He was actually closer to home than she thought. But not that much closer. For unbeknown to Amy he was on the selfsame Caribbean island as Lucinda and Benjy. Shooting had been postponed due to torrential New Zealand rains, and he’d taken a breather from everything, returning to a place where he and Lily had once had a holiday. It was thus that Lucinda and Benjy found themselves there.
“You absolutely must go there,” Lily instructed. “In fact, if you could bear the intrusion, I’d love to come, too.”
“You’ve got yourself a deal,” Lucinda agreed. She knew that wherever Lily led, good times and fun would follow. So it was on a distinctly more exotic beach than the Dorset one that Lily and Orlando met again. Lily was lying splayed out on a towel with her Walkman for company.
“I’d recognize those legs anywhere,” Lily said, screwing her face up into the sun as Orlando stood above her. Yelping and hugging followed, and when Benjy and Lucinda returned from their diving lesson they found the two sipping piña coladas from half coconuts and looking like a scene from a tacky postcard.
“Orlando,” Lucinda shrieked in surprise.
“All right, mate?” Benjy was more sedate and, knowing his sister, was less than surprised. Murphy’s law—she always ran into someone she knew. They all sat under a straw canopy and, after several piña coladas, had got over the small-world element and progressed.
“I can’t believe how beautiful this place is. Why don’t we just come out here and open a bar?” said Benjy.
“If you can make cocktails like this, I’ll be beside you all the way, darling,” said Lucinda.
“And Olly and I will be bouncers if you like,” Lily volunteered. There was a gap where Amy should have been. They all noticed but only Lily asked.
“And where does Amy fit into all this, Olly?” she asked boldly.
“Always rely on Lily to get to the heart of the matter.” Orlando smiled.
“Olly, what’s the story?” she urged.
“Well, your guess is as good as mine. I haven’t seen her since the day we were in the hotel and she left. I keep seeing her mentioned in the papers, and I saw that cover story about that video thing, poor love. How is she, Lucinda?”
“Unbearable, but irresistible as usual. I haven’t actually seen much of her this past week. She was a bit into the whole media thing to be honest, I got a bit pissed off.”
“Yeah, I could see that coming, but the way things are going, I guess it won’t last long. She’s a bright girl and she’ll get pretty sick of it soon,” said Orlando, more hopeful than prophetic.
“Poor Olly, she’s the nicest woman you’ve ever been out with. Don’t worry, sweetheart, she’ll be back soon,” said Lily, slathering her stomach with sun cream.
“I really hope so,” said Orlando.
“So that’s the plan, is it?” asked Lucinda. “Clever, I have to say. Amy’s not the kind of person to be immediately attracted to what’s best for her, but she does come round eventually. A stroke of genius, Mr. Rock. You may be the first guy our Amy has ever really fallen in love with.” Orlando held up his hand to show crossed fingers and sipped his piña colada through his straw.
“So what about you guys, when are you going to get married?” Lily continued her onslaught.
“Oh, you know, the longer you go on, the less you need to get married. We’re all right, aren’t we?” Benjy leaned over and took Lucinda’s hand.
“Yeah, we’ll be around forever, but no wedding bells just yet. I haven’t really got a thing to wear for a wedding.” They dissolved into laughter and turned their attentions to Lily.
“Oh, I’m going to be one of those old spinsters with lots of cats. The village children will think I’m a witch and I’ll buy a broomstick just to scare the hell out of them.”
“No one special lurking in your coal shed then, my love?” Orlando asked.
“Nah, my last encounter was with Amy, and you stole her from me, Mr. Rock, so I’d just keep your counsel and stop asking questions before I start to cry.”
“I suppose you could share her,” suggested Benjy, ever one for a novel solution to a problem, particularly if it involved risqué sex.
“Yeah, she’d love that,” said Lucinda. “It would make her feel like a lead part in a Noël Coward play, ménage à trois and all. Maybe you could suggest it.”
