by Clare Naylor
“Toby, my God, hello, what …”
He kissed her on the lips and smiled. “Good to see you, Ames.”
“What are you doing here?” she said, wondering if she could somehow surreptitiously put some lipstick on before their conversation. She settled for licking her lips.
“I’m Dagenham’s new favorite. I have to go to all her parties and look the part, foppish Bohemian, neo-Bailey. She fancies herself as a new Jean Shrimpton, albeit twenty years too old.”
Amy was horrified. “You mean, you and her?” Her nose crinkled in barely concealed disgust.
“No, you darling dummy, I just have to laugh at her jokes and wear velvet scarves a lot.”
Amy thought back to her early impressions of the photographer, so dashing and creative, she had almost fancied herself as Jean Shrimpton. She’d worn a few short floral-print dresses and combed her fringe down. Then she’d realized that she was more in love with herself than Toby. She’d spend all her time thinking about how she looked, what she said, and when she wasn’t with him she barely remembered what he looked like. And she’d been wildly turned on by his camera. He’d photographed her naked brushing her teeth and she’d soared on a wave of sexiness. But the photographer was not really boyfriend material, and at the time that was what she’d longed for. His lens was sexy but he was just a bit too elusive; she’d finally stopped calling him and hadn’t heard from him since.
But tonight he was her savior, and his hallowed position in this inner sanctum made him even more appealing.
“So, shall we go, petal?” He brushed his hair back from his face, and she remembered his appeal, brown eyes, long lashes, never quite clean shaven.
“What? Why?”
“Well, you were, I presume, leaving, as you’re wearing your coat?”
Amy nodded.
“So why don’t we go somewhere we can have some fun? The beach?”
“Toby, it’s eleven o’clock at night in February.”
“OK then, Battersea Bridge.”
They clambered into his mini (it didn’t really do the trick for her, she had to be honest) and juddered their way to the embankment, laughing at the party guests and breathing the air of silliness. No more best behavior, they were like children let out of class early. They left the car on some double yellow lines on Cheyne Walk and hopped out. In the wind the little waves of the Thames fluttered against the sides of the houseboats. Amy marveled at how cozy it would be inside, until Toby pointed out the lack of showers and central heating and more dry rot than the Mary Rose.
“You’re so boring, Toby, don’t spoil everything.”
“I’m your knight tonight, doll face, be careful.”
Yes, Amy thought to herself, knowing that she didn’t really want to be doing this. She wanted to be going home with the Actor, to his Mayfair home with deep duck-down pillows and a grand piano like the Robert Redford character in The Great Gatsby, and then he’d ask her to stay, forever. Instead she held hands with Toby and they walked along the riverbank. Amy wrapped herself in a little dance around the lampposts with dolphins swimming down them; he followed her with pretend camera pops, her own little feature film. Her own paparazzo.
They went back to his flat in Chelsea, a studio hangover from the eighties, lots of floorboards and coffee tables strewn with prints, negatives, contact sheets, and bits of lenses. She sat on the edge of a leather chair and flipped over the pages of his portfolio. He poured two mugs of whiskey and sat on the table in front of her.
“Well, who’d have thought it. What a happy twist of outrageous fortune.”
“We had fun, didn’t we?” Amy wasn’t sure whether she meant tonight or last summer, but the whiskey tasted nice and Toby’s hair flopped gorgeously forward into his eyes. She couldn’t resist brushing it away. This time a whiskey-tasting kiss. She was drunk enough to forget her boobs on this occasion, which made for an altogether happier half hour (not bad going). The photographer took his time and interspersed licks and kisses and enjoyable stroking bits with his own personal slant on lovemaking, which was to film the process. (Now while your average mom of three in Surrey can generally get away with cavorting before a video camera without more than a select few blokes at the local squash club having a look, a young aspirant like Amy has to be more wary of who films her pert bottom looking positively buoyant. Heaven forfend, only this very evening she’d mingled with the celestial habitués of TVAM.) When Amy saw Toby fiddling with his equipment (please forgive) her initial thought was her mother, who would have dissolved in a glut of Catholic cursing (“Jesus. Saint Anthony. Child. What were you doing?”). Her second thought was “hmmmmm, rather like the sound of that,” so with her best breast forward she abandoned herself to the glories of voyeurism and lust.
