The Valentine's Card

by Juliet Ashton

  ‘I’d forgotten about that.’ Orla took the valentine and held it reverentially. ‘Aw,’ she said, a sweet sound, the first un-ugly noise she’d made since the call. ‘It’s from him.’

  *

  Housework was a relic of past times, something she used to do. The cottage slumbered beneath three days’ worth of dust as Miss Orla Havisham slumped swathed in a blanket, staring blankly at a television screen that yodelled unheard. She saw only Sim, as if her brain were a film projector loaded with old movies.

  The troops had rallied. The school was ‘brilliant’, as Orla put it, offering her as much leave as she needed. The Cassidys pulled together and Orla received all the casseroles and sponge cakes and offers of help she could ever need. The food went in the bin, the offers were forgotten.

  The pink envelope, still unopened, had replaced Orla’s Ryanair tickets centre stage on the mantelpiece. It was constantly on the move, tailing her from bedside to bathroom cabinet to kitchen shelf. It was a symbol, but of what Orla wasn’t sure. She panicked if it was out of sight, yet opening it was out of the question. She knew what she would read. And it would slay her.

  If only, she thought, with the sort of histrionics she detested, if only something really could kill me.

  Sim was good at writing cards. Not for him a hasty ‘Lots of love’, or hurried signature. All his written messages to Orla were careful compositions. She’d kept them all, and had only recently bought a flat-pack container in which to house them. Large, striped in turquoise and cream, it had the presence of an Edwardian hatbox and now sat lidless on the coffee table day and night.

  Every so often, Orla dipped her hand inside, as if fishing for tiddlers. His first ‘I love you’ was there, inside a Hello Kitty card (he knew all her secret vices). That was hard to look at now, yet she read it umpteen times a day, along with the card with Al Pacino on the front that contained an impassioned plea for forgiveness after some argument she couldn’t remember, and his ode to the dark depths of her hair as it coiled about her naked freckled shoulders. He’d committed that one to a Snoopy card.

  Somewhere in there was the card he’d sent her on his second day in London, a collage of red phone boxes, the London Eye, bearskin-wearing soldiers and a pigeon.

  Why the pigeon? (He’d arrowed the bird.) The flat is AMAZING. You’d adore it. Yes, don’t frown, you bloody would. The area is very, very LONDON. Cosmopolitan, vibrant, full of life. Very Sim! And it could be very Orla if you weren’t such a stubborn old bat. Lucky that I find stubborn old bats v. v. sexy. X

  This morning’s fishing expedition had hooked a glossy reproduction of an old photo of St Stephen’s Green, the famous patch of park bang in the centre of Dublin he’d sent her in 2010.

  Live with me. Come on! Live with me and be my love. It’s cheaper, cosier, with much much more snuggling (you do know what I mean by snuggling, don’t you?) I can’t have you out of my sight for one minute longer than necessary. I’ll clear out a wardrobe and a drawer and an entire shelf in the bathroom. You can cook for me. The fun will never end!

  This invitation Orla had declined with wide eyes. ‘Are you crazy or what? Me, live in your ma and da’s basement? Imagine what your mother would say. I don’t think so, Simeon Quinn.’ Sim had replied on a charity notelet, explaining that he couldn’t do without ‘the olds’ (as he called them) financial support, but come the big break, come fame and fortune, he and Orla would buy a big house, he’d pop the question, they’d waltz down the aisle, do the baby thing and generally be as happy as any two sane humans could.

  The big break had come about – Orla’s doubts confounded, Sim’s confidence rewarded – and now here was the valentine throbbing with its unheard question. Every other missive from Sim had been torn open and devoured, but Orla debated with herself whether to read this one. The last one.

  Mightn’t it soothe her? Wouldn’t it be marvellous to hear him again, if only in her head?

  No, she’d countered, it feckin’ wouldn’t. Why put herself through such made-to-measure agony? Why hear a dead man ask to spend the rest of his life with her? Just one more day and we’d have been engaged. She shuddered, and made a firm decision never to read it, but to keep it within touching distance. If the house burst into flames it would be the first, only, possession she’d grab.

