by Clare Naylor
“I know I overreacted, in fact I’m sure he barely noticed her, but I couldn’t help myself, Ames, he barely looked at me all weekend.” She dropped another two sugar cubes into her coffee.
“Steady with the sugar, Luce. Look, anyone can see he loves you, but it’s not easy after so many years to be all over each other all the time.”
“I know, but sometimes I just have uncontrollable banshee moods. I just yell for no reason, and I quite enjoy it, it’s the only way of getting a response sometimes. I don’t think men are capable of loving as much as women.” Lucinda swirled her spoon in her still-untouched coffee.
“I know, you just have to look at literature. Anna Karenina couldn’t find anyone who’d love her enough, so she had to jump in front of a train.”
“And Eustacia Vye in Return of the Native, ‘To be loved to madness is my one desire,’ she said, and she ended up dead, too, because all the men in her life were hopeless.”
Amy winced at the mention of Eustacia Vye, and the delectable actress in Orlando’s film flashed into her mind. Oh God, I’m obsessed, she thought. I think I love him. The thought of Orlando sent her appetite scuttling for cover. The girls morosely picked the paper tablecloth apart, and Lucinda stabbed her fork into a huge piece of chocolate cake until she was about to pop.
“And I’ve got to go to one of Cath’s dinner parties tonight.” Amy stared out of the window onto the gray pavements slopping with rain.
“I’ve no idea why you don’t move out, Ames. Those girls are poisonous.”
“Yeah, but I was at school with them and they’re not so bad most of the time, they’re just pathological bitches.” She shrugged with resignation.
Cath’s party was hideous. More bankers than was necessary crammed around the small dining table dropping risotto and red wine on the tablecloth that Amy’s dead grandmother had made. Clever people who should have known better did their best to be boring and right wing. The house smelled of broccoli, and Amy was taunted because of her vapid job.
“Yes, I know but I just don’t think I’d enjoy working in the City,” she apologized. Why the bloody hell am I allowing these idiots to bother me, she fretted. But she knew it harked back to a long time ago, longer ago than she cared to address, and so she let them taunt her as they had done when she was the skinniest girl in the third form. She volunteered to wash up, as she knew that none of the Hoorays would set foot in a kitchen, and skulked to bed without saying good night, although she knew there’d be hell to pay for her “rudeness” tomorrow.
CHAPTER 10
“Amy darling, it’s me, Mom. Ermm. Are you there? No? Well, it’s just that I’ve got these tickets, well, actually Daddy got them, only he’s … well, he can’t come. So we thought maybe, if you’re not busy, perhaps you’d like to go … with me … oh, darling, there’s a strange bleep, does that mean I’ve run out of time? Well, maybe I’ll phone you later, lots of love, darling. Bye.”
Thus it was that Amy’s mother, in a roundabout mother-not-quite-getting-to-grips-with-this-answerphone-lark way, invited her to the theater on Thursday night. Now the laws of stage and screen dictate that one can’t be both onstage and on set at the same time. But Amy’s world and the excuse of a charity event attended by Fergie dictated otherwise, so for the gala performance of Henry IV, Part I with Orlando Rock as Hotspur, Amy and her mother had seats in the stalls.
Amy is a bright girl, and she knows in a vague way that the stalls are not really visible from the stage, but she’s also an optimist, so she left work at three o’clock on Thursday afternoon to indulge her optimism fetish. She exfoliated and lathered, waxed and waned, creamed and preened an excessive amount. She put her makeup on in the nude (very important for that oh-so-sexy frisson in one’s gait) and combed her hair with the loving strokes of a seven-year-old grooming her pony. She slipped into her exactly-the-green-of-her-eyes silk shirt and her oldies-but-goodies trousers. Veeerryy nice, she thought as she assessed her appeal. Not a hint of the lesbian, just lots of lipstick.
