The Valentine's Card (2 page)

She thought about Sim with her entire body. Her mind couldn’t pin down any one thing long enough for it to qualify as a thought, but her body, or maybe her being, resonated with him. He was in the dust that floated in the streams of sunlight through the dormer window. He was the soft nubbly feel of the bath mat beneath her feet. He was colour, he was sound.

He could not
be gone.

Orla made herself a cup of tea and heard the doorbell ring as if it were under water.

‘Howaya!’

Juno stepped over the threshold with the mandatory Dublin greeting and the
droit de seigneur
of an old friend.

‘I was on me way to the gym, lady of leisure that I am, and I saw your car in the drive. What’s up? Flu?
Love
sickness?’ She executed a showy swoon, but straightened up as she took in Orla’s face. ‘Something
is
wrong.’

‘Tea?’ Orla passed her, went to the kitchen. She opened the fridge. The food in it was like the food in her childhood doll’s house, painted lumps. She couldn’t imagine tasting food again.

‘Is it this lurgy that’s going around?’ Juno dipped and weaved around the kitchen, trying to get a good look at Orla as she travelled from kettle to tap to cupboard.

‘I had Oreos, but they’ve all gone.’

It was better, this display of normality for Juno, than the ugly confusion of earlier, and Orla clung to it, fending off the moment when she’d have to say the words out loud.

‘I’m not hungry,’ said Juno, hoisting herself on to the work-top.

‘Your hair looks great,’ Orla said to her friend.

Hair. Imagine hair mattering
. She caught a glimpse of them both in the chrome of the cooker hood. Juno’s hair was fiery ginger, her face bright. Orla’s own face was a parchment smudge under black hair. She raked her fingers through the tousles. It felt alien to her. Her eyes were still recognisably her own, though, blue … but dulled.

Juno was
yabbering, chit-chatting, picking up the salt cellar and pouring some into the palm of her hand. She was so alive it hurt to look at her. Orla returned to her own reflection, a whey ghost haunting its kitchen. She wondered what Sim looked like now. Not his body, but his essence. Up to now he’d
been
his body, now he was … Orla had no idea how to finish the thought, and so she plunged back into precious conversational banality, extending it, wallowing in it.

‘Don’t spill salt, Ju, it’s bad luck.’ Her lips stuck to her teeth. She squeezed out a tea bag and carried it ceremoniously to the pedal bin. She trod on the pedal, the lid yawned open and the tea bag plunged past it, to the floor.

Orla dropped the spoon. A terrible noise emerged from deep within her, like an animal backing out of a tight space, like something afraid of being burned alive.

‘He can’t be.’ Juno said it over and over. ‘He just can’t.’

Juno and Sim had been wary of each other, each critical of the other, each resenting the other’s importance to Orla, their beloved piggy in the middle.

Orla envied Juno her reaction. It was linear. There were copious tears but Orla could sense an ending. At some point, Juno would dry her eyes, shake herself and attend to things, whereas Orla was a blob on the fabric of time: she had no journey ahead of her, just this sprawling
now
. She didn’t say any of this. It sounded melodramatic, and she knew that Juno relied on her for common sense.

‘His agent called me. It happened in …’ This part was hard to say. In a sea of drear, she hated this detail most of all. ‘In the street.’

‘But what
is
a pulmonary embolism?’ Juno’s fifth tissue gave up and she accepted the one Orla held out. Her nose – rather a long nose – was bright red. She was hunched in her tight black sports gear, like a spider. ‘He hadn’t been ill. Had he? Sim’s never ill.’

‘I don’t know what
a pulmonary embolism is. Something to do with the lungs?’ It hardly mattered to her. It had killed him. It could have been a bullet or a stroke or a giant custard pie to the face: knowledge wouldn’t help here. Even if Orla were Ireland’s foremost authority on pulmonary embolisms, Sim would still be dead.

‘Have you spoken to your ma?’ There it was, that decisive sniff: Juno was rallying.

‘Not yet.’

‘I’ll call her for you.’ Juno stood up. ‘And the school.’ She was brisk again, if depleted. ‘You’ll get through this,’ she said, and it sounded like a threat. ‘You have me and you have your ma and your family and your pupils and
everybody
. We’ll get you through.’

How?
was all Orla could think. Juno was well-meaning but how on earth was she supposed to ‘get through’ losing Sim without, well, Sim?

