The Goddess Rules (8 page)

She’d decided to start with the polar bears because they were the most robust and, she imagined, well adjusted of the animals. The gorillas would have made her sad with their lonely eyes; the monkeys, with all their showing off and flirting, would have made her wish for companionship; and she wasn’t in the mood for docile elephants and their mooning ways. No, she definitely wanted to hang with the polar bears today. She loved their vast size, their elegant walk, and the way they somehow seemed incredibly friendly. Though she wasn’t convinced that if she landed in their den at mealtime this theory would hold much water. When she arrived at the polar bear enclosure she rolled up her cardigan beneath her, placed it on the hard grass, and sat down. She also arranged her pencils in a row next to her and pulled out her sketch pad.

She must have stared at the polar bears for ten minutes with her pencil scratching away at her page before she really noticed that she hadn’t produced anything vaguely resembling a polar bear, and had instead simply been doodling. Not, thankfully, anything as inane as Jake’s name, but rather words like
LIFE
and
LOVE
and
HOPE
and, a little less obviously,
FISH
and
FLASH
. She had also been thinking about whether she was a masochist for having hung around Jake for this long. There were, she imagined, all sorts of very lovely men out there who would allow her to use the term
boyfriend
in relation to them without calling their lawyers to sue her. She remembered when Tanya and Robbie had first gotten together. Not only was he her boyfriend after three dates, he was her fiancé after seven and her husband six months later. When Kate had first gone and had coffee with Tanya and her fabulous new man, Tanya had said, “Oh, Robbie and I don’t mind whether we live in his flat or mine. We just want to be together.” She’d said that in front of him, too. Kate contemplated what Jake would do if she said the same thing in front of him—three years down the line and for a joke. And while she couldn’t be completely certain, she knew that it would involve cardiac arrest and an ambulance.

“Okay, guys, enough of that,” she said out loud and stood up so she could get closer to the bears for a bit. She walked over to where they were lolling on the wet rocks beside the arctic-cold water. “I love him, you know. Do you think I’m mad?” she asked a bear who was looking directly at her.

“No, you’re not mad. It’s perfectly normal to speak to polar bears about your emotions.” Kate heard a man’s voice behind her. She’d assumed, of course, that she was alone in the zoo apart from a few sweeping keepers.

She spun around. “I was just—”

“It’s okay. I just wanted to let you know I was here before you went any further.” Behind her, standing on the grass next to her dumb doodles, was a man with a gray cotton hat over his head and a huge baggy sweater on, dressed as if he was oblivious to the soaring mercury of the afternoon. She took a couple of steps back, not able to ascertain at this close a proximity whether she should run and scream blue murder or not. “Kate, it’s me, Louis,” the man said.

“Louis?” Kate reappraised the sinister figure and then rushed toward him and gave him a huge hug. “What are you doing here?” she said with a broad grin on her face.

“I’ve got a few issues with intimacy that I wanted to work out in therapy. I thought I’d take the next appointment after yours.” He pulled the hat off his head, and thick blue-black hair spilled down over his face as he pointed in the direction of the polar bears. Kate had known Louis Alcott for years. Well, eight years to be precise. They’d met at art college when they were on the same bench in metalwork class. One day a shard of iron filing from the horse she’d been sculpting had flown up and caught him in the eye, and an unseemly amount of blood had gushed through his fingers as he’d clutched his palm against his face and turned the color of putty. Terrified that he’d been blinded, Kate had refused to wait for an ambulance as the tutor demanded and had instead thrust him into the front seat of her car and driven him on what he still referred to as the most nerve-racking ride of his life, to the local hospital. Then she’d sat with him in the emergency room for four hours while they waited to be seen by a doctor. Kate had tried to distract him by telling him about her father’s taxidermy—about the processes of stuffing and embalming rare species. It was only when he rushed to the nearest rubbish bin and threw up that she realized that she might have chosen a better subject matter to preach to a bleeding man with pending stitches in his eye area. Still, afterward, when it was revealed that he wasn’t blinded, only cut in a gangsterlike way through his eyebrow, and would need only five stitches and an eye patch, Kate took him home and fed him noodles and Ribena. Louis had been slightly baffled by all the attention from Kate, and they’d become firm friends.

