by Clare Naylor
“Not a problem.”
“Actually I think it is. That’s the thing about girls, they can only go out if they feel right, and I’m not an exception to that rule.”
“I know,” he said matter-of-factly.
“So, I can’t borrow your shirt really, can I?”
“No, but there was one of those horrid little boutiques in the foyer downstairs. Let’s go and buy you something gold and glittery, you’ll still look amazing no matter how tacky.” Amy recalled the horrid little boutique. Very expensive Italian horrid boutique actually, she was going to end up in some gold glittery number costing more than a small car. Oh well, if he insisted.
So in sunglasses and baseball caps the camera-dodging pair stole into the bijou arcade of cool marble hotel shops selling jewels and golf clubs and umbrellas and Swiss watches.
“Oh, darling, I’ve just remembered, I’ve left my rubies at home, I absolutely can’t wear my emeralds with my scarlet ball gown, I simply must have these.” She put on her best American-oil-baron’s-mistress-in-London voice and pointed to a string of shimmering stones with a price tag whose noughts ran into next week. This was taken by the shimmery, terrifyingly smart lady behind the counter as an everyday request to buy her wares, so Amy and Orlando had to scuttle off before she realized they could no more afford a ruby necklace than they could afford to run for the American presidency. Once inside the expensive Italian bolt-hole they squinted at the brightness of sequins and gilt buttons and tried to hide their distaste. Eventually Amy’s well-trained fashion eye alighted upon a red Indian number, sort of leather strands and suede. Orlando raised his eyebrows dubiously.
“Are you sure?” he whispered.
“Trust me,” she said.
As they entered the grand dining hall of the restaurant all eyes turned to witness the dazzling couple. The management kept the paparazzi firmly outside the hotel’s revolving doors, and Orlando was happier and prouder to be on show in public than he’d felt since his first review appeared in The Stage. Amy dazzled, quite simply. He held her hand and she turned to him.
“Are you sure I don’t look like Pocahontas?” she said quietly, her pale caramel-colored thighs darting through the strands of softest suede as she padded silently across the dance floor.
“You look wonderful,” he reassured her, needlessly. Orlando by her side was equally striking. His hair curled gently over his collar and he had shaven his beard off again, leaving the blunt contours of his jawline to vie with his navy blue eyes for attention. They were suddenly beyond. Beyond the reach of every person in the room, beyond everyday beauty and charm, they existed in some realm of moondust and glamour reserved only for those immortals come down from the olive groves of classical myth for the evening. It was an old-time Hollywood entrance, an entrance that you think only occurs in the mind of some journalist or social chronicler with an overactive imagination and one too many brandies, but this was real and those who saw it committed it to memory and never quite forgot it. It was the essence of youthful romance. And yes, we should envy them, we should wish ourselves them for this one fleeting, magical moment, for they’re fantastically happy up there on their cloud. Lucky, lucky them.
And the cup of love and the cup of happiness brimmed over. Their chatter chinked along with the glasses and flowed as easily as the bubbles rising to the surface of yet more champagne; the food was tender and delighted the palate but was barely registered as they slipped easily into one another’s eyes and revealed their heart’s desires. Amy laughed as high and hard as a sugared almond and the rich timbre of Orlando’s voice sank deep inside Amy’s head, saying exactly what she wanted to hear.
“It’s been a struggle, an ill-fated path at times but we got here,” he sighed.
“Not too much of a struggle, I hope?” Amy was eager to ease all his worries.
“No, just the Tiffany Swann thing, the media, me and my reluctance to socialize, but nothing could beat how good this feels.”
“To us.” Amy raised her glass to meet his.
“Too right,” echoed Orlando.
And the other diners watched with the same blend of joy and envy as we watch them, but this time neither really noticed or cared. The staircase to their room seemed eternal that night and with the ease of dripping honey they explored each other’s bodies in a familiar yet ecstatic way. It was at least two o’clock in the morning before Amy remembered that they were under siege and that she still had her public to face.
CHAPTER 28
The breakfast tray clattered on the bed and the orange juice flooded the scrambled egg.
