The Goddess Rules (7 page)

“I see” was all that Kate could manage. She knew it was true. It was so close to the bone that she thought she might be sick. At which point Mirri Moncur abandoned her perfectly executed
tour de Jake
and changed the subject. “So how long will it take you to paint this picture?”

“About a month,” Kate said blankly. Then, with her blood boiling, she added, “Which should give you just long enough to hang out with Jonah Sinclair.”

“Ah. Mr. Sinclair.” Mirri smiled and nodded at the memory.

“You might think that my judgment’s bad. But yours isn’t much better. He’s married, you know?” Kate had decided that an eye for and eye and a tooth for a tooth was the best way forward.

“Oh, yes yes, of course I know,” Mirri said in a blasé way as she flipped through Kate’s sketches.

“Don’t you think that’s a bit off?” Kate asked.

“Off?” Mirri didn’t understand the implication.

“Off color. Wrong. He’s got children, too. A few, I think.”

“Darling, I’m not the one cheating on my wife.” Mirri shrugged.

“I know, but isn’t it bad karma or something? I mean, I always think that if I were married and some tart—” Kate checked herself. “—some other woman came along and had an affair with my husband I’d be miserable. I wouldn’t necessarily want to make anyone else that miserable.”

“And you would blame the single, unattached woman who had never made a vow to be faithful to anyone? Rather than the married man who was cheating on his wife who had made that vow?” Mirri was rearranging a vase of antique lilac roses she’d picked from the garden yesterday afternoon.

“No, but I’d just be worried that if I ran off with someone else’s husband then someday my karma would come back and bite me on the bum and some woman would run off with my husband.”

“Oh, I see.” Mirri turned and looked at Kate quite seriously, then in a light way, like a young girl who’s just realized that Santa Claus does exist after all, added, “But I’m not married. And I don’t want a husband. So that’s fine.”

“Yes, but . . .” Kate was about to expand on her objections when she realized she was wasting her breath. Mirri was as likely to feel guilty about her fling with Jonah as she was to become a Carmelite nun. “I just feel sorry for his poor wife.”

“Then she should take a lover, too. Everyone would be happy.”

“Typical French,” Kate mumbled to her pencil and carried on sketching. “So we’re decided on oils, are we? I can do watercolor. And we haven’t even discussed the background.”

“Oh, oils, oils. I was once painted by Picasso, you know.” Mirri pressed her nose into Bébé’s neck. “He said, ‘I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.’ This is beautiful,
non
?”

“Isn’t it,” Kate said, wondering what would happen if she painted Bébé as a spoiled fat cat and Mirri as a black-hearted Jezebel. “Did you sleep with Picasso?”

“Of course,” Mirri said, and turned languorously onto her back on the bed. “Short men don’t have as far to go down.” She laughed throatily and pulled a packet of cigarettes from her nearby handbag. “Have you ever slept with a short man?”

“No, I don’t think I have.” Kate didn’t add, though, that almost every other physical shortcoming in a man was represented on her list of conquests.

“They are very good. They have a lot to prove so they try very hard.” She sat up and looked at Kate carefully. “You need good sex, my darling. It will make you happy.”

“So how was Picasso. I mean the important stuff. Like his art. Not his dick. How was the portrait?” Kate decided that if she got involved in a debate with Mirri about her sorely lacking sex life she would skewer someone with a sharp pencil. It was like being told by a bossy shop assistant that you look great in a sweater you can’t afford. Highly annoying.

“The painting sucked. Wow, it was bad.” Mirri laughed. “He was in his bad phase.”

“Is it in a gallery?”

“No, it’s in my kitchen in Mozambique.”

“Shouldn’t it be preserved? In a gallery?” Kate asked, concerned.

“No,
I
should be preserved. The painting should be thrown out. But one day I’ll sell it to save an elephant. I tell you,
ma choux,
you would stop worrying about such things if you were having good sex. People who are angry and resentful and full of judgment of others, they are simply not getting enough sex. I see it time and time again. If we all had good sex there would be no wars, no divorce, no sadness.”

