Love (2 page)

After the terrifying soul-searching part of the ceremony was over, the sermon, which always dwelled on love and made every couple present reach for one another's hand as a gesture of remembrance, guilt, or fear, the part which made one tremble at the magnitude
of the vows and wonder at the sanity of the marital pair, Amy glanced around the church and some rows behind recognized a face from her seventeen-year-old past. Luke Harding. A few years ago her younger, lankier self had felt little shame in pleading for invitations to parties where he'd be. She'd sit as alluringly as possible on a sofa somewhere, subtly gesturing to him with her eyelashes or toes, or some such part of her anatomy, discreet enough for her brazenness to have careered over his head. By eleven o'clock Luke was usually ensconced in a nearby armchair with a stouter, more peroxide version of Amy, his wandering hands cruelly drawing her attention to her own comparative lack of voluptuousness. The evenings had always ended thus.

The fact that she was currently receiving significantly more attention from Luke than he was bestowing upon the
All things bright and beautiful
being mouthed by the congregation was satisfying but slightly bewildering. Amy looked behind her to check that she wasn't being shadowed by a Sun-In-haired lovely. No. She had his absolute attention, so she turned round and licked her lips seductively? No, she concentrated hard on her song sheet and mimed “the Lord God made them aaalllll” more convincingly than even the maiden aunts.

Miranda's father had just finished his recounting of his daughter's adolescent peccadilloes (funny how all brides had at least one suitor with a motorbike and indulged a passion for black nail polish at some stage of their
journey into womanhood—just as well Dad never knew the quarter of it), when Amy, lolling slightly back in her chair and cradling an icy flute of champagne against her burning cheek, felt a brush of warm air behind her left ear. Her facial muscles set rigid as a man's voice whispered his invitation to skip the speeches in favor of a walk in the grounds. Her hand taken hold of, she had little choice but to follow.

Luke Harding, she could hear them now, well, that's what everyone's after at a wedding, isn't it? Who could blame him, they would say. Apparently his live-in girlfriend was away, probably just missing her. But Amy didn't care; all those diary entries, the time she rescued his Lucozade bottle from the bin and kept it for two terms, all was vindicated, she thought, just for the soft breath on her neck. But then she would think that, couldn't see the wood for the trees, he wanted a shag, couldn't she see that? they said.

They stood shaded by the imposing gray stone and ivy of the house, drinks in hand, resting against the trunk of an ancient plane tree. Amy could hear occasional bursts of laughter from the open windows of the house as the speeches continued. She could feel her face getting pinker by the second; champagne always did this to her. And there he was, blond, disheveled in black tie, and looking straight at her.

“You broke my heart when I was seventeen, Luke Harding.”

He laughed low, not displeased with the nineteen-year-old self which could have appealed to the heavenly creature who stood beside him.

“No, really.” Amy smiled wanly. A beauty from birth would not have felt the need for such candor.

Luke took her glass out of her hand and kissed her. Just like that. No messing. It was nice, she thought, a warm residue of champagne on their lips, light fingers resting on her bottom, the glass wavering precariously somewhere in between. But it was nothing to how it would feel later, when she played the little details back to herself, rewound the conversation and filled in the bits (champagne glass's whereabouts, envious onlookers, etc.) she had missed due to her participation.

The odyssey through the swirling red carpets of the hotel corridors in search of Luke's room left Amy breathless. Finally, the elusive room 101. Oh hell, thought Amy, a portent if ever there was one. She tried to object but toppled against the door frame instead. The keys rattled the door open and they fell in, giggling as one of the roses dropped off her hat. She bent down to pick it up and he grasped her bottom so firmly she gasped and stumbled forward into the hotel room. Hotel rooms were absolutely her favorite thing, the anonymity which spelled illicit encounters and the joy of pinching little guest soaps, this was the life. Amy dropped backward onto a bed of such chintzy proportions that for a blurry, tipsy moment she feared herself in her grandparents' bedroom. Luke shed his shoes with purposeful thuds and clambered on his elbows to her side. They held one another's gaze for a few hazy seconds and then continued where they'd left off. He tugged gently at the buttons of her jacket until he could feel the lace edges of her bra and then his hands disappeared beneath the linen in a frenzy of exploration. That old chestnut, Amy
half thought. She felt an ancient flutter of terror as he reached for her breasts, the moment she expected the interloper to sit up and yell that he'd been conned, but that was then—now she was as well endowed as, if not better than, the next goddess, so she focused on the pleasant lurching of Luke and felt for his zip.

