"Happy Valentine's Day"
There was something about the onset of autumn that always gave Shelagh Turner a burst of energy and excitement. Perhaps it was the welcoming of cooler weather or the fresh air after a musty Poplar summer. Even in the convent she had thrilled at the prospect of perfect autumn temperatures; summertime in the nun's habit and thick black stockings could be unbearable. There was a buzz in the streets as children were settled back in school and she even enjoyed the after-summer cleaning the new season prompted.
She found her feelings did not change once she married. By the end of August the Turner family was ready for a season change; Timothy was continually grumbling about how itchy his calipers were when the leather stuck to his legs and Patrick was brooding about wearing neckties, while Shelagh abandoned her stockings every day almost as soon as she walked in the front door. Yes, Autumn could not come fast enough for the Turners.
It was on a day at the end of September when the morning air brought a fresh chill that Shelagh set about to change over the family's summer clothes with cold weather clothes. For her own limited wardrobe there was not much to do: she simply exchanged heavier cardigans for thin and removed the dresses with summery prints. Timothy had outgrown all of his trousers from the previous year and was pestering his parents to take him shopping for new, so she had nothing to do for him but remove his summer shirts.
Conversely, Patrick's wardrobe was decades old and rarely gone through. He could be quite the hoarder, his wife found, thanks to his disinterest in drudging up the past. When he needed a new suit or waistcoat he would simply buy one, not thinking to throw away the old ones with fraying hems or missing buttons. Thus his clothing collection grew through the years, with many pieces being tossed in the back of the hall cupboard, never to be seen again.
Shelagh smiled and shook her head when she opened it. They had been married for half a year, yet she still managed to avoid this disorganized hall cupboard filled with bed linens, old clothes and toys. It was the only place Tim and Patrick were permitted their instinctual messiness. On tiptoe she peered into the shelf where Patrick had stuffed his jumpers months ago, scooping out an armful and walking down the hall. Depositing them on the bed, Shelagh smiled and sighed at the sight. She had once hated many of his clothes, but now she adored them. Having so little personal history of fashion, it had taken her a few months to voice her feelings to him about the endless string of ugly jumpers he seemed to own.
"Oh, that," he had said with a chuckle. "I know. Call me sentimental, but I can't bring myself to get rid of them…" Timothy's mother had knit one or two of them, he said, and there were some taken from Patrick's own mother's house after her death many years ago. Shelagh felt terrible for mentioning it after he told her this, but he assured her that he knew of their unsightliness and told her not to feel bad for a moment, kissing her cheeks softly as he spoke.
Standing over the pile of clothes now strewn across the bed, Shelagh promised herself she would try to find a knitting pattern so she could add one of her own to his collection. Taking up one of the jumpers, she crossed the room. The drawer in their wardrobe was already emptied, and she began to lay his winter things neatly inside. On her third trip from the bed to the wardrobe, she stopped as a small, square envelope fell to the ground from the folds of his red cardigan. As she picked it up from the floor, she saw her own name written in Patrick's unmistakable scrawl. Shelagh. He wrote it with a curly flourish at the end, and had added a double underline beneath. She imagined him whispering the word as he wrote it. Shelagh. She flipped it over, seeing the words "all my love" written across the envelope's top edge.
"What on earth?" she muttered to herself.
It was unlike Patrick to hide anything from her. Their life was filled with conversation and handwritten notes to each other. He loved to write her silly letters during the day on prescription pads or ruled paper and leave them on her pillow or the vanity for her to find later. He ended all of them with the words "all my love" above his signature. She never tired of reading them, always tucking each new one neatly in the drawer of her bedside table with the other letters he had sent her long ago.
This was a small, square envelope unlike any he had used before. Shelagh ran her fingers over the word love, slipping her thumb under the unsealed flap and extracting a store-bought card. There was a giant red heart in the center outlined with embossed white lace. Curly white script danced in the middle of the heart. "Happy Valentine's Day," she read aloud.
They were meant to be married long before Valentine's Day, but Timothy's illness had indefinitely postponed every plan they made for their future together. For many weeks they focused entirely on his recovery. The boy had finally been released from hospital at the end of February after he was struck with a chest cold the doctors thought might be dangerous to his condition and extended his stay. Their first Valentine's Day came and went without a word of acknowledgement between Patrick and Shelagh as they sat by Timothy's side in shifts through the day and night. Having never before been in a proper position to celebrate, the holiday was not too sorely missed by Shelagh.
But this card, bought so many months ago, was proof that it had meant something to Patrick. Shelagh traced the embossed lace of the card with her thumb before she could bring herself to open it. As she did, two tiny pieces of paper fluttered from inside and fell to the floor. She knit her eyebrows together as she picked them up, seeing that they were train tickets, dated the morning of Saturday the 14th of February, 1959. Another line below noted that they were purchased in December 1958. Shelagh sat down on the bed as she felt her knees wobble.
"Oh, Patrick," she sighed.
The typed, formulaic words inside the card had obviously displeased Patrick, who had scribbled them out to the point of illegibility. His own scratchy doctor's writing ran around the blacked-out text, clumps of his words slightly smeared as though he had been writing too quickly to let the ink dry. Silently, she read them in his voice.
"My darling Shelagh." Here again was the curl at the end of her name.
"I adore you. You have made me the happiest man in all the world. I'm sorry our plans have changed, but keep these tickets as a promise from me. When all is as it should be, we'll have a proper Valentine's Day.
