A beep from her pocket signalled a text. Marek hadn’t been in touch since a to-the-point Just touched down at lunchtime: she’d expected more ardent communication but he was busy, after all.
The text wasn’t from Marek.
Hello stranger! Lunch? Dinner? A trip to the moon? You’ve got my number – use it. Rx P.S. Hope you’re behaving.
Behaving.
The word pressed Orla’s ‘pause’ button. She stared at it, insulted, conscious of being talked down to. If I’m ‘behaving’, she told Reece in her head, I’m the only one who feckin’ is. Where was Reece’s headmasterly tone when Anthea was shagging Sim in her tented boudoir? When Sim was going through the motions of a loving boyfriend, about to propose? And did Reece reprimand himself for covering up the whole sordid tangle?
Behaving.
Orla had behaved her entire life.
Reece is frightened I’ll pounce on Anthea, use my claws.
Orla glanced down at her neat squovals, then grabbed her coat from the hook by the door. With her new acerbic inner voice, she thanked him for his earlier Tweeted tip-off.
Supping with client/chum Ms Anthea Blake tonight at our special place. #niceworkifyoucangetit.
She reckoned she could be at Reece’s club in forty minutes.
Tackling Anthea as she sat across a table from Reece would answer Reece’s finger-wagging question nicely: Orla Cassidy was not behaving.
In the whirlwind, the proposed test of her own character had been forgotten. Swallowing hard, Orla, her hand on the latch, paused. A sudden cacophony on the other side of the door made her leap away from it as if it were alive.
Orla knew only one person who simultaneously rang a tune on the doorbell and banged a tattoo on the knocker, and she was in Dublin. Opening the door a fraction, Orla saw a sliver of the high street, and a sliver of Juno.
‘Surprise!’ Juno said it limply, ironically, head to one side. ‘Look who it isn’t!’
‘This,’ said Orla, opening the door wide, throwing her arms around her visitor, ‘does not compute.’ Orla was dazed, and struggling with the feeling of being caught red-handed. She couldn’t help but fret that some evidence of the sin she’d been about to commit stained her clothes or was caught in her hair.
‘You look gorgeous! The fringe looks even better in real life!’ Juno was examining her and finding no clue. ‘Great jacket!’
‘Come in. Come in.’ Juno had appeared out of the drizzle like a genie and it took a moment for Orla’s manners to catch up with the action. ‘And welcome, Juno. It’s been so long. And you look fab.’
Juno did. Her spunky crop, reinstated after the brief excursion into growing her hair, was an even brighter vermilion than Orla remembered, and her emerald coat gleamed in the dim hallway.
‘Come for a drink,’ said Juno, bending at the knees, taking Orla’s hand in both her own, just the way she always had when coaxing Orla into something nefarious, whether it be skipping double maths or setting fire to Fr Gerry’s cassock. ‘Come on! We need a chat!’
‘Who’s that with you?’ Maude’s voice drifted from the top tier of the house, sleepy, cracked, old.
‘It’s Juno, Maude. We’ll be up in a minute.’
‘Ah, the famous Juno!’ Maude perked up a little.
‘Hi Maude!’ warbled Juno, her wide mouth open to show her pink pink tongue and her fluorescent teeth. ‘I’m just taking madam to the pub and then we’ll say hello!’
‘Enjoy yourselves, dears.’ A door slammed.
‘Come on.’ Juno was impish, sparking. ‘There’s a pub on your corner.’
‘Not the Rose? Juno, it’s like Fagin’s den in there.’
‘Great. London atmosphere. Come on.’ As ever, Juno won and the two of them stumbled to the pub.
Kicking open the weathered saloon door, Juno muttered, ‘I see what you mean.’ The room had never been refurbished, so it boasted etched mirrors on the walls, flock paper, an ornately carved bar. But it had never been cleaned either, and its clientele had followed suit. The carpet beneath their shoes was sticky as they picked their way past men with over-long slicked-back hair and chain smokers’ complexions to where a barman, liberally sprinkled with tattoos and sporting a belly that confirmed his love of the product he sold, awaited them.
