Love (23 page)

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 wonders 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.

“Darling, let's see if we can make it in to work and then we can sit somewhere quiet and talk about it.” Amy glued herself to her seat like a toddler refusing to go to playschool.

“I can't, Luce.”

“Come on, whatever it was couldn't be so bad, think of what poor Orlando has been through and he's still standing.” Amy was thinking of Orlando, but not poor Orlando. Bloody Orlando, if I'd never met him … But she wished he was there now, too. Couldn't decide whether she loved or loathed him. Hither, thither, which way next?

“Luce, it was me … without my top on.” Amy was in denial; the topless part she was coming to terms with, the fact that there was a shadowy figure of a man lurking in the same picture, the fact that she was actually having sex in print seemed not quite to sink in.

“But how, darling, was it another holiday snap?”

“No, it was the photographer.” Lucinda was getting nowhere with her line of inquiry so pulled the deadweight to her feet and marched her military fashion along the platform and up the escalator. Outside the station she picked up copies of every tabloid and left the change of her fiver with the fortunate vendor. After a frog-march down Hanover Street and a difficult negotiation of the revolving doors of Vogue House the girls found a quiet
corner of the beauty cupboard and Lucinda extracted two plastic cups of tarry coffee from the machine and set about making sense of Amy's rantings.

“Here's some coffee, now let's see what this is all about,” said Lucinda, opening the offending
Sun
.

“No!” Amy reached over and tried to cover the headline with her arm but was soon defeated. “I suppose everyone's going to see it soon enough.” Lucinda scanned the paper with barely concealed amusement.

“Darling, how on earth did they get hold of all this? Was this Toby's idea?” Amy shrugged her shoulders feebly.

“It's really not funny, Luce. Look, this bit here says you can buy the video for £11.99 on their hot line. They can't do this.”

“Darling, they are doing it, but don't worry, it'll be a one-minute wonder. And anyway, if I had boobs like that, I wouldn't care if they were on
News at Ten
.”

“But it's not just that, it's the fact that Toby's there, too, God, it's disgusting. It's so sordid. I feel so violated, Luce, it's horrible. I don't want to see anyone. What am I going to do?”

“Well, Toby actually just looks like part of the mattress he's such a dark shadow, so don't worry about that too much. And you're going to feel shit for a few days, your parents will disown you for a bit, and your answerphone will be overflowing with offers from
Playboy
, and then it'll die down and you'll wonder what the fuss was all about.” Amy remained singularly unconvinced. Of course she did.
AMY
AND
AMIABILITY
, and it wasn't just about how nice she was to animals and children, it was liberally
strewn with phrases like
insatiable
and
curvaceous, free-thinking
, and even, heaven forfend, wait till her mother sees it,
a bit of a goer
. No! thought Amy. I can't bear it. She couldn't sit still and she couldn't go anywhere. If she looked at the papers, she felt sick, but if she didn't read them, she imagined the reports as ten times more crass than they actually were. She was embarrassed even in front of Lucinda but couldn't bear to be on her own. Oh God, she thought, what am I going to do? For a moment she was struck with empathy for Orlando. Now I know how he felt, she thought. But she quickly forgot about him. She was more concerned with herself right now, more terrified of her fate.

“Oh well, look who it isn't. I had no idea you were moonlighting as a porn queen, Amy.” Nathalia flashed into the room, her silver puffa jacket setting off her ski tan, and her “helped” blond hair lent her that fresh-from-Klosters look.

“Come on, Nats, Amy's having a rough time, she can do without that,” said Lucinda, firm but fair.

“Darling, if I were to prostrate myself naked before a video camera, it would be naïve to think that it was going to end any way other than messily.”

“Piss off and leave us alone,” Lucinda snapped, her fair aspect vanishing behind a cloud. Nathalia picked up a pair of shoes fresh from a high-street fashion shoot and, with a wrinkling of her nose and a cursory “Cheap rubbish,” walked away.

Amy bit her lip and tried not to cry. Lucinda decided that it was time to take action.

She picked up the phone.

“Who're you phoning?”

“I'm going to get hold of Orlando. There's no way you can go through this on your own, darling.”