She stood in the foyer beside the rows of jelly babies and Kit Kats, looking ravishing among the red velvet and living in a little daydream of being Orlando’s lover. She looked alluring, and the second someone caught her eye she shyly and conspiratorially lowered her head, convincing them that, yes, she was the great woman behind the great man, but let’s just keep that between you and me, Mr. Theater-goer, don’t want the press crawling all over the place, do we? Don’t want to upstage the tiaraed one in the stalls. Her status as the new woman in his life was a fact she was sure she had convinced everyone in the crowded foyer of until her mother rushed in. Her raincoat sodden, panting and delving into her abyss of a handbag for the tickets, her mother cried, “Darling Amy, I barely recognized you. You look lovely,” to the assembled theater-goers, a few of whom turned to witness the transformation.
“Thanks, Mom, do I usually look so awful?” Amy mumbled, her chin buried in her chest.
“Now don’t be so sensitive, I just said you looked very nice. Now where are those tickets?” She foraged some more, a truffle pig let loose in the foyer.
They sat back in their seats as the pprrrinngg of the bell sounded in the theater. Amy’s stomach lurched with churning motions usually reserved for first dates and job interviews. She practiced different poses: coy, ebullient, nervous (a theater wife should always have sympathetic stage fright for the one she loves), tragic (it was Henry IV and Hotspur’s death was imminent). As she and her mother flicked through the programs she, ever so casually, let slip that she’d in fact had tea with the phenomenally famous Orlando Rock on Sunday (just enough volume to impress the neighbors), but her mother wasn’t deeply thrilled.
“And what were his parents thinking of, do you think? Sheer cruelty to give a child such a ridiculous name. Was he nice, dear?”
Amy gave up but felt suitably elevated in her neighbors’ esteem so resumed her careful countenance. You never know, he just might look up during a soliloquy and see me.
His performance was impeccable, and the actress playing his wife was attractive in a Royal-Shakespeare-Company-actress-type way but really nothing to write home about, and certainly not someone you’d invite to share champagne in your dressing room afterward, she reassured herself. When the time came for Hotspur to oh-so-heroically die she was barely consolable.
“ ‘Food for worms … etc.… Fare thee well, great heart.’ ” Dies. She could hardly bear it. God, she fancied him in his thigh-high boots and poniard thrusting in a Shakespearean fashion. Pure animal sex in chain mail.
In her mind she was whisked onto the stage at the end and kissed and thanked: “I couldn’t have done it without the love of this wonderful woman,” crooned Orlando, his poniard pressing against her thigh. The audience cheered as she wowed them all in her imaginary diaphanous Ophelia dress, as light and pale as baby’s breath. And then on to the Oscars and a whistle-stop charity tour of the Czech Republic. Amy handing tickets to culturally starved theater-goers at the door, Orlando pacing the stage with the passion and majesty of Olivier. Shakespeare around the Globe they’d call their project, Orlando Rock and his wife.
Actually her coat was trodden on by sniffy people impatient to leave, and her mother couldn’t find her handbag. People tried to get past and huffed and sighed, Amy crashed calamitously to earth and, bruised and unhappy not to have been spotted on her cloud in the stalls by Orlando Rock, caught the last bus home.
CHAPTER 11
Amy was chatting to the security guards in the reception of Vogue House, an injustice of models sitting on chairs around her, as thin as knicker elastic, their portfolios perched on their Prada-encased knees, and their flawless complexions and minimalist nails leaving every woman in the vicinity feeling as made-up and froufrou as Zsa Zsa Gabor. Amy was used to this particular drawback of working in the fashion industry, but she wasn’t used to feeling as though every woman she saw would be more likely to go out with the actor of her dreams than she was, including the fifty-year-old lady w
ho worked in the accounts department (could be fantastic in bed—all maturity and experience). On her way up in the lift she scrutinized herself in the cruel mirrors. Yeuch, she thought, even if I see him again, he won’t want to know; he’s so glamorous and talented, I just pin hems and ply bulimics with sandwiches for a living. The lift doors opened and Amy was greeted by an infantry of Vuitton luggage and a rail of clothes, plus several scuffling fashion editors.
“Amy, thank Christ, we had no idea where you were. Help me with these, we’re off to Dorset,” Nathalia yelled. Nathalia was pure Eurotrash. Blond, perma-tan, father owned Germany or something, and Amy was terrified of her.
“What are we going to Dorset for, I’m supposed to be working on my Council Estate Glamour shoot,” Amy protested, dreading spending the day with this monster who wouldn’t know a council estate if it got stuck to the bottom of her shoe.
