In the pale Sussex light of Monday morning Amy found herself humming in a faintly hysterical manner. She hummed as she removed cowpats from a field. This morning she was in no mood to marvel at the ridiculous nature of her job; she hummed in the way we all tend to do when there’s something we’d rather not think of. Hum to escape your horrible faux pas. Manically and with acute embarrassment. Amy dumped another cowpat into her bin liner and hummed a bit more.
“Great job, darling, nearly there.”
Amy yelped with horror. “Bloody hell, Lucinda, don’t do that, you’ll scare the cows.”
“Ouch, touchy, what’s wrong with you?” The affront soared over Lucinda’s head, and in galumphing Sloane style she carried on regardless.
“What happened to you on Saturday? I saw you leave with Toby, are you two on again?”
In no mood to discuss her sin, shame, and downfall, Amy shrugged, and mercifully Lucinda ran to the aid of the model startled by a rabbit. (Or could it have been the other way around?)
We should probably address the cowpats first. Cowpats, because in an ideal world, fields don’t have them; they have cows, naturally, but not ugly plops of dung. On any other morning Amy could probably have waxed lyrical on the joy of the cowpat, the rural idyll rather than some bucolic, Capability Brown–type excuse for one. She would have persuaded the stylist to leave the cowpats in. But today she was more concerned with her own downfall.
“Paradise Lost, with me as Eve.” Oh, sin, depravity, and video cameras. Oh, Shame.
Amy is, as we should perhaps know by now, at least as far as matters of the flesh are concerned, a woman of the nineties. We’ve witnessed the Harding episode and left her in pre-Lapsarian bliss with Toby. So whence all this guilt? Well, not guilt at all actually, that wouldn’t be very nineties. More disappointment and terror. She wondered if sadomasochists (real ones, not stockbrokerish, silk-cord-and-velvet-blindfold types) felt ashamed of themselves the next morning. Or did they have the courage of their sexual convictions? Was she a pervert for enjoying the camera bit? Probably, she obliged her conscience. (Catholicism!) Well, now she was paying. Divine Retribution. (Like every Catholic caught out by fluke she put it down to Divine Retribution. Tripped over after making a nasty comment about someone’s thighs? Divine Retribution. Migraine while enjoying the fantasy of credit-card fraud? Yes, you’ve guessed it.) Amy was just feeling like a cowpat because she was horrified that right now, as she loaded poo into a bin liner, a group of pseudo-Bohos smoking Gauloises and sipping Mexican beer might be leering at her hips, thighs, and heaven forbid, she couldn’t bear to think about it, her tits! (It was eight o’clock on Monday morning but it was perfectly plausible that a group of grown men with satellite TV of their own would hotfoot it round to Battersea to make a meal of her in flagrante.) Or, oh Lord, even worse, it wasn’t beyond the realms … the photographer was a friend of Damien Hirst. She pictured the Tate, the Turner Prize, queues of people waiting to see not Mother and Child but Photographer and Floozy. All disparate, abstract televisual images of her body parts, swilling around in formaldehyde. Fuck!
The cows snuffled and Amy sat on a crumbling stone wall, her bin liner at her feet, bathed in the milky winter sunlight. The models frolicked and the photographer yelled at them as Lucinda hopped on the wall beside her, and whispered, “When this is over let’s pop down the road to Charleston, the Bloomsbury group place, you can cadge a lift from me back to London.”
Amy, in her emotionally precarious state, was overcome with fondness for Lucinda and kissed her on the cheek before shedding a little tear. Lucinda gave her a hug and together they sucked on the models’ Marlboros and watched with horrified objectivity as the lunatics took over the asylum.
They slammed the doors of Lucinda’s battered sports car and tore off down the meandering Sussex lanes, narrowly avoiding decapitating curious farm animals. Lucinda was a brisk driver, to say the least. Amy feigned a relaxed demeanor but all the while dug her nails deep into the upholstery. Charleston was just the thing for a guilt trip. While Amy was feeling all seedy and disgusted with the late twentieth century she was slowly seduced by the goings-on in twenties and thirties Sussex. The passage of time lent them a certain air of glamour, but there was no escaping the fact that the Bloomsbury group, purveyors of great art and literature, had been distinctly seedy themselves as far as sexual antics were concerned, and Amy began to feel in better company with her debauchery.
She drifted around the house marveling at its freshness. The walls and harlequin pattern of sun-drenched colors, yellows, muted blues and greens. The bedrooms where great economists and artists had formed love triangles as colorful and bizarre as the decoration, and where Virginia Woolf had lain in bed listening as the occasional fish flipped over with a splash in the lake at the front of the house. The lake was more of a puddle but in the overgrown grass on its banks were scattered statues, classical men and a curious levitating woman. Amy lounged among the winter jasmine in the fast-fading light of late afternoon and slowly recovered.
Restored and reassured by Lucinda and the lascivious Bloomsbury set that her life wasn’t totally crap and that her lusty languishings weren’t going to end up as headline news in the Sun tomorrow, she faced her return to London with fortitude and a Vanessa Bell–print plant pot from the local shop.
On the drive back Lucinda and Amy nattered and chomped chocolates, sniggering about models and lamenting London life.
“Benjy and I should just get a little place out here, paint a bit, do something freelance, and cook. I could have a garden and grow flowers the color of boiled sweets, we’d have little fluttering muslin curtains, with a cupboard for our wellies.…”
“Luce, you’d be soooo bored, you’d hate it. And what would you do freelance? Dress the local Women’s Institute for its annual fête?”
“No, I had these friends who moved to the country and made papier-mâché things.”
Amy laughed. “Like what, for heaven’s sake?”
“Well, I think it was cows, or it could have been mushrooms.” Amy spluttered with laughter. “No, like toadstools, huge bloody toadstools with red spots.” Lucinda redeemed herself.
“And?”
“And they made money out of it, enough to buy a goat and go to Morocco every six months.”
Amy shrieked at Lucinda’s quite obviously trustafarian notions. “And then they inherited the parental stately home and the goat had its own wing and they called the child-product of their liaison Bicester after their time in rural paradise?”
“Don’t scoff, Ames, I’m surprised you’re not dying to go and live in the shadow of the Rude Man of Cerne Abbas with some Florizel-type goatherd, play Perdita, and copulate madly, Druid fashion.”
“And how did Druids copulate?”
“You’ve seen the penis on that thing, use your imagination,” smirked Lucinda.
“Anyway, don’t scoff, I loved Florizel. I once went out with an Etonian just because when they go rowing they wear those straw hats with flowers all over them. He was like a blond angel, all flowers, princely notions but innocent peasant love.” Amy smiled with self-consciousness at her overly romantic ideas, but she had loved him a bit and the memory made her quite nostalgic. Then she caught him in the cloakroom at a ball snogging his best friend. Exit Florizel. By the time they’d arrived back in London Lucinda had persuaded Amy that there was life after homemade pornography and that she should come to Dorset next weekend to stay with Benjy’s sister who had a place. As one does. There’d be a few people and they could all paint and have walks, smoke some grass and relax. Amy nodded in consent and went home to bed, totally knackered.