But right now the only part in any play Amy felt like was the back of a horse in a pantomime. She was missing her other half and missing her friends. She hadn’t even asked Lucinda where she was going. But she had to get on with things, today was Wednesday and as any secret Hello! fan knows but will refuse to admit to knowing, the aforementioned publication has its debut on the newsstands on that day. Amy thought it was all a bit bizarre actually, dressing up to buy pictures of herself dressing up. But it had to be done. Imagine if the man in the newspaper shop recognized her and she looked as bad as she felt. That was the thing about Tracy Sunshine-style celebrity, always look as if you’ve won the lottery and been invited to the best party in the universe, even if you’re boyfriendless and miserable. That’s what people love you for. A mascot. A happy shining smiling groomed mascot. The nearest affinity Amy felt to any mascot was to one of those troll dolls you put on your desk during exams, but, folks, the show must go on. I’ve made my bed, now I have to lie in it, thought Amy, wheeling out some more proverbs and curling her eyelashes for that Bambi look.
She strolled down the street and the spring sunshine made her feel much happier. No one would have guessed she’d been awake half the night crying. She sought out the largest newsagent within walking distance and made her entrance, but the only people in there were an Indian lady and her daughter, who sat behind the till not really noticing anything at all, least of all Amy and her Hello! lifestyle. The new issue was still tied up in a bundle on the floor, which was a bit embarrassing because she had to ask for a pair of scissors to undo it, and even if you regularly grace the pages of this glossy creation, you’re still hard-pushed to admit that you actually buy it rather than steal it from the doctor’s waiting room. So, blushes and scissors aside, Amy hastily purchased it and scuttled out of the shop. Life’ll be so much easier when I have someone to do my embarrassing shopping for me, she sighed. It was only then that she realized that it wasn’t her on the cover but some horsey-looking European Royal. This was quite a shock, as in her mind she’d always imagined that it would be her on the cover. Perhaps that picture with the nice yellow Versace jacket she’d worn, or the one of her with the cat—they’d found it outside the back door and borrowed it for a while—that would have been a perfect cover. But no, so she tried to juggle looking famous (sunglasses always help) with walking along the street and trying to find herself in a magazine that she was trying to seem as though she wasn’t reading because it was not Vogue but a naff magazine. Oh dear. Her debut seemed to have got lost somewhere among those pictures of massacres and world tragedy and the accompanying sensitive prose. All very distasteful really but Amy fought on valiantly. Eventually she found herself, tucked between Gary Lineker’s baby and Sharon Stone’s brother. A double-page spread: “ ‘My Hurt at Media Lies’ Former Lover of Actor Orlando Rock Tells of Her Pain and How Life Can Never Be the Same Again.” She scanned the text and was utterly embarrassed. On nought to ten, if buying Hello! was embarrassing, how about appearing in it. Way off the scale, she thought. Somewhere between fifteen and seven hundred and eleven. She looked like Julie Andrews in the yellow Versace number, like a bloody plastic daffodil, she thought. With the cat she looked like she was in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s, and the rest were too pitiful to look at. And all this victim bollocks. Oh, I can’t bear it. Amy didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. If only someone were here to share this with me, if only Lucinda and I could curl up on the sofa and wet ourselves laughing about it, if only Orlando had been around, he’d have said something sane like, “I don’t really think it’s a good idea, sweetheart.” If only she’d listened. The flat monsters would just read it and snipe even more when she wasn’t around, cows that they were. She returned home and found they’d all gone to work. Work, that was another thing. She was still employed but hadn’t made it in for a few days now. She’d assumed celebrity leave was a bit like compassionate leave, everybody would be really understanding and put their arm around you. But now she was plunging back to earth without her parachute she began to see that actually she might be in trouble, would have to face the music sometime or other. Anyway she was sick of daytime television, Richard and Judy were OK but there were only so many gardening slots and recovering anorexics one could bear and when it got to lunchtime she was totally at a loss for what to do. Aussie soaps reminded her of Orlando (no apparent reason other than the Australian connection) and she could never be bothered to go to the supermarket or out, ostensibly because she might be spotted, but really because she hated having to put so much makeup on in the maintenance of public image, and mothers with pushchairs depressed her. What goes around comes around, I suppose, she told herself.
If a parrot were to have flown over a particular Caribbean beach right now, he would have seen four young, tanned, and delightful people. Two girls in swimsuits were lying flat out on sun loungers, flipping the pages of an inexplicably popular magazine, their heads together. They hadn’t the heart to laugh at the pictures; being good friends, they winced.
“What on earth possessed her to do it?” asked Lily.
“Oh God, this is the act of a desperate woman,” said Lucinda.
“What are you girls crowing about?” Orlando picked up a towel from the sand and rubbed the water from his body.
