by Clare Naylor
“Don’t you believe it, darling, it’s just a test. If you like him when he’s ordinary, then he can safely show you the high life, sure in the knowledge that you love him for himself.”
There could be some truth in that, thought Amy, now starting to get confused about the whole situation. And I suppose he did say he had a dark side, made sure I knew that, even though it didn’t show through.
“You could be right, Luce, but the thing is I don’t even know if he likes me. He invited me thinking I was Lily’s lesbian partner, I’m sure it’s just platonic.” Amy depressed herself at the thought.
“Plato never had it so good, darling, just you wait and see.”
After the three-day Nirvana period when you’re happy just to bask in the hormones of the last encounter, an unsettling feeling begins to creep in. Will he? won’t he? call again. Amy was even less sure than most of us at this point because there were only her own hormones to bask in as they hadn’t exchanged body fluids of any sort. She threw herself into finding marabou mules for her council estate shoot and tried to avoid the nagging little voice in her head: Will he? Won’t he?
At the same time as she was choosing just the right shade of marabou Orlando Rock was frolicking in lots of heather on what passed for Egdon Heath. His leading lady, a beauty of note, was developing a crush on him. She pressed herself a little closer to him in the love scenes than nineteenth-century etiquette demanded. She cleaned her teeth three times before a kiss and tasted like a peach. All this didn’t go unnoticed by Orlando Rock. Like any other red-blooded male he found this siren infinitely desirable, but somehow she just wasn’t his cup of tea. An actress, you see. He was also quite taken with a certain young lady he’d found eating fish and chips on a Dorset beach. He liked her haphazard eccentric beauty, her funny cardigans, and her strange imagination. Yes, we can safely say he was very taken.
On Friday afternoon the phone rang in the fashion room. It rang and Amy was buried beneath a pile of crumpled Armani shirts. She yelled to anyone to pick it up.
“Amy, it’s for you,” called Amelia.
“Who is it?” the crawling pile of Armani yelled.
“Who’s speaking? OK, I’ll just get her. Amy, it’s Orlando Rock!” pointedly. Subtext being “you sly old fox, what’s he doing phoning you?”
The heap of shirts gave birth to a tall girl in jogging pants who, shaking them off, clambered toward the phone. Amelia held the receiver to her chest, refusing to hand it over until Amy had acknowledged her quizzical raised eyebrows. Amy tugged it from her, smiling conspiratorially.
“Orlando, hi.” Very nonchalant, well done, he’d never guess at the seven hours Lucinda and Amy had spent deconstructing him, the very peculiar dreams Amy had had about him, and the twitter of excitement he was causing in the fashion room.
“Yes, that sounds great, where shall we meet? OK, under the lion, two on Saturday. Take care. Bye.”
Aaargh! The fashion cupboard erupted with little shrieks and volcanoes of excitement. Romeo Gigli skirts came to life and danced a samba, Prada shoes tap-danced across the floor, and Amy was accosted by a huddle of Voguettes dying to know “everything, darling.”
By lunchtime she was a minor celebrity throughout Vogue House. The lady from the library offered to let her have a look at all Orlando Rock’s press cuttings, and the security guards winked as she left the building. A fully fledged date with Le Rock. Yeee ha! She swaggered home on the tube, ensuring that her bottom swung in a jungle manner. She went to M&S for supper instead of Tesco and bought a Chinese meal for one and a French beer, girls’ beers she called them. Heaven. She used all the hot water without worrying about the wrath of her flatmates and ate a whole box of champagne truffles she’d been saving since Christmas. Sheer irresponsibility. Divine.
CHAPTER 15
Saturday lunchtime found her beneath a lion in Trafalgar Square. She was sure she was under the right one but had a glance at the others just in case. Then she saw the silhouette of Orlando approaching, backlit by the glaring March sunshine, his thick brown hair and in-character beard barely concealing his heartbreakingly beautiful bones, his terrifyingly intense eyes. She was filled with fear. My God, what am I doing here, he’s beautiful and meeting me. Maybe I’ve overslept, maybe I’m still dreaming. Amy had dreamed of moments like this since she was thirteen and hoped that George Michael was her long-lost brother and all manner of television detectives were her boyfriends. But here she was meeting famous actor person on a dream date. I’m OK as long as I don’t look at him, she told herself. So, kiss kiss hello, she avoided eye contact and addressed his gray fisherman sweater.
