The Valentine's Card (23 page)

‘I get the best guys in. A perk of my position.’

Not all the homes Marek built came with wrinkle-reducing lighting and bespoke cabinetry; Orla had seen folders of his pet projects, the social housing where space per family was limited and budgets were tight. Neat, pleasing, well planned, they looked like somewhere she could live. He built honest houses, warm and welcoming.

‘Are you rich?’ asked Orla abruptly, surprising Marek into halting a ladle halfway to the dishwasher.

‘Rich? That’s a child’s word. Nobody’s rich any more. Nobody has gold under the bed. Money is abstract, virtual.’

‘Quit stalling, Rabbit.’ Since learning that Marek’s surname, Zajak, was derived from the Polish for hare or rabbit, Orla had coined a new nickname, pleased with how much it didn’t suit him. ‘You’re rich or you’re not. To give you an example – I’m not.’

‘I’m comfortable, I suppose.’ Marek
smiled, dimples deepening. ‘To say
I’m rich
sounds all wrong. I work hard is how I prefer to put it.’

‘Do you think you would have done so well without Aga spurring you on at the start?’

Aga could be mentioned, unlike Sim. There was a particular face Marek assumed when her name came up, one of formal blandness that nevertheless spoke of pain.

‘Possibly not. I wasn’t ambitious until I got my first taste of success and that was all down to pleasing her. Then I found I was good at making homes, and I enjoyed it. So I have a lot to thank her for.’

Poor old Aga
, thought Orla. She didn’t live long enough to outgrow her greed. Perhaps she and Marek would have made a go of things if she’d survived. Perhaps they’d still be together and Orla would be sitting all alone bathed in unflattering lighting. This glimpse of an alternative present made her cough, shift position, boot the thought away. Her feelings about Marek often manifested indirectly. Orla could imagine the hurt she’d experience if she suddenly lost him, yet had difficulty admitting how she felt with him right there in front of her. She sighed for her romantic two left feet.

‘I like that you call it “making homes”,’ she said. ‘Sounds so much nicer than property developer.’

‘Your mother preferred property developer.’

‘Don’t remind me, Marek. You got the full Cassidy third degree. Da wouldn’t have asked you a single thing. He went on instinct. Ma likes information. Lots of it.’

‘Hmm.’ Marek was smug. ‘I think she likes me.’

‘It’s safe to say she does.’

Orla remembered Ma’s gulping, squawked summing up.

‘Janey Mac, Orla, you fell on your feet
there! You kept him quiet, you little madam, and me eating me heart out with worry that you’d be a spinster like your Great Aunty Peggy, you know, the one with the funny foot. Doesn’t he talk lovely? He’s like an aristocrat, with that lovely accent and he reckons he’s a property developer and he looks after his sister so he has a good heart and he says, so nice, so proper, “You raised a lovely daughter, Mrs Cassidy,” imagine hearing that from—’ Ma had stopped short of her first criticism of Saint Sim.

Orla hadn’t meant to introduce Marek to Ma that evening; such events had to be planned with care and approached with caution, like a zookeeper introducing bashful pandas in the hope they might mate. Marek had simply mouthed ‘Your mother?’ at her and taken the phone.

As Orla died a thousand deaths she heard Marek’s responses to Ma’s quick-fire interrogation. ‘Yes, once, I’m afraid I’m a widower, Mrs Cassidy … I’m about ten years older than your daughter … I have my own business … Poland … yes, I’m a Catholic! … more than twenty years ago …’ At this point he’d looked puzzled but ploughed on with ‘My favourite Eurovision winner would be Dana with “All Kinds of Everything”, I guess.’

‘I like your
Ma
.’ Marek drawled the word as he ran water into the sink. ‘She is a proper mother. She doesn’t try to be your friend. Now I must meet Juney.’

‘Juno,’ Orla corrected him. ‘She’s busy with her little boy.’ That was glib, and Orla divined from Marek’s silence that he knew she was stalling. Juno would fly to London in a heartbeat, Jack on her hip. ‘She already likes the sound of you, anyway.’
For starters,
thought Orla,
you’re not Sim
.

During a hurried Skype
over breakfast that morning, mostly dedicated to complaining about the camera, Juno had said, all in a rush, ‘You know these conversations hold me together, don’t you? You wouldn’t give up on me, O, would you? Not even if I did something terrible?’

Orla’s toast-crunching had ceased at Juno’s tone. ‘Have you murdered somebody, Ju?’