‘What’s this?’ Juno stooped to pick up a pink rectangle. ‘Oh, it’s …’ She bit her lip, looked apologetically at Orla.

‘I’d forgotten about that.’ Orla took the valentine and held it reverentially. ‘Aw,’ she said, a sweet sound, the first un-ugly noise she’d made since the call. ‘It’s from him.’

*

Housework was a relic of past times, something she used to do. The cottage slumbered beneath three days’ worth of dust as Miss Orla Havisham slumped swathed in a blanket, staring blankly at a television screen that yodelled unheard. She saw only Sim, as if her brain were a film projector loaded with old movies.

The troops had rallied. The
school was ‘brilliant’, as Orla put it, offering her as much leave as she needed. The Cassidys pulled together and Orla received all the casseroles and sponge cakes and offers of help she could ever need. The food went in the bin, the offers were forgotten.

The pink envelope, still unopened, had replaced Orla’s Ryanair tickets centre stage on the mantelpiece. It was constantly on the move, tailing her from bedside to bathroom cabinet to kitchen shelf. It was a symbol, but of what Orla wasn’t sure. She panicked if it was out of sight, yet opening it was out of the question. She knew what she would read. And it would slay her.

If only
, she thought, with the sort of histrionics she detested,
if only something really
could
kill me
.

Sim was good at writing cards. Not for him a hasty ‘Lots of love’, or hurried signature. All his written messages to Orla were careful compositions. She’d kept them all, and had only recently bought a flat-pack container in which to house them. Large, striped in turquoise and cream, it had the presence of an Edwardian hatbox and now sat lidless on the coffee table day and night.

Every so often, Orla dipped her hand inside, as if fishing for tiddlers. His first ‘I love you’ was there, inside a Hello Kitty card (he knew all her secret vices). That was hard to look at now, yet she read it umpteen times a day, along with the card with Al Pacino on the front that contained an impassioned plea for forgiveness after some argument she couldn’t remember, and his ode to the dark depths of her hair as it coiled about her naked freckled shoulders. He’d committed that one to a Snoopy card.

Somewhere in there was the card
he’d sent her on his second day in London, a collage of red phone boxes, the London Eye, bearskin-wearing soldiers and a pigeon.

Why the pigeon?
(He’d arrowed the bird.)
The flat is AMAZING. You’d adore it. Yes, don’t frown, you bloody would. The area is very, very LONDON. Cosmopolitan, vibrant, full of life. Very Sim! And it could be very Orla if you weren’t such a stubborn old bat. Lucky that I find stubborn old bats v. v. sexy. X

This morning’s fishing expedition had hooked a glossy reproduction of an old photo of St Stephen’s Green, the famous patch of park bang in the centre of Dublin he’d sent her in 2010.

Live with me. Come on! Live with me and be my love. It’s cheaper, cosier, with much much more snuggling (you do know what I mean by snuggling, don’t you?) I can’t have you out of my sight for one minute longer than necessary. I’ll clear out a wardrobe and a drawer and an entire shelf in the bathroom. You can cook for me. The fun will never end!

This invitation Orla had declined with wide eyes. ‘Are you crazy or what? Me, live in your ma and da’s basement? Imagine what your mother would say. I don’t think so, Simeon Quinn.’ Sim had replied on a charity notelet, explaining that he couldn’t do without ‘the olds’ (as he called them) financial support, but come the big break, come fame and fortune, he and Orla would buy a big house, he’d pop the question, they’d waltz down the aisle, do the baby thing and generally be as happy as any two sane humans could.

The big break had
come about – Orla’s doubts confounded, Sim’s confidence rewarded – and now here was the valentine throbbing with its unheard question. Every other missive from Sim had been torn open and devoured, but Orla debated with herself whether to read this one. The last one.

Mightn’t it
soothe
her? Wouldn’t it be marvellous to hear him again, if only in her head?

No,
she’d countered,
it feckin’ wouldn’t
. Why put herself through such made-to-measure agony? Why hear a dead man ask to spend the rest of his life with her?
Just one more day and we’d have been engaged
. She shuddered, and made a firm decision never to read it, but to keep it within touching distance. If the house burst into flames it would be the first, only, possession she’d grab.

