The breakfast tray clattered on the bed and the orange juice flooded the scrambled egg.
“Shit,” muttered Orlando. It always seems quite blasphemous for the first word of a new day to be of the Anglo-Saxon variety, especially if the sky is blue and the evening before can only be described as heavensent. But Orlando had a hollow tummy and his hangover was merciless so we will forgive him.
“Mmmm, toast.” Amy’s nose twitched to life at the smell and she lifted her head to investigate the rest of the breakfast.
“Morning, my love.” Orlando leaned over and kissed her forehead, narrowly missing upsetting the teapot. Amy scrabbled up and, pulling on a T-shirt, eyed up the bacon.
“Do you remember the pig incident?” she asked, thinking back to the early hours of their acquaintance in the woods in Dorset.
“Am I supposed to?” asked Orlando, fearful of being negligent.
“When we were on the shoot and that woman Nathalia told me off for giving her pig sandwiches. Old trollop,” said Amy, feeling a million miles from her career in ironing.
“Vaguely. Was she the hard-faced one?”
“Yup indeedy,” said Amy, reaching for the newspapers, tabloid naturally, who could maneuver the broadsheets before midday, she wondered?
“Orlando.” She froze on the front page of the Express.
“Hmmm?” he quizzed, squeezing another butter-drenched soldier of toast into his mouth.
“Orlando, isn’t that us on holiday?” She registered it gradually. He put his tray to one side and leaned over the paper.
“How the bloody hell?” he asked, seeing a picture of himself and Amy wearing very little on a beach in Sydney. It was one that they’d done on self-timer, running into the picture as the button popped. Amy tried to make sense of the article. “Orlando Rocks His Lover All Night Long.” What? Oh my God, Amy caught sight of two names, Catherine Hastings and Kate Chapman. Who? she thought at first. Then. Click. Flat monsters.
“Orlando, oh my God, it’s my bloody flatmates, they’ve done this.” But Orlando wasn’t listening, he was devouring the contents of the piece. Amy looked, too, but could only make out … I was his sex slave … Ozzie hideaway … exclusive photographs … six times a night. No, please, God, no, thought Amy.
Orlando stayed silent until, “Amy, I think you’d better explain this to me.” Oh my God, he was fierce. Headmaster’s-study fierce. Amy couldn’t bear it. More than anything she refused to be told off.
“Explain what?” As if you didn’t know, Amy.
“This.” He pointed calmly but firmly to the newspaper. Amy thought it was the bit which said, “My Night of Passion with Rocking Romeo,” but she couldn’t be sure, maybe he just meant the whole thing.
“I really don’t know what makes you think you can talk to me like that, Orlando Rock, but in case it had escaped your attention, I’m free to come and go as I please and won’t answer to you … not when you’re treating me like a five-year-old on detention.” Deflection, Amy, oldest trick in the book when you’re guilty. But it won’t wash with Orlando, sorry.
“All I want to know is if you told the papers and if not, how they know all this crap, and how they got our private holiday photos.” Amy worked through the problem in her head. Kitchen table. Gossip gossip. Tell us more. Bitches, she concluded, and I bet they nicked the bloody photo. But still he can’t talk to me like that.
“You can’t talk to me like that and get away with it, you know.” She leaped out of bed and sought out her jeans.
“Amy, I just want to know what’s going on.”
“No, you’re practically accusing me of selling my story to the newspapers and I won’t stay here and listen to it.”
“I’m not accusing you of anything, I just want to get to the bottom of it. Just answer my question. How did they get hold of all this?”
“I’ve no idea, but you seem convinced that it was me so I’ll just leave you with that delusion and go.”
“Amy, I have to know I can trust you, don’t you understand?”
“I understand that you’re paranoid and that if I carry on going out with you, I’m doomed to spending the rest of my days like Persephone in the underworld, darkness and misery. I might as well just take the veil now, save us both the trouble.”
Orlando was lost. Veils? Persephone? He just wanted to know what was happening and how a photograph of him in his swimming trunks came to be on the front of every national tabloid and one broadsheet.
Once safely ensconced in the back of the taxi Amy wasn’t quite sure where she should go. She hadn’t thought of the consequences of returning to the nest of vipers at home; she was sure that if she saw either Kate or Cath, she’d club them with a blunt instrument. Orlando’s, her other safe haven, was most definitely off bounds, and all she could think of was Lucinda. She checked her watch: Lucinda and Benjy never went in to work earlier than ten. Would she make it? Amy took the chance, directing the cab to Notting Hill. She piled onto the doorstep with her carrier bags.
“Hi, Amy,” said Benjy without blinking at her red puffy eyes and backward-through-a-hedge look. Suppose he’s used to it by now, thought Amy, hoping at the very least to have caused concern or a minor stir.
“Is that Amy?” Lucinda brayed from inside the house. She came tearing out, oozing the worry and maternal anxiety Amy longed for. “Darling, where have you been? We’ve been trying for days to get hold of you, you do know what’s happened, don’t you?” She lifted all Amy’s carrier bags and ushered her into the house. Amy erupted into tears.
“I’ve left him,” she sobbed.
“Where?” asked Lucinda, slightly confused.
“No, I’ve left him. We had a fight about the papers, about my flat monsters.” Amy was incoherent so they just sat her in a large armchair and intravenously fed her chamomile tea with whiskey in it until the little hiccups of tears and misery abated.
“What have I done?”
“I don’t know, darling, what have you done?” Lucinda sat on the arm of the chair and stroked Amy’s shoulder.
“We had a really nice night. I was just thinking I might be in love with him but then he snapped because of all the newspaper stuff, practically accused me of kissing and telling, so I left,” Amy spluttered.
“I saw the pieces. You have to admit, sweetie, it does look as though you had a hand in it, all the photos and stuff about you guys on holiday.” Lucinda suddenly regretted saying this, and noticing Amy’s shoulders beginning to shake again at the mere mention that she might be responsible, she retracted it.
“But of course we know it wasn’t you, it was those awful bloody bitches and when I get hold of them I’ll throttle them. I’m just saying that you can’t be too harsh on Orlando. He’s had a rough time with the press over the past few years, he’s bound to be oversensitive.” At this Amy cried all over again. The shoulder stroking and chamomile teaing continued for some hours to come.
Amy woke up with bloated froggy red eyes from crying too much and lots of crumbled bits of tissue stuck in her hair. She was lying on top of a rosy sprigged duvet in the spare room at Benjy and Lucinda’s and it slowly came back to her that she was Orlando-less. And they’d had the most amazing evening. Quite simply she’d never been happier, and things were never usually very simple for Amy, so this was nothing short of miraculous. But now she’d pissed him off and couldn’t go back. How could he accuse her of that, she smarted, and her blood ran hotter at the very thought. Didn’t he know her better? So for a while logic escaped Amy; she didn’t stop to analyze in her usual way the fact that he had said nothing of the sort. Guilt, my dear, guilt.