The Goddess Rules (24 page)

“And Jonah?”

“He’ll be fine,” she said lightly. “I told him that there was no point in leaving his wife. We can continue to have an affair. Although now she has found out so I’m not sure whether he’ll be allowed out for a while. Still, I can amuse myself.”

“Did she see it in the newspaper?” Kate asked. She had picked up an
Evening Standard
yesterday when she and Louis had been driving home from their slightly surreal day in the studio. A day when Louis was so cool and professional that she had begun to wonder if “the kiss” had been a figment of her imagination—until six o’clock, when Louis had dropped Kate home at her gate and asked her for dinner on Friday at his place. If it hadn’t been for that, she would have been convinced she’d dreamed the whole thing. Though as dreams went it was a pretty good one—and when he brought her a latte and stood over her drawings and helped her to assemble the vast canvas, she was looking at his arms in a very unprofessional way and thinking of them doing far more exceptional things than hammering in nails. “It was on the front page,” Kate reminded her. She’d thought that Mirri looked fabulous next to Jonah, holding his hand lightly with her head slightly lowered, her hair buffeted by the evening breeze, with her devastatingly photogenic young lover by her side. They looked iconic and enviable.

“I don’t see how she
couldn’t
have seen it.” Mirri sighed. “Though to be honest she can probably make herself feel better that it’s me and not some perfect twenty-two-year-old. And he won’t be leaving her. So as far as these things go she’s not going to suffer too badly. I’ve experienced far worse ways of finding out that a man was cheating.”

“Still, not much fun.” Kate winced. “So have worse things really happened to you?” Kate wondered whether she might be referring to the mystery Nicholas. Though that was a long shot.

“Of course,” Mirri said. “Now, how are your sketches of me coming along?”

“Fine.” Kate mixed her paints and squinted at Bébé’s markings as he lay on the bed, deep in sleep. She was deliberating whether she ought to come clean about the portrait she’d been working on. She decided to take a leaf out of Mirri’s book and embrace honesty. “Actually, there’s something I wanted to ask you.”

“Hmmm,” Mirri said as she lay back on the bed next to Bébé and picked up a book. This was the new pattern for the sessions now—Kate brought her paints and easel up to the house, spread newspapers over Mirri’s carpet, and worked on Bébé. On these days she would sketch Mirri as she read and then they’d break for chats and tea and sometimes they’d get a rush of excitement about something—laughing either about old boyfriends, the oft-mooted idea of Kate coming out to Africa to visit Mirri at Christmas, or simply a cute way that Bébé was sitting—then Mirri would race down to the kitchen and bring up a couple of glasses of champagne. They’d clink to something meaningless and then feel the crisp, appley bubbles at the back of their tongues as they sat back in the sunshine flooding through the vast open windows. It was the most enjoyable work Kate had ever done, relaxed and stimulating, and every day she learned something about life or history or people from Mirri.

Though Kate had to admit that yesterday had come pretty close in the enjoyment stakes, too. Despite Louis’s business-like demeanor, there was still a feeling of mutual support between them. Perhaps it had always been there, but she was only just becoming aware of it, that feeling of warmth that could exist between two people. And even though the idea of
Kate and Louis
hadn’t yet registered on her consciousness, she didn’t feel pressured into having to make a decision about Louis and whether she wanted to “be” with him, just stunned by the passion of their kiss and thrilled at the feeling of two people wanting the best for one another. Rather than being engaged in a constantly vacillating power struggle as she had with Jake, who incidentally, only this morning, had sent Kate another CD in a brown envelope. This time it was Ronnie Lane’s “How Come.” Kate had hesitated to play it, feeling somehow guilty that she might be encouraging Jake by listening. But again it was a song she loved, and she did take the note that came with it and put it in the wastepaper basket. It had read,

How come I ain’t a superstitious fella but I love you so?

Kate had ignored the lyrics in a determined way and played the song as she got dressed. Poor Jake. If anyone was a day late and a dollar short it was him, she’d thought.

“So you wanted to ask me what?” Mirri said again as Kate tried to get “How Come” out of her head, from where it was melodiously refusing to shift.

