Love by Clare Naylor Page B

to sound like a philistine, but, who’s she?”
    â€œOne of your professional forebears, dummy, the greatest actress of her day. She was mad about her career and wouldn’t give up acting for anything, that’s why her husband painted her here.
Choosing
, some horrid Victorian allegory, she’s sniffing the camellia of worldly success rather than the violets of domestic harmony, or something like that.”
    â€œAnd what happened to her?” asked Orlando.
    â€œDivorced within a year,” Amy stated. A warning to men.
    He watched her squinting at the thick swirls of oil on canvas, smiled to himself at her strange tidbits of knowledge.
    â€œI thought I was the expert. I brought you here so I could impress you with my wealth of esoteric knowledge of history and you’re beating me hands down. I resign. How do you know all this stuff?”
    â€œAha! I did a curious degree called English Literature, which means that I went away and studied everything I liked for three years, dabbled in Victorian allegory,went shopping a lot, and learned how to crack a joke in Anglo-Saxon.”
    â€œYou speak in riddles, Amy, that doesn’t explain a thing.” He placed his hand on the small of her back and guided her through the door. She shrieked inwardly with delight. They wandered the halls lined with stern men in costume clothing, huge gilt frames hung heavy and austere, and Orlando provided a commentary on many of the assembled luminaries.
    â€œHogarth hated foreigners, and a few years ago they X-rayed his self-portrait and found he’d painted over a bit of canvas with his dog cocking its leg up, peeing all over some foreign drawings,” he explained.
    â€œWhat a weird thing to do. I guess he never anticipated technology.”
    As they alighted on the longed-for Romantics room Amy paid homage to
real
men.
    â€œOh, Byron,” she swooned.
    â€œCan’t think what you see in him, he had a gammy leg,” muttered Orlando, replicating a conversation that many a man must have had with his wife when the great poet was alive.
    â€œBut Shelley was lovelier, more ethereal. And Keats …” She fell silent before his portrait. Orlando indulged her excessively romantic nature and misquoted “She walks in beauty” at her.
    â€œAnd, Constable, I always vowed I’d make my bridegroom wear this outfit, black silk cravat and nineteenth-century frock coat.”
    â€œWell, you’ll be lucky to find yourself a husband then, won’t you?” said Orlando cheekily.
    â€œI’ll have you know there are many men in the world who would wear that for me,” she boasted.
    â€œIf you say so, dearest. Shall we go and get a slice of cake? I’m famished.”
    â€œJust one more,” pleaded Amy, leading him past Nell Gwynn with her nipple-revealing attire.
    â€œThey don’t make orange sellers like that anymore,” Orlando remarked.
    â€œLook,” said Amy, tugging his sleeve and craning her neck heavenward, “John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. The wildest man around. Rake, cad, libertine, all-round bad boy. Every woman’s fantasy.”
    â€œPervert.” Orlando grinned, leading her by the hand to the coffee shop.
    Postgallery they strolled up to Covent Garden. Amy felt particularly queasy going past the theater where she’d seen her companion tread the boards just ten days ago. He held her hand firmly, maneuvering her through cobbled streets smelling of alehouses and steak and kidney pies, her arm tugged insistently in her socket. “Masterful” she labeled the faint ache. She struggled to keep up her end of the conversation
and
take in the admiringly envious looks of passersby. People just don’t realize how multitalented you have to be to date a celebrity and remain coherent, she lamented. But she barely had time to think “woe is me” to herself before she was being marched into a stone-walled dairy ponging