‘I think a clean glass costs extra.’ Orla studied the map of filth around her vodka and tonic as they found a corner table as far as possible from the football match on the bellowing wide screen. ‘But what the hell. Cheers!’ She smiled con spiratorially at Juno then lowered her glass. ‘What is it?’ Juno looked haunted. ‘OK.’ Orla put the glass down. ‘What’s this about? You have much the same face on you as when you borrowed my new boots without asking and threw up on them.’
‘I wish it was that innocent.’ Juno downed her drink in one, grimacing at its aftertaste. ‘Now listen. I have a preamble.’ Juno launched herself into a patently prepared speech. ‘There’s something you need to know. About me. I’ve come all this way to tell you, so please, please don’t judge.’
‘If you’re trying to scare me, you’re doing a grand job.’ Orla’s tone was deceptively light. Horrified by the escapade Juno’s appearance had saved her from, she was in no position to judge anybody. ‘Just feckin’ tell me.’
‘I’m in love.’ Juno’s cat eyes turned liquid, and her wry wide mouth turned up in a smile that was too gooey for her wry face. ‘I’m in love, Orla, and you have to know and you have to approve and you have to love him as much as I do.’
‘What?’ Orla said it loudly, crisply. Had they time-travelled to an era before Himself, before Jack, when this pronouncement could be good news?
‘And he’s here.’ Juno nodded to somebody beyond Orla’s back, and Orla swivelled to see a tall man with a dandelion head of brilliant white hair stand up in a far corner and make his way towards them.
‘Rob?’ Orla frowned at the sudden appearance of yet another Tobercree native in this godforsaken boozer.
‘Yes, Rob. My Rob.’ Juno beamed at him as he made his way through the swaying, malodorous pub crowd.
‘Hi,’ Orla held out her hand. ‘How’s things?’
‘I’m good.’ Rob, crisp and clean and modish in this spit and sawdust interior, looked from one woman to the other. ‘Am I allowed to join you?’
‘Join us, please.’ Orla watched him drag his stool nearer to Juno, as if she were magnetic and he an iron filing, analysing her face as if committing it to his memory.
Rob had looked like that at Fionnuala, Orla recalled, on their wedding day. Orla had been a bridesmaid; Juno, as sister of the bride, matron of honour. There had been cummerbunds and gypsophila and Fionnuala’s horrible, horrible crinoline. ‘This is a bit of a surprise.’
‘Typical Orla understatement.’ Juno didn’t return Rob’s gaze, she was studying Orla. ‘This wasn’t planned. We know how it must look. It hit us both like a lightning bolt.’
‘At the very same moment,’ said Rob, treading on the tail of Juno’s sentence. ‘Wham!’
‘Wham,’ echoed Juno fondly.
This cheesy Juno was disconcerting. ‘How long …?’ Orla pointed from one to the other vaguely, uncertain what to call their affair.
‘Five months. Since …’ Juno turned to Rob, clasped his hand in hers and smiled, ‘July the twelfth at quarter past five.’ They both giggled, school-kid conspirators.
That was about the time Himself had been promoted. Orla recalled gripes from Juno about being left to her own devices, with neither a husband nor a confidante to call her own.
‘We bumped into each other in town, outside Bewlay’s café.’ Juno tripped over her words. ‘Rob was—’
‘—on my way home from work.’
‘I was getting new crowns done.’ She tapped her front teeth at Juno. ‘Like them?’
‘They’re great.’ Her old teeth, slightly gappy, had been cute.
‘We chatted a bit, then Rob said—’
‘Let’s have a coffee,’ said Rob.
&
nbsp; ‘So we popped in to Bewlay’s—’
‘—and our lives changed,’ said Rob, his gaze unwaveringly on Juno.
Feeling very much the third wheel, Orla raised her glass to them, then lowered it halfway, uncertain of the etiquette around adultery.
‘Juno wanted to tell you. Didn’t you, darling?’ Rob looked for, and got, an affirmation from Juno, as if asking his mummy if he could have more cake. ‘But there was never a right time.’
‘I’ve been bursting to confess but—’ began Juno, cut off again by Rob.
‘Not confess. We’re not doing anything wrong.’
‘Well …’ Juno looked as if she might contest that, but instead she chucked Rob’s cheek like a child’s and said, ‘There was never a right time. And I know you’re fond of,’ – she looked at Rob apologetically, as if swearing – ‘of Himself. I’ve been terrified of you finding out. You think I’m a bitch, don’t you?’