“Well.” Kate stopped painting and put down her brush on the ledge of the easel. “I wondered whether you would mind if I did a portrait of you rather than just a sketch. It’s okay if you say no. I won’t take it personally, because I know that if you’d wanted one you’d have someone else do it—but this would just be one for me, to remember you and the summer by and to see if I could actually draw people and not just animals and—”

“Yes,” Mirri said plainly.

“Yes you’d mind?” Kate asked cautiously. “Or yes I can?”

“Yes, you can paint me.”

“Oh my God, Mirri, thank you thank you. That’s so cool. I was so nervous about asking, I was sure you’d say no and I promise I’ll make it my best work.” Kate wanted to hug Mirri but instead she stood by the easel and shuffled about excitedly. She didn’t want to seem ridiculous.

“There’s one condition, though.” Mirri sat up on the bed and put her book to one side.
Oh, here it comes;
Kate half closed her eyes in dread. The rules:
No wrinkles, only smooth-like-an-egg skin; the neck has to look as if it belongs to a twenty-year-old; the pensive, faraway look will have to be a sultry pout instead.
Well, if that was the case, then Kate supposed she had to comply with Mirri’s wishes.

“I want to commission you,” Mirri said. Kate held her breath. “And then if I like it I will give it to the National Portrait Gallery, who have been asking for one for years. They only have photographs of me. So I will pay you. How is that?”

“Really?” Kate was stunned and thrilled. But terrified and fearful at the same time that she’d definitely have to airbrush out the crevices in Mirri’s face now and also that she wouldn’t be able to deliver anything to the standard of the National Portrait Gallery.
That
went without saying. “But what if . . . ?” she began.

“No what-ifs.” Mirri raised the palm of her hand for Kate to stop. “I will not have a peep from you about not being able to do it or not being good enough. You will paint me as you see me and I will pay you twenty thousand pounds.”

“What?” Kate almost fell through the floor.

“Is this a deal?” Mirri asked, without the hint of a smile that might suggest that this was anything other than a matter of business. Certainly she didn’t imply that she was doing Kate a favor of any sort. Which perhaps meant that she really trusted Kate’s work, though this was not a notion that sat easily with Kate.

“Absolutely,” Kate replied, as she knew she must at some point in her life—with seriousness and self-belief. And in her head she planned the paint colors for her new house.

“I’m looking for something small. And cheap. But nice,” Kate said to the woman with the slick blond hair and the remnants of a skiing tan. She had strolled into the estate agents on Regents Park Road on her way to buy a pint of milk. The office smelled of expensive perfume and the walls were hidden behind glistening photographs of stratospherically expensive houses with swimming pools and peach-colored soft furnishings that Leonard would have been deeply offended by.

“How much did you want to pay?” the woman inquired disdainfully, in possibly the poshest accent Kate had heard anywhere but a 1950s BBC radio broadcast. Kate hadn’t thought that people spoke that way anymore, but it was good to know, from a historical point of view, that there were pockets of it still in existence.

“Well, I was thinking maybe . . .” And Kate mumbled a figure so far at the top end of her price bracket, it was almost obscured by the mists of fantasy.

“Around here?” the woman asked as she checked her cell phone for text messages from her Swiss boyfriend who drove a vintage Porsche. Doubtless.

“Well, I don’t mind going a bit farther out of Primrose Hill. Obviously,” Kate said meekly.

“Obviously,” Blondie replied as she giggled at her message and keyed in a reply. Probably something about dirty sex and dinner at Sketch, Kate thought. This was supposed to be an exercise in liberation and empowerment, buying her first flat, with her own money, a place to call her own. Instead she thought that she might just have to move in with Robbie and Tanya after all.

“Never mind, then. If you haven’t got anything then I’ll just hang on, maybe until the market falls a bit and then . . .” She trailed off dispiritedly and was about to leave when Blondie clearly had a moment of clarity.

“There is one place in Primrose Hill. I mean,
just
in Primrose Hill. It’s small. But it is incredibly, almost unbelievably cheap. Do you want to see it?” She pulled out a piece of paper from a filing cabinet, without moving one inch from her chair, and handed it to Kate.

