The Valentine's Card

by Juliet Ashton

  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.

  But then he didn’t know where she’d been.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Da was a vague presence, a benign bundle of memories, but sometimes Orla remembered him so vividly that she could smell the pipe smoke that always curled about him, and hear his introspective chuckle. She had a sensory flashback now, as she queued in the post office to mail the last wave of presents home.

  Da had been a safer port than Ma. Orla’s mother believed that children should speak up in company, pushing Orla forward when fearsome relatives visited. Da would let his smallest girl hide behind his legs, safe from the grown-ups and their non-stop questions about how old she was and what was her favourite subject and wasn’t she the image of her mammy? Da understood. With him, all five Cassidy kids felt like only children; Orla’s shyness had been part-and-parcel of her Orlaness, not something to be corrected.

  And as quickly as Da’s essence appeared, it receded, leaving Orla with tears in her eyes: a Daddy’s Girl with no daddy.

  Pulling herself together, Orla looked about her. Perhaps Maude’s exposure therapy could start with a trip to the post office. Really just a chaotic corner of a convenience store, it smelled homely, of cooking and people, and was two minutes’ walk from the book shop.

  A small parcel fell from her pile and she squatted to pick it up. By its size and weight she judged it to be the Enid Blyton books for her niece, Niamh. These stragglers probably wouldn’t reach home before Christmas, but Orla couldn’t bear to leave anybody out. Word had got out in Tobercree that Orla wouldn’t be home for Christmas, but her plea of ‘No presents please!’ hadn’t; each morning brought a fresh batch of brown-paper packages that she guessed would reveal themselves on Christmas morning as a slag heap of novelty slippers and talc.

  The Cassidys didn’t do minimalism, particularly not at Christmas.

  The queue inched forward as the frontrunner turned away from the counter. Slight but erect in a raincoat devoid of the merest insolent crease, George passed her.

  Orla put a hand out, and he stopped. He smiled, creasing his faded eyes.

  ‘Hello there,’ he said.

  He smelled of pipe smoke: perhaps he’d prompted Orla’s reverie. ‘Could I have a word, George? I’m Orla, by the way.’

  ‘I felt you deserved an explanation.’ Orla watched George’s face as he took in her story. He’d suggested the chip shop for a cup of tea as they granted a discount to pensioners. There is an Irish expression, gregging, which means a smell or sight bringing on ravenous hunger: it’s fair to say the smell of fish and chips was gregging Orla.

  ‘It wasn’t the real Maude speaking when she shouted at you.’

  ‘I was rather surprised.’ George was as restrained as his outfit. ‘I admire the lady greatly.’

  ‘I’ll let you into a secret. She misses you coming in to see her.’ Good thing Maude couldn’t hear all this, thought Orla, or the old lady would slap her in the face with a battered hake.

  ‘Does she?’ George pressed his lips together. ‘This is all a great shame, then, Rola.’

  No point in correcting him again. She’d already been Oola and Only. ‘It is. But there’s hope. Have you ever heard of exposure therapy?’

  Unsurprisingly, George hadn’t. Orla filled him in, noting the strained look on his face, as if he’d seen something he shouldn’t, a flash of knicker or a bra strap.

  ‘Is this really any of my business?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Orla emphatically. ‘Because you can be part of it.’ She ploughed on, dismayed by his look of faint distaste. ‘Once I’ve managed to coax her out on a few short journeys, perhaps you could ask her out to dinner again? Or for a stroll? It could be an incentive.’

  ‘But what has this to do with me?’ George looked affronted, eking out coins and piling them on the table. ‘I’m sorry for your friend, very sorry, but really, to talk about, well, it’s not proper.’ He stood, belting his coat even tighter. ‘I wish Maude all the best but I have troubles of my own,’ he said. ‘Goodbye to you, Nylon.’

  Sim’s journal

  27 November 2011

  O called. I was in the mood for friskiness but she wanted me to measure my arms. This can mean only one thing – Ma Cassidy is knitting the dreaded Christmas jumper. There is another life out there that I can have by clicking my fingers. A life where the Christmas jumper comes from Christian LaCroix. I just can’t click my fucking fingers. Not yet, anyway.

