The Valentine's Card

by Juliet Ashton

  When Maude returned, her habitual good humour had been restored. She made tea for everybody and read aloud from T. S. Eliot and Tina Fey, one of her ‘Keep Out’ signs hammered firmly over the incident.

  Upstairs, alone, Orla lay on the sofa, her mind a blank, curtains drawn against the giant Sim. A knock on her door brought her upright, as if hinged at the waist.

  ‘Come in!’ she shouted, then jumped to her feet as Marek entered.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, curling her stockinged toes. ‘I assumed it was … I didn’t hear the front door.’

  ‘I came to the shop,’ explained Marek. He stood at the threshold, unsure of his welcome. ‘Maude said to come up, but if you are …’

  ‘Nope. I’m not.’ Orla shrugged, aware that she was being a bit bristly and rude but unable to help it. He was so tall and his clothes were so dark. Marek was a big male slab in her chintzy bower.

  ‘I want you to come to dinner tonight,’ said Marek, adding, ‘with me.’

  ‘Really?’ Orla wondered why the poor man bothered. She was dull. She was heartbroken. All her manners had atrophied. Couldn’t he see she was of no earthly use to him?

  ‘Really.’ When Marek was amused, two flat dimples puckered his cheeks.

  ‘Well then. Yes.’ Dragging up some grace from somewhere, Orla threw him a ‘Thanks, that’ll be nice.’

  It would get her through the evening, jostle her past the dread hour.

  ‘Good.’ Marek backed out of the door.

  ‘On one condition,’ Orla hastened.

  He looked at her questioningly, patiently, like a dutiful father visiting a child in a Wendy house.

  ‘This isn’t … romantic, OK? It can’t be a date. Because I’m not dateable, Marek. I know what you said, and it was lovely, and I’m flattered, but I’m not the real deal. I’m not all there any more. I’m not worth the effort. This isn’t, by the way, a plea for a compliment. I really am not worth the effort.’

  ‘It’s dinner. Two people. A table. Some food. Dates, anyway, are what Bogna has with those spotty sods who turn up for her. But we’ll be just a man taking a woman to dinner.’ He bowed his head, double-checking. ‘That’s acceptable to you?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘I’ll come back at eight, in a cab.’

  ‘You’re picking me up?’

  ‘Of course.’ Marek was surprised by her surprise. ‘That’s too early?’

  ‘That’s perfect.’ By 9 p.m., when people all over the country were settling down to watch the first episode of The Courtesan, Orla would be eating restaurant food and negotiating silences with Marek.

  There were no silences. Little about the evening panned out the way Orla expected.

  The restaurant was sleek, hushed, with heavy cutlery and unimpeachably white linens. A contrast to the café, and a contrast to Orla’s comfortable cords.

  In black again, Marek fitted in nicely. His looks were democratic, altering to his surroundings. Tonight the dark swoop of hair was glamorous, the long slender nose reminiscent of Nureyev. Orla noticed for the first time how full his lower lip was, how it pouted in repose. Perhaps he caught her staring; he smiled, and was an eleven-year-old. ‘Wine?’

  ‘Please.’

  Marek read the list, pondered it. He had a brief conversation with the sommelier before tasting the wine and sending the first bottle back. Firm, polite, sure.

  ‘So,’ he said after they’d ordered, after they’d covered the weather, her week at work, Bogna’s performance at Maude’s Books. ‘Let me tell you some things.’

  A covert look at her watch told Orla that it was ten minutes to The Courtesan. In Tobercree the Cassidys were gathered en masse. Juno was taping it. Lucy … with a start, Orla realised she had no idea what Lucy was doing on this momentous evening. Beyond a curt acknowledgement of the Longines watch, Orla had heard nothing. Even though any interaction with the Quinns left her feeling two inches tall, Orla had called and left a message, and even sent a postcard. Orla felt that Sim wouldn’t have wanted them to be so perfectly estranged. Talk, Marek! she willed him.

  It was as if he heard her thoughts.

  ‘So,’ he said again, hands folded on the table. ‘You should know about me. You should know that I am sane, solvent.’ He paused, allowing the waiter to set down their food. ‘I’m forty-one. I have all my teeth.’ He bared his teeth, white, strong, like a healthy animal’s. ‘I own a company that does well and so I have a house in Chelsea and another in Skwierzyna near my family and another in Devon because it’s beautiful there. I like to ride horses.’

