‘If I had a euro for every time my childer said “sorry Ma” I’d have enough for a diamond hat by now. So.’
‘Am I coming home for Christmas?’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘She doesn’t know. Charming. And what about New Year? You can’t miss me big party. It’s tradition.’
‘I’m not a fan of New Year, Ma.’
‘Since when?’
‘Since … I’m just not, Ma.’
‘Still looking for that diary?’
‘It’s somewhere. It’ll find its way back to me.’
‘Careful about reading it, love. You know what they say about eavesdroppers.’
‘I know. They never hear good of themselves.’
A celebration was called for. Not because of the ecstatic Courtesan reviews, but because of the expression on Abena’s face when she walked into the chilly classroom with its high banks of Victorian windows and announced, ‘I can stay! I can stay in this wonderful country!’
Orla took everybody, all eighteen of her global tribe, out for coffee and cake. ‘It’s role play,’ she told them (and herself). ‘We’re role-playing people who are thrilled about their friend’s happiness.’
‘Now all I need,’ said Abena, leaning in close and confidentially, so that the fabric elaborately knotted about her head touched Orla’s fringe, ‘is a man to love.’ She wiggled her shoulders. ‘I am ready for him!’
‘Plenty of men in London,’murmured Orla, sipping her latte.
‘Yes, but I don’t want just man.’ Abena scowled. ‘I don’t want lazy, bloody rude type. I want a special fellow.’
‘Me too.’ Javier, across the table, overheard. His Spanish accent was deep and guttural. ‘I want real man. You know what I mean?’
From the cheers and snorts it seemed that everybody did.
Orla, still finding her way as teacher to a crowd of adults, didn’t know whether to join in or hold back. Javier jabbed a finger at her and gave her no choice, demanding, ‘Orla, do you have a lover?’
To a backdrop of delighted whoops – and Abena’s outraged, ‘Javier, you are cheeky boy!’ – Orla felt herself blush. The truth would upend a bucket of freezing water over the party. (‘My lover is dead’ is such a vibe-killer.)
‘I was taken out to dinner a week ago. By a man. Not lazy, Abena, nor bloody rude. There are some decent men in London if you look hard enough.’
‘Ooh,’ said Sanae, a doll-faced Japanese girl whose pen-chant for long socks baffled Orla. ‘Does he call you all day? Does he beg for next date?’
‘Well, no, actually.’ Orla shrugged at their disappointment. ‘Sorry, but he doesn’t.’
‘I think,’ said Abena, chin up, regarding Orla with grave disapproval, ‘you do not enc … enc …’
‘Encourage?’
‘Yes. You do not encourage the gentleman.’ Abena lowered her fleshy chin, clamped her round brown eyes on Orla’s. ‘Sometimes I think you are like a nun. What are you saving it for?’ She paused for effect. ‘The worms?’
It was obvious, really. The food laid out on Maude’s coffee table, the candles lit on the mantel, the wafting Cole Porter, was all a ploy to usher Orla painlessly past episode two of The Courtesan. Maude claimed it was spontaneous, but Orla had heard the phone call to Sheraz specifying nice olives please, big fat ones, proper hummus, pitta bread, decent tzatziki.
‘I like a themed meal as much as the next woman,’ said Orla, raising herself from a white cushion on the floor. ‘But Jaysus, Maude, I can’t take another sip of that retsina.’ Lips puckering, she crossed to the fridge for the cold bottle of white wine she’d brought.
‘Bogna made me smile today,’ said Maude, legs crossed on the floor, defying Orla’s notions of what the older generation should be able to achieve with their nether limbs. ‘She said to me, what my brother wants, my brother gets.’ Maude let out a tinkling, synthetic laugh.
‘How was that funny?’ asked Orla. ‘Could you possibly be angling, Ms Maude Roxby-Littleton?’
‘Yes!’ said Maude emphatically, the tinkling laugh curtailed. ‘What happened last Saturday? You’ve been silent on the subject, Orla. It’s very cruel of you.’
Just like Ma, thought Orla. One’s posh, the other’s as Irish as a pint of Guinness, but they both live vicariously through me.
‘I’ve been quiet because there’s nothing to tell.’