CHAPTER 6
In the pale Sussex light of Monday morning Amy found herself humming in a faintly hysterical manner. She hummed as she removed cowpats from a field. This morning she was in no mood to marvel at the ridiculous nature of her job; she hummed in the way we all tend to do when there’s something we’d rather not think of. Hum to escape your horrible faux pas. Manically and with acute embarrassment. Amy dumped another cowpat into her bin liner and hummed a bit more.
“Great job, darling, nearly there.”
Amy yelped with horror. “Bloody hell, Lucinda, don’t do that, you’ll scare the cows.”
“Ouch, touchy, what’s wrong with you?” The affront soared over Lucinda’s head, and in galumphing Sloane style she carried on regardless.
“What happened to you on Saturday? I saw you leave with Toby, are you two on again?”
In no mood to discuss her sin, shame, and downfall, Amy shrugged, and mercifully Lucinda ran to the aid of the model startled by a rabbit. (Or could it have been the other way around?)
We should probably address the cowpats first. Cowpats, because in an ideal world, fields don’t have them; they have cows, naturally, but not ugly plops of dung. On any other morning Amy could probably have waxed lyrical on the joy of the cowpat, the rural idyll rather than some bucolic, Capability Brown–type excuse for one. She would have persuaded the stylist to leave the cowpats in. But today she was more concerned with her own downfall.
“Paradise Lost, with me as Eve.” Oh, sin, depravity, and video cameras. Oh, Shame.
Amy is, as we should perhaps know by now, at least as far as matters of the flesh are concerned, a woman of the nineties. We’ve witnessed the Harding episode and left her in pre-Lapsarian bliss with Toby. So whence all this guilt? Well, not guilt at all actually, that wouldn’t be very nineties. More disappointment and terror. She wondered if sadomasochists (real ones, not stockbrokerish, silk-cord-and-velvet-blindfold types) felt ashamed of themselves the next morning. Or did they have the courage of their sexual convictions? Was she a pervert for enjoying the camera bit? Probably, she obliged her conscience. (Catholicism!) Well, now she was paying. Divine Retribution. (Like every Catholic caught out by fluke she put it down to Divine Retribution. Tripped over after making a nasty comment about someone’s thighs? Divine Retribution. Migraine while enjoying the fantasy of credit-card fraud? Yes, you’ve guessed it.) Amy was just feeling like a cowpat because she was horrified that right now, as she loaded poo into a bin liner, a group of pseudo-Bohos smoking Gauloises and sipping Mexican beer might be leering at her hips, thighs, and heaven forbid, she couldn’t bear to think about it, her tits! (It was eight o’clock on Monday morning but it was perfectly plausible that a group of grown men with satellite TV of their own would hotfoot it round to Battersea to make a meal of her in flagrante.) Or, oh Lord, even worse, it wasn’t beyond the realms … the photographer was a friend of Damien Hirst. She pictured the Tate, the Turner Prize, queues of people waiting to see not Mother and Child but Photographer and Floozy. All disparate, abstract televisual images of her body parts, swilling around in formaldehyde. Fuck!
The cows snuffled and Amy sat on a crumbling stone wall, her bin liner at her feet, bathed in the milky winter sunlight.
The models frolicked and the photographer yelled at them as Lucinda hopped on the wall beside her, and whispered, “When this is over let’s pop down the road to Charleston, the Bloomsbury group place, you can cadge a lift from me back to London.”
Amy, in her emotionally precarious state, was overcome with fondness for Lucinda and kissed her on the cheek before shedding a little tear. Lucinda gave her a hug and together they sucked on the models’ Marlboros and watched with horrified objectivity as the lunatics took over the asylum.