“Shit,” muttered Orlando. It always seems quite blasphemous for the first word of a new day to be of the Anglo-Saxon variety, especially if the sky is blue and the evening before can only be described as heavensent. But Orlando had a hollow tummy and his hangover was merciless so we will forgive him.
“Mmmm, toast.” Amy’s nose twitched to life at the smell and she lifted her head to investigate the rest of the breakfast.
“Morning, my love.” Orlando leaned over and kissed her forehead, narrowly missing upsetting the teapot. Amy scrabbled up and, pulling on a T-shirt, eyed up the bacon.
“Do you remember the pig incident?” she asked, thinking back to the early hours of their acquaintance in the woods in Dorset.
“Am I supposed to?” asked Orlando, fearful of being negligent.
“When we were on the shoot and that woman Nathalia told me off for giving her pig sandwiches. Old trollop,” said Amy, feeling a million miles from her career in ironing.
“Vaguely. Was she the hard-faced one?”
“Yup indeedy,” said Amy, reaching for the newspapers, tabloid naturally, who could maneuver the broadsheets before midday, she wondered?
“Orlando.” She froze on the front page of the Express.
“Hmmm?” he quizzed, squeezing another butter-drenched soldier of toast into his mouth.
“Orlando, isn’t that us on holiday?” She registered it gradually. He put his tray to one side and leaned over the paper.
“How the bloody hell?” he asked, seeing a picture of himself and Amy wearing very little on a beach in Sydney. It was one that they’d done on self-timer, running into the picture as the button popped. Amy tried to make sense of the article. “Orlando Rocks His Lover All Night Long.” What? Oh my God, Amy caught sight of two names, Catherine Hastings and Kate Chapman. Who? she thought at first. Then. Click. Flat monsters.
“Orlando, oh my God, it’s my bloody flatmates, they’ve done this.” But Orlando wasn’t listening, he was devouring the contents of the piece. Amy looked, too, but could only make out … I was his sex slave … Ozzie hideaway … exclusive photographs … six times a night. No, please, God, no, thought Amy.
Orlando stayed silent until, “Amy, I think you’d better explain this to me.” Oh my God, he was fierce. Headmaster’s-study fierce. Amy couldn’t bear it. More than anything she refused to be told off.
“Explain what?” As if you didn’t know, Amy.
“This.” He pointed calmly but firmly to the newspaper. Amy thought it was the bit which said, “My Night of Passion with Rocking Romeo,” but she couldn’t be sure, maybe he just meant the whole thing.
“I really don’t know what makes you think you can talk to me like that, Orlando Rock, but in case it had escaped your attention, I’m free to come and go as I please and won’t answer to you … not when you’re treating me like a five-year-old on detention.” Deflection, Amy, oldest trick in the book when you’re guilty. But it won’t wash with Orlando, sorry.
“All I want to know is if you told the papers and if not, how they know all this crap, and how they got our private holiday photos.” Amy worked through the problem in her head. Kitchen table. Gossip gossip. Tell us more. Bitches, she concluded, and I bet they nicked the bloody photo. But still he can’t talk to me like that.
“You can’t talk to me like that and get away with it, you know.” She leaped out of bed and sought out her j
eans.
“Amy, I just want to know what’s going on.”
“No, you’re practically accusing me of selling my story to the newspapers and I won’t stay here and listen to it.”
“I’m not accusing you of anything, I just want to get to the bottom of it. Just answer my question. How did they get hold of all this?”
“I’ve no idea, but you seem convinced that it was me so I’ll just leave you with that delusion and go.”
“Amy, I have to know I can trust you, don’t you understand?”
“I understand that you’re paranoid and that if I carry on going out with you, I’m doomed to spending the rest of my days like Persephone in the underworld, darkness and misery. I might as well just take the veil now, save us both the trouble.”
Orlando was lost. Veils? Persephone? He just wanted to know what was happening and how a photograph of him in his swimming trunks came to be on the front of every national tabloid and one broadsheet.
