The Valentine's Card (30 page)

‘You should see our hotel. It’s pants.’

‘You usually head for a Four Seasons.’

‘Rob has no money,’ boasted Juno. ‘And I don’t care!’

‘But Rob’s a managing director of his family firm,’ Orla pointed out. ‘Why isn’t he rolling in it?’

‘It all goes to
her
.’

Shocked that Fionnuala, for all her faults, should be
her
and not
my sister
, Orla said evenly, ‘I suppose that’s fair. She’s bringing up their child after all.’

‘Oh of course it’s fair. Like I say, I don’t give a hoot. I’d live in a tent with Rob.’

‘A Gucci tent, maybe.’ They toiled up the broad steps of the National, eager for a hot drink and a respite from the slate-grey skies. ‘I can’t help thinking, Ju, why you didn’t look further than your sister’s ex.’

‘I wasn’t looking at all,’ protested Juno, pushing a plate-glass door. ‘This found me. It overwhelmed me. Nobody in their right minds,’ she said with confidence, ‘ignores love when it comes along.’

*

Bridling from the indignity
of the doctor’s visit, Maude was elusive that weekend. She granted Juno an audience and liked her very much – ‘Such spirit!’ – but she dismissed the affair, to Orla, as ‘karmic suicide’.

The joy of female friendship with your exact peer, a joy almost forgotten, was balm for Orla’s troubled mind. ‘Sunday afternoon already,’ she wailed, much as she’d bemoaned it every weekend back in their teens. ‘There’s so much dumb stuff still I haven’t told you yet.’

‘I know,’ agreed Juno. ‘I have about eight hundred really important but stupid things I haven’t told you yet.’

Orla was glad they’d reached ‘dumb stuff’. Cherry-picking what she could and couldn’t tell Juno about the fallout from the valentine was exhausting. Her friend was ignorant about the internet shadowing, the vigil in Beatrice Gardens, the determination to hear the truth from the journal.

‘Shall we skip the National Portrait Gallery?’ Such lowbrow behaviour was tempting and very ‘them’.

Juno prevaricated for a moment. ‘Nah. Let’s go in. I’ve always wanted to see it and besides we’ve done that too many times, sat in the pub instead of actually
doing
something.’

Orla felt time speed up; she needed to maximise each second with Juno, a walking talking encyclopaedia of Orla’s past. Her gestures mirrored Orla’s, both women used the same upward inflexion at the end of jokes, trotted out the same silly voices when putting words in the mouths of strangers who passed them. It was
fun
being together.

‘I liked the modern portraits,’ declared Juno as they lingered in the gift shop after their tour, picking out postcards. ‘When everything changed, and everything was
new
.’

‘Give me a Tudor every time.’ Orla disagreed partly to provoke, partly because she’d stood for
an age in front of Elizabeth I, transfixed by the detailed splendour of her brocade gown and her pale demi-smile. The Queen held flowers in her white hand but, according to the printed guide, the posy was painted over a coiled serpent. Responding to Juno’s impatient
Come on, you eejit
, Orla had reluctantly moved away, touched that she and a monarch born five hundred years ago should have something in common. It gave her hope, that she, too, could superimpose a posy over her own serpents.

Orla had found much to empathise with in the faces of the women on the high walls. She saw stress and effort and the strain of waiting, and of loss. Until this year, Orla had been juvenile, despite her degree, her responsible job, her mortgage. Avoiding real setback until her thirties now seemed like a fluke. Sim’s death and its aftermath had changed her forever; she knew about grief and she knew about surviving it. She understood more; her suffering had made her useful.

Paying for a postcard of Iris Murdoch, a present for Maude who adored the author, something occurred to Orla.

‘Juno, how did you get away from Himself for a whole weekend?’

‘Visiting you.’ Juno shrugged, as if she’d been in the grip of a higher power at the time. ‘It’s the only reason he’d accept for staying away overnight. I’ve visited you before. You
begged
me to.’ She punched Orla’s arm. ‘Sorry to drag you into my mess. I was visiting you the weekend Rob and I spent in Kerry. The first time we, you know.’

‘Too much information.’ Orla held up a stern hand.

‘But I have been trying to visit you, haven’t I? You’ve been aloof. Yes, that’s the word. Aloof.’ Juno carried on hurriedly, over the words
Orla was trying to frame. ‘It doesn’t matter. You’re recovering. You have to do it your own way. Just come back to me at some point, won’t you? I might need you. I might need you soon.’