“Mirri, please, can we just not discuss this anymore. It’s distracting. And like I said, quite unprofessional.” Kate was now bored of the subject. Jesus, this woman needed to go to Sex Addicts Anonymous.

“Did The Slug give you orgasms?” Mirri asked.

“If by ‘The Slug’ you mean Jake—” Kate looked inquiringly at Mirri, who nodded yes, she meant Jake.

“Yes, actually. All the time. Every time,” Kate blurted out.

“Good. Then it was just love he didn’t give you?” Mirri shook her head disapprovingly, and Kate chewed incredulously on her pencil and tried not to cry.

“I’ll be back at eleven tomorrow morning to paint your pet,” she choked out as she stood up and gathered her things together. “If I haven’t killed myself.”

Chapter Five

“Dad, have you seen my Sex Pistols CD?” Ella asked. She was nine but Nick had let her have the album for Christmas because she was mad about the song “Who Killed Bambi?” He made a conscious effort to be as liberal a father as possible so that his daughters would always feel that they could tell him anything. Though at twelve Jasmine was pushing the boundaries of his laissez faire approach to parenting—she had gone to a birthday party last week and had her ears pierced despite a very firm edict that demanded she wait until she was thirteen. She also insisted on wearing a bra despite him yelling at her, “Take that thing off and don’t put it back on until you’ve got tits.” He’d wondered afterward if he’d been too harsh. But she’d taken it off for a few hours, at least.

“Dad?” Ella came into the room with dripping black hair and a sodden bubblegum-pink bathing suit.

“Have you looked in my car?” he asked, without glancing up from the newspaper.

“Yes,” she said, as though he were the slowest, most stupid human being she’d ever come across.

“Have you asked your sister?” He tore his eyes from
The Times
and smiled at the desperation on his youngest daughter’s face.

“Dad,” she groaned.

“Okay, come on, let’s look in your room.” Nick put down his paper, picked up the wet little hand, and led her out of the drawing room into the hallway. “And where’s your towel? I thought I told you not to come into the house dripping water like that. Look at your lips, they’re blue.”

“I’m not cold. I’m really warm,” the shivering little body that was trotting beside him promised.

“You’re mad,” he said, and chased Ella up the stairs, shrieking her head off.

Sometimes Nick felt too old to have such lively young children. He was sixty-one and looked it. He’d married Jessica, their mother, when he suddenly found himself hurtling toward the fifty mark with nothing to show for his life except for the spectacular buildings he’d designed all over the world and a large cellar of extremely fine wines. He’d only bought this place, his beautiful house in Oxfordshire, with its swimming pool and paddocks for the ponies and walled vegetable gardens, because a family was supposed to have a place to live, right? Before Jessica came along it had never occurred to him that he might want a home. But now he was glad he had one. He had his library of architectural books, his friends came to stay for weekends with their children, and he had begun to see the point of something other than work.

“Here it is.” Ella turned around and waved the CD in the air as if it were buried treasure.

“Terrific,” Nick said, leaving his daughter to her music. “Now, ten minutes, and then it’s lunch, okay? Don’t go getting back in the pool.”

“ ’Kay,” she said absentmindedly as her father carefully negotiated the minefield of Barbie dolls and Groovy Girls on the way out of her bedroom.

While Nick waited for their lunch guests to arrive, he returned to the drawing room and his newspapers for one last moment of peace and quiet. He settled down in an armchair and picked up
The Times
from the floor, hoping he’d at least make it through the financial pages. Underneath it, though, was something that caught his eye, a headline in the
Daily Mail
that read:

M
IRABELLE
R
INGS THE
C
HANGES

He lifted the paper carefully off the floor and squinted closely at the picture beneath it. Mirabelle Moncur clambering over a garden fence, her sundress bunched up in her hands, with a lion cub beside her. Nick’s heart stopped in his chest. He could no longer hear its beat. Hollow and still, he became able only to move his eyes down the thick black lines of words.