Wedding days held no appeal. White frocks, aiming her bouquet overarm at a smartly dressed mob – no. Orla was a romantic, not a show off. Like many women, she’d been planning her ‘big day’ since she could first draw a meringue dress with a crayon, but when she visualised it, it was the meaning and emotion she conjured up. Her wedding would be plain and simple – no theme, few bells and whistles. She had imagined herself and Sim in nice new clothes, kissing on the top of the hill beyond Tobercree, having just been blessed by the same Father Gerry who’d married her parents and baptised all five Cassidy kids. There’d be an outdoor lunch on trestle tables. If she could be arsed, she’d hang a few lanterns from the trees. Their friends would carry on drinking and eating pork pies until late. Martha Stewart might throw her hands up in horror but Orla and Sim would be man and wife, wife and man (Orla’s feminism could be pedantic). They would be married.

But of course, thanks to a pulmonary
embolism, they wouldn’t.

Orla tucked the valentine behind the mirror frame as she pinned up her haystack of unwashed hair. She noticed a line under one of her greeny-blue eyes and, hairpins held between her teeth, leaned in to assess it. She peered closer. It had some friends, crowding at the corner of her eye.

Orla had a vivid premonition of her future face, worn and kind and telling its story. Sim, she thought, would never see her old lady face.

Chapter Two

Right from the start, Sim’s mother
had deemed that Orla was not good enough for her son. Wealthy, connected: not even Ireland’s recession could dent the Quinns’ bulletproof status. Sim was destined to marry a society gal, someone with long tan legs and a trust fund. Their town house was their castle, and when Lucy Quinn had spotted Orla approaching she’d pulled up the drawbridge.

‘Let’s avoid the olds,’ Sim always said as they slipped down to his basement pad. An only child, he was the fulcrum of his parents’ complicated, sophisticated partnership, a marriage so different to the one that Orla had sprung from that it was hard to compare the two. Before her father died, Orla’s parents had bickered non-stop, finding loud, creative ways to abuse each other for leaving the dishcloth in the sink, or forgetting to tape
Coronation Street
or backing out of the drive ‘like a feckin’ head-the-ball’. All was forgotten as soon as it was said, grudges were never held, and dinner-time restored peace over the gammon before war flared again over the arctic roll.

Arguments in the Quinn home centred around ancient wounds, opaque resentments to do with money, other women and broken promises. The miasma in the high-ceilinged rooms made Orla grateful for her family’s ordinariness, for the da who taught history and ma who permed hair in the Tobercree salon.

Death creates strange alliances. For the first time in her life, Orla
wanted
to talk to Sim’s mother.

They’d left messages. The latest
came while Orla lay in a bath, her fingertips wrinkling like walnuts. The sound of that patrician English accent, as redolent of privilege as an ermine stole, had made her sit up from beneath the diminishing foam.

‘Orla, it’s Lucy. You’re not there again. Where do you get to? There are arrangements you should know about. I need to tick you off my list. Call me when you have a moment.’

Moments, thought Orla, wrapping a towel around herself as she padded over to the phone, were all she had. Her future consisted of millions of moments, each a perfect bubble of longing and regret and a fury at fate. She dialled the number.

‘Lucy, hello. It’s Orla.’ It was necessary to introduce herself, she wasn’t in the habit of calling her almost-mother-in-law. ‘How are you?’ She was sick of the question herself, had come close to rage at Ma and Juno and everybody else who asked her, but really, how else could they put it?

‘I’m better than I was,’ said Lucy carefully. She always spoke carefully, as if picking glass out of her teeth, but today especially so. ‘And you? It’s a terrible shock.’

The unending understatement. ‘Yes. I can’t really believe it. I keep hoping there’s been a mistake.’

‘No mistake. I saw him.’

‘You—’ Breath fled Orla’s lungs.

‘I flew over immediately. I went to the hospital.’

‘I didn’t even—’ It hadn’t occurred to Orla to do any such thing. She had receded, wormlike; this Chanel-wearing, pearl-toting woman had ‘immediately’ jumped on a plane. Orla felt selfish, ashamed. ‘How did he look?’ she asked pathetically.

‘What a question!’ Lucy batted it away. ‘The funeral is Monday. Ten a.m. at St Mary’s Pro Cathedral. Afterwards at the Shelbourne. Do you wish to bring anybody?’

‘Ma. My mother, I mean. I know she wants to pay her respects.’

‘Oh.’ Lucy sighed, irritated. ‘Very
well. I suppose we can make room.’