Parting with a long hug at the bus stop – Juno worriedly scrutinising the map on the shelter the way Orla had done back in February as a London newbie – Orla hoped that the affair would run its course before the casualties began to pile up.

Whoever ran things – Ma’s white-bearded God or even just some minor celestial civil servant – had a genius for timing that infuriated Orla. Her forty-eight hours with Juno had been an unexpected treat thrust at her, but it had coincided with what should have been Maude’s first two days on medication.

The unopened bottles in Maude’s bathroom early Sunday evening told their own story.

‘Maudie …’ Orla waggled them at Maude shaking out the duvet in her oddly angled loft bedroom.

‘In case you missed the list of side effects,’ said Maude, as the duvet sank fat and downy to the bed, ‘I’ll recite them. Nausea. Headache. Diarrhoea. Dizziness. Dry mouth. Loss of appetite. Sweating. Insomnia. Stomach cramps.’ She beat a pillow soundly, as if it had insulted her. ‘Not my idea of a good time.’

‘Nor mine,’ agreed Orla. ‘But you won’t get all of them. Or perhaps any of them.’

‘And you know this how?’ Maude swept past Orla, forcing her to leap out of the way. She began to bang about in the kitchen, stowing pans with unnecessary vigour.

‘Are you at least doing the
yoga breathing I showed you?’

‘Breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth? Yes. I sound like a Grand National winner.’

‘Good. Because when we start the exposure therapy—’

‘The what?’ Maude looked as if Orla had suggested bestiality.

Orla had planned to introduce this idea slowly, and cursed her heavy-handedness. ‘I looked it up. Apparently it’s the most successful treatment for agoraphobia. You prepare by using techniques to help with the anxiety attacks – for example, medication, breathing and meditation – and then you move on to taking a very small trip.’

Maude shrank back against the worktop, a frying pan held like a shield in front of her.

‘Just a walk, a few hundred yards, and I’d be with you the whole way and you’d be in charge so we’d go as far as you were able and there’d be no pressure …’

‘You’re pushing!’ Maude threw the pan into a cupboard.

‘Sit down. Here. Come on.’ Orla guided Maude, who was surprisingly cooperative, to a kitchen stool. ‘We’ll do it at your pace. Message received.’

‘Good. I know best in this matter.’

That was up for debate, but Orla let it lie. ‘Will you
try
the tablets? Just for a couple of days?’

Maude hesitated, her lips twisting this way and that. ‘Oh all right,’ she said, half exasperated, half fond. ‘Bring me a glass of water and I’ll take the first one now.’ As she popped the pill into her mouth she asked, ‘Are you hanging about to make sure I don’t spit it into a potted plant?’

‘I’m hanging about,’ said Orla, putting the kettle on, ‘because I like
you very much and I’ve barely seen you this weekend and I don’t have to be at Marek’s until late because his plane gets in at ten thirty. I’m going to surprise him by being in his bed when he climbs into it.’ This would delight Maude and take her mind off the tablet.

‘How romantic.’ Maude beamed, as if it were she who had a passionate reunion pencilled for later that evening. ‘Will you strew the bed with rose petals?’

‘Does anybody really do that?’ Orla wondered how to get her hands on sufficient roses at short notice and decided against it. She’d only end up with petals lodged up her behind.

‘Arthur did.’ Maude smiled. ‘We were the only people we knew who slept in the nude.’

‘Goodness gracious me, Maude Roxby-Littleton!’ Orla looked outraged, then laughed. ‘How do you know? Perhaps everybody slept in the nuddy but nobody let on?’

‘True. Shall we open a bottle of wine?’

‘You’ve just taken a pill.’

‘Exactly. I need something to take the taste away.’

It was an ideal day, thought Orla. A little bit of Juno, a little bit of Maude, and later on a great chunk of Marek. She wrestled with the cork in the bottle, ignoring the lessons from history that wine plus a late night with her new lover would equal bear-like yawns in front of her class tomorrow.

They deserved this wine. Maude was, to use the favoured parlance of every tabloid, facing her demons and Orla had come through her cold turkey and proved something vital. Saved from a horrendous lapse by Juno on Friday night, Orla had completed an Ant-free weekend. No Googling, no urge to see Anthea in the flesh, no weeping over the journal.

Orla felt for the first time in a long time that she
could defy her obsession.