Once safely ensconced in the back of the taxi Amy wasn’t quite sure where she should go. She hadn’t thought of the consequences of returning to the nest of vipers at home; she was sure that if she saw either Kate or Cath, she’d club them with a blunt instrument. Orlando’s, her other safe haven, was most definitely off bounds, and all she could think of was Lucinda. She checked her watch: Lucinda and Benjy never went in to work earlier than ten. Would she make it? Amy took the chance, directing the cab to Notting Hill. She piled onto the doorstep with her carrier bags.
“Hi, Amy,” said Benjy without blinking at her red puffy eyes and backward-through-a-hedge look. Suppose he’s used to it by now, thought Amy, hoping at the very least to have caused concern or a minor stir.
“Is that Amy?” Lucinda brayed from inside the house. She came tearing out, oozing the worry and maternal anxiety Amy longed for. “Darling, where have you been? We’ve been trying for days to get hold of you, you do know what’s happened, don’t you?” She lifted all Amy’s carrier bags and ushered her into the house. Amy erupted into tears.
“I’ve left him,” she sobbed.
“Where?” asked Lucinda, slightly confused.
“No, I’ve left him. We had a fight about the papers, about my flat monsters.” Amy was incoherent so they just sat her in a large armchair and intravenously fed her chamomile tea with whiskey in it until the little hiccups of tears and misery abated.
“What have I done?”
“I don’t know, darling, what have you done?” Lucinda sat on the arm of the chair and stroked Amy’s shoulder.
“We had a really nice night. I was just thinking I might be in love with him but then he snapped because of all the newspaper stuff, practically accused me of kissing and telling, so I left,” Amy spluttered.
“I saw the pieces. You have to admit, sweetie, it does look as though you had a hand in it, all the photos and stuff about you guys on holiday.” Lucinda suddenly regretted saying this, and noticing Amy’s shoulders beginning to shake again at the mere mention that she might be responsible, she retracted it.
“But of course we know it wasn’t you, it was those awful bloody bitches and when I get hold of them I’ll throttle them. I’m just saying that you can’t be too harsh on Orlando. He’s had a rough time with the press over the past few years, he’s bound to be oversensitive.” At this Amy cried all over again. The shoulder stroking and chamomile teaing continued for some hours to come.
Amy woke up with bloated froggy red eyes from crying too much and lots of crumbled bits of tissue stuck in her hair. She was lying on top of a rosy sprigged duvet in the spare room at Benjy and Lucinda’s and it slowly came back to her that she was Orlando-less. And they’d had the most amazing evening. Quite simply she’d never been happier, and things were never usually very simple for Amy, so this was nothing short of miraculous. But now she’d pissed him off and couldn’t go back. How could he accuse her of that, she smarted, and her blood ran hotter at the very thought. Didn’t he know her better? So for a while logic escaped Amy; she didn’t stop to analyze in her usual way the fact that he had said nothing of the sort. Guilt, my dear, guilt.
CHAPTER 29
On the creamy, inch-deep carpets of the Knightsbridge hotel Orlando Rock sat with his back against the wall, the day’s newspapers scattered about him. He tried to read the horrors in print but kept returning to the picture of Amy in her bikini on holiday. He remembered how much they’d laughed and how much they’d eaten, how he had to tell her that if she ate another prawn, she’d turn pink and start swimming backward in the bath. And last night, last night with its glow almost too bright to look at just yet, he could only feel the soft tassels of Amy’s dress brushing his skin as he touched her, remember how ethereal she had looked with her fading tan and almond skin. How much lovelier than any woman he’d known. But what could he do? She’d told someone about them, that was for sure. And she’d told whoever it was things he couldn’t imagine telling anyone, not even Bill. Logic told him that women had different codes of revelation and discretion among one another than men had, but to talk about their jokes, their feelings, the whole kit and caboodle? And although Orlando knew this, he didn’t feel an awful lot better. Well, let’s face it, would you if your sexual prowess had been turned into a series of trite one-liners mostly pertaining to Rocks or Rock ’Ard or something for the nation to digest over breakfast, on building sites, and in hairdressing salons? The more he thought about it, the more furious he became.