‘Oh I hate it when you do that!’ Maude slapped down her pitta bread and crossed her arms petulantly. ‘Why must you downplay everything, as if you’re not made of the same flesh and blood as the rest of us? Good lord, that man puts his balls on the line coming to your door, humbling himself in front of his sister and me – and you can tell it doesn’t come easy to a proud specimen like Marek – and you still insist it was just a meal.’
‘Maude, you know why I can’t get—’
‘No, no, let’s not make this about dear Sim.’ Maude took up the pitta again and smeared it with garlicky goo. ‘At some point, my precious girl, you have to stop making him the centre of everything.’
‘A little soon for that, no?’ muttered Orla, not liking the turn the conversation had taken.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Maude. ‘Women who put men at the centre of their existence often find it’s a mistake.’
‘I’ve never done that. Ever. If anything I didn’t make Sim important enough.’
‘Is that how you see your relationship with Sim?’ Maude sounded intrigued.
Orla felt a surge of empathy for butterflies she’d seen impaled on collectors’ pins. ‘You sound as if you disagree.’
Maude hesitated. ‘This is none of my business,’ she said, with an air of finality. ‘Please, dear, forgive me. You needn’t talk about Marek if you don’t want to.’
‘Everything is your business.’ Orla surveyed the feast in front of her, every morsel of it evidence of Maude’s care and sensitivity. ‘There truly is nothing to tell. It was what it was.’
It was a source of guilt, and a source of pleasure. It was vivid, a gemstone in her pocket. After prolonged prodding from Juno, Orla had finally confessed that yes, she found Marek attractive and not just physically; he was an elegant, intriguing thing both forthright and veiled. There was much more to learn about Marek.
‘I’ve met him a couple of years too soon,’ she’d told Juno. ‘The timing is wrong.’ Orla had agreed with Juno that yes, sure, the timing is always wrong, but disagreed that she should encourage him.
‘See where this leads.’ It could lead nowhere, because Orla wouldn’t let it. Emotionally speaking, she’d backed into a culde-sac.
‘Never mind my gentleman followers, Maude,’ said Orla, arch. ‘What about George? Hmm?’
‘You and Bogna are very very naughty.’ Maude’s long, thin, faded pink mouth was tight with the effort not to smile. ‘The poor chap is just a customer.’
‘Customer, my arse.’
En route to Sheraz’s that afternoon, Orla had been ambushed by Bogna and manhandled out to the back room. Twirling Orla around to look back at the shop through the bead curtain, Bogna had hissed, ‘Look!’
In the shop an old man loitered by the poetry and a schoolboy pored over an aged Beano annual, drinking a can of Coke.
‘Him!’ Bogna jabbed a finger at the elderly man. ‘Maude’s stud!’
The stud wore a raincoat over tweed trousers and an old pair of shoes so polished they shone. Balding, colourless, with pince-nez teetering on the bridge of his nose, he wasn’t reading the book he held, Orla knew, but was peering over the top of it at Maude.
‘Explain.’
‘He comes in every Saturday. Always buys a book. And always stares.’
‘At Maude?’
‘Yes. Like sheep. Look!’ Bogna’s appetite for scandal, and her bony-fingered prodding, reminded Orla of her female relatives back home.
‘I’m looking,’ she assured Bogna, sidling away from her. ‘He’s agog.’
‘What is gog?�
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‘He’s entranced. Can’t stop looking at her.’
‘He is mad for it.’
‘As mad as a pensioner can be for it, I guess. How does Maude react to him?’
‘Watch. He’s going over!’ Bogna jumped up and down, her customary nonchalance forgotten. ‘Grab her, man!’ she hissed. ‘Kiss her!’
Orla strained to hear the conversation. Stud asked the price of his weathered poetry omnibus; Maude replied that it was eight pounds but as a regular he could take it for six. The customer beamed, paid up, hesitated, turned away with his paper bag full of poetry, turned back again, opened his mouth, closed it, left hurriedly.
‘He’s got it bad,’ crowed Bogna, delighted. ‘He’s called George.’
‘Does Maude know she has an admirer?’
‘Look at her face.’
A self-satisfied smile broke Maude’s customary serene expression.
She knew.