‘Your friend, Juno, is full of life.’ With a resigned air, Maude accepted the small glass Orla had selected for her. ‘Hurtling towards disaster, though.’

‘Don’t,’ grimaced Orla, walking to the eaves window that gave her a pleasing view of roof after rainy roof.

‘And taking a lot of souls down with her. Can’t you get through to her?’

‘I tried.’

Orla hadn’t felt able to express herself too strongly: Juno’s real fear of her censure had troubled her. Had Sim felt constantly judged when they were together? She knew, from experience babysitting nieces and nephews, that if you told a child repeatedly not to do something they would, inevitably, do it. Perhaps her loftily high expectations of Sim had contributed to his last, spectacular failure to meet them.

‘She’s so utterly in love. I can’t believe it’s the real thing with somebody as insubstantial as Rob.’

‘There’s no accounting for taste. Particularly in bed.’ Maude’s glass was empty and she looked at it as if it had personally let her down. ‘Keep an eye on her. She’s doing an unwise and cruel thing.’

Just as Sim had. At least Orla now knew the reason for Juno’s inexplicable empathy with him. She thought of Juno, rushing to the airport with Rob, savouring the last hours of their freedom to be a couple, and looked at the slight figure now up from her chair and inching towards the wine bottle. Loving people turned your skin inside out, so that the world was full of sharp edges and potential hazards. Orla wouldn’t countenance unhappy endings: Juno
would
come to her senses in time; Maude
would
vanquish the agoraphobia
.
And she would find a way to love Marek honestly.

When her father was
diagnosed with his last, horrible tumour, the Cassidys had chosen to believe that the combined force of their love would beat the cancer into submission. They had been wrong. Orla promised herself that she would get Maude through this process of recovery. Who else but she could be the ‘stout ally’ the doctor had prescribed? Tutting as Maude refilled her glass, Orla saw Maude’s recovery as a thread that extended into the future, pulling them both irresistibly with it, until they were out the other side, past Juno’s lovestruck madness, past the agoraphobia, past Anthea Blake and past the journal.

Marek jumped back in the dark, knocked his head on the bed’s headboard, swore loudly in Polish, switched the lamp on and gasped. ‘You!’

‘Me!’ laughed Orla, holding out her arms. ‘Oh, Rabbit, your poor head!’

‘Never mind my head.’ Marek slipped between the covers and glued his body to hers. His grin was unstoppable, as if his face wasn’t big enough to contain it. ‘You’re crazy, Irish.’

‘But are you pleased to see me?’

‘I am very pleased to see you.’

Orla had slipped in the front door as his taxi jolted along the mews, despite having hours to spare after leaving the tiddly Maude.

Her cold turkey had turned out to be a purely circumstantial fowl: once freed from Juno and Maude, Orla, like a strict dieter offered the
keys to a patisserie, had binged. Standing on the corner of Beatrice Gardens, out of the jurisdiction of Anthea’s security camera, Orla faced a truth.

I’m an addict
.

She’d read enough misery memoirs to tick off the symptoms – the need that built and built until it was unignorable, the sweet release of meeting that need, then the crashing realisation that the sweetness was momentary. Now that she’d dashed across London to Anthea’s darkened house, Orla was awash with guilt and shame and stupefaction at her own rat-in-a-maze behaviour.

Most ruinous of all, she knew she was jeopardising her relationships for the sake of another fix.

A silver car, gleaming and almost noiseless, had interrupted her soul-searching. Nipping behind a pillar, Orla saw it glide to a stop outside Anthea’s house. The driver jumped out, another eager courtier, and held the door open.

Orla concentrated. She’d have only as long as it took Anthea to disembark and climb the steps to study her.

Anthea wore a soft woollen blanket, in a moody lavender colour unknown in Primark’s palette. Her red mane was dishevelled: she’d obviously dozed on the way home from recording the ITV medical drama she’d Tweeted about.

Rehearsing Lady M AND filming Second Opinion today. Send Lucozade!

The contrast between the sleepily dishevelled woman and her freezing, disconsolate sentinel couldn’t have been greater. The front door closed with a clunk and Orla put her forehead to the rough stone of the pillar, shaking, waiting for
the anger and the unhappiness to pass.

‘She has everything,’ whispered Orla. Her desire for the journal clutched to Anthea’s chest was endlessly rechargeable, as was her inability to claim it.

The night had melted. She raced Marek back to his and won.

And he was pleased to see her.