‘Not yet. Although if Himself falls asleep in front of
Newsnight
again I don’t hold myself responsible for my actions. I miss you sitting on my shoulder. You’re my conscience.’

‘I am
not
,’ Orla had roared, her outrage only partially mock. ‘You’re an Irish Catholic, proud owner of the most highly developed conscience in history. You don’t need me to tell you right from wrong.’

‘S’pose not.’ Juno had sounded miserable.

Back in the moment, the delicious moment, with seconds of roast chicken in front of her and an easy-on-the-eye man rinsing dishes a few feet away, Orla murmured, ‘Perhaps I should see her soon.’

But Juno would know. She’d take one look and
know
that Orla was planning something toxic.

What was it about London, wondered Orla, that made people do things they had to hide from the ones who knew them best?

Back when Orla’s worst vice was biting her nails, Ma would come at her with the Stop ’n’ Grow; seven-year-old Orla would dodge around the kitchen table, shrieking with laughter.

As we grow more sophisticated, so do
our bad habits. Orla’s colleagues were addicted to gossip: the current hot staffroom topic was the burgeoning dalliance between the office manager and the newest tutor. Orla, busy withstanding the lure of her own habit, left them to it on the central lagoon of sofas and folded her legs beneath her on an islet built for one, an uncomfortable chair upholstered in nubbly material by a radiator. Beneath her chair, her iPad dozed in her bag, its wonders dormant. She’d made a promise to Marek; it was off limits.

Ruddy red cheeks, flattened nose and an upper body that threatened to rip through the constraints of his M&S machine-washable suit told the most casual onlooker that Cal was a rugger-bugger. His Irish forebears made natural allies of him and Orla in the staffroom, but it wasn’t the only reason he sought her out this lunchtime. His crush on Orla was common knowledge amongst the staff and the main reason soft-hearted Orla always greeted him warmly even though he bored her rigid. Cal’s passions were rugby and beer, and they were pretty much all he talked about.

‘Not feeling sociable today?’ Cal dragged over a section of the low-level modular seating that sat like toy furniture in the massive room whose Victorian bone structure was mocked by the college’s preferred laminate and plastic. ‘Usually you’re in the thick of it.’

‘Not today,’ said Orla grinning toothily, overcompensating for her real response to Cal – boredom.

‘Man,’ groaned Cal, unwrapping a Mars Bar lustily, ‘I was wrecked yesterday evening.’

Ninety-nine per cent of Cal’s stories
began this way, just as the denouement always featured him falling out of a minicab with a traffic cone on his head.

‘Were you?’

‘Yeah. I was out of it. Fell asleep in the kebab shop. My mates covered me in ketchup. Woke up and thought I’d been stabbed. Classic.’

‘You’re a crazy bunch, all right.’ Orla chatted on automatic pilot, her thoughts catching on her bag, out of her sight but pulsing beneath the chair. ‘Early night tonight, then?’

‘Nah. Hair of the bloody dog!’ Cal held up his polystyrene cup of machine coffee in salute to his own recklessness before describing, in meticulous detail, his contribution to his team’s victory prior to the kebab shop hilarity.

Cal droned on, Orla interjecting with an ‘ooh’ or ‘really?’ at intervals. She shifted on her chair, fancying she could feel the rounded rectangular outline of her iPad through the seat; ‘The Princess and the Pea 2013’.

‘I took off down the left. Shoulda seen me!’ Cal’s face shone as if he’d glimpsed God.

‘Hmm.’

‘I saw my chance and yes! C’mon! Get out! Thirty twenty-seven!’ Cal bounced on his seat, a toddler with pneumatic thighs.

‘So you scored a goal?’

‘Well,’ Cal’s pity mingled with tenderness for her adorable feminine ignorance. ‘We call it a try.’

When Cal was summoned
to the kitchenette to open a jar (he was lionised among the college women for his jar-opening abilities), Orla sat on her hands. When alone, she existed in a fog of need. That such a miraculous answer to her prayers as the journal should exist, and yet be denied her, was surely the work of some malign spirit with access to the control knobs and levers of Orla’s life.

How odd that nobody seemed to notice Orla’s yearning – she felt it so keenly. Didn’t Marek sense it? And as for Maude – nothing! And she would notice a single misplaced pin from space.

Without expressly deciding to, Orla bent down and whipped out her iPad. She worked the gadget dexterously and with studied intent, trying to drown out her promise to Marek. He hadn’t mentioned it since, an omission due more to discretion than forgetfulness, she knew.

She launched Twitter.

Lazy morning in Blake Towers! Charity ball tonight for #nspcc! Honoured to be involved!

