Love (15 page)

“It's not a disco, Mom, it's a club.”

“Precisely.”

Or alternatively, and much worse, “Ooohh, Amy met a young man last night, Peter!”

“Tell us all about him, do you want to invite him to tea?”

“Dad, shurrrup.”

Occasionally the younger siblings became involved, in which case you could guarantee that your diary would be quoted from at the breakfast table, and every visitor to the house from the person collecting for Christian Aid to Granny would be greeted with the singsong rendition of, “Amy's got a boyfriend.”

“Bugger off.”

“Mom, Amy swore.”

Amy's stomach churned at the thought. And it was often worse if you didn't want to speak to Friday night's snog because they had spots and were in the third form.

“Amy, you can't just leave that poor young man on the end of the phone. Go and speak to him.”

“Mom, he's ugly.”

“Amy, I have not brought you up to be rude and cruel. Go and talk to him,
now!
”

Adolescence, thought Amy, suddenly putting all her problems into perspective. I suppose it'll be the same throughout my life: the men you don't fancy send you flowers, phone you incessantly, and can afford to buy you Hermès handbags. Those you do fancy are utter bastards and infidels.
C'est la vie
.

A
s Amy was tickling the tonsils of her nameless consort in deepest North London, Orlando Rock was having breakfast with his director and great friend Bill Ballantyne. A hefty Scot, Bill was tucking into the full sausage, bacon, and eggs while depriving Orlando of anything other than muesli and semiskimmed.

“Bill, you're six stone heavier than me and you're having the works. Please, let me have just one sausage.”

“No way. If you come back from your shag-fest two stone heavier, it is nae ma problem. I'm not the madman going in front of the camera.”

“Bill, come on, one sausage and I'll fix you up with that Anthea Turner,” Orlando promised.

“I said no. You had your oats for two weeks and now you'll have none.”

“I don't want porridge, just a sausage sandwich,” pleaded Orlando, starving hungry.

“Hush up, now, tell me about your lassie, what's she got that young Tiffany doesn't then?”

“Half a brain.”

“Come on, Olly, Tiffany's a bright woman. You could do worse now Joanna's out of the picture.”

“Let's leave Joanna out of this. She's in LA doing her
thing and good luck to her. And can we leave Tiffany out of it, too? Amy's nice, bright, funny, extremely attractive and that's it.”

“And I bet she's not averse to having her very own celebrity to take her out on the town.”

“Bill, Amy's really great.” Orlando took the opportunity to lean over and help himself to one of Bill's sausages.

“I know, but you could do worse than Tiffany. Good publicity, too.”

“Bill, you're supposed to be my friend and you're beginning to sound like a pimp.”

“OK, but I like to get to know your young ladies. I've been in the business thirty years and you're a young pup who could easily be conned by some conniving young beauty dying to make it big.”

“Amy's already got a career. She's done very well in her life without you or me and you'll get an introduction when we get home. OK?”

“Och, don't mind me, I'm just a cynical old bastard. I'm sure you've done very well for yourself and I canna wait to meet her.”

Orlando was impressed at the resemblance between Dorset and New Zealand: grassy, rocky, enough sheep to keep you in chops for the rest of your born days, and the film-set banter of English voices made him feel almost at home. But he kept remembering little things that he'd had in England. For instance he couldn't just nip round to Lily's after filming and trawl through the verbal archives of their childhood. The time they'd kissed at the age of ten and then not spoken to each other for two years.
The time Lily broke her arm as they played circuses in the garden and she'd confused the seal part, standing on the ball instead of balancing it on her nose. All the adults kept saying, “Poor Lily, what have you done to your arm?”

“I fell off a ball.”

“Oooh, Terence, poor Lily fell off a wall.”

“No, it was a ball,” the tyrannical two chimed, time and again.

He missed Lily in the way that being thousands of miles from home makes everything seem much more acute. If someone said Marmite, he melted; and every British television program under the sun became a masterpiece of comedy or drama.
Are You Being Served?
was repeated once a week on satellite and Orlando would not move from the screen.