They slammed the doors of Lucinda’s battered sports car and tore off down the meandering Sussex lanes, narrowly avoiding decapitating curious farm animals. Lucinda was a brisk driver, to say the least. Amy feigned a relaxed demeanor but all the while dug her nails deep into the upholstery. Charleston was just the thing for a guilt trip. While Amy was feeling all seedy and disgusted with the late twentieth century she was slowly seduced by the goings-on in twenties and thirties Sussex. The passage of time lent them a certain air of glamour, but there was no escaping the fact that the Bloomsbury group, purveyors of great art and literature, had been distinctly seedy themselves as far as sexual antics were concerned, and Amy began to feel in better company with her debauchery.
She drifted around the house marveling at its freshness. The walls and harlequin pattern of sun-drenched colors, yellows, muted blues and greens. The bedrooms where great economists and artists had formed love triangles as colorful and bizarre as the decoration, and where Virginia Woolf had lain in bed listening as the occasional fish flipped over with a splash in the lake at the front of the house. The lake was more of a puddle but in the overgrown grass on its banks were scattered statues, classical men and a curious levitating woman. Amy lounged among the winter jasmine in the fast-fading light of late afternoon and slowly recovered.
Restored and reassured by Lucinda and the lascivious Bloomsbury set that her life wasn’t totally crap and that her lusty languishings weren’t going to end up as headline news in the Sun tomorrow, she faced her return to London with fortitude and a Vanessa Bell–print plant pot from the local shop.
On the drive back Lucinda and Amy nattered and chomped chocolates, sniggering about models and lamenting London life.
“Benjy and I should just get a little place out here, paint a bit, do something freelance, and cook. I could have a garden and grow flowers the color of boiled sweets, we’d have little fluttering muslin curtains, with a cupboard for our wellies.…”
“Luce, you’d be soooo bored, you’d hate it. And what would you do freelance? Dress the local Women’s Institute for its annual fête?”
“No, I had these friends who moved to the country and made papier-mâché things.”
Amy laughed. “Like what, for heaven’s sake?”
“Well, I think it was cows, or it could have been mushrooms.” Amy spluttered with laughter. “No, like toadstools, huge bloody toadstools with red spots.” Lucinda redeemed herself.
“And?”
“And they made money out of it, enough to buy a goat and go to Morocco every six months.”
Amy shrieked at Lucinda’s quite obviously trustafarian notions. “And then they inherited the parental stately home and the goat had its own wing and they called the child-product of their liaison Bicester after their time in rural paradise?”
“Don’t scoff, Ames, I’m surprised you’re not dying to go and live in the shadow of the Rude Man of Cerne Abbas with some Florizel-type goatherd, play Perdita, and copulate madly, Druid fashion.”
“And how did Druids copulate?”
“You’ve seen the penis on that thing, use your imagination,” smirked Lucinda.
“Anyway, don’t scoff, I loved Florizel. I once went out with an Etonian just because when they go rowing they wear those straw hats with flowers all over them. He was like a blond angel, all flowers, princely notions but innocent peasant love.” Amy smiled with self-consciousness at her overly romantic ideas, but she had loved him a bit and the memory made her quite nostalgic. Then she caught him in the cloakroom at a ball snogging his best friend. Exit Florizel. By the time they’d arrived back in London Lucinda had persuaded Amy that there was life after homemade pornography and that she should come to Dorset next weekend to stay with Benjy’s sister who had a place. As one does. There’d be a few people and they could all paint and have walks, smoke some grass and relax. Amy nodded in consent and went home to bed, totally knackered.
CHAPTER 7
Amy didn’t have a clue what Dorset had in store so she packed her that weekend-in-the-country wear, thrilled that at last her life was catching up with her wardrobe. This particular outfit was the result of many a Laura Ashley sale and consisted of Little Lord Fauntleroy hats and waistcoats and some sludge-colored wool socks. The other guests would all be undoubtedly trendy and Lucinda’s will would reign supreme, with every woman in hipsters, but what the hell.
The car tooted in the street and Amy ran out, her small suitcase swinging in her hand. The car was an assortment of Benjy’s friends. They were all quite sweet. One was a scriptwriter, one a cauliflower-eared accountant, and the other an Irish ex-pop star. Amy was introduced but immediately forgot their names since she was so busy trying to look pretty as she shook their hands. Not because she fancied them, just because pretty is as pretty does, whatever that meant. They whizzed along with the radio blaring, squashed into the back like a packet of sausages.