  Orla could imagine him on a horse. The image prompted a sensation, deep inside, like a door swinging open. She coughed, swigged some wine, and the door thudded obediently shut.

  ‘I like to walk but not in town. I work too much. I need new clothes but shopping bores me. My parents are both deceased now.’ Marek made an unhurried, discreet sign of the cross. ‘I support my stepmother, Bogna’s mother. And as you know I do my best with Bogna but I still worry that she’ll end up a stripper. I don’t normally talk this much but I’m not normally as dull as I was the last time we met, either. You make me a little nervous and I’m not used to that. I like it when you blush like that, by the way. I’m allergic to coriander. I’m bloody good at table tennis. I have a scar across my back from the time I fell off a wall when I was fourteen and landed in barbed wire. I used to smoke but now I don’t. I drink sometimes; I get drunk sometimes. I never go to the gym and I secretly dislike people who do. I have three friends, the rest are acquaintances. My friends can expect a lot from me. I expect a lot from them, but mainly I expect them to make me laugh and not let me down. I make snap decisions. I can be arrogant and if that happens please hit me on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper. That’s what my mother used to threaten me with, because it worked on our dog. And I am married.’

  ‘And you’re what?’ Orla, grateful for the flood of information and the way it washed away the minutes, sat up straighter.

  ‘I married very young,’ said Marek carefully, holding her gaze. ‘You and I have something in common, Orla. Perhaps that’s why I fool myself I know you better than I actually do. She died, you see.’

  ‘I’m so sorry.’ Orla knew it didn’t help. ‘That’s terrible.’

  ‘It was a long time ago. Fourteen years. Bogna – good God, this never occurs to me – Bogna was only five.’

  Orla knew time was immaterial. ‘Were you living over here?’

  ‘Yes. I had come over first, then Aga joined me when we could afford it. I really only came to England because of her. She wanted a different sort of life. Better. I came here to …’ Marek smiled, with little mirth. ‘To make my fortune. A Polish Dick Whittington.’

  ‘Am I being condescending if I comment on how good your English is?’

  ‘Yes, you are,’ said Marek, and he laughed with her. ‘But so it should be: I’ve been in this country for what feels like a hundred years. Poland was very different back then, just emerging from the Soviet era. It was grey, like porridge. I remind my sister of that sometimes, how lucky she is. When I was her age we had nothing.’

  ‘Bet she loves that speech.’

  Marek looked to the ceiling. ‘She’s not my biggest fan. I’m the only person in the whole world who says no to her.’

  ‘Sounds to me like you’re very good to her.’

  ‘Sure. But that’s an adult opinion. Bogna still sees everything through the eyes of a twelve-year-old. I want. I get. Gimme gimme gimme.’

  Marek looked down at his plate for a while before looking up at Orla.

  ‘My wife, Aga, was this type. She was not happy with her life. She wanted things. But when we looked around us in Skwierzyna there was no way to improve our situation, and accumulate these modern luxuries. We were twenty. Imagine. Twenty and married.’ Marek shook his head, as if to dislodge a vision of his younger, naive self.

  ‘I gave up my law degree. My father was furious. I came over here. I’m not one of the recent influx,’
he said, underlining this with a wave of his butter knife. ‘At first I was a unicorn, the only one of my kind. There were no kabanos for sale in Sainsbury’s, no Polish clubs. Just the one café I took you to in Ladbroke Grove. No internet either: I spoke to my wife once a week, from a payphone in the hall outside my bedsit. I worked on building sites, I knocked down walls, I learned how to build extensions – learned how much the British love extensions – and I sent every penny home. It was a tough time, and I would have loved to have the support of the kind of Polish network we have now. So, teacher lady, that’s why my accent is good. Because there was no option. I had to fit in. I needed camouflage. And once I hit my stride,’ Marek raised a charcoal eyebrow to acknowledge his easy use of colloquialism, ‘I discovered that I love this city. It’s …’ Marek grasped for a word, held out his arms as if holding a beach ball. ‘It’s elastic! There’s room for anything and everyone. Exploring it kept me sane, because it was a while before I made friends. My focus was my wife, bringing her over. Because, you know, I was crazy about her and I am a romantic man.’

  He paused, looked intently at Orla.