Actually “unbelievably cheap” still managed to make it a solid fifty thousand pounds over Kate’s budget, but it did look sweet. It had high ceilings, what was described as an “interesting” layout, and a roof made of something other than corrugated fiberglass. Which, as things stood right now in Kate’s life, was a marked improvement.

“I’ll see it,” Kate said. “Please.”

“Sure,” the girl said, and pulled out a Smythson diary. “I can fit you in on Saturday morning before I take a client to Chalcot Square.” She said this so that Kate would know how low The Blondie was stooping to show Kate her hellhole of choice. Kate wondered what she’d think if she knew she lived in a shed. Unfortunately when it came to filling in her details Kate had to give Leonard’s address, which was grand enough to make Blondie blink twice at Kate before reassuring herself that she must be the au pair at the grand house so it was okay to be snotty to her again.

“It really is supersmall. But I’m sure you’ll be able to do something with it,” she sneered.

“I could fill it with brooms. Like the cupboard it is,” Kate said brightly. Blondie was unamused.

Chapter Eighteen

By the time Friday night came around Kate was yearning for her evening with Louis. It was strange that she was suddenly so excited about seeing a man with whom on practically every day of her life for the past ten years she could have hung out, but hadn’t been interested in. But still, this was the way it was now. They’d seen one another at the studio almost every day as she’d progressed with the polar bear, but they hadn’t so much as had lunch together. So by the time Friday arrived she’d been storing up every observation, every joke she heard, every thought she’d had to share with him. She wanted to hear everything he had to say, too, to lounge around with him in his flat and swap news and stories. She wondered if this was how all couples always were. Not that she was thinking in terms of couples right now, she was just dying to be in his presence for more than the two minutes he flew in and out of the studio.

“Are you playing hard to get?” she’d joked nervously yesterday as he dropped off a sandwich for her and checked out her work.

“Oh, I’m always like this when I’m in the middle of a piece. You know that, Kate,” he said to her as comfortably as if he’d been married to her for years. Actually she didn’t know that. She barely knew him at all, she was beginning to realize, as she marveled at the way he was revered and admired by the people who worked with him. All week people had dropped in and she’d overheard him chatting to builders, gallery owners, and the PR girl for the exhibition in a way that made him seem so far beyond her reach that she could barely focus on him, let alone recognize him as the Louis she’d known only a week ago. He was self-assured and jocular and they all loved him.

Kate hated the PR girl and hoped Louis could see for himself that her dress sense was cheesy and her cleavage the result of a clever bra—though she feared that he probably couldn’t. But the glimpses she caught of him were perfect for building up the suspense of dinner. She wondered whether he’d cook or whether they’d order in and of course whether she’d stay the night. She also had hours and hours in the studio of climbing up ladders and outlining the polar bear, during which she thought of little else than what it would be like to have sex with Louis. She’d imagined them in every room in his house, every windowsill, every way, and a few more things besides. In fact, at one point she was so busy having sex on his workbench, with her left breast tumbling out of her dress, that she failed to notice that he was at the bottom of the ladder asking her whether she’d prefer mozzarella or ham sandwich for lunch.

“Any tips for my date?” Kate asked as she passed Mirri, who was lying in the hammock reading Flaubert while Bébé dug up Leonard’s lilies in the flower bed.

“I think you will be just fine,” Mirri said.

“I was hoping for a little more practical direction than that,” Kate complained.

“Then just remember that it’s the things that are most
you
that are most appealing,” Mirri said as she shooed Bébé away from the precious plants.

“No, it’s the things that are most me that are most
appalling.
That’s why I need your tips.”

“Okay, then remember that his balls are very sensitive and you should hold them and pay them lots of attention.” She shrugged.

Kate cringed. “I was thinking somewhere in between French airy-fairyness and too much detail. But thanks.”

“If the man is right you won’t have to think about anything. His balls or your appeal. He’ll love you for your experience, or he’ll find your inexperience adorable. He’ll love you for your dirty hair or your soapy clean smell. If you burp he’ll laugh and if you don’t he’ll think you’re a lady. You can’t lose if it’s love.”

“That’s much more like it.” Kate smiled. “Now, what shall I wear?”