The road leading up to the cottage was so strewn with stones and potholes that they emerged rubbing their buttocks for dear life. The cottage was a rustic pink color that wouldn’t have looked out of place nestling away in the Umbrian Hills. The winter light gave it a warm glow, and tucked away behind huge terra-cotta pots of bay trees and strange cacti was a tiny front door with a huge lion’s-head door knocker. On closer inspection the paint was weathered and flaked to the touch, and Amy could just make out the etchings of a Renaissance fresco above the downstairs windows. In fact, Lily and friends had labored over this last August but hadn’t accounted for English winter besetting their Italian palazzo. Wow, Amy gasped in barely audible admiration. They piled out, myriad carrier bags and shabby paperbacks and an army of sleeping bags. At an upstairs window appeared the aforementioned Lily, Benjy’s sister. Her plaited hair hanging forward, her face covered in—
“Yogurt, I was out this morning and got windburn, yogurt does the trick,” she yelled.
The boys exchanged bewildered-by-women glances as she disappeared and ran downstairs to open the door. Everyone got a kiss, despite, or perhaps because of the yogurt, and she ushered them into her living room-cum-studio.
The various merits of strawberry versus mango yogurt were discussed at length by the assembled company, nine in all. Not so scary as Amy had expected but all a bit older and a bit cooler than her own friends. They decided that a walk was number one on the agenda and anyone not on for that could meet them in the local pub in an hour or so. Amy tugged on a tweedy peaked cap and, gratified by the “ooh, how divine” from Lily, walked off down the rubbly driveway with a little skip. She discovered from Benjy that Lily was a painter with a bit of pottery thrown in who’d absconded from the City two years ago in favor of the good life. Well, she had two chickens, one of which acted as her alarm clock and one for eggs, but she was basically besieged every weekend by friends, so she couldn’t be classed as a true country dweller.
Amy tried to take up this conversation with Lily, whom she took to instantly because Lily was not only exceptionally pretty but the epitome of the Girl Men Fall in Love With, so Amy thought she’d watch and learn. Or at least Amy perceived this to be true; not to be too convoluted, she was the Girl Women Want Men to Fall in Love With, because women liked her and believed in her. She was pretty, eccentric, and fun. But we all know that these virtues, not being anatomical, don’t necessarily count for much with men, so women go on getting it wrong. And in their own way it’s the women who fall in love with these women because they’re what men so often aren’t. Gorgeous and nice
.
Lily, though, seemed more intent on waving at the stony-faced passengers on the train to London than making small talk, so Amy, spurred on by the howling wind, joined in. Such abandonment was wholly uncharacteristic for Amy, who only really let go in her imagination. But here she was, running shrieking around what she thought must be Hardy’s Egdon Heath with the grace of a deer and the lungs of Pavarotti. Lucinda watched with amusement, gratified that all was going according to plan. She’d known she had to do something about Amy, she just wasn’t sure what. What she did to fashion spreads she liked to do to life, the odd hitching of a hemline to create the perfect silhouette here, a bit of excitement for her friends there. It was what she was good at. What she did know was that a weekend in Lily’s company was never going to do anyone any harm, and certainly not Amy.
On the way back to the pub they discussed their favorite Hardy novels. Hands went up for Return of the Native, the dour Irish pop star backed Jude the Obscure, and Lily spun round and opted for Tess. “Don’t you think that Amy has lips like Tess? Come on, boys, you could pop strawberries into that mouth very happily.” Amy flushed with delight and the boys turned away, embarrassed and grunting while Lily smiled straight at her.
They commandeered a green velveteen corner of the pub for most of the afternoon, consuming Guinness in indecent quantities and staying on to beat the locals in the pub quiz that evening. Amy’s head swam with a creamy deluge of Bailey’s and whiskey. In an effort to get home they all linked arms for stability and trundled through puddles and ditches.
“It’ll be OK,” Lily soothed. “I’ve fallen asleep behind the hedgerow before now and got a lift home on the milk truck the next morning, so all is most definitely not lost …” She trailed off with a little slur. They stumbled all the way back to the cottage and numerous bruises later tumbled into the irrelevant sleeping bags.
