. Very bad for the skin. People do funny things when somebody dies, I suppose,’ said Anthea, assuming this new amiable persona
as easily as shrugging on a blouse. ‘As stalkers go, I’ve had worse.’

‘I should get her home.’ Orla gestured despairingly at Maude. ‘Do you have a cab number?’

‘My PA is downstairs. If she’s not too pissed, I’ll get her on to it.’ Ant stood, stooped to look in the dressing-table mirror and played with her disordered hair. ‘Good thing the bedhead look is in.’ A few pats with a sponge, a flurry of brushes and powders and Anthea was presentable again. ‘I should thank you. They’ll be talking about this party for fucking
years.’
In the carefully lit mirror, Anthea looked ten years younger.

‘Will you tell me who Sim was in love with?’

Anthea looked directly at Orla’s reflection, her green eyes vivid in the glass. ‘I don’t owe you a thing.’ She returned her gaze to her own face, smoothing her eyebrows with one finger. Orla wondered if Anthea knew the image was flattering, or if she really thought she looked like that. ‘I have a suspicion,’ Anthea said eventually. ‘A hunch. But I can’t share a hunch with you, doll, in case this madness starts all over again with somebody else who doesn’t deserve it.’

‘Does Reece know?’

‘Ah, Reece …’ Anthea exhaled heavily. ‘The keeper of all our skeletons in all our closets. Put it this way. I’d be amazed if he didn’t. But, listen, if he hasn’t told you then there’s no point bugging him. Reece is all about damage control.’

Anthea shook herself and was gleaming again. Pulling on her shoes, she grew three inches and threw her shoulders back.

‘Time to dive back in.’ She paused at the door. ‘I will say this, though, and that’s the subject over for me. If
you’d
died on Valentine’s Day, Sim wouldn’t be tormenting himself. He’d have made a fresh
start. You do the same.’ She reached over, trailed a finger down Orla’s jaw. ‘In your own funny way, you’re kind of gorgeous.’

The room was drab again
when she left. A crystal knob on the wardrobe door fell off.

‘Let’s go home,’ said Maude feebly.

Sim’s journal

1 January 2012

This is going to be my best year ever!

Chapter Thirty-Four

To recap.

No journal.

No idea who Sim left me for.

No Marek.

From her chair at the end of Maude’s bed, Orla watched the first sun of 2013 rise.

Odd how a sleepless night can train a spotlight into the mind’s dingiest corners. Truths stand obvious in the glare, and of these three deficits, the third was the one that cast the longest shadow.

And losing Marek was all my own work
.

The slight figure in the bed stirred, swallowed, turned, but didn’t wake. Orla had helped a paper doll up the stairs a few hours ago, and sat listening to her sleeping breaths in case they petered out.

They hadn’t. Maude had slept well while Orla kept guard. And now London woke up around them.

On her feet, groomed to her
standard high level, vigorous in limb and voice, Maude was physically revived. Her erect bearing, her sprightly gait all seemed to say,
it takes more than a hideous trauma for me to have a lie-in.

Emotionally, there was a noticeable shift. It was a quieter Maude that padded about her Queendom, one reminded of her frailties. Orla caught her look of introspection at odd moments and had difficulty calling her back to their present.

For this, Orla unequivocally blamed herself.

The aftermath of New Year’s Day was more dramatic for Orla. It was as if some reckless giant hand had torn off the roof, flooding her claustrophobic doll’s house with light.

Orla’s mistake about Anthea had been fundamental, but she’d come away from Primrose Hill with something. She’d learned that Anthea was a woman, and just that, for all the trappings of celebrity.

And she’d learned that if, as Orla had often wished, Sim had lived one more day he wouldn’t have taken Orla back. Because Orla wouldn’t have asked him to. The sages were right to warn against idols: Sim’s feet of clay had gone all the way up to his neck during that last sexless, jokeless Christmas. She could conjure up, even now, the pea-souper of septic boredom he’d dragged from room to room.

And that phone call.

Her life since pivoted on that call. Her romantic history might be different if she’d acted decisively on her instincts by either ending the relationship or rushing to London to re-stake her claim.

