The Valentine's Card (4 page)

Sitting on the far side
of Juno, Jack had squirmed and fidgeted against the pew. Young children at funerals aren’t unusual in Ireland, where the old guard respect the rituals of death. Juno, however, was vehemently new guard, free of the heavy hand of Irish Catholicism, and Orla knew she’d only brought him for her benefit. Orla had held her arms open.

‘Give him to me.’ Orla had taken Jack onto her lap for the rest of the service. He had turned out to be the best buffer of all.

Gravely looking about him, a miniature man in a miniature suit, he’d whispered to Orla, ‘You’re not really my aunt.’

‘No. But I’m as good as.’ Orla normally folded Jack up in her arms, blew raspberries on him, but sitting in that church she’d wondered how she ever found the energy.

‘Mammy says you’re eating your heart out.’ Jack sounded fascinated by such an activity. ‘Is it all gone yet?’

‘Almost,’ whispered Orla, peering down at her chest. ‘Still enough left to get by, though.’

‘I ate a bogey I found once.’

‘Jack!’ Juno had hissed, eyes flickering around the congregation. ‘You never did.’ She’d whispered to Orla. ‘He makes this stuff up.’

I did
, mouthed Jack.

Orla had kept
her eyes devoutly on his thumbprint of a face, rather than the wooden oblong in the aisle draped in the Irish Tricolour. The coffin was bulky proof that Sim’s life was over.

Orla’s breakfast had risen in her throat at the thought of him inside that box. Passing the coffin before Mass began, she’d placed a hand on the wood and left it there, unable to move. Juno’s compassionate, ‘Come away,’ only made her burst into tears.

The first time Sim’s ever been mute at a get together.
Orla had comforted herself with the absurd. At her feet, in her ‘best’ bag – a birthday gift from him – lay the valentine.

The service inched on, prayers and responses flying up into the thick air like dry leaves. Orla had recognised nobody, knew none of the hymns. The Mass was an endurance test and she’d found no solace in it. Rather, she’d felt even more keenly her impotence against an indifferent force that could snuff out a person at random, caring little if that person took the hopes and dreams – the very
future –
of another with him.

The disquiet on Jack’s perfect little face as he took in her raw eyes and grimly clamped mouth had been perhaps the worst part of the day.

He’d never seen grief before.

‘Let’s not go to the reception.’ Juno had said this casually as they filed out of the cemetery, Ma taking up the refrain with equally strained breeziness. They’d held Orla up, one either side, as ropes lowered all that was left of Sim down into the ground.

‘I have to go.’

They’d
gone along with her decision believing that she was doing it for Sim, and they were half right. But only half. Orla was on a mission.

In the exquisite hotel function room, Orla had moved among the guests in search of her prey, her coat bright amid the black. Nobody here would
miss
Sim. Their expressions were masks. Nobody here had ever really known him.

On one side of the room, moving among the guests with his customary finesse, Senator Quinn looked tired. On the opposite side entirely his wife’s careful make-up couldn’t rewind the decade she’d aged in the last twelve days. Orla noticed they never came together.

‘Orla.’ Lucy had tilted her chignon benignly. ‘You’re wearing red? How individual.’

‘Sim’s orders. Lucy, I’ve been thinking. I want to help.’

‘That’s kind, but everything’s under control.’ Lucy had smiled at somebody over Orla’s head: she was a tall woman, and always wore heels.

‘I recognise that smile. I use it too, since … since Sim died.’

Lucy had looked puzzled.

‘This one.’ Orla had mimicked Lucy’s expression. ‘Nostalgic. Sentimental. Rueful but brave. For a smile, it’s horribly sad.’

Lucy took a sip of her champagne. She hadn’t demurred.

Orla pressed on, excited that she might be reaching Lucy woman to woman. ‘Do you walk into a room, forget why you’re there and just say to yourself,
Oh Sim
…?’

‘All the time.’

‘The
dot-dot-dots never lead anywhere,’ said Orla, quietly.

‘I have to greet the Minister for Education, Orla. Excuse me.’

‘Hold on, Lucy. I won’t keep you long. Like I said, I want to help. I’ll go to London for you, clear out his apartment there.’

‘Maria is—’

‘This feels right. Remember Sim wanted me to go with him, live with him there.’

‘And you refused.’

‘Yes, and I regret it now.’ Orla had hesitated, scared she would expose herself too much. ‘This is my way of making amends.’

‘Orla, I really must see to my guests. I’m having trouble getting hold of a key for the London property but as soon as I do, Maria will go.’