She’d encouraged him in his career as a conceptual sculptor even though she didn’t understand the first thing about it, and he always showed up for her private views with one of a string of gorgeous girlfriends who made Kate feel like a frumpy suburbanite with a penchant for paint-by-numbers art. They invariably had golden legs, knee-high boots, and whiplash wit; were ominously intellectual and flashed their wares as a columnist for a national newspaper with a sultry photograph at the top of their page; or appeared on stage as the latest, diaphanously clad Ophelia in a hip North London production of
Hamlet.
At least that’s how it had felt to Kate. She had never quite understood how Louis, who was painfully shy even with her and hid behind his admittedly very sexy devilish black hair most of the time, was so successful with women. And as she was too intimidated by the hothouse orchids he dated to dig them in the ribs and giggle about what it was they saw in her old pal, she was never likely to find out, either.

“Still in love with that loser boyfriend of yours, I take it?” Louis asked through tightened lips. He’d always hated Jake. Well, not always, just since the day he’d bumped into a sobbing Kate in the car park of Sainsbury’s in Notting Hill after Jake had delivered one of his early flesh wounds over the phone. Louis had picked her up off the pavement she was crying on and taken her to the circus. They’d eaten cotton candy and they’d had a laugh, but the next day, when Kate called Louis to say thank you and announced that she was okay now because Jake had seen the light and was on his way over with a bottle of wine and takeout, he was less than amused. In fact, Kate hadn’t seen much of Louis outside gallery openings for the past couple of years. But she was thrilled to see him now, and indulged his crossness over Jake.

“Unfortunately yes. And for the record, you and the polar bears aren’t the only ones who think I’m mad.
I
think that I’m mad, too. But it doesn’t seem to change things.”

“Yeah, well. I’m prepared to overlook your terrible taste in men for the moment.” He smiled. “So what are you up to, kitten?” He always called her kitten because there had been two Kates in their year at art college. And even though it was only Louis saying it, she always had a feeling of loveliness when he did.

“This and that. Actually I’m doing a portrait of a lion cub, believe it or not.” She shrugged. “Oh, and I’m miserable, broke, and living in a shed. How about you?” she said blithely.

“A shed?” Louis looked genuinely alarmed. “You’re serious?”

“It’s okay. It’s Leonard’s shed so it’s very high end,” she reassured him. “What about you? Shouldn’t you be having some amazing exhibition soon? It’s been a while. Well, that is, unless I’ve fallen off your invitation list.”

“What, for keeping bad company?” He smiled wanly. “No, I’m just a slow worker. I’ve got a show opening at Tate Modern next month, though. It’s a retrospective with a couple of new pieces, too. That’s why I’m here. Looking for inspiration.” He nodded at the polar bears.

“God, Louis, don’t tell me that you’re going to take up animal portraits. I’m not sure that there’s room for both of us in the marketplace and as living in a shed’s about as rock bottom as I can stand . . . ,” she pleaded with a smile.

“Don’t worry, I’m just thinking of doing a big piece. Not sure yet, though, what it’ll be. I wanted to look at huge things. I’m into messing with perspective at the moment.” He gestured to the polar bears, who were sunning themselves on a rock in the blazing afternoon.

“So are you, you know, married yet or anything?” Kate asked, in what she thought would pass for an adult tone. But just as Louis pulled off his sunglasses, clearly preparing an answer for her, there was a fantastic crashing sound behind Kate as one of the bears, in a bid for attention, stood up and dived into the water. Kate felt an enormous splash crash over her and then water seep through the back of her T-shirt. She screamed as the cold hit her warm skin, then laughed and pulled at her wet top to investigate just how soaking she was.