“You don’t want to know,” Lucinda said bluntly. She was sickened by the photographs, Amy looked so smug and ridiculous. And how dare she take Orlando’s name in vain. Lucinda wasn’t one to slag off her friends readily but, God, Amy was pushing it. Orlando presumed it was some magazine article about whether size mattered. He picked it up and, sitting on the edge of Lily’s sun lounger, flicked over the pages. He stopped.
“Fucking hell.” You said it, Orlando.
“She looks like a plastic daffodil,” noted Benjy, leaning over Orlando’s shoulder and not wanting to be left out. There was a sense of communal horror. They were afraid for her, afraid for what she might do next. But what does come next? Humiliation on breakfast television? An exercise video? Why not just have done with it and put yourself in the stocks, Amy. That’s a more direct way of inviting the public to throw rotting tomatoes and bitter insults at you.
“Orlando, I’m really sorry.” Lucinda sat up and watched Orlando’s stony expression anxiously. Lily and Benjy had become engrossed in some article on Pamela Anderson in the Express.
“Christ, Lucinda, it’s not your fault.” He shook his head, reading through the article. “I just really can’t believe she’s done this.”
“I knew she was a bloody liability and should have warned you sooner. She was like an idiot possessed with all her talk of agents and journalists.”
“Why do you think she did this?” Orlando looked so desperate, so miserable. Lucinda didn’t know which way to go. She couldn’t bear that Amy had behaved so badly, dragged Orlando into all this. But neither could she bear that he was so hurt. Her mother looked after hurt animals, Lucinda inclined toward hurt men.
“Do you think I should call her and get her side of the story?” He was longing for Lucinda to give him some excuse, some reason for him to forgive Amy.
“I think her side of the story is pretty clear, Orlando. Look, it’s here in black and white. ‘I felt there was great sadness in Orlando’s life.’ She’s the only sad thing in your life,” said Lucinda, who was having trouble blunting her pique.
“I think you’re both overreacting. What she did was tasteless but she’s only a child, you can’t blame her. Anyway, this guff won’t last more than three minutes.” Lily waved her hand dismissively at the European Royal on the cover of the magazine. “I think we should call her, tell her to pack her bikini, and come over. You can talk it through when she gets here. Olly, you can pay.”
“Thank you so much for the kind offer, Lily,” Orlando said sarcastically, but inside, excitement was splintering and crashing around. God, it would be so good to see her, I’d fly her to the moon if I had to and what better excuse than this island with her friends. But then he looked down again: “We had a fantastic holiday in Australia. We stayed in a lovely little house in Sydney and just spent days on the beach. Orlando was a wonderful companion.” Well, wouldn’t it make you want to throw up? But for Orlando the issue was a little deeper. A lifetime with Amy might not turn out to be any different from a lifetime with Joanna or any number of other women who couldn’t get enough of this crap. He’d thought she was different but obviously not. And how bloody dare she do this without asking him? This was big-time betrayal. Orlando decided that Amy should suffer a little bit more, that she shouldn’t win him back just yet, that the more pain she had, the more joy she would feel, vain and mean maybe but we think Amy deserves it. But then again maybe Lily was right, maybe if he saw her, he’d understand.
“How about you just give her a call, don’t tell her I’m here? Lie, say something like you’ll pay through work expenses.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, she’d never fall for that.” But she did. Amy was so accustomed to freeloading after just three weeks of celebritydom that she wouldn’t think twice about a gratis holiday in the sun.
“Lucinda, hi, where are you? I thought you were on holiday.” Amy was thrilled to hear the familiar rounded vowels and endearments from Lucinda.
“Listen, darling, just put a little case together and book a flight, let us know when you’ll be arriving, and we’ll sort accommodation out this end. C’est parfait.”
“OK, sounds lovely, but I’m not going to be a third wheel, am I, Luce?” Lucinda mopped imaginary sweat from her brow in relief. The little telltale signs that Amy was back in the land of the thinking were beginning to surface, and not a moment too soon.
Amy pulled at the foil on the peanut packet with her teeth and they spilled out on her lap. The man in the seat next to her smiled sympathetically. She darted her gaze away. There was no escaping people on airplanes; the sooner the flight was over the better.
