For the next two days the phone lines in London were burned up by Amy. She increased BT’s profit margin single-handedly and developed a crick in her neck. But she didn’t tell a soul about her afternoon with Orlando Rock. She heard her friends’ problems, talked about last night’s episode of Men Behaving Badly, and systematically phoned her way through her Filofax. Somehow, though, she could never find the right words: “Oh, by the way, I’m seeing that hugely successful actor Orlando Rock,” or “Have you seen Henry IV at the Haymarket? Yes, I had a remarkably intimate roast with Hotspur yesterday. Actually.” It just didn’t sound right. And do I really want them to know? To know what, anyway? We just had lunch, gorgeous, but—no, nothing happened. Amy hadn’t really thought the whole thing through, which was why she needed to tell someone, anyone. But not. Oh God, another pickle. So she toyed with her thoughts alone. Until Lucinda phoned her and shrieked, “I hear you have something to tell me!”
“Lucinda, what are you talking about?” Genuinely wondering what she meant. There was no way Lucinda could know.
“Excuse me, I just thought we were friends.”
“Luce, settle down. What are you talking about?”
“Benjy just called to say that you’re going out with Orlando Rock.”
“Benjy? But how? Don’t be stupid, of course I’m not.”
“He spoke to Lily who’d seen Olly, he said you’d spent Sunday together.”
“Which does not constitute ‘going out with,’ ” rationalized Amy, somewhat out of character.
“I want to hear all about it. I’ll buy you supper in the oyster bar, meet me there at seven.”
Amy pulled on some halfway decent trousers and lip-glossed her mouth into a mini ice rink. Once at the oyster bar, she sat waiting for Lucinda for the customary twenty minutes. She was used to this facet of their friendship. But it left her rewinding her encounter with Orlando, dissecting and analyzing, until she saw his ghost walking through the foyer into the Conran Shop where she’d bumped into him. Serendipity if ever it was, she romanticized. She thought back to him onstage, strutting Hotspur in his thigh-high boots; saw his face on an infinite number of magazine covers; recalled how she’d felt at the party for the magazine editor. He was in another league. Sunday had been a fluke. Maybe it never happened. Lucinda turned up and two glasses of Chablis later they were still chewing over the conundrum.
“You see, I just can’t reconcile his public image with the man I had lunch with. I kind of expected him to be so aloof, so beyond. But he wasn’t, just lovely.”
“Have a ciggy, darling,” proffered Lucinda.
“I’ve given up, Luce, I don’t smoke.”
“I think you probably do tonight.”
So they huffed and puffed, and Lucinda was quite disappointed with the nonevent that Amy had painted. No snogging. No drugs. No sex. And not even Amy’s usual embellishment of the occasion, just roast chicken and red wine. No God, I love hims. No I think this is its, which she was so used to with Amy. Something must have gone wrong. She determined to find out what.
“Nothing, Luce, I just had a lovely time. But y’know, he’s very ordinary, more ordinary even than that accountant friend of Benjy’s with the funny ear.”
“Don’t you believe it, darling, it’s just a test. If you like him when he’s ordinary, then he can safely show you the high life, sure in the knowledge that you love him for himself.”
There could be some truth in that, thought Amy, now starting to get confused about the whole situation. And I suppose he did say he had a dark side, made sure I knew that, even though it didn’t show through.
“You could be right, Luce, but the thing is I don’t even know if he likes me. He invited me thinking I was Lily’s lesbian partner, I’m sure it’s just platonic.” Amy depressed herself at the thought.
“Plato never had it so good, darling, just you wait and see.”
After the three-day Nirvana period when you’re happy just to bask in the hormones of the last encounter, an unsettling feeling begins to creep in. Will he? won’t he? call again. Amy was even less sure than most of us at this point because there were only her own hormones to bask in as they hadn’t exchanged body fluids of any sort. She threw herself into finding marabou mules for her council estate shoot and tried to avoid the nagging little voice in her head: Will he? Won’t he?
At the same time as she was choosing just the right shade of marabou Orlando Rock was frolicking in lots of heather on what passed for Egdon Heath. His leading lady, a beauty of note, was developing a crush on him. She pressed herself a little closer to him in the love scenes than nineteenth-century etiquette demanded. She cleaned her teeth three times before a kiss and tasted like a peach. All this didn’t go unnoticed by Orlando Rock. Like any other red-blooded male he found this siren infinitely desirable, but somehow she just wasn’t his cup of tea. An actress, you see. He was also quite taken with a certain young lady he’d found eating fish and chips on a Dorset beach. He liked her haphazard eccentric beauty, her funny cardigans, and her strange imagination. Yes, we can safely say he was very taken.
On Friday afternoon the phone rang in the fashion room. It rang and Amy was buried beneath a pile of crumpled Armani shirts. She yelled to anyone to pick it up.
“Amy, it’s for you,” called Amelia.
“Who is it?” the crawling pile of Armani yelled.
“Who’s speaking? OK, I’ll just get her. Amy, it’s Orlando Rock!” pointedly. Subtext being “you sly old fox, what’s he doing phoning you?”
The heap of shirts gave birth to a tall girl in jogging pants who, shaking them off, clambered toward the phone. Amelia held the receiver to her chest, refusing to hand it over until Amy had acknowledged her quizzical raised eyebrows. Amy tugged it from her, smiling conspiratorially.
“Orlando, hi.” Very nonchalant, well done, he’d never guess at the seven hours Lucinda and Amy had spent deconstructing him, the very peculiar dreams Amy had had about him, and the twitter of excitement he was causing in the fashion room.
“Yes, that sounds great, where shall we meet? OK, under the lion, two on Saturday. Take care. Bye.”
Aaargh! The fashion cupboard erupted with little shrieks and volcanoes of excitement. Romeo Gigli skirts came to life and danced a samba, Prada shoes tap-danced across the floor, and Amy was accosted by a huddle of Voguettes dying to know “everything, darling.”
By lunchtime she was a minor celebrity throughout Vogue House. The lady from the library offered to let her have a look at all Orlando Rock’s press cuttings, and the security guards winked as she left the building. A fully fledged date with Le Rock. Yeee ha! She swaggered home on the tube, ensuring that her bottom swung in a jungle manner. She went to M&S for supper instead of Tesco and bought a Chinese meal for one and a French beer, girls’ beers she called them. Heaven. She used all the hot water without worrying about the wrath of her flatmates and ate a whole box of champagne truffles she’d been saving since Christmas. Sheer irresponsibility. Divine.