“Holy shit. I’m drenched.” She laughed, then looked up and saw that Louis was smiling shyly, trying to look at his feet but clearly unable to resist the lure of her translucent top. He was swinging his sunglasses in his hand, and through the slivers of bangs she could see his deep, bottle-green eyes flicker to hers as he finally managed to avert his gaze.

“Can I help?” he asked.

“I think I’ll survive,” Kate told him. “It’s quite refreshing actually. “

“Damned right it is.” He winked at her then hastily added, “So where were we? Oh, yeah, me. No, I’m not married. Only to work. You know how it is.”

“I wish I did,” Kate said, as she was forced to recall her financial woes, which always made her stomach lurch as surely as hurling herself from a moving train might. “Still, at least I’ve got this big commission for the lion cub. Could be worse.” She forced a cheerful face.

“Come on, kitten, it can’t be that bad. You were the most talented painter in our year.”

Louis was looking intently at her. She’d forgotten how penetrating he could be when he looked at her. It had been so long since she’d been alone with him. She felt slightly uncomfortable, because even though Louis was sweet he wasn’t the easiest person in the world to get along with. It wasn’t as though conversation just flowed.

“It’s not at all bad.” She batted the black cloud away. “So why don’t you come by and have a cup of tea one day soon. We ought to catch up properly. When I’m not wet,” she added, and tugged at her T-shirt to make it dry out more quickly.

“Sure,” Louis said, and was about to shuffle from one foot to the other when he noticed Kate’s sketch pad at his feet. “So, you’ve been sketching today. Can I have a look?”

“No.” Kate jostled past him and dived onto the book. If he saw
FISH
and
FLASH
and her lunatic scribblings he’d think she’d really lost her mind. Then she noticed, as she hugged the incriminating page guiltily to her chest, that he looked slightly hurt. “Well, what I mean is, best not look as they’re not all that great.” She tried to smooth over the crack she’d just driven through their conversation.

“Sorry, I shouldn’t have asked,” Louis said shakily.

“Actually, Louis, they’re hardly sketches. They’re the musings of a half-wit,” she confessed.

“No problem,” Louis said gently. “Well, I’d better head off. Leave you and Percy the Polar Bear to your important discussion.” He shrugged and gave her the trace of a smile.

“It was great to see you, Louis,” Kate said overeagerly. “You will come around for coffee, won’t you?”

“Yeah, ’course I will,” he promised. Though Kate suspected that he wouldn’t. He waved and walked away.

“ ’Bye, then,” Kate said to herself as she sat back down on the grass. Once again she picked up her pencil, but still she didn’t draw anything. And she was so distracted by guilt and how messily her chat with Louis had gone that it was a whole fifteen minutes before she remembered to check her phone for missed calls.

Chapter Six

“Okay, I’ll do it.” Kate sat down heavily on Tanya’s sofa and tossed her sketch pad on the coffee table.

“You’ll do what?” Tanya and Robbie had just gotten back from Robbie’s parents when Kate had rung their doorbell and demanded entry. She’d come straight from the zoo to tell them about her decision.

“We finally get to adopt you?” Robbie asked as he put his jacket over the arm of a chair and made for the drinks cabinet. It had long been a joke among the three of them that if Kate never found a husband, she would just come and live with Robbie and Tanya. They would keep a spare room and en suite bathroom for her, she’d bring them cups of tea and newspapers every morning for the rest of their lives, and they’d all get to lounge around on the duvet gossiping until Robbie went to work and the girls went to yoga. Any babies born would be communal, and Kate’s lovers would be welcome on the understanding that they were quiet and didn’t waste water. Sharing baths was very much encouraged in the Hirst household.

“Actually, no. You might finally get to marry me off, though,” Kate said as Tanya sat down wearily in the chair opposite.

“Has this got to do with the phone call earlier?” Tanya asked guiltily. “Only if it does I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean that you were delusional, only that, well, Jake isn’t always as nice to you as he should be.”