“The fasten-seat belt sign hasn’t been switched off yet, madam.” The air hostess pointed meaningfully to Amy’s midriff. God, she was sick of people getting at her; she felt so victimized and exposed. Paranoia maybe, but it was miserable. She had nearly resorted to theft when she saw a copy of the offending Hello! sticking out of some woman’s travel bag in the departure lounge. The woman was now sitting just two rows in front of her, and Amy was convinced that she and her husband kept turning round and looking at her while pretending to be seeing if the loo was free. It was horrible, she felt really misanthropic and fed up. And what’s more it was all her own fault; she’d gone to the press not vice versa, she didn’t have anyone to blame but her stupid self. As soon as the dust had begun to settle, she’d stopped feeling quite so embarrassed about her bad outfits and started to fret for Orlando instead. What a bitch I am. He goes to all that trouble to be careful not to talk to the press, and then I come along and bugger it all up. I’m no better than his ex-wife, in fact I’m worse. She was consumed with self-loathing. And Lucinda. How can she bear to be so sweet to me after I’ve been such a cow?
To the schmaltzy music of the hotel lobby they planned how best to surprise Amy. Benjy and Lily pushed for maximum shock factor, like having Orlando push his way out of the wardrobe as Amy unpacked in her room, or perhaps have him disguise himself as a hairy German and chat her up in the disco. Orlando however decided to go for maximum punishment and keep himself concealed until the eleventh hour. He’d begun to have doubts about the wisdom of this plan. Reading over the interview again, he’d started to doubt if Amy was at all interested in him anyway. Maybe he’d totally misjudged her; Lucinda certainly seemed pretty down on her and she was supposed to be her closest friend. Maybe she loves being headline news. She certainly looked happy in that yellow dress. Maybe I shouldn’t go through with this.
So when Amy walked in through the doors of the hotel there was no welcoming committee, no flags, no friends. There were, however, an abundance of women who had decided that Orlando Rock was to be their holiday romance. Though most of them had no idea of his celebrity he was by far the most fling-worthy man in the resort, thus he was the basis of many a fantasy and the cause of a drain of the hot-water supplies when at six o’clock the women would leave the beach en masse and make for their boudoirs where they would shower away the day’s sand and sexy thoughts, and perfume, blow-dry, and drape sarongs for optimum flesh exposure and maximum Rock appeal. Then they’d sit at supper fiddling oh-so-sexily with the straws in their cocktails until Orlando Rock fixed them with the stare to end all stares and dragged them in a fireman’s lift back to his room … oh, how they wanted him. But Amy knew nothing of this as she walked up to the reception desk and brushed sand from her smooth, long legs, her silk slip clinging alluringly to her dusty, hot body. She had no idea of the strategies that were being hatched to have her eliminated from the competition for Orlando, depilatory in her shampoo, steal her foundation, etc. For surely this languid beauty was a threat to their plans for a steamy holiday encounter, and they watched and resented as she remained luscious and oblivious.
Amy unpacked her bag and showered away her dusty taxi ride and still there was no sign of Benjy and Luanda. They’d probably gone sightseeing or to the beach or something, she imagined. She pulled on her bikini and, finding traces of sand in it, thought of Orlando with that kittens-drowning-in-her-stomach feeling, nerves and regret and nostalgia in a handful of sand. She pulled her hair into a ponytail and headed down to the swimming pool area; she could maybe have a swim and a drink and then catch up with the others later. It was very sweet of them to think of her, she thought, albeit briefly. Amy stretched out on a sun lounger and decided that the pool was not going to be the place to be. It was deserted save for a couple of remarkably mahogany Swedish girls and an old man doing laps of the pool. But Amy wasn’t too concerned about being in the right place right now, she’d had rather enough of that and much preferred reading Virginia Woolf by the pool without a Hermès handbag or television personality in sight. It was like being able to breathe again, she thought. She meandered around Bloomsbury in the early part of the century, walking through St. James’s Park and watching ladies with hats and rooms with fluttering gauze curtains, then she drifted from Virginia Woolf into a light doze, the bright sun grazing her skin and turning her face and chest pink.
“You’ll need something cool on that later,” a voice traced fingers over her burning chest. Amy shivered awake.
“Orlando,” she said softly, half believing the voice to be in her head, but the fingertips were cooling and she turned her head to see him, crouched down beside her sun lounger, an iced glass in his hand. “Oh my God, Orlando, I’m so, so sorry, darling. What are you doing here?”
