The Valentine's Card (21 page)

After pressing send, Orla took a moment to do something unthinkable a week ago, but now a must. With two jabs of her forefinger she deleted Sim’s number and all his messages, including his last, sent at midnight on the thirteenth of February.

Tomorrow’s a big day for both of us, Fairy. Brace yourself. X

A soft rap at her door startled her and made her throw down her iPad, as flushed as if she’d been caught masturbating in John Lewis. ‘Come in, Maudie!’

‘Dear?’ Maude stood, nonplussed, on the threshold. ‘Shouldn’t you be getting ready?’

‘I’ve bags of time. It’s only—’ Orla looked at the ormolu clock on the mantelpiece and her hand went to her throat. ‘Shit!’ she said.

‘Quite,’ agreed Maude.

The entire afternoon had been eaten by the internet.

‘Jump in the shower,’ ordered Maude. ‘Chop chop.’ She clapped her hands for emphasis. ‘And then I want to talk to you.’

Damp, smelling of ylang ylang, Orla sat on the bed and rubbed moisturiser strenuously into her face as if waxing a car.

‘Slow down, dear. Not washing your
hair?’ Maude disapproved.

‘Not enough time. I’ll backcomb it.’
And make it look worse
, thought Orla. ‘Shall I wear the black dress with the bits on the shoulders or shall I, hang on, no I can’t wear the new dress because he saw it the other night.’

‘Black with bits.’ Maude was decisive enough for Orla to suspect her of shutting her up. ‘Now. Listen.’ Maude sat on the end of the bed, clear of the pile of tubes and brushes and goo that Orla was applying as she squinted into an inadequate hand mirror. ‘I have something to tell.’

‘Yes?’ Orla’s hand stalled in mid-air, one eyelid only half anointed with liner.

‘Don’t stop, dear.’ Maude settled her full velvet skirt around her. ‘I haven’t talked about this, well,
ever
, so forgive me if it sounds a little rusty. I need you to know you’re not alone, not unique. Well, not in one important aspect at any rate.’

The mascara wand swooping in and out of her vision, Orla waited while Maude cleared her throat, uncharacteristically hesitant.

‘Very well. Here we go. Arthur and I
were married in 1961. I was twenty-two. To save you counting on your fingers, that makes me seventy-four. You might imagine I had long ironed hair and miniskirts, but the swinging sixties never reached our corner of the home counties. I dressed like my mother, in neat suits and stupid hats and always, always stockings.

‘Arthur was destined for great things. In my parents’ world, the one I happily and unthinkingly inherited, great things meant a powerful job with the Foreign Office. That was just the icing on the cake, because Arthur was handsome. The first time I saw him he was in tennis whites and I thought he was a young god.’

A lipstick lolled forgotten in Orla’s towelled lap.

‘We were happy. He’s the only man I’ve ever gone to bed with. And no regrets there. I adored him. And he me. He was proud of my looks. Forgive the boast, but now that I’m just a mass of wrinkles and bones I feel I can say it. He also applauded the way I kept house. A lovely big rambling thing, on the edge of the village. We had a duck pond and a paddock, with a fat little Shetland I just loved.

‘I’d been trained to be a wife from the moment I could walk. I was required to look pretty but not tarty, run the homestead and churn out babies. That last was beyond me.

‘Arthur wanted a son to carry on both barrels of the family name, but we shared a cheery philosophical outlook. “Never mind,” he’d say. “We’ve got each other.” That helped when I gave in and cried into my pillow. I used to imagine what our baby would look like. His eyes. My hair, God help it. It would have – but listen to me rattling off on a tangent, dear, that’s quite another story.

‘He said it over and over. “We’ve got each other.” We were close. I wanted for nothing. And then, after thirty-four years of marriage we were blighted by serious illness. Oh, Orla, it was hard. Eighteen months of hopeless agony for Arthur, who fought all the way in the certain knowledge he couldn’t win. I nursed him, read to him, slept at the foot of his bed. I knew he’d do the same for me. Goodness gracious, girl! Don’t gawk like that – finish your face!’

‘Oh. Yes.’ Orla hurriedly returned
to her features in the mirror. Rubbing in blusher felt too banal an activity while listening to Maude’s never-told tale. She wondered where it would lead.

‘After he died, Arthur left me very comfortably off, but the lion’s share of his legacy went to a woman in the next village, a woman I knew rather well. Or thought I did. Arthur had fathered four children with her. Set them up, supported them, sent them to the best schools. Spent every Wednesday night there when I thought he was up in London on Her Majesty’s service.’