‘I don’t think you’re a bitch. I think you’re an adult and you can make your own decisions.’
Even if one of them is to embark on a love affair with a frankly dull man who left your sister when she was pregnant because he had to, for Jaysus’ sake, ‘find himself’.
Orla trusted Juno not to put innocents at risk for the sake of a fling, so there had to be more to this story and Orla didn’t care to hear it in the Rose.
‘Come on. Back to mine. Cheese on toast, wine, chat. Yes?’
‘Oh yes!’ grinned Juno as if she’d been promised a guided tour of the hanging gardens of Babylon. ‘I’ve missed you so much. And I want to hear all your news, too, yeah?’
‘Yeah.’ Orla led the way, privately qualifying that ‘yeah’; Juno didn’t need to hear all her news.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Despite the fug of her new affair, Juno was sensitive enough to despatch Rob to their hotel for part of Saturday so she could have some time with her oldest friend, just the two of them.
‘Well,’ she said eagerly, as they walked together along the Embankment, self-conscious tourists, ‘what do you think?’
‘Of Rob?’ Orla stared out at the lazy Thames. ‘I’ve met him before, Ju.’
‘Yeah, but he was just my sister’s husband then. I mean, what do you make of us together?’
‘Um, he’s a nice guy. Quiet.’ This wasn’t nearly enough to satisfy Juno, Orla knew, so she added, ‘And he’s wild about you, anybody can see that.’
‘Can you?’ Juno did a short, impromptu Riverdance. She was the antithesis of Orla: sketchy, nippy, thin. ‘He’s so nice, Orla. I never appreciated that in a man before. He’s sweet to me. I think about him all the time.’ Juno stopped walking, stopped swinging her Union Jack carrier bag. ‘Do you think about Marek all day too?’ She’d skirted around the subject of Marek, wary of pushing too hard, but was obviously eager to learn more.
The wind dashing her hair into her face, Orla said, ‘It’s different with me and Marek. Because, I’ve just lost Sim. Yes, just,’ she insisted at the flicker of dispute in Juno’s eye, ‘and it’s complicated. Not as complicated as you and Rob, admittedly.’
She booted the conversation back to Juno’s end of the pitch. Her own reluctance to enthuse about Marek dismayed her. She’d never been a gusher – in the early days with Sim she’d been just as circumspect – but she could feel herself keeping it in. Perhaps she was waiting for it all to go wrong, for Marek to agree with Sim that Orla wasn’t worth the trouble.
Quite when she’d grown so cancerously pessimistic, Orla wasn’t sure.
‘Our relationship isn’t complicated.’ Juno spoke with the certainty of a woman wilfully in the wrong. ‘I love him and he loves me back. Simple.’
‘Oh come on, Ju. It’s not so simple for Fionnuala, is it? Or Himself. Or Jack. Or your niece.’ They seemed to have agreed without saying so not to use Poppy’s name, as if they were on a daytime chav-spat show.
‘Do you hate me for this?’
‘Not this again! If I did hate you, would it matter? I’m not one of the people who could be hurt by it, so it’s not my opinion you should be worried about, Ju.’ Orla caved at Juno’s crestfallen expression. ‘And of course I don’t hate you. I couldn’t. Mainly I’m scared for you. All of you.’ Except Rob, she silently qualified.
As if obeying a secret signal, they both turned away from the river, companionably knocking into each other as they meandered towards the boxy bulk of the National Theatre.
‘He’s very calm,’ said Orla eventually, feeling she should throw Rob a bone of a compliment.
‘Oh, so calm!’ Juno grabbed the scant praise and ran with it. ‘He’s like a rock.’
Glib, serene, Rob verged on the plastic. He was new, with no philosophy or history about him, as if unwrapped fresh every day from cellophane. Orla had never known what Fionnuala saw in him, and for him to lasso the younger sister’s heart too was incredible. She didn’t hate Juno for embarking on an affair with Rob – they’d been through too much together for hate to gain a foothold between them – but she did wonder at her lack of concern for the innocent parties.
‘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 Valentine's Card Page 23
