The Valentine's Card (11 page)

‘Why doesn’t anybody get it? That card is my lifeline.’

‘If you were here, we’d go out for a Thai curry, cure my marriage and drown that card in the Liffey. What’s this Reece like, then? A possible?’

‘A what? You mean, Jaysus woman, a possible
boyfriend
?’

‘No, lover. They’re much better value. Or do you plan to wall yourself up with your old biddy?’

‘I don’t hop from man to man.’

‘Unlike me, filthy tart that I am, eh? You didn’t say it, but you thought it now didn’t you …’

‘Ha! Well, if the tarty hat fits …’

‘I was a bit of a one, wasn’t I? God, it was
fun. So, anyway, Reece isn’t a possible? Are you truly telling me you’re in London, capital of the known world, and you haven’t met one single solitary man who’s piqued your interest? Who hasn’t made you feel, well,
womanly
?’

Marek, she thought – and almost said it out loud.

‘No.’

That unusual name with its soft opening and its whiplash final syllable had popped up like a mole from her subconscious, after just five minutes’ exposure to a dark and quiet man who should mean nothing to her.

‘Who sent you flowers?’ Bogna circled the roses on the counter, popping her gum.

‘None of your beeswax.’ Orla played with the long-stemmed beauties, trying to muss them up, failing. Such haughty blooms could do nothing but look stiff and expensive. Reece’s tastes were grand: Sim had known to send her posies.

‘Arthur used to send me roses,’ said Maude, halfway up a ladder, dusting the foreign language section. ‘Always red. Like those.’

Arthur! Orla pounced on the unsolicited nugget of Maude’s autobiography and squirrelled it away. That there’d been a Mr Maude was obvious: according to the post Orla picked from the mat each morning, Maude was a Mrs, and double-barrelled at that, but her husband was never mentioned, nor alluded to. If a conversation threatened to trespass on Maude’s romantic history, however obliquely, Orla felt the air between them thicken and become gelid.

As an Irish woman, Orla was accustomed to the special
atmospheres generated by her elders. Weaned on Ma’s trademark atmospheres surrounding menstruation, intercourse and homosexuality – Breda Cassidy’s holy trinity – she knew when and how to step away from discomfort.

Another one of Maude’s no-go areas was any conversation about her financial set-up. Coming from a family that had always lived close to the bone, Orla was fascinated by the wealthy. She’d been perversely impressed by Sim’s ability to spend money – his unerring choice of the most expensive items on any menu, be it a Harvester’s or the Ritz. Likewise, Lucy’s habit of arranging for the tiniest pot of Crème de la Mer to be delivered from Brown Thomas, instead of popping it in her handbag, had left her dumbstruck.

The economics of the rich was beyond her. How, Orla had puzzled, did a job – even one as high profile as Senator Quinn’s – generate sufficient money to fuel a Dublin town-house, an underground garage quivering with cars, a dependant son and a high-maintenance wife? And mistresses don’t come cheap.

Similarly, though, how could an elderly woman with no visible means of support own three floors of central London real estate? Orla was savvy enough to know that even in this edgy postcode, flanked by pound shops and bookies, Maude’s house was the financial equivalent of an entire street in Tobercree. But still, the middle flat was let out at a cut-price rate, and the shop was a drain, not an asset. Presumably Maude had what Ma referred to reverentially as ‘old money’ – cash that had tumbled down the generations to land in her pocket.

‘Arthur?’ asked Orla warily, concentrating on the roses.

‘Orla’s flowers are from a friend to celebrate
a wonderful development in her life.’ Maude turned to Bogna, drop-kicking Orla’s timid cross into the long grass.

‘Yeah?’ Bogna was careful not to look interested. She hoisted her bra strap with her thumb, manoeuvring one breast so it sat up and begged beneath her slash-necked tee.

‘She’s accepted a full-time job at the college.’ Maude beamed: her plan had come together. ‘From September the tenth Orla will be a TEFL tutor to adult students. That stands for Teaching English as a Foreign Language. Her contract’s for one year. After that,’ said Maude mysteriously, ‘we’ll see.’

‘Why does she do this?’ Bogna looked disgusted, as if Orla had belched. ‘College is rubbish and boring.’

‘Not to me,’ said Orla patiently. ‘I love teaching.’ She noticed that the roses were stripped of their thorns.

The bell above the door sang and Maude scurried over to greet the customer, wafting talc in her wake. Orla leaned on the counter and recalled the latest Wednesday call from home.

‘Orla? It’s Ma. Can you talk?’

‘Howaya Ma?’