Instead, Orla had put her fingers
in her ears, carrying doggedly on with her backwater life.
I encouraged him.
Some observers might argue that Orla had told Sim
she
didn’t love
him
long before he put pen to pink paper.

Sim’s sudden death left a hole bigger than Sim: the vastness of Orla’s loss had perverted everything, made her suspicions unthinkable, even sacrilegious. So she’d kicked them under the rug, where they festered.

As Orla tended to Maude, discreetly – Maude didn’t care to be tended to – she compared their situations. In a moment of acute distress, both women had handed the reins to their subconscious. Negative thoughts had swarmed to the fore, looping and coiling, folding back on themselves until both women had created their own super-real alternative reality. In their looking-glass worlds, the absurd seemed obvious. Wall myself up in the house?
Excellent idea!
Stalk an actress?
Why, I don’t mind if I do!

Love would get Maude on her feet and out through the front door, to the corner, and, in time, beyond.

And it wouldn’t go amiss for Orla. There was some straight talking to be done.

‘Good evening, the Cassidy residence.’

‘It’s me, Ma, you can drop your phone voice.’

‘Darlin’! What a lovely surprise. I was just rinsing out me unmentionables. This is much more fun.’

‘
More fun than washing knickers
. They can put that on my gravestone.’

‘How’s the hols going? Getting out and about?’

‘You could say that. Listen, Ma, I’ve been thinking about the future.’

‘And?’

‘And it’s here. I’m staying.’

‘Oh. Right. Well, I expected this, I suppose. Is
it to do with Marek?”

‘No. Well, I’d hoped it was. It’s a long story. I’ll tell you in February. I’ve booked my flights. You have to put up with me, whether you like it or not, from the twenty-second to the twenty-fourth.’

‘Are you codding me? That’s fabulous, Orla. I’ll have to air that duvet. And I’ll get some Vienettas in. You can help me shop for a cardigan. We’ll have a whale of a time! Can I help you with the fare?’

‘Definitely not. There’s something else I have to say, Ma.’

‘Go on. Me loins are girded.’

‘Your New Year’s Eve parties are the best in the world.’

Christmas falling on a Tuesday made the college holiday two and a half weeks long –
too
long for a disappointed, regretful, lovesick Irish woman. Keeping an eye on Maude was a happy distraction, but Maude had rallied quickly, belying her age. That worrying tendency to drift had gone: Maude was back to her pin-sharp self, and impatient with Orla’s concern.

‘Bake a cake, dear,’ she suggested shortly, discovering Orla yet again on the shop sofa.

‘Wouldn’t you like to do a little visualisation?’ Orla used the kind of encouraging face she’d used when coaxing Year Two to eat their cabbage. ‘Mmm? Maybe visualise going to the dry cleaner’s?’

‘I’d rather visualise you out from under my feet.’

Out came a recipe book splodged
with grease, and a rusty scales and a buckled cake tin. Creaming the butter and sugar, Orla wondered if the resulting victoria sponge would be as delicious as one of Anthea’s ‘famous’ cakes. It was funny, if she was in the right mood, how this would have genuinely exercised her mind until recently.

The seventh of January seemed an age away. She wondered if her students knew how two-way the classroom traffic was: she taught them English grammar and idiom; they grounded her and gave her purpose.

Orla was allowing lots of small truths to resurface and one of these was her pride in her profession. Teaching had never been just a job for Orla. She’d wanted to be Miss Cassidy ever since she’d first lined up her teddies and Barbies and called out the register.

Teaching adults had stretched her at a time when she needed fresh experience, something to baffle her pain, but now, as the dust settled around her, Orla felt the pull of primary teaching again, just as Marek had prophesied.

Instinct had mattered with him. He’d tuned in to her,
known
her.

With a whinny of regret, Orla checked the cake through the glass oven door.
Rise, you git!

One thing was certain: never again would Orla allow anybody to describe her as ‘just a teacher’.

The sales tempted Orla into Oxford Street. She bought a belt and a poncho thing that she regretted before she’d even left the shop, and possibly the nicest dress ever, a draped fuchsia knee-length design which she knew would have inspired Marek to whisk her out of it.