Until then, all my love,
Patrick"
For a long time she sat rereading his words, her fingers absentmindedly rubbing the tickets in her other hand. She read it twenty, fifty, a hundred times until she could have copied his message perfectly, scratching every pointed high and low of his handwriting. You have made me the happiest man in all the world. Had she not felt the same way about him, Shelagh would have been afraid she would never live up to this declaration. Her heart swelled with love for this man who could write such a thing before even kissing the subject of his adoration. She could find no proper thoughts or words to articulate the feelings she had racing through her mind and body at that moment, and just sat reading it over and over.
The thump of the front door slamming downstairs stirred her into consciousness. She glanced at the clock, noting that it should be hours before Timothy arrived from school and felt her pulse quicken. Before she could properly worry about who was at the door, she heard Patrick's voice call, "Hello! It's only me! Shelagh?"
She closed her eyes and laughed silently to herself. When you speak of the sun, so it shines. Shelagh's fingers tightened on the papers in her hands while she stood and silently made her way down the stairs. When she rounded the corner she saw Patrick removing and hanging his overcoat, his back to her.
"Hello?" he called again, not knowing she was behind him.
She fought the urge to run up and embrace his back. She wanted to wrap her arms around him, feel his frame against hers and hear his heart beating in her ear. Instead she just stood at the foot of the stairs and softly said, "Hello."
Patrick turned quickly, his face aglow with delight at seeing her before him. He did not notice that her hands were tucked behind her back or that she was breathing deeply.
"I had to come home to get a clean shirt and tie," he gestured to his front, which Shelagh realized was clad with his white lab coat. "There was an expectant mother who did not react well to the smell of Nurse Franklin's perfume and promptly vomited on me before I knew it was coming. It soaked straight through my coat. Luckily I had this spare, but Sister Evangelina threw me out of the clinic because she said the stench on my shirt was intolerable."
Shelagh blinked at him from across the room. She could see his undershirt through the thin white of the coat, which hung limply without the bulk of his shirt beneath. He looked utterly ridiculous but she was dazzled.
She must have had a certain look in her eye, because he tilted his head, shot her a crooked smile and furrowed his eyebrows into a teasing frown. "What's wrong?"
"I came across these today," she said when she found her voice, bringing the card and tickets from behind her back.
It took a moment or two for Patrick to focus on what she was holding. He stood perfectly still while his eyes hopped between her hands, and with a short gasp he looked up at her face, finally understanding. "Oh good Lord! I'd completely forgotten! Where did you find that? I thought I'd lost it."
Patrick started to step toward her with his hand extended, ready to take and read his own message, but he was stopped when Shelagh removed it from his sight and hid her hands behind her back again. There were only a few steps between them – he could gather her in his arms in a second if he wanted to – but there seemed to be a wall of mystery built in front of her. Intrigued, he remained standing in the hall.
Shelagh pursed her lips to suppress a smile. "Do you remember what it says?"
"Do I – do I remember what it says?" He seemed shocked at the prospect of such a question. He stepped forward again, and she scuffled around the corner and stood on the bottom step of the staircase. They were eye-to-eye and only an arm's length apart.
"Yes, I want to see if you remember what it says." She smiled in earnest now, knowingly teasing him.
"It says the only things I can ever say," he muttered, taking a tiny step closer, "that I adore you." Another small step. "That I have never been happier in my life." Step. "That you have bewitched me." Step. "That I will never deserve you."
His nose was a hairsbreadth away from hers, their eyes completely locked. He saw his own reflection in her glasses.
"Close enough," Shelagh whispered, though she did not know if she was referring to his guessing or his physical proximity.
She felt her breath hit her own face as it bounced off Patrick's. He was waiting for her to make the first move, and she knew it. She stood on the stair, holding his gaze, feeling his breath on her lips and smelling his skin. Slowly her hands came out from behind her back. Still holding the card, she let the tickets fall to the floor. When her fingers started to undo the buttons on his coat, his whole body shuddered and he drew a quick breath.
"I've never celebrated Valentine's Day before," she said as she finally broke eye contact, tracing the lines of his face with her gaze, drinking in every twitch of his muscles as he reacted to her fingers on his torso. "What do people normally do?"
A puff of air hit her lips when Patrick laughed. "Well, let me think." His hand crept to her hip now, fingering the zipper of her skirt with the expertise he had acquired in the few months they had been married. The fastener was stubborn, but he eventually urged it into submission. "I've heard some people like to go to restaurants for a romantic meal. Or out to a picture."
"Hmm," Shelagh teasingly pondered, "I don't know… I rather feel like staying in today." Her hands finished the buttons and followed the collar up to his neck, stroking his collarbone as he pulled at the zipper of her skirt. His other hand was fiddling beneath her jumper at her back, delicately tugging the slip she wore beneath her clothes.
She could stand it no longer and closed the gap between them, wrapping her arms around his neck, forcing his lips to meet hers. Their kisses were always delightful; even the small ones given as greetings thrilled her. But there was something to be said for passion, and today she wanted nothing more than to show him how passionate she could be. He made tiny moaning noises as their tongues danced and their faces turned every which way, building pressure between them. Patrick's arms were holding her to his chest, and hers were still wrapped around his neck forcefully.
"You want to stay in, you say?" His voice was gravelly as he kissed her between each word.
Shelagh's glasses were smudged from contact, making Patrick's face slightly hazy when she opened her eyes. "Yes," she fell more fully into his body, prompting him to lift her from the stair as he stepped backwards to lean on the wall before setting her down and towering over her again. "I want to stay in."
She felt his lips smile on her neck as his hands grasped her hips urgently. She was unsure he heard the last thing he said while she hastily unfastened his belt. But then, as she kicked away the skirt that had fallen to her ankles, he repeated the words back into her ear.
"Happy Valentine's Day."