And so they sit at opposite ends of London, not really understanding each other but longing to forget the whole thing and just kiss and make up without the intervening postmortem. Mais non. Star-crossed lovers were ever thus, their love shines brighter but when extinguished there’s no finding your way in the darkness. Amy didn’t really understand what all the fuss was about. So what, there was a bikini shot on the front of the newspapers? It was quite nice, not a spare tire in sight, she thought with relief. And it was pretty embarrassing for her mother and old math teacher to bear witness to the fact that she had rather a lot of sex with a famous actor, but it could have been worse, they could have exhumed one of the exes. Small mercies!
Amy was naïve in most matters tabloid. She knew about magazine distribution and could tell her Vogue masthead from a subeditor, but the logistics of dishing the dirt escaped her. But not for long, folks.
Lucinda pushed open the door of the spare room.
“Amy, are you awake? I’ve got to go to work in a min. Are you going to come in?”
Amy groaned to life. Actually she’d been awake since four o’clock in the morning, feeling sick and terrified of never seeing Orlando again, but she’d forgotten about the demon work.
“I guess so. Can I borrow some clothes?” Lucinda handed over an outfit she’d prepared earlier, safe and black and baggy. What a gem.
As they were squashed up on the tube with frizzing hair and dandruffy shoulders serving to remind them how horrible the human race was, they were rendered even more misanthropic by a glance at a headline in the Sun. Lucinda saw it first but she didn’t have her contact lenses in, so squinted in a bid to make out the bold type of AMY AND AMIABILITY, rather charmingly literary for the Sun, you have to admit. Amy saw it and were it not for the grainy topless shot of her underneath she would probably have been flattered at the aptness of it. But right now her attention was drawn to her left breast. She would have screamed had she not had a mouthful of commuter’s elbow as the train jarred into the station. Her knees went weak, and continuing the Jane Austen motif, she felt faint. She would have run mad, too, had she had the space. Imagine your horror. The breasts that you are familiar with only in terms of having a bath with them and the odd squeezing into a Wonderbra, you’ve tried to keep them half-hidden even when trying on some divine garment in a shop changing room, you’ve looked anew at them at the beginning of relationships and hoped they would pass muster, then realized they must do or the relevant man wouldn’t give them the time of night. And so they are forgotten again, those w
onders of womankind. Until they appear on the front of a newspaper being read two feet away from you on the underground. Then you feel very peculiar indeed. Especially if they weren’t teased to peak perfection by some ice-cube-wielding photographer for rather a lot of money, but instead recorded by some rat ex-boyfriend for five minutes in his monochrome Battersea flat. Bloody hell. Rat. Bastard. Traitor. Cad. No word was strong enough, no implement sharp enough or blunt enough to club him about the head with when she saw him next. But what was she to do? She couldn’t go to work and have everyone see that. Oh my God, the men in the post-room, the security guards. Her editor. The man standing next to her. Surely he could see the resemblance between the shadowy figure with breasts protruding from his briefcase and the girl who stood in front of him. Amy had to get hold of a copy. She had to lock herself in the loo and cry with horror at herself looking like a star of Emanuelle II for national delectation, or even worse, and more likely, she concluded, ridicule. All this time she was holding on to Lucinda’s jacket sleeve, her mouth open, her face frozen in horror. Lucinda was oblivious to the full catastrophe, being as she was deprived of the salient image due to her shortsightedness. Amy mouthed various swear words at Lucinda but no words came out. She motioned noiselessly at the paper but made no sense. Eventually they got to their stop and Lucinda had to steer Amy over the gap onto the platform. They sat on a broken plastic bench.
“Amy, what is wrong? Tell me what it said! I was half tempted to wrest it from that man but thought you might keel over!”
“I … it’s me,” spluttered Amy.
“I know, sweetheart, but what did it say?” coaxed Lucinda.
“It was me … with the photographer.” Lucinda was none the wiser and the way Amy was staring at the peeling Holidays in the Sun poster on the other side of the track thought it best if she steered her away from the train part of the station altogether. She knew of Amy’s penchant for Tolstoy and didn’t want an Anna Karenina drama to deal with, thank you very much.