Reclusive star of the silver screen Mirabelle Moncur was sighted in public for the first time in many years yesterday—scaling a fence in London’s Primrose Hill with a lion cub on a lead. The eccentric wildlife campaigner and former actress is not thought to have visited Britain for twenty-five years. She is staying with old friend Leonard Ross in his luxury London home. When asked about his exotic houseguest, Mr Ross declined to comment. Miss Moncur, who was married three times, is thought to be in London on business.

Nick held the picture in his hand and looked again at the photograph. It could have been taken twenty-five years ago. Mirri’s hair cascaded over her shoulders, and her legs looked as lithe as they always did.

“Dad, they’re here. Can we just have one last swim before lunch?” Jasmine had shoved her head around the door and was waiting for a reply. Actually she was waiting for a yes. “Dad, are you deaf?”

“What?” Nick looked up at his daughter and found himself propelled headlong down the decades back into the present. His daughter wanted to go for a swim. Before lunch. “Yes,” he said.

Jasmine stared at him for a moment, certain that she’d misheard. She was never allowed to go for a swim this close to lunch because her hair always dripped on the table. “Really?” she asked.

Nick didn’t answer this time. He was somewhere else entirely. Different place. Different time. And the way it felt when he looked down at the familiar woman in the newspaper on his knee, he’d been a different person then, too.

“All-righty,” Jasmine said under her breath, in case he changed his mind, then bolted from the room and back out into the garden in delight.

Kate almost ran from Mirri’s room. In fact, if she’d had in mind a place to run to, she would have. But the worst part about this whole thing was that she couldn’t run from what was in her head.

You can’t run from the truth, you see.
Kate heard the voice of Mirri Moncur in her mind. Smug and yet horribly unsettling as she hurried down the stairs and into the hallway.

“Ouch!” She crashed shin-first into a vast steamer trunk and two men in blue overalls who were looking gravely at it.

“Careful, love, you’ll hurt yourself tearing around like that.”

“Bit late now,” she said bitterly as she clutched her shin and hobbled back down the garden. Behind the trunk had been another three of the things that Kate could see. How many more things could one woman own, Kate wondered. Unless of course Mirri had simply had Africa covered in Bubble Wrap and shipped over. “Most likely has,” Kate mumbled. Her shins hurt even more when she realized that there was no way that the ghastly woman upstairs, with her out-of-control libido and deep love of her own hair, was going anywhere soon. It’d take her a week to repack her underwear drawer, for heaven’s sake. No, the fact of the matter was that Mirri Moncur was most likely staying for a while, whether Kate painted her stupid cat’s portrait or not. So she’d better get used to the idea. Or move out.

Kate went back to her shed and pulled her phone out of her pocket to see whether maybe it had vibrated with Jake’s call at the precise moment she was bashing into Mirri’s luggage, in which case she would have missed it. It hadn’t. Kate picked it up and dialed.

“Hi, Kate,” Tanya answered.

“Do you think that I’m delusional?”

“What?”

“Do you think that I’m delusional? About Jake?” Kate sat on her bed and waited for her friend to refute her wild notion.

“Well . . .”

“Well?” Kate sat up a little straighter. A direct no from Tanya would be enough.

“Darling, I’m actually just at lunch with Robbie’s parents. Can I call you back later?”

“Just say yes or no. Please,” Kate pleaded.

“Kate,” Tanya said uncomfortably.

“Yes or no, Tanny?”

“Yes.”

“No?”

“I’ll call you later, darling, I promise, we’ll talk then.” And Tanya hung up and resumed her lunch with Robbie’s mother and stepfather and, as usual, Lady Hirst was clunkily attempting to steer the topic of conversation around to babies.

“You have to put them down for Eton terribly early these days,” Lady Hirst was saying while topping up her glass. “Practically before they’re conceived.” She laughed at her biting wit and looked pointedly at Tanya over the rim of her glass. Tanya glared at Robbie, who flew to her rescue.

“Mother, are you still using that wretched weed killer on your tomatoes? I can taste it. Why can’t you use manure like a civilized person?”

