Authors: Juliet Ashton

The Valentine's Card (39 page)

BOOK: The Valentine's Card

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‘The first thought in my head this morning was Sim.’ Juno let out a laugh/sigh. Or maybe it was a sigh/laugh. ‘After all the bastard did, I’m sad about what happened to him.’

‘Me too,’ said Orla.

They left it
at that.

Today had to be about the future. If Orla was to salvage anything from the carnage of the last twelve months then she had to retool them, affix a happy ending.

By now, Orla was generous enough to imagine that Sim would be happy to know that his last card to her, followed by a howling silence which wasn’t his fault, hadn’t broken her. If she spun the straw he’d left her into gold, then today could be her own wonky memorial to him: he hated wreaths, anyway.

With time to kill, Orla opened her computer. Who would have thought a morning could last so long? Cruising through on-line newspapers, Orla stopped dead at an unexpected image. Sour memories reared up; Orla had only recently reclaimed the internet and reassured herself that this was not backsliding, but coincidence.

VALENTINE SURPRISE FOR TOM BEST’S WIFE, smirked the headline.

‘Oh no.’ Orla read the copy.

TV temptress Anthea Blake proves that life mirrors art by stealing her latest co-star from his wife of eight years. Tom Best, 32, is pictured leaving Ms Blake’s two million pound North London house in the early hours of this morning. From the look on his face, and Anthea’s dishevelled appearance in what appears to be a negligee, they weren’t learning lines. It won’t be a happy Valentine’s Day in the Best house.

‘Oh. You’re still here.’ Maude
stopped dead as she passed Orla’s doorway. She was wearing lipstick, a first, and holding the sheaf of roses aloft as if it the Olympic torch. ‘No work today?’ She looked suspiciously at Orla, inspecting her face.

‘I booked it as holiday. Ages ago.’ Orla hadn’t told Maude. Today was hers and hers alone. ‘I have … plans.’

Behind Maude, George stood patiently, politely, glad just to let her sun shine on him. All this and more Orla read in his face, and she admired his courage in knocking on Maude’s door, and for facing down his cowardice about her condition. Orla needed affirmation today that love was muscular, that love can conquer, well,
all
. And here was old George, affirming for all he was worth.

‘Are you expecting Marek to make an appearance?’ There was anxiety in Maude’s query, and protectiveness, and fear.

‘No. Not expecting. Although it would be nice if he did.’

Maude and Orla read each other’s invisible subtitles.

‘I’ll leave you alone,’ said Maude, her subtitles spelling out
I love you, dear.

‘Thanks.’

I love you too, Maudie,
said Orla’s.

With five minutes to go, Orla had to force herself to stay in the flat. Better to leave on time.
Stick to the plan
.

‘Orla!’ Maude’s shout up from the shop had a frill of excitement. ‘ORLA!’

‘What is it?’ Orla’s body trusted Maude. If Maude was excited then it would be excited too: a glissando swept up and down her spine.

‘A recorded delivery
package.’ Maude was trying and failing to regain her composure. ‘For you!’ she added, then, ‘do hurry up dear!’

Turning the sign on the shop door to SORRY WE’RE CLOSED, Maude tiptoed upstairs with George, who was baffled by the change in atmosphere but ready to follow his valentine like a spaniel.

Alone with the package, a rectangle wrapped neatly and anonymously in plain paper, Orla knelt. She took a moment. Her intuition was adamant that this was significant and these days she listened to her senses.

Orla tore the paper to reveal a box longer than it was wide. The cardboard creaked as she pulled back the lid and then the journal was as heavy as a bible in her hands. She ran a finger down the cord that bound the spine, and traced the words
Simeon Quinn, His Journal
sculpted on the cover.

‘Hello,’ she said. ‘At last.’

A square envelope was taped beneath Sim’s name. Its top edge jagged, it had been opened. The postmark was a year old and it was addressed to Reece at his flat above his office.

Orla laid down the journal and peeled off the envelope. A scrawl on the front, in Reece’s hand, read
The silly bugger put them in the wrong envelopes. You got my valentine. I got yours. He died loving you. I hope this brings you some peace. Keeping it from you has destroyed mine. R

Orla took the card out of the
envelope and opened it, barely taking in the Picasso portrait of Françoise Gilot on the front, the one that had always reminded Sim of Orla. Without pausing to think, she read.

Fairy,

Very very late in life I’ve learned something most people (you included) know from a young age. I’ve learned why honesty matters. It’s always been a theory up to now, but something has rocked the way I feel about you and my life and suddenly I get it. We can’t go forward together if I’m not frank with you.

O, take a deep breath – I’ve been unfaithful.

Take another – it’s not the first time.

But this time I fell in love. The others are hardly worth mentioning, purely physical, just me being an opportunist. I always felt like poo afterwards but this time I planned to leave you and make a life with somebody else.

I feel as if I’ve woken from a dream where I was standing on a ledge high above traffic. One more minute and I would have stepped off. But I didn’t.

So, O, I’ve lied, I’ve made a fool of you, I’ve been a bastard over and over again. I need you to know all that and I need you to forgive.

This card is really one big question – can you forgive? Can we start again?

OK. Another biggie coming up. This affair – which is OVER – was with Reece. I don’t know if I fancy men – I just know that Reece was a comet streaking across my sky. I have to tell you, in this new spirit of honesty, that the relationship was intense, life-changing, unexpected and a roller coaster but crucially it wasn’t YOU.

I’ll never, ever, ever lie to you again. I’m different now. This has changed me. I’ll cut Reece off utterly. I’ve cauterised the relationship by letter, a brief and cruel one, and I have no doubt that he hates me now. I must live with that.