Orla held up a bronze door key. ‘Sim sent me this.’ She flourished her ticket. ‘And this. My flight leaves at 6.10 a.m. on the twenty-fourth. I
am
doing this, Lucy,’ Orla had held Lucy’s gaze, ‘but I’d prefer to do it with your blessing.’

There was a long pause.

‘It shouldn’t take longer than an afternoon,’ said Lucy. ‘He took very little. If you find his grandfather’s watch, it’s a Longines, inscribed.’

‘I know it well. I’ll bring it home safely to you. If I find his journal, may I keep that?’

For a moment it had seemed as if Lucy might say no. Orla held her breath. So far Lucy had done everything in her power to deny Orla even the smallest keepsake. The journal had taken on a new significance. Yes she had teased him for his diligence about keeping a diary (a diligence notably absent from any other area of his life), but now it represented a conversation of sorts. The only conversation left to an almost-widow.

‘Yes,
all right.’ Lucy had turned to wave at a new arrival. ‘You may.’

Sim’s journal

14 October 2011

Ryanair Flight FR112

Mid-air

Watching her grow smaller and smaller as I walked through the departure gate brought on a wintry sadness like when the olds used to dump me back at school for the autumn term.

How can such a soft woman be so HARD? She should be beside me. She could get time off work if she wanted. Like I said to her she’s just a primary school teacher. Even I could do that!

Focus, Simon. Simeon. I need to focus but nobody touches me like O. I already miss her take on everything. And I’m only on the bloody plane!

Chapter Four

Movement
helped. Packing a suitcase, running for her flight, watching the clouds from the window of the plane, all helped with the weight in Orla’s chest. The valentine was carefully tucked between the covers of a W. B. Yeats anthology Sim had given her their first Christmas together. The card was retracing its sender’s last journey. Knowing this was an odd comfort; Orla was beginning to appreciate odd comforts.

Stepping out of the taxi, Orla double-checked the address.

‘Jaysus,’ she breathed to herself. ‘Really, Sim?’

I love this place!
he’d enthused, in email and on the phone.
It’s so me!

In that case, the London Sim was a very different creature. Orla had expected something chic, something louche, not three storeys of sooty brick, sandwiched between a railway bridge and a 24-hour mini-mart. Dublin Sim would have taken one look and bolted to the nearest five star hotel; this crossing of wires made a stranger of him, here where she’d come hoping to commune with him for the final time.

A tube train charged across the bridge, rattling the sign for MAUDE’S BOOKS that swung above the shop on the ground floor. A figure waved frantically through the shop window, as if drowning.

Wheeled
suitcase trailing her like an awkward pet, Orla passed a man in a hard hat breaking the paving stones with a pneumatic drill, and negotiated the crawling traffic. She passed the mini-mart with a wince for the death rattle cough of the homeless man downing a can of lager in its doorway.
Ladbroke Grove is the real London, very cosmopolitan
; Sim had conjured up an art deco cocktail bar, not a fluorescent hovel where you could buy Pringles at 3 a.m.

The bell above the door of Maude’s jangled and delivered Orla into a place where books ruled. They tottered in piles in the window, stood to attention along white shelves on the bare brick walls, lay brazenly open on the tatty sofa. Hard backs, paperbacks, cloth covers, massive art tomes, flimsy children’s wipe clean stories, new books, old books, raggedy, over-loved books, they almost obliterated the whitewashed floorboards.

The shop was peaceful despite its location on a busy stretch of high road. In the midst of all these stories was a pepperpot of a woman with a bushy white bun of hair and a smile that squashed her eyes into vivid half-moons.

‘Maude?’ asked Orla.

‘And you’re Sim’s Orla! Every inch the colleen, just as he promised.’

Every elderly lady of Orla’s acquaintance crossed themselves and murmured ‘Lord have mercy on his soul’ at the mention of Sim’s name. It was both scandalous and a relief that Maude rattled on at full pelt without paying her respects.

‘Look at you with your black hair and your green eyes. You’ve walked out of a fairy tale! Oh, freckles too, we must count them one evening when we’ve nothing better to do.’ Maude’s face beneath her Belle Époque puff of hair was lean and brown and handsome with clever eyes the colour of damp hyacinths. The woman’s weathered beauty made Orla shy as she took in Maude’s linen dress and rakish velvet scarf. Some how Maude had grown older without losing any of her juice.

‘Thanks
for letting me stay,’ said Orla.

‘But darling the telly people have paid the rent until the end of April.’ Maude took an arm; it was as if a bird landed on Orla’s sleeve.