“I’m styling Orlando Rock and I need you to iron his gear,” she said in her mid-Atlantic drawl. Amy bristled proprietorially, like a tomcat marking out his territory.
“Oh, Olly,” she improvised. “Yeah, he said he’d be down there, Return of the Native.”
“You mean you know him?” Incredulous.
“Mmm, we had tea on Sunday, lovely, he’s a darling.”
Amy, what are you doing, you’ll be caught out, embarrassed. Shut up. But it did the trick. Nathalia was deferential until they reached the motorway and she realized she’d forgotten her lipstick and fell into a sulk.
In the chasm of Nathalia’s silence Amy was suddenly struck with fear at the enormity of the situation. She was wearing a cardigan she’d had since sixth form, she was in love with the man she was going to see, he had her down as not-the-marrying kind, to put it mildly, she’d just lied to Nathalia, who would be sure to show her up, and … and Amy glanced at the brief for the session.
“… Orlando Rock … blah … Versace … blah … stylist Nathalia … photographer …” No! It can’t be him! She looked again. No! It can’t get any worse. A nervous rash crept up her chest and onto her neck … it was worse. Toby Ex, Chelsea’s answer to Hugh Hefner, was the photographer and Amy had broken out in spots. Oh my God, what if he says something, what if he mentions the video, tries to blackmail me. Never mind Christmases, all her nightmares came at once.
By the time they pulled up outside Hardy’s cottage Amy’s rash had made her look like a giant raspberry. She saw the photographer outside the front door, engrossed in light meters and Polaroids, and braced herself for the inevitable.
“Amy, hello, dearest.” He kissed her fruity cheeks and smiled kindly. Anyone that can come within a mile of me and my rash, let alone kiss me, can’t be that bad, she sighed.
“The ubiquitous Toby,” she managed with a grin. They exchanged sympathetic, vows-of-secrecy glances and buried their dubious sexploits beneath a duvet of professionalism. Phew! number one, thought Amy gratefully. Which was of course tempting fate. Nathalia came tearing out of Hardy’s garden like Jude the Obscure on acid, all maniacal depression and misery.
“Where’s the makeup artist! I can’t face Orlando without lipstick. Amy, you haven’t even begun to unpack those clothes, you’re bloody useless.” She spun off again. Amy’s tear ducts pricked and she looked heavenward with her eyes wide open in a bid to prevent the tears rolling down her cheeks and spoiling her blusher. I hate her, she chanted, kicking about two thousand pounds’ worth of suitcase until it bore the imprint of her shoe. And I hate bloody Orlando Rock, he’s just some rich git who’d fall for the fake charms of Nathalia and her crass jet-set friends. Inwardly she gave up, that moment when for self-preservation you know it’s better to believe that it will never be. Optimism is not only misplaced but idiotic and masochistic; why hurl yourself off the cliff of rejection headfirst? We’re from different worlds, thought Amy with a hollow pit of misery inside her. Even at the party I knew there was never a chance, I should never even have entertained the thought. She sat on a little bench at the bottom of Hardy’s garden, early spring birdsong drifting from woods nearby. She was calmed as she leaned down to stroke a cat curling himself around her feet, and she made a private bid to be more sensible. Life’s not like books, she told herself, I’m not Anna Karenina or even Holly Golightly. From here on I’ll set my targets in the real world. Maybe Cath and Kate are right. But one small thought peeked through her gloom. Maybe Orlando will come up behind me now, sit down, and in the still garden, we’d laugh and chat. Stop! She pushed the last of the romantic thoughts to the back of her mind and faced grim reality.
Grim reality was ironing shirts for most of the afternoon. Amy presented a curious sight beside her ironing board among the trees. She solemnly eased out the creases and derived a little therapy from her task. Within earshot the photographer coaxed steely glances and heroic stances from Orlando Rock. Amy had thus far avoided him as though it were he and not she who had a rash. She watched the scene through a break in the trees, Orlando sitting on a log, a shaft of sunlight highlighting his beauty, singling him out like some Olympian god of long ago that had just wandered into this modern-day forest by accident. He was like a sad and lonely sculpture, a breed apart from the men surrounding him, and untouchably beautiful. She caught a flicker of muscle in his thigh as he changed position and a broad boyish smile at the pretty makeup artist who puffed powder onto his cheekbones. She could just stand and watch all day, hear his distant chuckles and easy banter. So ordinary and affable, but, my God, so special. She felt safe just watching and dreaming of the night she would be the one to meet him with a kiss after a performance or accompany him to a dazzling premiere. But she had to stop daydreaming, the time had come for her to dole out tea from her flasks and supply the troops with ham sandwiches. She wandered around gazing at her feet, avoiding everyone’s glance.