  She coughed, and fussed with her side salad. This was the longest Marek had spoken since she’d met him; her pasta was neglected.

  ‘Sorry. Where was I? I save. I buy a little flat. Tiny. My wife comes over. We buy a bigger flat. We buy a house. We try for a baby. No baby.’ Marek’s matter of fact words were undermined by his jaw, which clenched. ‘I work harder, longer. The housing boom is wind in my sails. Aga discovers more and more things that we need. That becomes what we talk about. Things. Never how we feel.’

  ‘It’s easily done.’

  ‘No, it’s not.’ Marek was adamant. ‘We should have fought it. We should have taken more notice. I’ve had a long time, too long, to go back over those years in my mind, and, seen from this distance, our marriage was strangely old-fashioned. I was a bread-winner. Aga was a housewife.’ Marek held his fork like a caveman’s club. He put the fork down, interlaced his fingers to illustrate what they were not. ‘We weren’t partners. We had roles, instead of personalities. I still wake up at night and regret I didn’t say, let’s get away, just you and me, somewhere windswept where there are no shops and no telephones. Even when we escaped it was to villas with private pools. We choked on luxury.’

  Marek sighed.

  ‘We’d had another of our stupid rows, that day. Oh, by the way, this is something you should know about me. I have a temper. I am a passionate man.’

  The flutter in her tummy was unexpected. Orla hated arguments.

  ‘I’ll remember that.’

  ‘I rarely give in to it, and it’s over very quick, but every now and then, kaboom!’ Marek mimed a mushroom cloud, nudged the sommelier, apologised. He and Orla shared a conspiratorial smile, before he returned to his subject and his face became sombre.

  ‘I yelled at Aga, that morning. She yelled back. We hurt each other where before we would have held back. Yet neither of us would walk out on the marriage.’

  ‘There was still some love there,’ suggested Orla.

  ‘That’s not the reason. We were far from home and clinging together. We didn’t want to let our families down, but I didn’t look forward to seeing her and I could feel her disappointment in me. Any fool could sense the lack of happiness in our house.’

  ‘That’s so sad.’

  ‘And then she’s gone. Cardiac arrhythmia. I won’t go into it but basically, the rhythm of her heart was interrupted and Aga was snuffed out. I found her. She’d been on the floor of our new conservatory all day. She was so proud of that conservatory.’

  The simple way Marek presented such heartbreaking details touched something in Orla, like a finger plucking at a harp.

  ‘Sim, my boyfriend, he died suddenly too. It’s hard, isn’t it?’

  She was sick of the pain in the world. The loss.

  ‘Very. But, Orla, in other ways my loss is unlike yours.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I didn’t love Aga.’

  There it was again, that searing frankness. Orla frowned, sorry for the dead woman who inspired such an epitaph. ‘What, not even a little?’

  ‘Not like I should have. Not like I’m capable of. We were bitter, like animals chained together in a cage.’ Marek waited a moment before saying, ‘If Aga was still here, we wouldn’t be together.’

  Ouch. Was this insistence on calling a spade a spade an east European trait, wondered Orla, or simply Marek. ‘How can you know that?’

  ‘Because I am clear-eyed.’

  ‘If Sim was alive we’d be together.’ We’d be married, entwined in our jimjams on the sofa, watching him on TV.

  ‘I envy you.’

  ‘Really, don’t.’ Orla snorted caustically.

  ‘That give and take, that companionship, I’ve always wanted it. I’ve found other things – desire, good times – but there’s no substitute.’

  ‘Like marge and butter. I Can’t Believe it’s not Love.’

  ‘Sorry?’ Marek floundered.

  ‘You know, the spread? It doesn’t matter.’ Sim would have got that. ‘I’m being glib. Ignore me. I wasn’t brought up to talk about emotions. Even though I’m Irish I have a stiff upper lip.’

  ‘You don’t have to be English to have one of those.’ Marek broke a bread roll freckled with caraway seeds. ‘Poles have a stiff upper body. Eat, Orla, eat,’ he exhorted. ‘I don’t say any of this to depress you, or to ruin our – whatever this is, not a date, definitely not that.’

  ‘You haven’t depressed me.’ The bogeyman Death was a regular guest at Orla’s table. ‘It’s all part of life.’ She intuited why Marek had gone into such detail. ‘It brings people closer, talking about the big stuff. Life. Death.’

