The Valentine's Card

by Juliet Ashton

  I feel as if I’ve woken from a dream where I was standing on a ledge high above traffic. One more minute and I would have stepped off. But I didn’t.

  So, O, I’ve lied, I’ve made a fool of you, I’ve been a bastard over and over again. I need you to know all that and I need you to forgive.

  This card is really one big question – can you forgive? Can we start again?

  OK. Another biggie coming up. This affair – which is OVER – was with Reece. I don’t know if I fancy men – I just know that Reece was a comet streaking across my sky. I have to tell you, in this new spirit of honesty, that the relationship was intense, life-changing, unexpected and a roller coaster but crucially it wasn’t YOU.

  I’ll never, ever, ever lie to you again. I’m different now. This has changed me. I’ll cut Reece off utterly. I’ve cauterised the relationship by letter, a brief and cruel one, and I have no doubt that he hates me now. I must live with that.

  Do you still love me? Call me and tell me you still love me. Now. And while you’re on the phone, tell me you’ll marry me. This year. This month? Tomorrow, if you like. You keep me on the straight and narrow (no pun intended).

  I want to be faithful. I want to be a good man. I want to be your man. It’s finally clicked. We’re real, Orla.

  My life is in your hands, my beautiful executioner.

  Sx

  Orla re-read it, twice. Sitting back on her heels, she let the card slip out of her hands and looked up at the ceiling map of cracks and wrinkles.

  Everything shifted.

  Shadows lengthened and contracted as her perspective altered.

  Sim’s lover had been in plain view the whole time.

  Orla had never considered Reece’s sexuality. He was modern, urbane, private. He was a strut for others, with no apparent needs.

  But everybody has needs, Orla corrected herself sharply. Every human being needs love. It’s not a trivial need, it’s not copyrighted to Hallmark Cards. Love is a natural resource, like sunlight or water, without which we’d all wither and die.

  Any minute now the hatred should arrive for the Machiavellian man who’d denied her the truth, let her cry on his shoulder, turned a false mask towards her.

  It didn’t arrive, and Orla couldn’t see it on the horizon. She’d woken up that morning with a large landscape in her mind, an appropriate panorama for what she had to do. To see today through, she needed to be brave, she needed to be philosophical. And now this package had dropped from the sky, and it demanded much the same of her.

  There’s no way to keep love out. Orla had fallen for Marek before she was officially ready in much the same way as Sim and Reece had given in to their feelings about each other.

  Everybody says yes to love. Everybody in their right mind.

  The journal sat, fat and smug, on the floorboards. Orla opened it, heard the soft flump flump flump as the yellowy pages fell on one another. It was all here. Her life with Sim in perfect chronological order right up until the moment the clocks stopped.

  His handwriting flashed by, hieroglyphics ready to give up their code. She was the keeper of the secrets now.

  A feeling like a dove landing in her chest.

  Orla turned to the last page. She read the date, then an impulse made her check her watch.

  She was going to be late. Orla snatched up the journal and tore out of the door.

  Her boots were purposeful. Head erect, arms crossed over the journal, the new landscape in Orla’s head held: despite the clamour of Ladbroke Grove, she was on a wide beautiful plain and could think in a step by step, forensic manner.

  Effortlessly she read between the lines of the second, last, real valentine.

  You would have done it again, Sim. There is an Irish saying, ‘What do you expect from a cat but kittens?’ Sim was a pleasure baby who could deny himself nothing: he demanded gratification as his right. If he’d lived, he’d have gone on to fresh conquests.

  She halted suddenly, a no-no on a busy London pavement. With a ‘Sorry! Sorry!’, she stepped to the kerb, to the side of a vast rusting skip. Orla opened the journal at its last page, read the entry. And smiled.

  For what had Sim done after writing that plea to Saint Valentine to intervene? He’d set off to find Reece.

  Orla’s well-documented passivity had meant she’d never questioned just what an actor was doing outside his agent’s headquarters at six a.m. He’d been heading for Reece’s pied-à-terre, above the office.

  You’d already gone back on your promise, Orla pointed out. You were trying to intercept the card before he read it. She thought of Sim, panic-stricken, trying to wrench control of the future back from the valentine, unaware that his future was only minutes long.

  You hadn’t changed, you couldn’t. Sim was slippery, evasive, dishonest. And glorious and warm and irresistible. Lovable. A lovable man.

  You and I should have been a fling.

  Orla tossed the journal into the skip. The soft crash of its landing put an end to their dialogue. She didn’t need to know the whys and wherefores. None of it mattered. It was a historical document. Everything she really needed to know she carried within her.

  Orla crossed the road, dodging the traffic, confident that one particular Saint – and it wasn’t Jude – would grant her special protection against the number seven bus bearing down on her.

  Be there, she begged. Really begged.

  Orla’s blood pounded. The landscape in her mind changed slightly. Colour crept in, as when rain soaks the ground after a long drought. She’d been through the contemplation and reassessment, and now that it was time for action she couldn’t wait.

  Three quarters full, the café was quiet, the kind of quiet a library generates, except this was the sacred hush of man communing with food. Orla was the only female, bar the bored-looking woman who sold her two rogalicki and a syrupy coffee.

  Orla stood by the chair opposite Marek. ‘May I?’

  He’d seen her come in, looking up from his steaming plate of something foreign, and kept his eyes on her as she pushed her tray along the counter and paid at the till.

  Marek nodded and laid down his cutlery. He was properly silent: he wouldn’t speak, this silence said, until she’d laid out her wares.

  She’d remembered his eyes many times, but never caught the history in them, a fable of duty and loss and experience. And loneliness.

  It had taken a while to interpret that last one. Marek had such stature and confidence. He was a strider. He asked for no favours. But he was lonely and he needed a companion, a partner, somebody for him to protect who would protect him in return. Somebody who understood him.

  Taking a seat, Orla placed her cup and plate just so. She licked her lips. The urn hissed. Somebody turned the page of a newspaper.

  Orla began.

  ‘You don’t have to say a thing. But you should know that I heard what you said to me. I heard it and now I want to say it back to you. I love you, Marek. If I’ve missed the boat, that’s my problem but I need you to hear me. You don’t have to answer me. That’s not the point. But I need you to know that you are loved. And missed. And wanted. And here’s a rogalicki, because I know you like them.’

  Orla held out the small sweet crescent, its sugar coating gritty on her fingertips, to Marek, who hesitated then took it.

  He broke the biscuit, dipped it in his coffee and bit into it before he spoke.