Lazy morning? Rightly or wrongly, Orla felt she knew Anthea well enough by now to guess that no morning at ‘Blake Towers’ was lazy: she imagined the Tweeter on the phone to Reece, complaining, cajoling, demanding, then suffocating him with an avalanche of compliments.

Hopping nimbly from link to link, Orla polished her defence manifesto, hoping she’d never have to test it on Marek.
Everybody does it! Throw a stone into any crowd and you’ll hit someone who’s feverishly tracked an ex’s relationship status on Facebook, or written cryptic messages on a colleague’s wall, or checked out Tumblr snaps of the party they weren’t invited to.
Yes, the internet offered a thousand exquisite ways to self-harm: Orla was only human to join in.

By the law of averages, this cyberstalking
must surely present Orla with a fabulous nugget sooner or later: it would eventually highlight a spot in Anthea’s crammed diary when the actress wasn’t at a premiere, a rehearsal, a first-night party, a charity dinner, a dear chum’s birthday bash, or supper with somebody higher up the celebrity food chain. And then Orla could find her, accuse her, hear her confession and demand the journal.

Reece wasn’t the only one shy of scandal: Orla didn’t want her name linked in perpetuity with Anthea Blake. This was where the internet came in handy: it was like having a brash, fearless private detective on the payroll. It would tail Anthea and alert her to the perfect, discreet moment to challenge the woman.

Until then, Orla would pick at the scab that kept trying to form over her damaged self-esteem. She would put up with the squalid sensation that lingered like a head cold after chasing Anthea through the internet.

All of a sudden, an article caught her eye, sending a frisson of excitement up her spine. It was a two-year-old piece, on an interiors website, all about Anthea’s home.

‘Orla?’ Cal stood over her. ‘The bell went ages ago.’

Stop ‘n’ Grow hadn’t worked
either. Orla still bit her nails.

Sim’s journal

1 November 2011

Set was tense. Have the crew noticed? What if we just said, sod it, and ran away together? Mum would DIE. Dad … I can’t dress this up: Dad would disown me. He’d have to. The Irish press would go to town on the scandal of the senator’s son and his ‘unsuitable’ beloved.

Maude – Maude might understand.

Chapter Twenty-One

‘Admit it, old lady,’ said Bogna, ‘you like George in sexy way.’

‘Hey!’ Orla couldn’t let that pass. ‘We don’t call Maude
old lady.’

‘Ugh.’ Bogna sighed at the tedium of political correctness. ‘All right. Admit it, senior lady.’

Bogna was no longer Orla’s precocious, surly, mini-skirted in all weathers ex-pupil, she was Orla’s boyfriend’s little sister. Marek was now outed as Orla’s boyfriend. That Rubicon had been crossed. Before she’d read the valentine, the formality of that statement was freighted with baggage and she’d wondered if she could ever confer the term ‘boyfriend’ on a man again. Now it was the obvious, indeed
only
description for a man who cooked her meals, made regular and exquisite love to her, sent her texts that began, ‘Good morning beautiful’.

‘But I
am
old,’ said Maude mildly. ‘Have you catalogued my French classics yet, Bogna?’

‘I hate Flaubert,’ said Bogna. ‘And Zola gives me dry heaves.’

‘Try not to mention it
around the customers.’ Maude sniffed, possibly in recognition of the redundancy of her rebuke: the street outside heaved with humanity, but none of them turned their toes towards the shop. ‘And I would have thought it bloody obvious that I like George very much.’ Her face was wry as her sparring assistants turned to her, united in amazement. ‘Old though I am, I have not quite withered yet. George is well turned out, polite, cheerful and his eyes are a particular grey I’ve always admired. Like pebbles,’ she said, looking past Bogna and Orla. ‘Like pebbles at the bottom of a spring.’

‘Bloody hell,’ said Bogna loudly, slowly.

‘I don’t intend to act upon my feelings.’

‘Why not?’ Bogna was outraged. She always acted upon her own romantic impulses: many times Orla had begged for fewer details of a social life which involved much WKD and what Maude termed ‘heavy petting’ by nightclub bins. (Marek, Orla knew, was ignorant of the WKD and the petting, preferring to believe that his sister was ‘saving herself’. She rather admired this wilful fiction, adhered to against all the evidence.) ‘This is twenty-first century!’

‘I’m aware of that, dear. I’m happy as I am.’

‘Nobody is happy alone,’ grunted Bogna, and Orla could hear Marek’s obstinacy in her tone.