  ‘How did this creep up on me? It’s next Tuesday! How am I going to get through it?’

  ‘Christmas didn’t creep up on you, Ju. It’s beautifully predictable, the same date every year. Take your head out of your hands, lady. You’re making my computer screen look like Sky News coverage of a Middle East hostage situation. You’ve still got a few days to wriggle out of Christmas Day at Fionnuala’s. Make some excuse.’

  ‘But it’s the only way I’ll spend Christmas or at least part of it with Rob.’

  ‘Is that so important?’

  ‘Yes, actually. I’d like to spend Christmas with the man I love. It’s not such a big ask.’

  ‘Is Rob looking forward to sitting around a turkey with his ex-wife, his daughter, his lover who’s the ex’s sister, and his lover’s husband and his lover’s son?’

  ‘Jaysus, my life is a bad soap opera. He’s very cool about it. Rob’s very cool about most things. That’s one of the reasons I love being around him. He soothes me.’

  ‘Maybe he’s enjoying it.’

  ‘Nah, no way, that would be weird. He’s just very capable, very calm.’

  ‘Fake a headache on the day. That’s what Deirdre does every time she wants to get out of something. Everybody knows she’s pulling a fast one but nobody dares say so.’

  ‘But then I’ll miss Rob.’

  ‘This is circular. We’re back at the beginning again.’

  ‘Himself is looking at me sideways. He knows something’s up. He can smell the sexual satisfaction I radiate.’

  ‘Be careful, Ju. Don’t rush into anything. Think of Jack.’

  ‘The best thing for Jack is a happy Mammy!’

  ‘You know what I’d like? A special elixir that locks everybody’s emotions down the instant they fall in love.’

  ‘I would refuse to take it.’

  The room felt quiet after Juno said goodbye, called inevitably away to Jack and an interface between a white sofa and a jammy hand. When Orla had first arrived in the little L-shaped flat she’d been aghast at the non-stop intrusive noise that leaked in through every window. Now her ears automatically blotted out the urban opera: now the flat was too quiet.

  Quiet can be a euphemism for lonely: that certainly applied here, with all Orla’s personnel otherwise occupied. Juno was in a whole other country. Maude was dozing upstairs. The twentieth was the day Ma put up the tree and ladled it with far too many decorations. And Marek was working overtime, pitching in with ‘the lads’ to meet a Christmas deadline.

  She imagined him in a hard hat, breaking a sweat. She knew he’d be as good at knocking
down walls as he was at negotiating deals. Orla’s fingers itched: she’d like to knock down a wall herself. Physical graft might distract her.

  Maybe, she thought, it’s just Christmas. The season to be cheerful is equally the season to be lonely, after all. For somebody who generally liked – and, growing up with a mass of siblings, had occasionally craved – her own company, Orla was doing her best to avoid herself, picking up and putting down a magazine, pulling together a haphazard sandwich and leaving it uneaten, cleaning a bathroom that was already spotless.

  The television was no help. Eight zillion channels and nothing worth watching. Orla’s iPad, now joined by the laptop, was imprisoned in a distant cupboard out on the landing, her tiny flat’s version of Siberia. Technology couldn’t help.

  If only she could fast-forward to Christmas. She would be grounded then, distracted, surrounded by people, her people, with much to do. It would be another anniversary ticked off and survived; her first Christmas since Sim had died.

  It wasn’t as if their last Christmas together had been joyful. He’d acquiesced to a plan that had dismayed her, but if they’d known it would be his last Christmas, perhaps Sim could have withstood Lucy’s maternal thumbscrews, her we never see you, darling, can’t we have you to ourselves, just you, at Christmas lunch this once?

  Belatedly, a penny dropped.

  His protestations against Lucy’s selfishness had been far too baroque all along, and his disappointment at missing lunch with Orla’s family had struck her as false. A year on, the truth rose to the surface, decomposed and rank.

  When Sim had come to Orla on Christmas night, an hour later than promised, he was fresh from Anthea.

  It shouldn’t sting so much.

  But it was Christmas! Once again, Orla was full to the brim with feelings she couldn’t put anywhere. There was nobody to rant at, nobody to shake and ask, How could you?

  Off to Siberia she went, where it was cold, and the climate suited her better.