“I wanted vegetarian, Amy, not pig,” snapped Nathalia. Amy winced at the mention of her name and delved back into her lunch box for an alternative.
“Amy, hello, Lily’s friend. It is, isn’t it?” asked the god. A smile superglued itself to Amy’s lips and her heart sprinted.
“Orlando, I’ve, er … been ironing,” she floundered, trying not to seem impolite for not saying hello earlier.
“I had supper with Lily on Wednesday, she’s very well.” He winked. Amy’s mortification was concealed behind her grin.
“Good, that’s nice.” Jesus, I’m so boring, why on earth is he wasting his breath? Get a grip, Amy.
“How’s the filming going?” Amy attempted, trying to resuscitate her brain, but she was felled by a shriek from Nathalia as she bit into roast beef and horseradish.
“Are you totally stupid?” she shrieked, spitting her sandwich all over the floor. Amy turned away from Orlando and glanced at Toby, looking for some sign of solidarity, but he pretended not to have noticed her and carried on with his lens-fiddling. Amy fled, tears and her rash competing to make her face as red and blotchy as possible. If she’d stuck around a bit longer, she’d have witnessed Orlando’s newly chilly handling of Nathalia. As she stroked his hair into place over the collar of his coat he brushed her hand away; as she fawned he glowered. Nathalia, of course, didn’t seem to notice.
CHAPTER 12
Taking the view that you have to pick yourself up, brush yourself down, etc., Amy faced Saturday morning with a schizophrenic blend of utter misery and eternal optimism. She flicked off the shipping forecast because she wisely knew it would depress her, all those lonely little boats in gales and wives sitting sadly at home. Instead she put on that anthem for female empowerment, “I Will Survive,” and had it blaring from stereo and tonsils. Nine in the morning and she was dusting her room in her pajamas. She flung her arms and duster tunelessly around, feeling better now. Thanks, Gloria, you’ve done a lot of women, and many a gay man, a great service over the years.
She decided that retail therapy was just what the doctor ordered for this particular brand of nagging pain. The pain of humiliation and professional catastrophe. She burned lavender oil t
o lift her spirits and slipped her emergency-only credit card into her purse. On the bus to King’s Road she read glossy magazines, mentally noting her purchases: new nail polish, a must; shampoo for thicker, fuller hair, could transform my life; fennel tea to kick the demon coffee. She hummed her anthem the length of Sloane Street and felt content in the morning sunshine. In Harvey Nichols food hall she picked up some black olives in basil, she sniffed a scoop of Chinese green tea, and ran her fingers through a barrel of shiny black coffee beans. She bought a bag of watermelon-flavored jelly beans and meandered her way back downstairs via bed linens and Le Creuset saucepans. This is the life, she smiled to herself.
Pottering down Fulham Road, she popped into the Conran Shop, past the array of flowers and lobsters, stroking rosewood tables and, catching a glimpse of herself in a knotted wood Mexican mirror, looking good for a girl low on love, Amy reassured herself. Self-love is the first step to loving others, she had once read. As she picked up a giant starfish which would look exquisite in her bathroom she saw the familiar profile of Orlando Rock browsing among the potpourri. Oh, no, it can’t be. I spend my life not seeing a single famous person and then in the space of two weeks they begin to reproduce asexually all over the place, like those spores I learned about in biology. Except that this was one famous person cloning himself all over her life. She decided to ignore him; he’d hardly be offended that a person whom he’d met for a grand total of an hour in his entire life decided to snub him. She slunk behind the bathrobes and disappeared into candles, surreptitiously glancing in mirrors to make sure he wasn’t behind her. Just as she was about to disappear up the stairs and make her exit she felt a hand on her elbow.