When Kate went back to her shed to get dressed, after a very lengthy and slightly heated discussion with Mirri about wardrobe, she found another of Jake’s packages pushed under her door. It was the fifth day in a row she’d received one. Annoyingly each song was more beautiful than the last, and she had to play them even if she did make a point of ignoring the notes. Today’s note seemed longer than the others; clearly Jake was reaching out, she thought cynically. Though when she slipped on Tammy Wynette and George Jones with their sweet country duet “Take Me” she felt the same tightness in her throat as she had every other day. She pulled the sticky note off the front of the CD and tried not to notice Jake’s scrawl:

The very first moment I heard your voice, I’d be in darkness no more.

She turned up the volume and opened the shed door. If Jake had one thing going for him, she had to concede, it was great taste in music. But then that was supposed to be his job. Though it didn’t stop her from sitting on the edge of the bed for a moment as she put on her shoes and thinking, for just the briefest of moments, of Jake in his flat flipping through his records, pulling one out, holding it carefully between his index fingers as he blew the dust from it and then dropped the needle onto it. She could hear the crackle of dust at the beginning of the recording and it made something inside her lurch.

“Probably just my lunch.” She shrugged as she pulled on the other shoe and picked a thread from the rug off the bottom of her long, cream lace skirt. Kate had wanted to go short but as ever Mirri had been correct in her instinct.

“You must wear the long skirt if you’re going to his house. If you wear a short one he’ll feel as though he has hired you for the night. If you wear a long one it will seem as if you belong there,” she’d said simply.

“Pretty song.” Mirri tapped on the shed door before putting her head inside.

“Yeah,” Kate said, hoping that Mirri hadn’t seen Jake come around earlier with a package. She was slightly curious herself as to how and when he was delivering them, and didn’t want to alert Mirri to the fact that The Slug was behaving in a faintly stalkerish way.

“Pretty skirt as well.”

“Thanks.” Kate did a floaty twirl and then picked up her handbag. “I suppose I’d better be off.”

“Of course. I just called in to tell you to have fun.” Mirri watched wistfully as Kate fussed over her keys and lipstick and purse.

“I will.” Kate kissed her on both cheeks and was about to race out the door when Mirri sighed.

“Oh, to be young again.”

“Mirri, you don’t want to be young. You’d hate it.” She laughed. “It’s hell.”

“No. I wouldn’t.” Kate looked at her friend to see whether she was being serious or just maudlin in the French way. She seemed to be intensely serious.

“Mirri,” Kate said imploringly, not because she didn’t have time to get into this now, but because she couldn’t bear to see Mirri looking so defeated. “You’re you. It doesn’t matter what age you are. You know that.”

“Sometimes I think that’s true. But right now I wish I could have it all back.”

“What, the panic and not knowing who you are and the worrying about men and other pointless things?” Kate tried to be logical but Mirri was talking about something much deeper.

“No, the time.” She looked frail as she sat on the arm of the chair. “You go. He’ll be waiting for you. Hurry.” Mirri tried to chase Kate out but she remained fast in the doorway.

“You always said you wouldn’t do a thing differently. You’ve done more living than any other human being I’ve ever met. Or read about,” Kate added.

“I lied. I would do things very differently.”

“Like what?” Kate took as step back into the room and rested against the sink.

“I just want it back. I turned my back for a moment and all my life had slipped away.”

“But what? What would you do if you could?” Kate asked quietly and waited for the answer she knew was coming.

“I was in love with a man and we’ve spent our lives apart.”

“Nicholas?” Kate knew that she shouldn’t have said his name but it seemed pointless to pretend.

“Yes, you saw the film of the wedding?” Mirri seemed unsurprised.

Kate nodded. “What happened to him?”

“You mean where is he now? I have no idea.”

“What happened between you?” Kate rephrased her question.

“Darling, you have a night out with a handsome man.” Mirri roused herself from her torpor.

“I was going to cycle but I’ll get a taxi instead,” Kate said practically. Mirri looked at Kate for permission to begin. Kate moved toward the bed and sat down near Mirri. “So tell me.”

“Really?”

“Yes,” Kate said, and Mirri leaned back against the chair. Without moving her gaze from her knee she began to speak.