“Someone has to keep you out of trouble,” he said, leaning over to kiss her on the lips. With the other hand he teased an ice cube out of his glass and, dripping freezing beads of moisture onto her skin, ran the ice cube slowly over her lips. She shivered, and her lips parted instinctively; he ran it along her inner lip and let it flicker on her tongue. All the while drops fell from his hand onto her scalding chest.
“Someone has to teach you to keep your cool, darling.” He wore just shorts and his chest was bare and lightly covered in blonding hairs. He took the ice cube and, never moving his eyes from her lips, let it glide down her neck, trickling into each crease and the hollow of her breastbone; Amy was silent except for a slow gasp as he pulled down the strap of her bikini and took the now much smaller piece of ice along her ribs, over them one by one, slowly until his fingertips reached into her bikini and lightly rubbed the freezing cold hard nub over her nipple, again and again. Then he kissed her again, his tongue warming her chilled lips. Oh my God, she thought. She wondered if the bronzed Swedes were still there and she could certainly hear the splash, lap lap of the old man in the pool. Orlando’s cool hands trailed across her burning stomach and down to her tiny bikini bottoms. He can’t be going to do this here, she thought, not moving or even breathing, but his hand remained, firm on the front of her bikini. He flicked the elastic with two fingers and let it snap gently back, taking her hand instead. They kissed and Amy was burning up inside and out. Stretching his palm out to match hers, he folded his fingers through hers and eased Amy to standing position.
“My room, do you think, before the others find us?”
“Orlando, I don’t really understand,” she said, reeling from one of the most erotic experiences she’d ever had, well, by a swimming pool and in public. “Do Benjy and Lucinda know you’re here then?”
“Why do you think you’re here, if not for me?” he asked, picking up her drink and placing it in the hollow of her back.
“Orlando, that’s cold,” she said, skipping away from the shock.
“Just call it punishment,” he said.
“For what, you bastard? As I remember, you were the one who did the throwing out.” But she didn’t really care. She was here, Orlando was here, and they were going to his room, it’s what one might call a lucky day. As they walked into what was a mirror image of her room he locked the door and just as she was about to take her usual spin around checking out soaps and minibars he slid his finger down the back of her bikini bottoms, letting the elastic flip back again. She froze and turned around.
“Ow,” she said without a flicker of pain in her voice, but looking up just saw his eyes and beard. In her mind she could already feel it scratching her face, longed for it to graze against her stomach and be buried in every crevice.
“There’ll be no impunity, I hope you realize?” He smiled tantalizingly.
“Vice versa, darling. I believe in the crime fitting the punishment,” she retorted swiftly and as huskily as she could manage.
“So.”
“So?” she asked. So he took a step toward her and, bending to kiss her, bit her lip.
“Ow,” she yelped, digging her nails into his arm. They stepped back toward the bed, a tug of her hair for him, a pinch on his leg for her, until they fell onto the bed and swallowed one another’s ouches, exchanging them for sighs and gasps and ahs, and Orlando pulled down her bikini and she slipped off her top and eased his shorts down. They were drawn together in two short thrusts. There they were, reunited in bed and in love, Amy supposed, if she had time to suppose, as he pulled her smooth thighs apart and she slid them up his legs to join behind his back, locked in a pact of pleasure, of pain. Orlando was scratched and Amy was bruised, small pink marks on her arms, which would turn the pale lilac of his discarded shorts later on. His lip bled and they collapsed postbattle on the top of the bed in exhaustion.
“Welcome back, darling,” Orlando said.
“Glad I could make it.”
They dozed as the sun filtered in through the slats in the blind, naked and moist with the sweat and scratches and tiny drops of blood. Delicious, she thought. Polarity is a divine thing; there can be no pleasure without just a touch of pain, and touching a mark on her upper arm, fell back into sleep.
“Orlando, are you there?” A knock followed by Lily’s voice.
“Mmmm, I’m here,” he shouted gruffly.
“Olly, we can’t find Amy. I think she’s here ’cause she left a note, have you seen her?”
Orlando got up and, pulling on his shorts, walked to the door. Amy could just hear the exchange in whispers but not make out the words, then the door closed and Orlando came back and sat on the bed.
“Is it OK if we meet them all in a couple of hours downstairs?” he asked, running his fingers over her sunburn.