M
onday night was commonly laundry night in Amy's Battersea abode, the kitchen windows steamed with an excess of clothes drying on radiators and boiling pans of rice. Her two flatmates had done their dark wash before she had time to add her jeans and now she was waiting patiently in a bid to get her whites in before she ran out of underwear altogether. She sat on the floor amidst a heap of washing (she'd been sentimentally avoiding washing what had fondly become her Harding knickers, but the time had come), and nursing a cup of tea, she related her latest notch to the distinctly moribund-looking pair occupying the only two chairs in the kitchen. They egged her on for details, eyebrows rising and plummeting in time to the symphony of her recollections.

“You know, I've fancied him for so long that it had to happen, it was fate. Like Hardy's poem ‘Faint Hearted in a Railway Station,' you know, where he sees a girl sitting on a railway platform and knows if he doesn't get off the train and speak to her, he could be altering his entire destiny. Well, we looked at one another and had to get off the train, as it were. Had to know if this was it.”

Cath's eyebrows crashed together as she frowned, all faux bewilderment. “And was it?”

Amy heard the tone, felt the mockery, but chose to shrug it off.

“Well, no. But it was nice and he's got a girlfriend, so we can't. But the point is now we know.”

Cath and Katie sought each other's glance and eye-rolled knowingly at each other as Amy bent down to close the door of the washing machine.

Amy left the detergent and the gruesome twosome and trailed upstairs. As soon as they heard her radio go on in the room above they launched their Waterloo. Cath hugged her knees into her chest.

“Her ego's just gone mad, that's the problem, a few guys show a bit of interest and she's so flattered she jumps into bed with them.”

“Yeah, I read that that's what happens to ugly teenagers who lose weight or something, they just become intolerable and so lose all their friends.” Katie omitted the rest of the article, which dwelled on the fact that “Friends often find it difficult to adjust to the new status ascribed to BTB (beastly turns beauty) as they feel it threatens their domain. There's only so much jealousy a friendship can take before it starts to turn sour.”

“ ‘Meant to meet!' God, she was bad enough with her fantasies when men wouldn't touch her with a barge pole, but now … heaven help us. Think of all those years at school when she'd hide behind all those baggy clothes because she was so overweight.”

Katie's subconscious unfairly presented her with a snapshot of Amy in school uniform. She wasn't vastly overweight, in fact she'd been more of a beanpole, but fat was a more heinous sin, so she decided to let it pass uncontested.

Amy pottered around her room for the rest of the evening, listening to old cassettes and sorting out her underwear drawers, one of which was given over to sample pairs of support tights and beige camisoles. Oh, the joys of being a fashion assistant. Friends thought your life was awash with complimentary Prada bags and Conran evening gowns, but it was usually all you could manage to beg a zipless pair of canary yellow nylon hot pants (in December). And far from the stylishly groomed environs one might expect of the employee of such a salubrious publication, Amy's room was positively dishabille. Not a Louis XVII clock or bleached oak floor in sight. Merely a well-Hoovered but nonetheless thinning beige carpet; a childhood duvet begging to be replaced with Egyptian cotton sheets and chenille throws; an array of Moroccan plant pots from Cambridge market spewing beads and sunflower hair clips; an abandoned set of mini dumbbells from an aeons-old bid to get fit; and the wardrobe of a hopeful twenty-four-year-old. That is, things picked up in sales, which will come in handy for
that
cocktail party on the lawn,
that
week on a yacht in Saint-Tropez,
that
picnic at Glyndebourne. Needless to say, most of the outfits hadn't had an airing yet, but we live in glorious anticipation.