  Wedding days held no appeal. White frocks, aiming her bouquet overarm at a smartly dressed mob – no. Orla was a romantic, not a show off. Like many women, she’d been planning her ‘big day’ since she could first draw a meringue dress with a crayon, but when she visualised it, it was the meaning and emotion she conjured up. Her wedding would be plain and simple – no theme, few bells and whistles. She had imagined herself and Sim in nice new clothes, kissing on the top of the hill beyond Tobercree, having just been blessed by the same Father Gerry who’d married her parents and baptised all five Cassidy kids. There’d be an outdoor lunch on trestle tables. If she could be arsed, she’d hang a few lanterns from the trees. Their friends would carry on drinking and eating pork pies until late. Martha Stewart might throw her hands up in horror but Orla and Sim would be man and wife, wife and man (Orla’s feminism could be pedantic). They would be married.

  But of course, thanks to a pulmonary embolism, they wouldn’t.

  Orla tucked the valentine behind the mirror frame as she pinned up her haystack of unwashed hair. She noticed a line under one of her greeny-blue eyes and, hairpins held between her teeth, leaned in to assess it. She peered closer. It had some friends, crowding at the corner of her eye.

  Orla had a vivid premonition of her future face, worn and kind and telling its story. Sim, she thought, would never see her old lady face.

  Chapter Two

  Right from the start, Sim’s mother had deemed that Orla was not good enough for her son. Wealthy, connected: not even Ireland’s recession could dent the Quinns’ bulletproof status. Sim was destined to marry a society gal, someone with long tan legs and a trust fund. Their town house was their castle, and when Lucy Quinn had spotted Orla approaching she’d pulled up the drawbridge.

  ‘Let’s avoid the olds,’ Sim always said as they slipped down to his basement pad. An only child, he was the fulcrum of his parents’ complicated, sophisticated partnership, a marriage so different to the one that Orla had sprung from that it was hard to compare the two. Before her father died, Orla’s parents had bickered non-stop, finding loud, creative ways to abuse each other for leaving the dishcloth in the sink, or forgetting to tape Coronation Street or backing out of the drive ‘like a feckin’ head-the-ball’. All was forgotten as soon as it was said, grudges were never held, and dinner-time restored peace over the gammon before war flared again over the arctic roll.

  Arguments in the Quinn home centred around ancient wounds, opaque resentments to do with money, other women and broken promises. The miasma in the high-ceilinged rooms made Orla grateful for her family’s ordinariness, for the da who taught history and ma who permed hair in the Tobercree salon.

  Death creates strange alliances. For the first time in her life, Orla wanted to talk to Sim’s mother.

  They’d left messages. The latest came while Orla lay in a bath, her fingertips wrinkling like walnuts. The sound of that patrician English accent, as redolent of privilege as an ermine stole, had made her sit up from beneath the diminishing foam.

  ‘Orla, it’s Lucy. You’re not there again. Where do you get to? There are arrangements you should know about. I need to tick you off my list. Call me when you have a moment.’

  Moments, thought Orla, wrapping a towel around herself as she padded over to the phone, were all she had. Her future consisted of millions of moments, each a perfect bubble of longing and regret and a fury at fate. She dialled the number.

  ‘Lucy, hello. It’s Orla.’ It was necessary to introduce herself, she wasn’t in the habit of calling her almost-mother-in-law. ‘How are you?’ She was sick of the question herself, had come close to rage at Ma and Juno and everybody else who asked her, but really, how
else could they put it?

  ‘I’m better than I was,’ said Lucy carefully. She always spoke carefully, as if picking glass out of her teeth, but today especially so. ‘And you? It’s a terrible shock.’

  The unending understatement. ‘Yes. I can’t really believe it. I keep hoping there’s been a mistake.’

  ‘No mistake. I saw him.’

  ‘You—’ Breath fled Orla’s lungs.

  ‘I flew over immediately. I went to the hospital.’

  ‘I didn’t even—’ It hadn’t occurred to Orla to do any such thing. She had receded, wormlike; this Chanel-wearing, pearl-toting woman had ‘immediately’ jumped on a plane. Orla felt selfish, ashamed. ‘How did he look?’ she asked pathetically.

  ‘What a question!’ Lucy batted it away. ‘The funeral is Monday. Ten a.m. at St Mary’s Pro Cathedral. Afterwards at the Shelbourne. Do you wish to bring anybody?’

  ‘Ma. My mother, I mean. I know she wants to pay her respects.’