“Classic British comedy,” he'd mutter if anyone tried to disturb him, but try making him watch it in London and he'd have said TV was for sad people without lives of their own. So I think we can safely say he was homesick. But more than homesick, Orlando was Amysick.

It had been a year since he'd had anything resembling a relationship with his ex-wife Joanna, but it was only recently that the press had cottoned on, probably because Joanna had started parading a string of handsome young men on her arm at every LA dinner and dog dance and none of them was Orlando. But that was past. There was absolutely no comparison between Joanna and Amy. Joanna was as hard as nails, which had turned him on when he was in his early twenties: Blond Ambition, as every magazine article about her headlined. Orlando had been mad about acting, fresh
out of drama school, and she was great for him. But then she started inviting journalists into the house, telling all about their decision not to have children because they valued their careers too much, where they bought their sofas, and the perils of a show-business marriage. Orlando had become increasingly uncomfortable with this side of his life. He couldn't take his wife out to dinner without the paparazzi collaring them and journalists asking the restaurant staff if he was a generous tipper. Eventually, he didn't really want to take his wife out at all; she had little conversation beyond herself and her latest role, and he just began to find her very dull. He had a vague string of other women: models, costume designers, scriptwriters, all in the demonic world of stage and screen. The reputation kind of stuck, but he hadn't really been out with anyone for the past year, and didn't really want to until now. But Amy, different kettle of fish, he told himself. Or even soup tureen of fish, remembering their mad encounter in the Conran Shop. Amy was real. Real and bright and inspiring. She was also the kind of girl who, once you'd got a look at, nobody else seemed quite as strikingly beautiful. Other women stopped traffic. Amy stopped your heart. (And Amy was, at this very moment, squeezing the bum of a modelly looking guy in a nightclub.) It was such a relief to be with someone so completely natural and clever. She taught him things he didn't know, and didn't really need to know, but that was part of the fun. And he wanted to impress her, take her to places that she'd love. Show her that he wasn't just some showbiz himbo. It wasn't the acting he minded, that was his passion, his
raison d'être. It was the trappings, the interviews, the media. Clichéd but true, folks.

I want to take Amy and live in Brittany, and she could write her novels and I could research parts, and then when I was away she could follow me with her laptop. We could just wear Breton shirts all day and cook marvelous dishes of roast onions and garlic and have horses (but not for dinner). Orlando didn't know quite how close he was sailing to a fantasy voiced by Lucinda not so long ago, and he didn't know how Amy had laughed off Lucinda's dream as ridiculous. But men are often hopelessly romantic creatures and forget to include the important extras into their daydreams, such as Harvey Nichols charge cards and friends. Presumably they forget friends because they would spoil the sex-on-tap-twenty-seven-hours-a-day fantasy which men usually incorporate into their daydreams. And on Orlando went, sitting with his head in his hands in a far corner of the set. No one disturbed him because they thought he was getting in character.

“OK, young fella me lad, your turn,” yelled Bill from his large seat behind the camera.

Orlando didn't hear.

“I said get your backside over here, lover boy.” Orlando sat up, startled and filled with nerves, as he always was before he trod the boards, as it were. Tiffany was waiting on set, her cloak and hood lending her considerably more mystery and appeal than her satin look.

“Have you told Bill then?” she cooed.

“Told him what exactly?” Orlando snapped. His Mr.
Darcy was in fine fettle, charging away with the scene, except it was the wrong character for this film. But there was just something about that faux-winsome thing that Tiffany did which brought out the curt, gloomy bastard side to his nature.

“Oh, come on, Olly, I know you're a bit publicity shy but enough's enough. Everyone here can see that you can barely keep your hands off me.” (A painfully familiar phrase—could Amy have heard it at this moment, she wouldn't have laughed it off with the incredulity and contempt it deserved—she'd have hit them both.)

“I haven't a clue what you're talking about, Tiffany. Please, can we just let it drop?”

Thankfully Bill interrupted their tête-à-tête.