  ‘Yes!’ Marek seized on that, glad to be understood. ‘Since Aga’s death I only bother with the real things. I try to be honest. I try to connect. When I want to,’ he added.

  Ignoring the compliment, Orla said, ‘It’s a way of honouring her, I suppose. Of taking something, some little thing, that’s positive from her death.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ Marek looked above her head. ‘Yes.’

  ‘After all,’ said Orla, ‘we do have to recover, somehow.’

  ‘Yes. We recover because we have to.’ Marek’s raisin-dark eyes were sombre. ‘It has hardened me. I’m a different person. I expect less. I hope it doesn’t do the same to you.’

  ‘I think it already has.’

  ‘Fight it. You don’t want to be like me. Forty, scarred. I only embark on relationships that have an obvious fault so that I won’t be hurt when they inevitably finish.’ Marek slid to a halt. ‘That would make the worst ever profile on a dating site.’

  Glad of the ray of light, Orla laughed. ‘GSOH, likes long walks and log fires goes down better.’

  ‘I’ve always hoped I’ll find somebody I want to be nice to. Somebody I can be myself with. Spoil a bit. Know.’ He considered that word. ‘Yes. Know.’

  His gaze was frank. Marek was a clean arrow of a man and when he looked at Orla she felt examined, but gently, as if her frailties would be excused.

  It was ten o’clock.

  The Courtesan was over.

  Orla held her watch up to the valentine. ‘See? Just gone eleven. Not late at all.’ She unwound her scarf. It was Marek’s, she realised. She’d meant to return it. Tugging off her jacket, she toppled to the sofa like a felled tree. ‘You’d have approved of the restaurant,’ she told the card. ‘Classy. And there was squid on the menu. You’d have ordered the squid, wouldn’t you, darling?’ She smiled at the pink shape on the mantelpiece; she knew it so well. ‘No, it wasn’t a date. No need to scowl. Worry lines, Sim, worry lines – so very ageing! I made it clear it was just a friendly meal and Marek was cool with that.’

  No need, thought Orla, feeling her lips tentatively with her fingertips, to blab about what happened on the doorstep. He’d lowered his head, she’d panicked, she’d dropped the key, she’d bent to retrieve
it, he bent with her, she’d bumped her head on his chin as she straightened. They’d giggled. He’d backed away, hands in pockets, head dipped, eyes on her. ‘Goodnight, Irish,’ he’d said, the words heavy with reluctance.

  ‘Goodnight!’ she’d said, the word bright with relief.

  Chapter Twelve

  ‘Orla? It’s Ma. Can you talk?’

  ‘Howaya Ma?’

  ‘Grand. Grand. Apart from me hip. I’m going all clicky. You’d think I have a machine gun in me knickers when I get off me armchair.’

  ‘That bloody hip. Is Deirdre running you to Tesco like she promised?’

  ‘Yes. She’s a good girl.’

  ‘Girl?’

  ‘You’re all girls to me even if you live to be a hundred. So. Anyroad. We watched it.’

  ‘It? Oh … And?’

  ‘Janey Mac, Sim was magnificent. You’d swear he was French. And the gear on him! Satin. Frills. You couldn’t see him for lace. But oh he’s a bad lot, Orla. A right sod. Nearly killed a poor servant girl because she dropped his claret. How did he remember all them lines?’

  ‘I’m glad you liked it. It’s all over the papers here. Seems like the whole country sat down to watch it. By the time it was over, Sim was a star, just like he wanted – just like he knew he would be. Did you hear he’s up for an award? Best newcomer. Posthumously. Lucy was interviewed in the Daily Mail.’

  ‘Let’s hope she didn’t burp gin all over the journalist. I’ll watch the next episode, but Jaysus, it’s hard. I had a little cry on me own, like, in the kitchen afterwards. What did you do while it was on, musha?’

  ‘I went out to dinner with a friend.’

  ‘Oh. Reece?’

  ‘No, um, yes. Reece.’

  ‘You haven’t even noticed, have you?’

  ‘Noticed what, Ma?’

  ‘Me cunning plan. I’m employing reverse psychology. I haven’t asked you if you’re coming back for Christmas for at least three weeks and you haven’t even bloody noticed.’

  ‘Sorry, Ma.’