‘Grand. Grand. Lookit. I had a queer owld conflab with your headmaster outside the butcher’s.’

‘Oh.’

‘Yes, madam.
Oh
indeed. Says he, Orla’s staying on in London. Says I, No no no, Orla wouldn’t make a decision like that without telling me.’

‘Ma, I’m sorry.’

‘So am I. That I raised a chit with no manners.’

‘Ma! No, don’t cry! Please, Ma.’

‘What makes you want to be so
far away, amongst strangers?’

‘You don’t say that to Caitlin. Or when Brendan went backpacking.’

‘They weren’t bereaved. Grieving. Half mad with—’

‘Ma! I can cope.’

‘You’re half dead, Orla!’

‘I know! I bloody know, but we mustn’t say it.’

‘Oh, love. I’ve made you cry.’

‘I hate crying, Ma. Eighteen days tear-free and now I’ll have to start at day one again. How’s everybody?’

‘Grand. Deirdre’s suing the man who put up her conservatory.’

‘Good for her. She hasn’t sued anybody for ages.’

‘And her little Roisin is after winning a prize for reciting poetry.’

‘She sent me the clip. It was almost as long as
Titanic
.’

‘Don’t. We shouldn’t laugh. But Jaysus, there’s only so many times you can watch a child recite a Viking saga. You’re coming home for Christmas, aren’t you?

Maude’s reaction to the job offer had been to toast Orla’s burnt boats. It had troubled Orla, who preferred to imagine a serviceable bridge behind her rather than a flotilla of burning wrecks. True, she thought as she checked an old edition of
A Sentimental Education
for marks and scuffs, this new job was to her liking. The students would be more motivated than the summer schoolers, less privileged, champing at the bit to embed themselves in UK society. To enable them would be satisfying. Yet despite it all, a little line of seven-year-olds snaked through her thoughts, with all their credulity, their enthusiasm, their
need.
They were in the boats she’d torched.

The bell above the door sounded
again; this was a busy Saturday by Maude’s standards.

‘Not you,’ snarled Bogna.

Orla looked up, a tut springing to her lips: three times today she’d had to chastise Bogna about her people skills.

‘I don’t finish until five, Marek.’ Bogna was scowling at her brother. ‘Come back then and drive me home.’

‘I have no intention of driving you home,’ said Marek. ‘Orla, come for a coffee with me.’

Maude looked up from her accounts, ears pricked, like a dachshund who’s heard the fridge door squeak.

‘Now?’ Orla stalled.

‘Yes.’ Marek held the door open. He regarded her squarely. He didn’t elaborate.

‘OK.’

‘Bloody hell,’ said Bogna loudly as the door closed behind them.

‘I’ve never noticed this place before.’ Orla took a corner seat in the unpretentious café two streets away, with its fluorescent lighting and a beehived proprietress.

‘It’s Polish.’

Marek sat opposite, slid a laminated menu across the checked plastic cloth.

‘Ah.’ Orla smiled. ‘Good. I’ve never tried Polish food.’
Shut up
, she counselled herself.
Don’t fill the gaps.
The walk to the café had proved that Marek didn’t do small-talk; a bonus, in Orla’s view. There was too much small-talk in the world, filling up each nook and cranny, leaving no room for contemplation. She scanned the offerings, stumbling over G’s and S’s and Z’s.

‘Do you like
biscuits? Cake?’ asked Marek.

‘I do.’

‘OK.’ Marek stood. ‘What sort of coffee do you like?’

‘White, thanks.’ Orla had withstood the siren call of coffee chains, and stuck to ‘old-fashioned’ coffee.

At the counter, Marek ordered in Polish, his deep bass voice rumbling over the hard edges of his mother tongue like a tank. Orla watched him, noted that he didn’t turn and smile at her. She wasn’t sure he’d smiled at all on the way, just strode on as she scuttled to keep up. She wondered why she’d acquiesced. She put it down to the opiate quality of that dark voice with its merest tang of an accent. As Sim would attest, Orla was not a natural yes-girl: Celts are suspicious and she tended to respond to direct invitations with ‘maybe’, ‘why?’ or ‘feck off’, and yet here she was, in a corner, watching a tall black-haired man bring her a chipped plate of little sugared crescents.

‘They are
rogalicki,
’ he told her. ‘Try one.’

Orla did as she was told. ‘Delicious,’ she said, licking sugar from her lips. ‘I’ve never come across them before.’

‘In Poland they’re everywhere.’

‘Right. Mmm. Lovely. Yum.’
Stop. Stop filling the gaps.
She chewed on.