Sim’s journal
11 February 2012
When I was three, so the family story goes, I put my hand in the fire. ‘I wanted to see what it felt like, Mummy.’ Head hurts. Hair hurts. Ego hurts. Driver had to hammer on front door to wake me this morning. Maude not quite so charming as usual when woken at 5 a.m. Late to the location shoot. Pretty little make-up girl (she’s deelish) bemoaned the circles under my eyes.
‘Richard Burton boozed,’ I reminded Reece. ‘Oliver Reed. Peter O’Toole.’
‘You are not Richard fucking Burton,’ he said.
I’ve chosen the valentine card. Perfect image. I’m drafting and redrafting the words. I’ve got to get it just right. O tells me I’m ‘good’ at cards but the significance of this one is paralysing me.
Ant is worrying me. She’s being odd. Around the crew I can trust her to be discreet but today she was mouthing off, saying, ‘I can’t wait to meet your Orla. We’ll have SO MUCH to talk about,’ all sarky. I grabbed her wrist. Left a mark. The pretty make-up girl had to cover it up.
Fairy, Fairy, trust me on this. Trust me to know what’s right for us.
Give me a heartfelt YES right from your toes.
I’m not three any more but I can’t keep my hand out of the fire. At least when you burn yourself you know you’re alive.
Chapter Thirteen
‘Tonight’s the night.’
The valentine had watched Orla go through the rituals of hair washing and styling, anointing with body lotion, the business of eyelash curling. Buffed, sheened, primped, Orla put her arms into the blue dress, slid it over her head, snaked the zip up her side.
‘Will I do?’ Orla waited for the card’s response then thanked it. She was generally uneasy with compliments, distrusting them, but Orla knew she looked striking. She’d made an effort, as her Ma constantly exhorted her to. The dress fell to mid-thigh, showing an expanse of leg Orla didn’t normally share with the world. Her hair had behaved and lay straight and heavy and shining around her discreetly made-up face.
Sim would have stood in front of the door. He would have told her she wasn’t going anywhere. He would have kissed her lipstick off and they would have been late for Reece’s party.
The valentine was a poor substitute.
Lipstick. Phone. Small mirror. Fresh breath spray. Keys. They followed each other into the evening bag, another new purchase. Beaded silk, it drooped like pretty chain mail. A larger tapestry bag, borrowed from Maude, stood packed and patient by the door. ‘Toothbrush!’ exlaimed Orla, bolting for the bathroom and sucking the bristles dry before tucking it into her washbag.
Knees together, Orla sat on the edge of her bed, waiting, careful of her alien glossy self, nervous to move too suddenly in case her eyelashes drooped or her fringe collapsed. The valentine waited with her, on her lap.
‘No falling in the swimming pool this time, got it?’
The doorbell propelled her off the bed, sent her skittering around the room, looking in the mirror before grabbing the invitation and cramming it and the card into the small bag.
New shoes turned her dash to the sitting room windows into a hobble. Orla pushed aside the lace curtain and looked down into the dark street. Beneath the towering picture of Sim (now with graffiti genitalia) a long-nosed car crouched at the kerb. On the pavement, Marek stood looking up at the window. He saw her and smiled.
Snatching up the overnight case and shouting a goodbye up the stairs to Maude (who replied, ‘Do everything I wouldn’t do!’), Orla hurried down to the front door, bandy with the effort of keeping her heels under control. She paused and held the bag to her face. The beads were cold on her lips. ‘He’s not really my plus one,’ she whispered. ‘You are.’
Sim’s journal
13 February 2012
She’ll open it in about ten hours. I feel like death. Nerves? Or the brandy I had after dinner? Midnight already. Time flies when you’re shitting yourself. Must sleep and stop fretting about tomorrow. I have plenty of tomorrows and after this particular one, the others will have the rosy glow of a fresh start.
Floor lanterns lit their path over the gravel to a rambling shingled house, each window amber, radiating civilised good times. Orla suddenly despised her outfit, realising too late the bag didn’t match. The valentine, inside the bag, made itself as heavy as lead. Awkwardly, she took Marek’s elbow, then dropped it as if it were too hot to handle. The valentine would not sanction elbow holding.
Fairy lights peeped out of the box hedges standing to attention around the door. The scene was picture perfect. Sim would have loved it. He’d have been champing at the bit. Looking up at Marek she saw a smooth mask take possession of his features, a level, almost corporate stare that hinted this was more of an ordeal than a pleasure. Then he felt her gaze, met it, and grinned, shunting his eyes into crescents.