“Yeah, sure, but what shall we do till then?” Disingenuous does it, Amy, you should know by now, nothing gets a man quicker than letting him think it was his idea, his seduction. Well, it worked with Orlando as he pulled off his shorts and buried his head in Amy’s pink chest, worked a treat.
Amy was seen by one of the admirers, leaving Orlando Rock’s room in his white Armani shirt and nothing else. She padded down the corridor like a furtive pervert in one of her beloved Carry On films and Orlando tapped her bare bottom as he saw her out of the door.
“Don’t! Someone might see,” she panicked. After the swimming pool it was rather academic but this was not a university entrance exam and Amy’s brain was scrambled by morality and hormones again. She skipped barefoot through the corridors and by the time she was back in her room showering and applying balm to her sunburn but not her battle scars (let everyone see my trophies, she thought proudly), the word was out on the hotel grapevine that a scrappy, sunburned, mousy hairdo, very badly dressed, probably English girl had been seen leaving Orlando’s room. The hotel was alive with the sound of hopes dashing like broken plates on stone floors. But still the makeup was applied and the sarongs slung slinkily and the hair blow-dried carefully and still a chink of optimism remained in their minds, based on the fact that Amy didn’t seem to possess a hairbrush, let alone a hair dryer and mousse and that she may have cellulite-free thighs but that didn’t constitute international style, which they had and she didn’t.
But Amy was oblivious to the sneers as she came down the swirling staircase into the lounge with parrots and huge palm trees framing her entrance, free of her labels and Hello! accessories and wearing just Orlando’s shirt and a pair of loose cotton trousers. Orlando stood up from the white leatherette sofa and kissed her gently on the lips.
“Hello, beautiful,” he said. “Drink?”
“Whatever you’re having,” she said, sitting down a little painfully, for was an intense stint in bed not as physically taxing and muscle-ache inducing as a hefty workout in a spartanly sadistic gym? Amy looked around as Orlando went over to the bar and was surprised to find about twenty pairs of eyes flick away from her own. Wow, they all fancy him, she clicked in a nanosecond, well, who wouldn’t with that edible little bottom, she thought. But more importantly she wasn’t thinking anything at all. We’ve just witnessed a seminal moment in Amy’s development: she watched Orlando, not everyone watching her watching Orlando. A slight difference but it means everything, and it would have meant everything to Orlando had he known. But it was fleeting and it didn’t stop her, on realizing she was the envy of each woman in the room, from flashing lustrous eyes at her beau and then self-consciously running her fingers over her lightly bruised arms. She wanted them to detect the pain and detect the precursor to the pain, namely tempestuous sex in his room upstairs, oh, how they’d hate her, she thought with perverse pleasure. But her daydream and status as a vamp were interrupted by three burnished figures crashing down beside her on the sofa and ruffling her froideur.
“Hi, you old trollop, are you better now?” said Luanda, loudly hugging her.
“What do you mean?” Amy pretended not to know she’d been a royal pain in the bum for several weeks.
“The Hello! piece was horrid, wasn’t it?” said Lily with genuine sympathy, as though it was a mistake we could all make at the drop of our bra straps.
“Hiya, Ames,” said Benjy, kissing her on both cheeks. Their exuberance was exhausting, and as they bounded around like puppies, she abandoned all pretense and slurped down the seabreeze Orlando had just brought her, and snorting with laughter, put paid to her image as a glamour-puss. And good riddance, she thought, as she showed her friends and inadvertently the rest of the bar her dramatic white bikini marks branded into her lobster skin.
“Gruesome, isn’t it?” she giggled as the Orlando admirers looked on in horror and renewed hope for their own chances with the god.
But none of them got him that night, nor for the next week, because Amy was on fine form. She was her funniest and liveliest and it became her mission to shock her fellow hotel guests. She and Lily snogged over the breakfast table as Orlando looked on and smiled. She and Orlando replicated a fair few ice cubes and other love aids scenes by the pool, and she and Lucinda made the rest of the holiday a fashion show of high camp and vulgarity. All of this was watched with bewilderment and contempt by the tastefully Guccied set in the hotel and would be related at European cocktail parties and county shires horse trials for months to come.
“Orlando Rock was terribly charming whenever he talked to me, but the people he was with, no better than louts, no idea what he was doing with them.”