“Hi, how’s it going?” casually, deeply, and deeply sexily, Orlando asked.
“Hi, good, fine.” She overegged it.
“It’s one of my all-time favorite places and I never get to come, so I thought it’d be perfect. Is that very selfish?” he asked, leading her up the steps of the National Portrait Gallery.
“No, I absolutely love it here,” Amy gushed.
They were on nodding acquaintance with most of the monarchs, speculating on Elizabeth I’s sexuality, prevaricating over which of Henry VIII’s wives was the most beautiful. Amy hummed “Greensleeves” and proclaimed that any man who could write tunes like that couldn’t be all bad, even if he did decapitate several wives. Through dark Tudor chambers they emerged into the airy portals of the pre-Raphaelites.
“Ellen Terry was a radical feminist, you know,” she informed Orlando.
“I hate to sound like a philistine, but, who’s she?”
“One of your professional forebears, dummy, the greatest actress of her day. She was mad about her career and wouldn’t give up acting for anything, that’s why her husband painted her here. Choosing, some horrid Victorian allegory, she’s sniffing the camellia of worldly success rather than the violets of domestic harmony, or something like that.”
“And what happened to her?” asked Orlando.
“Divorced within a year,” Amy stated. A warning to men.
He watched her squinting at the thick swirls of oil on canvas, smiled to himself at her strange tidbits of knowledge.
“I thought I was the expert. I brought you here so I could impress you with my wealth of esoteric knowledge of history and you’re beating me hands down. I resign. How do you know all this stuff?”
“Aha! I did a curious degree called English Literature, which means that I went away and studied everything I liked for three years, dabbled in Victorian allegory, went shopping a lot, and learned how to crack a joke in Anglo-Saxon.”
“You speak in riddles, Amy, that doesn’t explain a thing.” He placed his hand on the small of her back and guided her through the door. She shrieked inwardly with delight. They wandered the halls lined with stern men in costume clothing, huge gilt frames hung heavy and austere, and Orlando provided a commentary on many of the assembled luminaries.
“Hogarth hated foreigners, and a few years ago they X-rayed his self-portrait and found he’d painted over a bit of canvas with his dog cocking its leg up, peeing all over some foreign drawings,” he explained.
“What a weird thing to do. I guess he never anticipated technology.”
As they alighted on the longed-for Romantics room Amy paid homage to real men.
“Oh, Byron,” she swooned.
“Can’t think what you see in him, he had a gammy leg,” muttered Orlando, replicating a conversation that many a man must have had with his wife when the great poet was alive.
“But Shelley was lovelier, more ethereal. And Keats …” She fell silent before his portrait. Orlando indulged her excessively romantic nature and misquoted “She walks in beauty” at her.
“And, Constable, I always vowed I’d make my bridegroom wear this outfit, black silk cravat and nineteenth-century frock coat.”
“Well, you’ll be lucky to find yourself a husband then, won’t you?” said Orlando cheekily.
“I’ll have you know there are many men in the world who
would wear that for me,” she boasted.
“If you say so, dearest. Shall we go and get a slice of cake? I’m famished.”
“Just one more,” pleaded Amy, leading him past Nell Gwynn with her nipple-revealing attire.
“They don’t make orange sellers like that anymore,” Orlando remarked.
“Look,” said Amy, tugging his sleeve and craning her neck heavenward, “John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. The wildest man around. Rake, cad, libertine, all-round bad boy. Every woman’s fantasy.”
“Pervert.” Orlando grinned, leading her by the hand to the coffee shop.
Postgallery they strolled up to Covent Garden. Amy felt particularly queasy going past the theater where she’d seen her companion tread the boards just ten days ago. He held her hand firmly, maneuvering her through cobbled streets smelling of alehouses and steak and kidney pies, her arm tugged insistently in her socket. “Masterful” she labeled the faint ache. She struggled to keep up her end of the conversation and take in the admiringly envious looks of passersby. People just don’t realize how multitalented you have to be to date a celebrity and remain coherent, she lamented. But she barely had time to think “woe is me” to herself before she was being marched into a stone-walled dairy ponging to high heaven of divine cheeses.