Orla gaped. In idle moments she’d fleshed out a past life for Maude but never had it sounded like this. She slung her make-up into the bag, stood up and grabbed a pair of cranberry jeans; the black dress with bits felt too dressy.

‘Four children, Maude?’

‘All girls.’ Something like the first cousin of a smile flitted across Maude’s features. ‘So I too was
dumped from beyond the grave
.’ Maude attempted a comedy horror intonation, but she was wan and couldn’t pull it off. ‘You’re wrong, Orla: one
can
survive such exquisite betrayal. I’m living proof. People say this all the time but I know how you feel.’

‘Yes, you do. I wish you didn’t.’

‘Pish. It made me the woman I am. I can’t disown a single hour of my life, even the truly horrid ones. And nor should you. I imagine, if you’re anything like I was, you had an initial period of denial when all your senses told you that your beloved Sim could never be so barbarous.’

Orla nodded.

‘Then there was flaming anger, the kind that makes you want to punch things or even people.’

‘Quite a lot of that,’ admitted Orla.

‘I smashed a lovely Meissen bowl when
I got home from my solicitor’s office. Been in the family for yonks. I wanted to roll up to the woman’s house and have it out with her. Can you imagine?’

Only too well. ‘Yup.’ Tartly, Orla zipped up her jeans.

‘I restrained myself. Spilt milk and all that. What could she say to me that wouldn’t hurt me more?’

‘I guess.’ Orla’s face was in shadow as she reached into the wardrobe for a blouse patterned with swallows.

‘And now I suspect you’ve moved on to the next phase – deep deep sadness. Am I right?’ Maude’s voice was liquid with compassion.

‘Yes,’ said Orla briskly, pulling on the blouse, before bleakness overwhelmed her and she froze in scarecrow pose, arms stretched through the sleeves. ‘Tell me how I get past this, Maude.’

Maude considered for a moment, eyes on the worn rug. ‘I know each generation thinks they invented the idea, but probably I loved Arthur just as much as you love Sim.’

‘
Loved!
’ snapped Orla, all action again, attacking the fiddly buttons.

‘Well, I used the past tense as I swept up the Meissen shards, but I found my way back to loving him. It was tricky, but I did it for my sake as much as his.’

‘I don’t want to love him. Only a
fool would love a man who did that to her. If I’m to survive, I have to hate him,’ said Orla miserably. ‘How can they do it, these men?’

‘Couples are cruel to each other. Arthur and Simeon weren’t the worst. We loved them and that love had meaning. Ring fence it. They can’t defend or explain their actions in life from beyond the grave. We have to find our own way back to loving them, and leaving them behind.’

‘What did you do?’ Orla hoped for a map, with explicit instructions. The route she was planning was not sensible.

With a sigh and a creaky readjustment of her legs, Maude said, ‘I started again from scratch. It wasn’t just Arthur who’d lied to me. My family knew. As I hadn’t been able to fulfil my side of the contract, they understood that Arthur must have an heir. I found myself looking at my mother and wondering how many times she’d sat with me, chatting about this and that, choosing not to warn me about the great calamity in my life. No, I didn’t
understand
and I still don’t. Love has certain rules. I don’t mean morals, the made-up sexual dos and don’ts. I mean things such as treating each other with respect, telling each other the truth, whether it’s a marriage or mother and child.’

Maude slapped her lap, happy to have reached the turning point in her tale.

‘But you asked, what did I do. I sold up, lock stock and barrel, and walked away. All the way to London, where it’s noisy and modern. I had friends here but I didn’t look them up. The puzzle of working out who knew and who didn’t was too painful. Simpler to sever all ties.’

‘Your mother?’ asked Orla, watching Maude’s childishly slight seated figure in the wardrobe mirror as she tucked in the blouse and pivoted to check out her back view.

‘We never spoke again. She died in
1999.’ Maude’s hands moved, one over the other, over and over, as if she were washing them.

‘I immersed myself in a new kind of life, among all kinds of people. I went into business – not the done thing in my circle, I assure you. I was my own woman, rather late in life, and it felt marvellous, Orla, like taking off one’s corsets after a ball.’

Never having worn corsets, and certain that the Tobercree Church Hall Disco didn’t qualify as a ball, Orla smiled.

‘I fitted in, snug as a bug in a rug, as Nanny would say. Who’d have thought?’