Kate meanwhile was still on the edge of her bed, blinking in the cold, harsh light of the truth. Not only did Mirri Moncur think that Jake was a waste of space, but apparently so did Kate’s best friend. And really, who was Kate to argue. It wasn’t as if the evidence pointed to any other possibility—her phone was hardly ringing off the hook, and Jake wasn’t exactly prostrate on the grass outside her door. No, sadly the facts seemed to bear out these opinions. Nor was it such a revelation to Kate; it was simply that she’d never heard the truth spoken quite so unequivocally before. Probably because she’d never asked. And the strange thing was that once a truth is spoken, it has, well, the ring of truth about it.

“Right.” Kate stood up and without putting down her pad and pencils, which she’d had in her lap this whole time, grabbed her purse and left the shed. She needed to think, and she knew that the only place she could do that was away from the bed she’d slept in with Jake and the garden shed that her love for him had landed her in.

Ten minutes later Kate was sitting on the top deck of a bus. There was something about motion, she found, that always made you feel better. Once, when she and Jake had split up before, she and Tanya had gone on a road trip to Scotland. Granted, it wasn’t Thelma and Louise in the Arizona desert, but there was something about the fields flashing by, the clumps of trees, the vast gray skies, and finally the heather-quilted Highlands that soothed her. That sense of time and things flying by was like time travel into a future without Jake. Of course when she got home to London she had found him asleep in her sitting room with a bunch of dying carnations on the coffee table by way of an apology and the Scottish Highlands ceased to matter. But she tried to remember that they were always there if ever she needed them. As was Arizona, if the going ever got really tough. The bus to Regents Park, though, was barely one stop, let alone a road trip. Still, it was high above the street, and the people below looked small enough to give life a similar sense of perspective.

Kate watched Londoners shedding their clothes in the afternoon heat. From here she could see everything. On building sites shoulders were turning lurid shades of pink, and out-for-a-stroll-at-lunchtime businessmen were rolling up their sleeves. Kate clutched her pencils and stood up to ring the bell. The next stop was the zoo.

“Thanks,” she called out to the driver as she hopped off the bus and onto the soft pavement. Kate hadn’t been to the zoo in months, which only served to remind her how miserable she must have been. She used to come here all the time and laugh at the monkeys or marvel at how sinister and prehistoric the crocodiles looked. But to be honest she couldn’t even remember the last time she’d felt joyful at a normal thing—like laughing at a stupid newspaper headline or seeing a seagull in the city—those sweet,
Sound of Music
moments like dewdrops on roses. She was a painter, for heaven’s sake, she loved stuff like that. But it really had been ages since she’d been properly happy, she realized with a wave of depression. God, with or without Jake, she didn’t see the good in life anymore. Which was about as bad as it got. Once upon a time Kate would have laughed and called all her friends to tell them that Mirri Moncur and Jonah Sinclair were shagging in her hammock outside her window. Last night she’d simply been a belligerent cow.

Kate took a ticket from the man in the booth at the entrance to the zoo and made a point of smiling at him. Granted, underneath her smile she felt wretched and fearful of what all this thinking was going to mean, but she had to start putting her life right somehow.

“Which way are the polar bears?” she asked. “Only I think it’s all changed since I was last here.”

“Polar bears is still in the same place they always was,” the ticket man said, and bared his crumbling teeth at her in what she took to be a smile. The zoo smelled even more pungent than usual in the heat but was eerily quiet; there wasn’t even a school party of bored teenagers or a huddle of Japanese tourists today. Kate pretty much had the place to herself. As she wandered through the cool darkness of the reptile house, she couldn’t hear even the faintest squeal of a monkey outside, only her sandals tripping on the concrete floor. She stopped and watched as a snake drew his dry scales against the glass of his tank and felt glad that she’d come here. Not only did the zoo remind her of home and the inanimate creatures that had roamed her parents’ house, but she also managed to justify being here to herself as work. Because even though she’d drawn and painted every single animal, reptile, and bird in the whole place at least six times, she never ceased to come away with a sketch that she was happy with.