Do you still love me? Call me and tell me you still love me. Now. And while you’re on the phone, tell me you’ll marry me. This year. This month? Tomorrow, if you like. You keep me on the straight and narrow (no pun intended).

I want to be faithful. I want to be a good man. I want to be your man. It’s finally clicked. We’re
real
, Orla.

My life is in your hands, my beautiful executioner.

Orla re-read it, twice. Sitting back on her heels, she let the card slip out of her hands and looked up at the ceiling map of cracks and wrinkles.

Everything shifted.

Shadows lengthened and contracted as her perspective altered.

Sim’s lover had been in plain view the whole time.

Orla had never considered Reece’s sexuality. He was modern, urbane, private. He was a strut for others, with no apparent needs.

But everybody has needs
, Orla corrected herself sharply. Every human being needs love. It’s not a trivial need, it’s not copyrighted to Hallmark Cards. Love is a natural resource, like sunlight or water, without which we’d all wither and die.

Any minute now the hatred should arrive for the Machiavellian man who’d denied her the truth, let her cry on his shoulder, turned a false mask towards her.

It didn’t arrive, and Orla
couldn’t see it on the horizon. She’d woken up that morning with a large landscape in her mind, an appropriate panorama for what she had to do. To see today through, she needed to be brave, she needed to be philosophical. And now this package had dropped from the sky, and it demanded much the same of her.

There’s no way to keep love out. Orla had fallen for Marek before she was officially ready in much the same way as Sim and Reece had given in to their feelings about each other.

Everybody says yes to love. Everybody in their right mind.

The journal sat, fat and smug, on the floorboards. Orla opened it, heard the soft
flump flump flump
as the yellowy pages fell on one another. It was all here. Her life with Sim in perfect chronological order right up until the moment the clocks stopped.

His handwriting flashed by, hieroglyphics ready to give up their code. She was the keeper of the secrets now.

A feeling like a dove landing in her chest.

Orla turned to the last page. She read the date, then an impulse made her check her watch.

She was going to be late. Orla snatched up the journal and tore out of the door.

Her boots were purposeful. Head erect, arms crossed over the journal, the new landscape in Orla’s head held: despite the clamour of Ladbroke Grove, she was on a wide beautiful plain and could think in a step by step, forensic manner.

Effortlessly she read between the lines of the second, last,
real
valentine.

You would have done it again, Sim.
There is an Irish saying, ‘What do you expect from a cat but kittens?’ Sim was a pleasure baby who could deny himself nothing: he demanded gratification as his right. If he’d lived, he’d have gone on to fresh conquests.

She halted suddenly, a no-no on a busy
London pavement. With a ‘Sorry! Sorry!’, she stepped to the kerb, to the side of a vast rusting skip. Orla opened the journal at its last page, read the entry. And smiled.

For what had Sim done after writing that plea to Saint Valentine to intervene? He’d set off to find Reece.

Orla’s well-documented passivity had meant she’d never questioned just what an actor was doing outside his agent’s headquarters at six a.m. He’d been heading for Reece’s
pied-à-terre
, above the office.

You’d already gone back on your promise
, Orla pointed out.
You were trying to intercept the card before he read it.
She thought of Sim, panic-stricken, trying to wrench control of the future back from the valentine, unaware that his future was only minutes long.

You hadn’t changed, you couldn’t
. Sim was slippery, evasive, dishonest. And glorious and warm and irresistible. Lovable. A lovable man.

You and I should have been a fling.

Orla tossed the journal into the skip. The soft crash of its landing put an end to their dialogue. She didn’t need to know the whys and wherefores. None of it mattered. It was a historical document. Everything she really needed to know she carried within her.

Orla crossed the road, dodging the traffic, confident that one particular Saint – and it wasn’t Jude – would grant her special protection against the number seven bus bearing down on her.

Be there
, she begged. Really begged.

Orla’s blood pounded. The
landscape in her mind changed slightly. Colour crept in, as when rain soaks the ground after a long drought. She’d been through the contemplation and reassessment, and now that it was time for action she couldn’t wait.

Three quarters full, the café was quiet, the kind of quiet a library generates, except this was the sacred hush of man communing with food. Orla was the only female, bar the bored-looking woman who sold her two
rogalicki
and a syrupy coffee.

Orla stood by the chair opposite Marek. ‘May I?’

He’d seen her come in, looking up from his steaming plate of something foreign, and kept his eyes on her as she pushed her tray along the counter and paid at the till.

Marek nodded and laid down his cutlery. He was properly silent: he wouldn’t speak, this silence said, until she’d laid out her wares.

She’d remembered his eyes many times, but never caught the history in them, a fable of duty and loss and experience. And loneliness.

It had taken a while to interpret that last one. Marek had such stature and confidence. He was a strider. He asked for no favours. But he was lonely and he needed a companion, a partner, somebody for him to protect who would protect him in return. Somebody who understood him.

Taking a seat, Orla placed
her cup and plate just so. She licked her lips. The urn hissed. Somebody turned the page of a newspaper.

Orla began.

‘You don’t have to say a thing. But you should know that I heard what you said to me. I heard it and now I want to say it back to you. I love you, Marek. If I’ve missed the boat, that’s my problem but I need you to hear me. You don’t have to answer me. That’s not the point. But I need you to know that you are loved. And missed. And wanted. And here’s a
rogalicki
, because I know you like them.’

Orla held out the small sweet crescent, its
sugar coating gritty on her fingertips, to Marek, who hesitated then took it.

He broke the biscuit, dipped it in his coffee and bit into it before he spoke.

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