Such thoughts were useless, but
they persisted. She looked about the coffee shop as she ate her post-purchase snack and gauged it as the sort of place she and Marek might choose. She likened the small biscuit which came with her coffee to the
rogalicki
he’d fed her the last time they’d shared a bed.

Marek had supplanted Sim in her
if only
daydreams. There was a crucial difference between the two men, beyond the obvious ones of temperament: as Juno pointed out, ‘Marek is alive!
’

Juno felt that the breach could be repaired, but Juno wasn’t in full possession of the facts. She knew that Marek had left after a row on Christmas Day, and she knew that Anthea had been absolved; one day, when Orla felt strong enough and there was enough wine in the house, Orla would tell her about the cause of the row.

For now, Orla relished the sensation of power returning to her limbs, of energy rising within her. She was transforming, as in a fairy tale, into another being, except she was transforming back into
herself
.

There was no word from Reece. The promised present didn’t arrive. His attentions were turned off like a tap. Anthea and he must have talked. She imagined them knee to knee in a corner of their club.

Good
, Orla found herself thinking. She was weary of wondering about Reece’s motives, gauging his sincerity, querying whether their friendship was genuine or part of, to use Anthea’s chilling term, ‘damage control’.

It was obvious that Reece knew
the identity of Sim’s other woman. Orla could pick up the phone, badger him, start the whole cycle all over again, but she had no plans to. She’d had her fill of half-truths and hints, of being led through mazes and past distorting mirrors. Squaring her shoulders, Orla hunkered down for a lifetime of not knowing. She shouldn’t care about the true identity of Miss X, any more than she should care about the hows, whys and whens of Sim’s defection.

But she did.

She shouldn’t miss Marek so much, when she’d only known him for a few months.

But she did.

Abena, Sanae, Dominika and the others regrouped noisily. They demanded to know if Orla had liked their presents, and milked her for every last detail of her Christmas.

‘I know what you’re up to.’ She’d pointed to each one in turn with a ruler. ‘Trying to distract me. Well, it won’t work. Page fifty-eight, ladies and gentlemen.’

Their cheeky questions, their
attention to her, their lack of attention to her, it all energised Orla. She was mutating still, sparks flying from her fingers, changing back to herself. It was a profound feeling, and warming. As she listened to Dominika read, faultlessly, an official pamphlet which would have confounded her a few months ago, Orla felt serene.

Chapter Thirty-Five

January was wet.

The sound of rain on window panes is cosy; sopping toes inside leaky boots on the way home from work less so. Orla vaulted puddles and forded the angry little rivers coursing along the gutters, eager to reach the warmth of Maude’s Books.

Her thoughts tonight were not serene.

Lately she’d likened herself to a phoenix, rising out of the ashes of New Year’s Eve to be reborn as an emotionally robust specimen. Her mutation was decelerating now. She whirled slower, preparing to land again, and she couldn’t help but notice some new landmarks down there that weren’t pretty.

It’s terrible to know that, handed the ingredients for happiness, you simply opened your fingers.

Choose
, Marek had commanded, black and white, just like his colouring. She’d chosen and, taking her at her word, he hadn’t looked back when he’d walked away. There was nothing coy about Marek.

The happiness she’d found with
him had been like a personal red carpet they could have rolled out into the future, insulating them from every stone in the road.

There had never been a sense of potential with Sim: after the first euphoria they’d begun counting down to the inevitable dwindling, despite what the
billets doux
in the hat box said. She’d thought Sim good at loving; turns out he’d just been good at writing cards.

Marek, however, was good – very good – at loving.

The window of Maude’s Books glowed, and Orla quickened her step. ‘It’s times like this,’ said Orla, shaking out her overwhelmed umbrella in the doorway, ‘that I envy you agoraphobics.’

‘Tea,’ said Maude decisively, leaving her post at the till. ‘Bogna!’ she called, ‘come out and say hello to Orla.’

‘You’re back.’ Orla shook her wet Medusa tendrils. ‘How was your trip?’ She’d forgotten it was late-closing day, and felt ambushed. Would Marek lunch around the corner tomorrow, she wondered, before answering
of course he will
. He was a creature of habit. ‘Did you get to like skiing in the end? That’s most people’s experience, isn’t it?’