Love (6 page)

“Amy works with Benjy's girlfriend at
Vogue
,” Lily informed him. Amy smiled weakly and resisted saying “for my sins.” Her job sounded so stupid. Yes, I'm a multidimensional person who knows about hemlines and can spot Versace leggings at fifty paces.

“So how long have you and Lily been together?” he inquired sensitively when Lily had leaped up to go to the loo. No. Please, God, no. It's not like you're even in with a chance, Amy, she told herself. But Oh No. He thinks I'm gay.

“Oh, well, we're not … umm exactly …”

“It's OK, I've known Lily for years. It's hardly a secret,” he reassured. I'm trying to flirt with him. I have a god of stage and screen. Mr. Rochester. Mr. Middlemarch. At my table. And he thinks I fancy women. Fuck.

“We've only just met. Yesterday, in fact. I'm only here for the weekend.”

He chuckled throatily.

“Lily always was a fast worker.”

Lily reappeared at the table, shaking her hands dry.

“Shall we go, guys? The celebrity angle's getting them confused, the waitress just asked me if I was Goldie Hawn.”

They said fond good-byes outside. A gargantuan hug
for Lily and a polite pair of kisses for Amy. Good going though, she thought, from a megastar.

“Lily let's have supper midweek, I'm filming just round the corner. I'll give you a ring. And, Amy.” He turned his attention to her. She felt ridiculous in her Amazonian sarong ensemble, as though she was wearing a brightly colored paper napkin. “Amy, it's been a pleasure, and who knows,
Vogue
have asked me to do a shoot for them, maybe now I'll oblige.”

Puff. Amy was Trafalgar Square, Leicester Square, and any other pigeon you cared to mention. Prehistoric and postmodern pigeon. Her feathers puffed proudly and her chest burst with pride and excitement. She pushed the gay thought to the back of her brain and longed to be back at work where the actor could call her, as she knew he must.

T
hey drove back from Dorset late at night, and Amy fell asleep in the back of the car, her head lolling on the Irish ex–pop star's shoulder. She occasionally woke with a start to find her mouth hanging open and quickly closed it and dropped off again. When they pulled into her street it was past midnight and she barely had the energy to utter her good-byes.

Needless to say, another Monday morning found her feeling less than raring to go. But she tugged herself from bed and by nine o'clock was picking at a flapjack and diet Coke behind her desk. She was doodling ideas for a feature on Council Estate Glamour when the phone rang. In her best Judi Dench voice she leaped to answer it.

“Hello, fashion.” What a ridiculous thing to say.

“Amy, it's me. Cath. Where were you this weekend, you dirty dropout?”

Her stomach plummeted. Not the actor. She'd known it wouldn't be, but Cath. Oh God, what did she want?

“Cath, hi. I thought I'd told you I was going to Dorset.”

“Of course, sorry, forgot. Anyway, I'm having some people to dinner tonight, will you be around?” Amy wasn't sure whether this question meant she was invited or expected to disappear.

“I'm in, I think, but don't worry about cooking for me, I can just have cheese on toast in my room or something.”

“Oh, well, if my friends aren't good enough …,” Cath joked. But she wasn't joking. She was chippy.

“Cath, if you're inviting me, I'd love to come. Shall I?”

“OK, I'll buy extra broccoli then,” volunteered Cath grudgingly. That girl! fumed Amy. And broccoli, I hate broccoli.

Girl dyeing her hair in the kitchen sink. Two neighbors, mules and dangling fags, talking over the fence while hanging washing out. Lots of rollers. Amy was jotting down her view on Council Estate Glamour when Tash, the features editor, burst into the office in search of a thesaurus.

“Tash, I've been meaning to ask you, are you interviewing Orlando Rock?”

“Trying. He's very elusive, I suppose I'll have to go down to the set in Dorset to seek him out. He's also avoiding journalists because of his divorce.” Amy winced at the mention of his wife, ex or otherwise.

“What's he doing in Dorset?” Amy ventured, still doodling and trying to sound nonchalant.

“Hardy.
Return of the Native
, I think.” Tash pushed her cuticles back with a pencil and lost interest in the conversation and thesaurus and left. Amy returned to her brief. Model looking seductive in satin slip as man sits in vest with beer cans in armchair behind her. She chewed her Biro and daydreamed about having to return to Dorset for a photo shoot. Then she could wow him with her loveliness and convince him of her heterosexuality.
Or at the least, bisexuality, she purred, still proud of her newfound status.

All day she sat at her desk with one ear listening for the phone, trawling the newspapers for snippets about her new paramour. But each time she came across one she was plunged into despair as she saw his leading lady. All raven locks and creamy skin. When Lucinda came to rescue her at lunchtime the trough of her depression was river deep.

“Lunch, darling?” Lucinda called up from reception, where she'd been gossiping with some girls from
Homes and Gardens
. Making sure the office answerphone was on, just in case, Amy went down to meet her. Huddling under the security guard's umbrella, they headed through the swing doors out into the noise and drizzle of Hanover Square. It was much too wet to contemplate a lunch hour browsing in Bond Street so they opted for smoked salmon and cream cheese bagels in a café across the road. Amy slumped over her coffee. Lucinda, too, hung her head over her lunch. Benjy hadn't spoken to her since last night when in a fit of tiredness she'd accused him of ogling a girl in the petrol station on the way home.

“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.

“A
my 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.

A
my 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 who 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.