“OK, now look at me, Tiffany, you've just found out that the man you love, the one who was going to rescue you from the Heath and your drab life, is going blind; you're destined to stay here for a long time yet,” Bill coached.

Lights, camera, action.

“Clym, what do you mean we can't go to Paris?” The actress looked distressed.

“I think we had better stay on Egdon for now, Eustacia. I can keep us somehow, there's always furze cutters needed this time of year.” Orlando's Dorset brogue was second nature and his acting impeccable.

They carried on until, “OK, cut, take five, guys,” said Bill, more than satisfied with the scene.

Orlando took a sip from his bottle of water and resumed his head-in-hands pose. This time though he was thinking of Clym Yeobright and his failing eyesight, and his increasing disenchantment with the demanding Eustacia.

“I think we really should sort this out, Orlando.” It was the ubiquitous Tiffany again. Orlando raised his head and looked at her with sheer disbelief.

“Just what is it you'd like to talk about, Tiffany?”

“Us.”

“Us?”

“Yes, you have to let me know whether we can go ahead with this or not. Do we let the crew know?”

“Do we let the crew know what?” Orlando sighed, knowing where this was heading but figuring that playing dumb was the best tactic.

“Well, I know that you've talked to Bill because, well, because he called you lover boy earlier, and that's fine, I know he's a good friend of yours and you're entitled to talk it through with him first, but I think I also have a right to know where I stand.”

OK, Olly, grab the bull by the horns, but gently now, there's a touch of the basket case about her, go easy. Look, Tiffany, I think you're really talented and beautiful but I've just been through a nasty divorce and … no, that doesn't sound right. Can't use that excuse, she might find out about Amy and stick pins in her effigy. OK, here goes.

“Tiffany, I really admire you as an actor and you're a very attractive woman, but I think that you deserve better. And I make a point of never becoming emotionally involved with my fellow actors.” Orlando delivered his set piece and watched her turn from shrew to rabbit caught in the headlights, all hurt and wide-eyed. Please don't cry, he thought, don't.

“Orlando, I know you're probably cut up about your divorce, but I've been there and I can help you out, show
you that there's life after alimony.” There is if you're on the receiving end, thought Orlando bitterly, calling to mind his latest bank statement and the rent on a house in Bel Air he was paying for. This made his blood boil and Mr. Darcy was resurrected.

“There is absolutely no point in you wasting your time with me, Tiffany. There is nothing going on between us and as far as I'm concerned there never will be.”

Wooh, you tell her, Olly. Why oh why can't Amy be a fly on the wall right now, why is she instead lying sad and alone in Lucinda's spare room with only last night's discarded clothes and a cold cup of coffee for solace.

Orlando walked flushed into an interview with a journalist from a New Zealand women's magazine. He felt guilt-stricken about Tiffany and was sure that Bill would give him hell when he found out, which was inevitable because she'd tell everyone that he was numero uno bastard and then everyone on the film would blame him for dragging his personal life onto the set.
No-win situation
was a phrase which sprang to mind. And now he had to go and answer questions about art, life, sex, and his favorite type of pasta. He looked like an impoverished sheep farmer and knew that every detail of his mangy beard and bloodshot eyes would appear in print. Oh, Amy, where are you when I need you?

Jane Sykes had a very short, tight skirt on and the kind of spectacles only found on schoolmarms in Hollywood movies. She was just begging for them to be removed in true “My-God-but-you're-beautiful, Ms. Sykes” fashion, but no one ever did.

“So, Mr. Rock, let's get the formalities out of the way. I'm Jane Sykes and my readers would like to get to know you better, they want to feel they know you, so let's start in the bedroom department … what do you wear in bed?” Except she didn't say
bed
, she said
bid
, and she was brassy and fearsome and having her readers' best interests at heart was not going to be fobbed off by “an old pair of pajamas that my mother bought,” which was the truth. Except of course when Amy was present. She wouldn't settle for anything less than “nothing, except a condom.” (These are the nineties, Mr. Rock, and my readers like their sex symbols in the buff but with a social conscience.)