“Luce, that would just be too embarrassing. Besides, he was awful to me, accusing me of all sorts of things, I wouldn't ask him for help if you paid me.” Defiant, she was. She was also deeply worried how he would react to her recent excursion into pornography. While he may have forgiven her for blabbing to her flatmates (although she wouldn't give him the chance), she could see she'd have problems explaining away her top-shelf antics. And bloody hell, I'm a grown woman, if I want to experiment with sex, I will, it's none of his business. Amy was defiant, if distraught.

“Yup, I'd like to speak to Orlando Rock, I believe he's in room … Amy, which room is it?” Lucinda was on fine form.

“Can't remember.” Stubbornly.

“Amy, which room is Orlando in?” she shouted.

“Fifty-nine.” Surly.

“Yeah, he's in room fifty-nine, I'm a friend. What do you mean his agent, I'm his friend, please put me through,” Lucinda bellowed. But she persisted, agent's number from directory inquiries. Dial dial.

“Yes, I'm trying to get in touch with Orlando Rock, his girlfriend needs to speak to him.” Contempt on the other end of the line.

“Look, he doesn't pay you to be some moral judge, so just tell him to call Amy as soon as possible. If you don't, there'll be hell to pay. What do you mean you don't know where he is, just tell him, OK?” Lucinda hung up.

Amy was mortified. She may be Miss Big Happening Girlfriend in her head but in the eyes of the world she was Miss Kiss-and-Tell Sleazy Sex Scandal. I'll show him, she thought.

In an unconscious mirroring of Orlando's behavior yesterday Amy sat on the floor in the corner of the fashion room with the papers about her, deep in thought. Orlando, however, had braved it out of his room and was sitting in the hotel dining room sipping black coffee when he encountered Amy's proud breasts half obscured by a bowl of cereal.
AMY
AND
AMIABILITY
. He couldn't believe it either. Firstly he couldn't believe that she'd ever have let herself be filmed having sex with some social-climbing photographer, secondly he felt incredibly sorry for her. But decent though he is, Orlando could not help countering his sorrow with the hope that there'd be a chastening lesson in there for her. And let's face it, this could happen to anyone, Orlando knew only too well, he'd been caught in a few clinches in his time. But despite this he didn't feel as philosophical as he should. There was a glint in her eye; he'd seen it in his wife on many an occasion. Amy may not be solely responsible for yesterday's tabloid fest, but she wasn't opposed to it and was quick to dismiss his anxieties as paranoia. Maybe now she'd have a bit more sympathy with his plight. He also still wanted to hug her though, wished she hadn't been so wretchedly stubborn and would call him. With the perspicacity only marriage to an actress can bestow, Orlando realized he'd just have to give Amy time if he wanted her and let her work some things out of her
system, so when he packed his bags to return to New Zealand later that day it was with a sagacity and patience often granted only to Buddhist monks.

Later on in the day Amy was smuggled out of Vogue House under an Isaac Mizrahi parka, its furry hood over her head and a pair of Ray-Bans obscuring her eyes. This was at her own insistence. She'd decided that the ponytailed couriers littering the pavements of Hanover Square were in fact paparazzi in disguise. Lucinda had tried but failed to take a firm stance.

“Amy, these guys don't even bother to disguise themselves when they're lurking outside Nicole Kidman's front door trying to catch her in her rollers and La Perla. What on earth makes you think they'd go to such lengths just to snap you leaving work on a rainy Tuesday?”

“Because I swear to you, that one down there, the one with the label with CFP Couriers on his back, the bald one with the ponytail, he was definitely outside Orlando's flat and he was also outside the hotel. I'd know those beady eyes anywhere, I even had a nightmare about them last night.”

“Darling, don't you think you're being just a bit melodramatic?” said Lucinda. Orlando may be being saintlike in his patience but Lucinda could feel her halo sliding.

“Lucinda, I'm telling you, just let's find something that doesn't show my face and certainly not my body, and then we can call a cab and have the security guards radio up when it arrives.”

“Look, I'm sure you'll be perfectly safe on the tube, it's
not as though you'll be topless, is it?” Lucinda instantly regretted her cheap jibe but after approximately five hours of being barricaded into a room in Vogue House with Amy and her bruised yet recovering speedily ego she felt rather worn.