“I always expect Tess of the D’Urbervilles to come out and serve me,” said Orlando, swiftly falling into Amy’s pattern of a literary-hued world.
“Sod Tess, let’s get the whiffiest Stilton imaginable and some of this Brie,” instructed Amy. Orlando looked slightly perplexed.
“Don’t look so offended, it’s just that you’ve discovered my Achilles’ heel.”
“Cheese?”
“Yup, oozing Brie and the smelliest blue cheese, but it has to be with port.”
They walked away with two brown bags brimming with oatcakes and Cornish wafers. Blue-marbled bliss, thought Amy. Curiouser and curiouser, thought Orlando.
CHAPTER 16
“How was your weekend, Orlando?” breathed Tiffany, alias Eustacia Vye.
“Good, thanks.” He continued tugging on his boots and doing up a multitude of brass buttons on his jacket. Amy would probably love this getup, he thought warmly, grinning at the memory of her weak-kneed before salacious heroes of the past. Tiffany mistook his smile for encouragement and called him over to help her to rearrange her bustle.
“We’d better be careful,” she giggled. “People might talk.”
“Can’t think why,” Orlando mumbled, striding off.
If Amy could have seen him, she would have marveled at his Mr. Darcy moodiness, his lack of grace with others, but his gorgeous warmth and attentiveness toward her. But the logistics of the Dorset-London scenario meant, of course, that she didn’t see him. She couldn’t read his mind, so she agonized instead.
“You mean you feasted on Stilton and port, on his bed, and he didn’t kiss you?”
“Correct.” The girls had worked late and were rewarding themselves with margaritas in the Hanover Grand. They found a quiet table in the corner and sat back to dissect Amy’s date.
“You spent the whole day together, he told you about his horrid years at boarding school and his divorce, and nothing happened?”
“Lucinda, you’re making me feel like a freak.”
“I’m sorry, sweetheart, but I don’t really understand it. What time did you leave?”
“Eleven o’clock,” said Amy timidly, terrified about what this hour would denote to Lucinda. Was he a vampire? A priest? Gay?
“Hmm. Well, I’m puzzled, I have to say. Maybe he’s just feeling bruised after his divorce.” She plumped for the sensible option. “Did he ask to see you again?”
“It’s not 1953, Luce,” she said, giving in to temptation and reaching for one of Lucinda’s cigarettes.
“Imagine if he asked if he could kiss you.” Lucinda leaned over to offer a light.
“Oh God, that would be so horrible. Luce, people don’t really do that, do they?”
“I don’t know, I’ve had the same boyfriend for years, but it does happen in films.”
“I’d die, Luce. Or, even worse, imagine if he said ‘make love’!”
“What?”
“I hate it when people say ‘make love.’ It’s such a horrible euphemism, like women are too sensitive to know about sex. Yuck!”
“Or like ‘family planning.’ That’s so stupid. I don’t go to the family-planning clinic because I want to have six babies, two blond, four dark, I go because I don’t want any at all,” added Lucinda.
Mercifully for Amy the conversation veered away from Orlando and onto less awful topics. This wasn’t one of those things she could romanticize or rationalize. She had a really nice time with him, he hadn’t kissed her yet, and she was too nervous to think about it anymore.
Arriving home and thinking the flat monsters would be in bed, Amy automatically went to the fridge and picked at an apple strudel that’d been there for a few days.
“Who’s a dirty stop-out then?” Cath appeared in a pair of men’s pajamas, her gesture to prove to the world that there had once been a male in her bedroom. Kate was not far behind.
“Hi, kids,” Amy mumbled through apple strudel. “I hope that wasn’t, like, an important apple strudel.”
“Well, actually I was going to take it to work for lunch tomorrow,” Kate said, putting her head around the fridge door to check how much Amy had devoured.
“Sorry. I’ll buy another one tomorrow to replace it.” It was bloody horrible anyway, Amy thought.
“OK. Anyway, where have you been?” Cath persisted.
“Oh, just for a drink after work with Lucinda. Just a gossip.” Amy poured herself a glass of orange juice and plopped down on one of the chairs, leaving the she-devils to fight over the other.