The door opened before Marek’s hand reached the bell pull, and they entered a wide hall that managed to incorporate a suit of armour, a Sam Taylor-Wood photograph of a weeping Daniel Craig, a venerable oak staircase and quite a few famous people.
It’s dreamlike, thought Orla, to recognise people you’ve never met. A good dream or a nightmare she had yet to decide, as she held up her chin, a sign of insecurity that Sim would have recognised and answered with a squeeze of her hand – or, possibly, her buttocks: parties brought out the devil in him.
Orla exchanged a furtive look with Marek as a young actress, more famed for her beauty than her talent, strolled down the stairs, glass in hand. A singer Orla had once queued to see trotted past, chirruping, ‘Off to the loo!’ over her shoulder to a languid man who fronted a prestigious BBC4 series on the renaissance.
‘It’s like,’ Orla whispered to Marek, as they weaved through the scrum towards a tray of champagne, ‘those dreams when you meet the Queen and you’ve got no knickers on.’
Marek’s expression revealed that he never had such dreams.
Debonair in a dinner jacket, foxy cap of hair glinting, Reece descended on them and twirled Orla out of her coat, handing it to an anonymous serf who manifested at just the right moment. ‘You’ve made my night,’ he said in an undertone before greeting Marek. Orla detected the faintest trace of reserve as he said, ‘I’m so glad she used her plus one. She needs looking after.’
‘Does she?’ The comment seemed to amuse Marek as much as it irked Orla.
‘Come on, chaps.’ Reece ignored the question and turned, his hand on Orla’s back to guide them through ceiling-height double doors. ‘Let’s throw you in at the deep end.’
The party pulsed with conversation so animated it verged on the manic. Orla felt an adrenaline rush, as if she were standing on tiptoe before a bungee jump. The room was generous in its proportions and venerable in its decoration (Louis XIV flirting with Andy Warhol against Chinese papered walls), and lit by countless tea lights and candles: Orla pitied whoever had stooped and stretched to light them all.
‘Did you bring it?’ Reece murmured as they followed the magic path that opened up for them through the guests.
Orla opened her bag to afford him a peek of pink.
‘So, you really are ready?’ Reece’s eyes seemed sad.
‘I am. I turned a corner out of the blue.’
‘Is it to do with …’ Reece inclined his head minutely in the direction of Marek, who was tailing them. ‘I couldn’t believe my ears when you said you were bringing somebody.’
‘It’s nothing to do with him.’ Orla saw Reece didn’t believe her and let it lie: she didn’t entirely believe herself. ‘It’s to do with me.’
‘Here’s a cosy perch to people-watch.’
Reece motioned to a high-backed velvet chair the colour of rotten plums, seating himself on the arm when Orla sat down. Marek stood to one side, weighing Reece up with a sidelong glance.
‘Now,’ he said discreetly, bending his head to Orla’s, ‘what’s the plan? I hope, darling, you’ve decided against reading it.’
Orla nodded.
‘May I be there? In case you need me? I don’t want you facing it alone.’
Reece seemed intent on disappearing Marek. ‘OK,’ nodded Orla. ‘I’d like that.’
‘It’s a privilege. And Sim would want me to make sure you were in one piece afterwards. Shall we say in one hour? Do it with some ceremony?’
‘Sure. Is Ant here?’ Orla couldn’t talk of Sim tonight. She was far too brittle, far too riddled with doubts about every aspect of this evening.
‘She’s somewhere, getting off with the help, feeling up a producer. I’m sure she’ll break from the undergrowth at some point.’
Reece must surely be tipsy to talk like that. Orla took a closer look at his brilliantly cold eyes and reconsidered: perhaps he was on something. She was vague about what that might be – she was the kind of woman who took Calpol with misgivings – but she’d endured enough veiled references to ‘naughtiness’ and suchlike from Sim to intuit that there had been some drug-taking during his last months. She’d always despaired of his weakness, noting his feigned nonchalance when Charlie’s arrival was whispered at parties. She also noted his animation, his altered pupils, his energetic chattiness and his maddening sniffs soon after. Orla had allowed him this subterfuge, but alarm bells had insistently rung about him running wild in the fleshpots of London without her.
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