  ‘Oh.’ Lucy sighed, irritated. ‘Very well. I suppose we can make room.’

  ‘Ma was very fond of your son,’ said Orla. Her almost son-in-law. ‘In fact, she adored him.’

  ‘We all did,’ said Lucy crisply. ‘Any other hangers on?’

  Orla swallowed that. Made allowances. Counted to ten. ‘My – our – friend Juno. She’s on the list, I suppose?’

  ‘Never heard of her. Send me her details. Anybody else?’

  ‘Have you invited Patrick? And Emily?’

  ‘Who are they?’

  The friends he kept away from you in case you froze them out or embarrassed him with your pissed carry-on.

  ‘Friends. From drama school. They really should be there. Oh, and his tutor. And—’

  ‘It’s not a party!’ snapped Lucy. ‘It’s the funeral of a senator’s son. We can’t invite just anybody. There are security issues. Now, are you definitely coming?’

  The brusque question deftly demoted her. Orla felt her head spin. ‘Of course I’m coming.’

  ‘Excellent.’

  ‘Lucy, listen … If you need somebody to talk to. Because we both lost him, didn’t we? I don’t mean I know how you feel but—’

  ‘True. You can’t know how it feels to lose one’s only child. So please, no platitudes. Now. I’m sorting out his things in the basement tonight. I’m turning it into a studio. You know how Simon adored my art.’

  Nobody else called him Simon. Even Sim’s father had got with the programme and referred to him as Simeon. Only Lucy had refused. You were christened Simon, she’d told him. After my father. I don’t care if there’s already a Simon Quinn in Irish bloody Equity. To me, you’re Simon.

  ‘Oh God, his stuff.’ Orla pictured Sim’s flat, its exquisite cornicing and high spec finish quite overwhelmed by its tenant’s ability to generate clutter. She remembered Ma, back in 2001, dealing with Da’s side of the wardrobe, knee deep in sober suiting, sobbing her heart out over a cardigan. ‘I’ll help.’ Orla glanced down at her pyjamas, covered in islets of dripped tea. ‘What time?’

  ‘I don’t need any help.’ Lucy seemed surprised and, as was her habit, insulted. ‘The family can manage, thank you.’

  ‘Of course.’ Orla was both respectful of the woman’s grief and rather frightened of her. Lucy’s sharp tongue was legendary. ‘But, you know,’ she went on, with caution, keeping her voice warm, ‘I loved him too and I’d like to help.’ She glanced at the valentine.

  ‘If you’re worried I will mix his things up with your own, there’s no need. I’ve already whisked through and put your belongings in a bag. You can pick them up any time you want.’

  There would be no companionship in bereavement.

  ‘I’m not worried about that at all, Lucy. I just want to do something to help. And honestly, it would help me to see Sim’s flat again.’

  ‘You’d only hold me up. It’s a busy time and everything, d’accord, is on my shoulders. I have to sort out the apartment in London, too. I’ll send the housekeeper over to do that, I think. Maria’s more than capable. I’ll see you at the funeral, Orla. I know Sim was fond of you, but please, respect the family’s privacy at this time.’

  Fond? Orla remembered the rub of his skin against hers, the ferocious and tender feel of him inside her. There had been no privacy between her and Sim. Together they were family. If Sim had died just one day later, Lucy would be unable to talk to her like this.

  ‘His valentine arrived the day he died.’

  This seemed to wrong-foot Lucy. ‘Did it?’

  ‘I haven’t read it. But I know what it says.’

  ‘All valentines say the same thing.’ Ice clinked in a glass.

  ‘It’s a proposal, Lucy. Sim and I were going to be married.’

  Lucy’s snort tapered off. ‘Read it to me,’ she snapped.

  ‘I can’t. I can’t bear to open it. But we both knew that when he got his big break he’d—’

  ‘Orla,’ there was a discreet gulp and Orla pictured Lucy’s well-coiffed head thrown back as she downed her G and T, ‘I’m sure your valentine will say some very lovely things. My son was a sweetheart and you were a lucky girl, but as for your little … fantasy? Believe it if it helps but my advice to you is, burn the thing. For the good of your psychological health.’

  ‘It’s not a fantasy.’

  ‘Orla, I must go.’

  The line went dead. No goodbye, no soft word of any kind.