“And what’s news?” Kate said, hastily claiming the spare seat. Amy’s tongue was loosened by the margaritas and a healthy desire to tell the world her exciting news. She also knew that if she didn’t tell them, they’d probably spike her shampoo with a depilatory.
“Well, not much really. I’ve kind of met this guy though.” The flat monsters tightened their lips and watched her. “He’s quite nice.”
“Oh yes?” The Amy Inquisitions always followed this pattern. Sneering questions with Amy feeling compelled by ancient loyalty to divulge all.
“Yeah. You might know him actually.” This was bait for the piranhas.
“Really? Who?”
“A guy called Orlando Rock?” ’ She didn’t want to presume.
“What? Orlando Rock the actor?” Cath didn’t miss a beat. Deadpan. Not a flicker of excitement.
“Yeah, I suppose so.”
“So how did you meet him then?” No girly shrieking and hearty congratulations. Hey, our friend’s sleeping with a love god, let’s open that bottle of tequila. Well done, Ames!
“I suppose I met him that weekend in Dorset. We’ve only been out a couple of times.” She played down her conquest.
“So this has been going on for a while then?” The accusation was leveled straight at Amy’s conscience. And why didn’t we, your oldest and dearest (ha bloody ha) friends, know about this?
“Not really, it’s not a big deal. You’ll have to meet him.” Amy offered this encounter with Orlando as an olive branch. She’d no more want him to meet them than she would have liked to have been reincarnated as a Christian in Roman times. Their eyes were narrow and their derision much more hideous than being fed to the lions. Suddenly Amy couldn’t be bothered anymore; she emptied the rest of her orange juice down the sink. “Anyway, guys, I’m really knackered, I’ll fill you in on all the gory details in the morning. Sweet dreams.” Like hell. Their idea of sweet dreams was to spike a toddler’s sherbet dip with arsenic. Amy fell into her own Orlando dreams with the ssssshhhhhing of the witches’ whispers in the kitchen below.
The phone rang and Amy jumped out of the bath, a deluge of her favorite lilac bubbles settling in pools around her ankles
. She grabbed a towel and hurtled herself down the stairs to catch it before the answerphone did.
“Hello.”
“Hi, could I speak to Amy?” Drip drip, bubble bubble, melting sensation in tummy.
“Orlando, it’s me.”
“I didn’t recognize your voice.”
“I’ve just got out of the bath.” Pause so Amy can imagine him imagining her in her glorious state of undress.
“Oh. I was just wondering, I won’t be around this weekend so thought maybe you’d like to come round tonight, have some supper?”
“That’d be lovely, but I think it’s my turn. Why don’t you come here? My flat monsters are out and we could get a take-away.”
“OK, I’ll be there in half an hour.”
Orlando Rock, have you no sense of decency? No shame? Don’t you know that it’s a cardinal sin to allow a girl a meager half hour to get ready? We’re not just talking “See you in the pub in half an hour,” which can be accommodated. A few miracles with concealer and some mousse and all could be well. But here? In half an hour? Gottabejoking. Amy coped womanfully with the task. She deposited all dirty laundry in her sports bag; hid her Tampax and contraceptives in a drawer; turned round her clipboard with twee photos of herself in mutton-sleeved ball dresses, myriad ex-boyfriends all over it; chucked Hello! under the bed and replaced it with Trainspotting, no, on second thought, too hip and grim. Fear of Flying, that’ll do, very retro but seminal and sexy.
She plunged a bottle of white wine into the freezer (mustn’t forget or I’ll end up with an exploded mass of frozen peas and white wine all over the place), took the pair of black lacy knickers someone had hung on the notice board down, and hid her council tax demands. Good. Nearly there. Oh my God. Me? She looked down at her deeply unsexy toweling dressing gown and hurled herself back up the stairs. No time for nude lipstick application. Powder, Japanese silk dress number? Nope, too try-hard. Jeans, T-shirt, nice and tight. Fine. Barefoot? Yes, very Bardot. So, within twenty-seven minutes Amy was perched at her kitchen table perusing the arts section of the Telegraph, sipping wine with Sting at low volume as though she’d been born there. As though she always wore full makeup and shaved her legs just to sit at the kitchen table.