‘Me,’ smiled Orla. ‘I’d have thought. You’d fit in anywhere.’

‘I wish I could offer you a helping hand through the sadness, dear, but it’s something you have to face, endure, and then let go.’

‘I know.’ Trouble was, Orla was on her second lap. She was trapped in an emotional Groundhog Day, facing, enduring, letting go and then meeting the same old feelings again.

‘Trust me, child. This is the
worst of it. When it clears you’ll be filled with energy and you’ll break into a run. That’s when I opened the shop. If I can do it …’ Maude left that lingering in the air as she stood, with some effort, and advised, ‘Perfume, dear, on your hair. That gets a chap going.’

Chapter Nineteen

The meze kept coming. One smiling moustachioed man after another approached their table to deposit platters of hummus, feta, mushrooms and stuffed vine leaves.

‘I hope you’re hungry,’ said Marek, sitting back, surveying the feast.

‘Ooh, ow, the peppers are hot,’ Orla fanned her mouth, regretting her bravado. She
was
hungry: she’d forgotten to eat. This was yet another symptom of her return to the recent bad old days and she determined to do the starter justice. ‘Do you like Greek food? I should have checked.’

‘I like food. I am a Polish man. We don’t turn anything down. But yes, I love Greek food. Have you ever been to Greece?’

‘Never.’ She had hardly been anywhere. Orla was a champion of the staycation long before desperate tourist boards coined the term.

‘Then I must take you,’ said Marek. ‘I’ve
been to Santorini, and the mainland. We could explore the islands together.’ Without looking at her, concentrating instead on marrying up a pitta and a meatball, he asked, ‘Would you like that?’

‘Yes,’ she said, rather enjoying the subjugation of being ‘taken’ somewhere. She wouldn’t, she knew, have to look up deals or organise passports for a trip with Marek. ‘You have excellent meze manners.’ She steered the conversation away from a putative trip, shy of projecting their rickety partnership into the future.

Marek questioned the phrase with a look.

‘Some people have the
worst
meze manners. They just dive in and vandalise the hummus, drop feta in the olives. You’re approaching things calmly, you’re not double dipping, you’re not nicking all the best bits.’ Orla enjoyed the glimmer of enjoyment in Marek’s dark foreign eyes, and warmed to her playful theme. ‘And you haven’t tried to feed me. That always ends badly, usually with taramasalata in my eyebrows.’ His hiccupped laugh rewarded her. ‘My friend Juno – I’ve mentioned her before – almost gave up on the man she married during their first date because of his meze manners.
He
tried to feed her.’

‘I would never dare.’

‘Good. It’s a messy old business and neither side really enjoys themselves.’ Orla refilled Marek’s glass and her own from the bottle he’d chosen. He’d eschewed both the straw-covered house carafe and the ouzo, promising her that the lemony notes of the chenin blanc would complement their food perfectly.

‘This wine is nice. I mean, memorably
nice,’ said Orla. Left to her own devices she ordered the cheapest, and left to his, Sim had ordered the most costly. They’d mocked wine buffs.
Mmm! A fine bouquet with hints of dirty knicker and the merest whisper of Formica!
‘It actually tastes like you said, as if we’re on a summer beach, and not in rainy November London.’

‘I’m glad you like it. I’ll remember that.’

From somebody else that could sound suave, part of a trite seduction, but Marek meant it. Orla’s hand hovered over the food. She knew Marek was watching her, had been since the moment she’d arrived, as if he were at an invalid’s bedside. He was watching for signs of relapse.

Sim hadn’t come up in conversation. There was no mention of the valentine and no solicitous enquiry about how she felt. Sensing this was a plan, and not an empathy deficit, Orla applauded Marek’s tact.

He was happy. Orla made him happy. She didn’t need to be witty or profound or even, Lord knew, well coiffed; Orla made Marek happy by sitting opposite him and sharing a meal. This was empowering stuff for a spirit as gaga as Orla’s. And, in the middle of a main course of unctuous lamb, she realised
she
was happy, too – and her happiness wasn’t to do with the meat. It was to do with Marek.

‘To us!’ she said suddenly, holding up her glass, going with it, being, as Marek had optimistically described them,
normal
.

‘To us!’ Marek’s glass shot up with alacrity. ‘To Orla and Marek,’ he said, more quietly, lowering his chin so that his upturned eyes were trained on hers.

‘To Orla and—’