“It was 1974 and I was in London for Tony’s wedding,” she said. Then she thought about something for a second and looked up at Kate. “It’s not as though you go through all your days thinking about the love of your life who you lost, you know? You hardly notice it. You have lovers and you may even have a husband or two.” She smiled wryly. “And you have fun. It’s just that there are rare moments when your life is flooded with a kind of light and you see everything so clearly. Then you know that there is nothing else that matters. That as a person you’re not made up of what’s on the outside, that you’re not the way you look or the things you own, you’re not even your memories—you’re just what’s inside, perhaps that’s what they call the soul, I don’t know. But all that really exists of you is that. And that’s the part of you where the love of your life lies. And waits for those moments when you realize that it’s all that counts. All that’s ever going to count.”

“Mirri.” Kate let out a deep sigh. But Mirri didn’t want sympathy.

“And that’s where Nick Sheridan is. He’s in my heart or my soul or whatever you like to call it. And most of the time I don’t think about him. Well, I didn’t used to. I spent years not knowing that I had missed him for the last thirty years. I mean, of course I knew that I had wanted him, and I knew that I’d loved him. But not that I still did. Then late last year I began to think of him on evening drives in Africa. I’d get in the Land Rover and drive across my land and I began to remember him. Some evenings I would imagine that the reason he was in my mind was because he had just died and he was haunting me.”

“I don’t think he’s dead.” Kate recalled what Leonard had told her about Nick still working as an architect, though he had said he wasn’t sure. But Mirri was hardly listening.

“Then I decided that it was just my life reaching the point where I’d done so much living that it was time to start looking back. The reflections of old age—though of course I deny them and dye my hair and make love to young men—I suppose they will always catch up with you. And it was then that I realized that Nick Sheridan was the love of my life. The man who shone out at me as the only one who really mattered.” Mirri walked over to the sink and poured herself a glass of water from the tap. “And the more I thought about him, the more I knew that I had to come to England.” She caught Kate’s eye.

“Ha, so it wasn’t my legendary skills as an animal portrait painter that drew you here after all.” Kate smiled kindly.

“Of course it was, darling. You’re wonderful.” Then she stood beside the window and looked out onto the grass. “But I think that I must find him. I think I have to know. Do you think that means I’ve finally grown up?”

“I hope not.”

“So do I.” Mirri looked over her shoulder at Kate and smiled. Then she turned back to the window and watched the leaves on the cherry trees stirring in the breeze. “We were at Tony’s wedding and he had no idea who I was, which was very rare then because everybody in the world knew who I was. Anyway, Nick had never seen my films or my posters or magazine covers. Today you’d say he was a nerd. He loved architecture and buildings and we were at an old church in Chelsea and he was examining the pillars and stone and I laughed at him. He was quite serious to begin with. Anyway, we talked and I liked him. He was sweet but he didn’t have a clue about anything apart from architecture, I swear.” Kate lay on her front on the bed and glanced at her watch discreetly as Mirri continued. She had to be at Louis’s soon, but supposed she’d have to be a bit late. “Anyway, to get to the point,” she said, as if she’d sensed Kate’s close eye on the time, “we had a love affair. For one weekend. We talked and laughed and we burned with interest in one another and our lives. He was engaged to another woman who was at the wedding briefly but who left early because she wasn’t feeling well. You probably saw her in Leonard’s film. I can’t remember what she looked like. Anyway, it didn’t matter because he was going to break it off. We were so swept away by one another.” Mirri’s look when she turned to Kate was as naÏve as a schoolgirl’s. All her cynicism was gone and instead she just looked vulnerable. Like every other woman on the face of the planet who has ever believed a man when he lied to her. “And you may think it was stupid of me to believe that, but it was true. He would have done it. Except the next day, when he went to tell her about us, then she told him that she was having his child.”

“Oh my God. Was it true?” Kate asked as she swiped away a tear with the back of her hand.

“I don’t know. But he made the decision. And it was the hardest night of my life. And I didn’t want to pick myself up off the floor of my hotel room ever again. But I knew that if I didn’t move then and tell him that it was okay to leave me then I would never get up again. So he went. And that was Nick Sheridan.”