Love by Clare Naylor

Lily who’d seen Olly, he said you’d spent Sunday together.”
    â€œWhich does not constitute ‘going out with,’ ” rationalized Amy, somewhat out of character.
    â€œI 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.
    â€œYou 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.”
    â€œHave a ciggy, darling,” proffered Lucinda.
    â€œI’ve given up, Luce, I don’t smoke.”
    â€œI 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.
    â€œNothing, 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.”
    â€œDon’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.
    â€œYou 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.
    â€œPlato 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