Marek sipped his coffee, which came in a doll-size teacup and was as sticky as tar.

‘So,’ said Orla, when the silence had lost its elasticity. ‘D’you come here often?’

He got the reference, as she knew he would.

‘Actually yes. My first job
was around the corner. I still come here every Thursday for lunch.’

‘What do you do for a living?’

‘I am a cliché.’ He nodded his head in acceptance of the fact and his shiny fringe fell across his eyes. Orla noticed that his hair needed a trim: neither one style nor another, it flopped, glossy as a Georgian front door and charming despite its neglect. ‘I am a Polish builder.’

‘Hmm. There’s a lot of you around,’ smiled Orla.

‘Or I used to be. Now I have builders working for me. Men from home. I am a developer.’

‘Is that a tricky way to earn a living? In the recession?’

‘Not for me.’

He wasn’t bragging, she knew, he was stating a fact. Orla took in the cut of his black velvet jacket, the heft of his watch, and realised that Marek was a man of means. A self-made man of means.

‘What kind of property do you develop?’
He asks me out; I ask all the questions.

‘Nowadays, I concentrate on building from scratch. Mixture of social housing and high end. You understand this?’

‘Sort of. You get permission to build expensive houses if you agree to sell some of them to people who find it hard to get on the property ladder.’

‘Exactly so,’ said Marek, pleased. Not pleased enough to smile, she noted, and wondered what it would take.

‘It must be satisfying. To give people a home.’

‘It is.’

Another silence, filled with more
rogalicki
, doughy and comforting.

Marek said, ‘So, when do you
go home? To Ireland.’

‘Oh, I’m not. I’m staying on.’

‘Good.’ Marek nodded, looking directly at her, his blackish gaze steady. ‘Good. Why?’

‘I’ve accepted a full-time job at the college where I taught Bogna.’ She left it at that. The silence lay between them on the red and white check. When she couldn’t stand it any longer, she carried on, like a drowning swimmer coming up for air, and gabbled, ‘I’ve given up my old job at home, decided to give London a proper go, stopped pretending it’s a temporary thing or a stopgap, accepted I’ve made a quantum leap and that I’ve changed.’ Orla stopped herself, shocked at what she would blurt out to neutralise a silence: she’d never admitted out loud that this was such a gigantic prospect for her. ‘Listen to me!’ she fluted, embarrassed at answering questions he hadn’t asked.

‘I am.’ Marek pulled a biscuit apart. A tinny tune sounded from the breast pocket of his jacket. Taking it out, he frowned at it. ‘Work,’ he said.

‘Take it,’ Orla sat back, ‘I don’t mind.’

‘Of course not.’ Marek was stern. He silenced the little machine with one fleet stab.

‘You’re not a slave to your mobile phone, then?’ smiled Orla. It pleased her that at least one modern human had the psychological strength to leave a call unanswered. Sim had been welded to his iPhone, allowing the world and his wife access all areas.

‘No. Otherwise the tail wags the dog, and life is the wrong way round.’

‘Just a lump of metal, after all,’ said Orla vaguely, as she flushed at her treason in comparing Sim, unfavourably, to this stranger. Her quantum leap was going a little far, and a little fast.

The weather, huffy since the start of
September, finally collapsed into a sulk.

‘Looks like rain out there. I should get back.’

‘Yes.’ Marek stood, his chair scraping on the lino.

‘What do I owe you?’ Going Dutch would convert this potential date into a simple coffee between two consenting adults.

‘Nothing.’ And, tickled by her disgruntlement, Marek smiled at last. ‘You owe me nothing. I paid already.’ The smile was wide, artless, pitched his face into a whole different gear. He had even white teeth, except for his pointed canines. The fairy tale prince could also play the wicked wolf, it would seem.

‘Thanks. It was lovely. Thanks.’ Orla scolded herself for her effusiveness.
It was coffee and a damp biscuit
.
Just go!

Reaching the door first, Marek held it open for her, squinting up at the foaming sky. ‘Don’t like the look of that.’

‘It’s going to pour.’ Orla dipped beneath his arm, out into the street, turning to him with a genial look of farewell. She didn’t get to say her goodbyes, because he began to talk rapidly, steadily, eschewing punctuation.

‘We are a cliché, talking about the weather like two old people. I know this didn’t go well. It was dull. I was boring. But I think we should meet again. I know what has happened in your life to make you sad. I’m sorry about it. I’ve lost people. You’re coping well, I think. I’m going to persevere, Orla, I warn you. I won’t rush you but I see something in your face, something that I recognise, and I can’t ignore it.’