‘I’ll just sort out Sim’s stuff and then get home. One night should do it. Then I’ll be out of your way.’

‘No, no, no.’ Stern, Maude was still playful. ‘Tonight we talk. All night. With a bottle of wine on the table. And we cry a bit. Probably. You can’t make a start on the poor sod’s
stuff
until tomorrow at the earliest. So. At least two nights, yes? Agreed?’ Maude stopped suddenly and picked up a book. ‘Do you like W. B. Yeats?’

‘Yes.’ Orla could have sworn the valentine bristled in its bookish nest deep in her luggage.

‘Have this.’ Maude pressed the small, linen covered book into Orla’s hand. ‘Yeats could be a terrible old fraud at times, but his poems about the agonies of love are right on the button. This way!’

Maude was away through an arch, one foot on the stairs, shouting over her shoulder, before Orla gathered her wits to follow. ‘Dare say you need the loo. A nice little wee always sets me up when I arrive somewhere new.’

After the prescribed nice little wee, Orla joined Maude in a pale modern box of an attic, furnished with angular teak and floored in limestone. It was tranquil and impressive and Sim’s enthusiasm for his home-from-home began to make sense.

‘What
a beautiful space.’ It looked like the pages Orla tore from interiors magazines.

‘It was remodelled a year ago when I had the bright idea to take in lodgers. I wanted arty-farty types, you know, so I thought I should tempt them in with clean modern lines. Here, drink that. Never met a Celt who didn’t take their tea strong and often.’

Orla accepted the proffered mug with the first genuine smile of her trip. ‘Thank you.’ Small kindnesses reared up at her these days, magnified and meaningful. ‘Just what I wanted.’

‘Sit. Sit. Sit.’ Maude flapped her arms. The scent of patchouli flooded the room.

‘Gosh. White sofas.’

‘Highly impractical but very beautiful. And I might die tomorrow so I insist on beauty.’

Die
glittered between them like barbed wire.

‘Thanks for the wreath, by the way. It was glorious.’

‘I’ve given up funerals. I thought about him on the day instead. And those anthuriums and heliconia were not a wreath.’ Maude held up a bony forefinger and shuddered. ‘Such a godawful word. Sim wasn’t a wreath kind of boy. It was an arrangement. Ah, you’re smiling, dear, why?’

‘Hearing you call him a boy. He was thirty-five, after all.’

‘Trust me, that chap was destined to be a boy if he lived to, well, my age.’

‘True.’ Orla recalled her boyfriend’s bounce. His hair had been gold and his eyes had been tawny and, yes, he had been a beautiful boy.
Her
beautiful boy.

‘Anyway.’ Orla slapped her lap. ‘So.’

These days she could tolerate other people for a short while before craving solitude. And then hard on the heels of the need for solitude came the renewed craving for company. It was tricky, this grieving business.

Maude took
the hint. ‘Ah. You want to be alone, dear. Well, alone with Sim’s things.’ She stood up, crossed to the door, cocked her head when Orla didn’t follow. ‘Come on then! I’ll take you down to his flat.’

‘But … oh.’

‘I loved the new top floor so much I kept it.’ Maude pushed at the door of the flat on the middle landing, sandwiched between the shop and the minimalist garret. ‘I feel so Scandinavian up there, wafting through white rooms free of clutter. Whereas
this
flat …’ She stood back to let Orla in.

The door opened directly onto the sitting room, which stretched across the front of the house. Trinkets. Gewgaws. Thingummybobs. Shelves of books, tables bearing lamps and glass ornaments and snuffboxes, paintings of doe-eyed ladies and dashing gentlemen. It was hard to imagine Sim in this corner of old lady-ville.

Two sash windows ogled the top deck of a passing double-decker. Orla followed the room as it snaked around the corner, knocked through to create an L shape, with a kitchen, of sorts, in the shorter leg.

‘Sim kept the curtains closed
all
the time.’ Maude tugged at the moss green drapes with tiny hands, allowing a little February sunlight to elbow through the lace nets. ‘Bedroom’s at the back.’ She pointed to a door at the far end of the defiantly unfitted kitchen. ‘Shower room’s off the bedroom. The place needs a little TLC. I haven’t lingered here since … well, since he died.’ Maude forced it out. ‘Sorry, dear, I can’t say he’s passed away or gone before or, heaven help us, only sleeping. Poor old Simeon is dead and we must manage the best we can with that fact.’ Maude put her head to one side to survey Orla’s drooping face. ‘Have I offended you?’