Underwear was particularly close to Amy's heart at the moment. It seemed somehow … representative. The for-her Jockey briefs and athletically cut sports bras were an ailing breed. Over the last year or so, as she'd begun to get more confident, less gawky, they had been usurped by mesh and lace and gauzy, flouncy things, mostly white but occasionally black. It heralded a new start for her. She was Madame Bovary and her shoes,
thought Amy. When Emma Bovary had wanted to escape her dreary life she wore a pair of garnet-colored slippers; they elevated her into the lavish realms of her imagination, from the mundane into a world of swirling ballrooms and gentlemen with silver cigarette cases. Her shoes are my underwear. She giggled at the notion, but it was true. Had she not wooed Luke Harding with her “push 'em up” bra? She certainly knew that if she wore something divine and silky close to her skin, she behaved more sexily and was more inclined to wiggle her bottom for the benefit of random strangers. For some women, shoes do the trick: in their usual penny loafers they're capable of feeding the cat and rearing seven children but present them with a pair of slut red Manolo Blahnik dagger heels and they metamorphose into a lusty harlot who wouldn't know one end of a potato peeler from the other.

But Amy had never needed more props, or much encouragement, to charge off into wonderland, to follow a fantasy. The artistically gathered dust on her bookshelves bore testament, not to the fact that she didn't read, but rather to the way she felt books should be: worn, old, and telling. Outmoded and sentimental, some would say. A blade of grass in
The Winter's Tale
reminded her of a summer spent revising at university, flopping on the grass in the quads, trying to memorize soliloquies; a bus ticket in
Crime and Punishment
recalled a grueling spell of work experience at a publishing house in South Kensington. And now? Now she pulled out a copy of the supremely erotic
Delta of Venus
by Anaïs Nin and smiled at the curled pages. During a particularly rampant affair with a photographer last
summer she had read this copy in the bath, over breakfast, on the loo, cover to cover.

The written word, the photographic image, both were infinitely more satisfying to Amy than reality. There was a detached beauty about them, a sublime loveliness that made her gasp with almost more pleasure than the most expertly delivered orgasm. She would dearly have loved to mold her life into the cornfield-kiss scene from
A Room with a View
, to experience the passion of Elizabeth Bennett as she beheld Mr. Darcy, or to want to die for lost love like Anna Karenina.

L
ucinda led Amy around Knightsbridge with the awe-inspiring confidence of one of a hallowed breed who are met not with disdain but deference when patrolling the upper echelons of Sloane Street's boutiques. There was a type of woman in this part of town whom one imagined wouldn't be able to breathe outside this postal address; place her in an SW11 or an N6 and she'd be reaching for her inhaler, rasping in a bid for her self-respect. Swathed in camel color, with dashes of Hermes black leather, like some piebald horse, she walks with balletic steps the length of Walton Street before hailing a cab. Never known to speak or to eat.

They were on a scarf-finding mission. They strolled purposefully from the bitterly cold, early morning, sundrenched pavements into the silk-walled casements of luxury. Chanel, Farhi, Hamnett. It was curious being in with the right set in these terrifying shops. When Amy was at the publishing house she and another work-experience girl would escape most lunchtimes to meander around South Kensington. They developed a formula for being treated seriously in the shops. Turn waxen with glumness before entering and don't smile. Appear uninterested at all times and express delight, loathing, and
any greeting merely with your eyelashes. Thus a flicker denotes excitement, a plummeting of lashes disgust, and imploring eyelashes “I'm trying this on” (no
pleases
here, I'm afraid). They'd stoically wander between the rails in this fashion, suppressing all rapture. Once outside they'd curl over with laughter and
I must have thats
. There invariably followed the adage
I've got to be rich
, chanted so sincerely and with such desperation that Amy almost believed that if she closed her eyes tightly enough, the darkness would yield it. Rich boyfriends or checkbook fraud seemed more likely options, though.

And the scarves: the soft velvet and lace, rich chocolate chiffon, amethyst silk and dense satin. Amy fingered each in turn, draping some over her shoulder, veiling her mouth and nose with one so she looked like a Turkish Delight temptress or just inhaling the trace of perfume and opulence of the fabrics. Amy pondered but Lucinda knew.