  Just one more day, one phone call, one word and she’d have been able to fight Sim’s corner and stop his funeral turning into a travesty. She’d have a role, a purpose.

  Biting her lip helped keep the tears at bay. Orla was so sick of crying. She let her eyes rest on the portrait of her drawn by Year Two which Sim had framed and hung on her kitchen wall. They’ve caught your very special beauty, he’d lisped. Miss Cassidy had green hair, three eyes and a very, very, very long neck.

  She sighed. It was time to get back to work. Year Two wouldn’t bother to psychoanalyse Lucy, they’d declare her an evil witch.

  As a grown up, Orla felt obliged to be more generous.

  She’d missed them, with their skinned knees and their super-tidy ponytails and their general air of wriggliness. Year Two had missed Orla too and let her know with hugs and bouncing and shouted questions about her absence.

  ‘On the carpet! On the carpet!’ After a week away, Orla was Miss Cassidy again, using her special teacher voice. ‘Now, please, ladies and gents!’

  Thirty-one bottoms collapsed to the rug. Legs were crossed, a shushing finger applied to each pair of lips.

  ‘That’s better. I’ll answer your questions one at a time.’

  Orla had wanted to be ‘Miss’ since for as long as she could remember, following in her father’s and grandfather’s footsteps, the third teacher in the family but, as Da had been proud to point out, the first female one. She shied away from the word ‘vocation’, as she shied from anything pompous or ponderous, but it came closest to describing the fervour she felt for her job, the deep nameless pleasure it gave her.

  So her reluctance to leave the house this morning had puzzled her. Her dry mouth and fidgety unease had increased on the short drive over the stone bridge and down the main street. Now, standing in front of her class, Orla had to concentrate hard to keep frantic negative thoughts at bay.

  ‘Miss! Miss!’ The most zealous child in the class, the one who barged to the front in the milk queue and took the tortoise home at Easter and Christmas, waggled his hand.

  ‘Yes, Niall?’

  ‘Did your boyfriend really die, Miss?’

  Gentle, funny Miss Cassidy, beloved by all the Year Twos that had passed through her classroom, Miss Cassidy who could answer questions about how babies are made with aplomb and was a practised peacemaker in plasticine disputes, was lost for words. Niall’s query had confirmed something Orla had suspected since the school bell had rung at nine that morning. It was too soon.

  ‘I’ll just be a moment,’ she said as she lef
t the classroom. It was the first proper lie she’d ever told the children.

  Sim’s journal

  21 October 2011

  Been here a week and feel like a native. All the things I love about this city would make O tut. (She’s big on tutting. It’s an Irish thing. Her Ma has awards for it.) I love London’s crowds, the buzz, its 24-hour, up-all-night energy. Its potential for adventure.

  Rum to have Juno on my side for once. ‘Go with him, Orla! Wouldn’t have to ask me twice to run off to London,’ she said. That woman is ripe for an affair.

  And here’s something I can only share with my journal. It’s kind of exciting to leave O behind. She’s so certain about stuff, about right and wrong. Without her I can let out my belt and burp.

  Chapter Three

  She addressed the valentine.

  ‘This one he sent from a shoot for a butter commercial.’ Orla held up a postcard of Ballymaloe. ‘He had to say, “It’s so golden the leprechauns want it back,” and run away from a computer animated goblin he couldn’t actually see. On the back he wrote, Did Laurence Olivier have to go through this? It’ll be worth it one day, won’t it, when we’re married and living in the Hollywood Hills? And he put too many kisses to count.’

  The valentine didn’t respond.

  ‘Who are you talking to?’ Ma bustled in from the kitchen, yellow Marigolds flapping, apron corset-tight around her black chain store bought-for-the-funeral dress.

  ‘Nobody.’

  ‘Thanks be to God the funeral is behind us. They’re heartless, that bunch.’ Ma went to the mirror above the mantelpiece to check her iron-stiff curls, not from vanity but because she needed to look neat. ‘All the money in the world but not a shred of common decency. They didn’t introduce you to anybody and some foolish fecker from the senator’s office did the reading! Funerals are part of letting go. Of saying goodbye. They matter.’ Ma’s pointed nose, today’s careful powdering worn off with the effort of spring cleaning, shone with indignation. ‘A few sandwiches in the kitchen with his best mates would have been more appropriate. That boy had no airs and graces.’