“You’re not getting married to him, are you?” Robbie suddenly stopped pouring gin into a glass and turned to Kate.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Kate said sadly. If she were she’d be shouting from rooftops and pole-dancing around chimneys rather than calmly imparting her news like this. Then she quickly added, “I’ve decided to take you up on your offer to set me up on a date.”

“Oh, darling, I’m sorry. I’m already married.” Robbie handed Kate a generous gin and tonic with a slice of lemon.

“With your friend Joss. You know, the guy who’s kind and sweet and clever and good at cooking.”

“The one you think is dull,” Robbie teased.

“I don’t think he’s dull. I just think he’s . . .”

“Great news. I’ll call him.” Tanya said, reaching for her phone. “He’s so kind and sweet and clever and . . .”

“Good at cooking,” Robbie and Kate said at the same time.

“But what about Jake?” Tanya suddenly remembered that this was Kate she was talking to, not some normal person who was longing to meet a Joss.

“I went to the zoo and I’m over him,” Kate declared theatrically.

“I see,” Robbie said. “Nice work.”

“What happened?” Tanya said as she sipped at her tonic and abandoned her phone for the moment.

“Well, I had this conversation with the madwoman in the attic and she told me that she thought Jake was a slug and treated me like dirt and then, even though I hate her and thought she was talking out of her overexposed backside, I called you and you said that I was delusional, too. Anyway, I went to the zoo, realized that I didn’t get excited by the smell of cut grass anymore, and then I bumped into Louis Alcott in the polar bear enclosure and I realized that by persisting in living the same nightmare over and over with Jake that I’ve lost the sympathy of a lot of people I love . . . so I decided that I ought to at least try to get over Jake because while he’s still around I’m not open to good things.”

“Darling, do you think you ought to have that G and T?” Tanya asked, a little concerned by her friend’s flagrantly mad behavior.

“Hang on a minute. Can we start again?” Robbie asked. “Who’s the madwoman in the attic?”

“Oh, she’s some decrepit film star called Mirri Moncur who’s staying with Leonard. If she stays another day I’m moving out,” Kate said bitterly. “Does Joss have his own place, by the way? That would be a distinct bonus.”

“Mirri Moncur. My God, what’s she doing staying with Leonard?” Robbie was suddenly much less laconic than usual. In fact, he was positively overexcited.

“They had sex in the sixties,” Tanya informed him.

“Everyone had sex in the sixties,” Robbie said. “Is that the real Mirabelle Moncur?”

“Well, if she were only a hologram I’d be much happier,” Kate said. “But unfortunately yes, she’s real.”

“Can I meet her?” Robbie was sitting on the edge of his chair. “I can’t believe you’re both being so cool about this. Kate, Mirri Moncur is staying with you. Why did nobody tell me?”

“Why would we? She’s just some washed-up actress.” Tanya sat back in her chair and picked up her phone. “So, Kate, you really want to go on a date with Joss? Because I’ll call him right now if you do.”

“Yes I do,” Kate said decisively. “I have to break the Jake habit sooner or later, don’t I? And it’s not that I was paying any attention whatsoever to Mirri’s advice, but when
you
said that I was being stupid . . .”

“I said delusional, Kate, not stupid,” Tanya said guiltily.

“Same thing, anyway . . .”

“Would you two just stop talking a minute please?” The girls looked up at Robbie, who was standing in his long jeans and lilac rugby socks in the middle of the room, holding a remote control in his hand. They stopped talking at once.

“Watch this,” he said with unusual authority for such a mild man, sliding a DVD into the player and clicking a button on the remote. Then he pulled down the blinds on the sitting room windows and plunged the room into darkness. Moments later Kate and Tanya watched as a black-and-white movie began.

“What is this?” Tanya whispered loudly to her husband, who had perched himself importantly on the arm of her chair, his eyes riveted to the screen.

“Ssshhhh. You’ll see,” he said. And they did. As the credits began to roll, the words

MIRABELLE MONCUR

came up on the screen in large white letters and were followed by the flash of what seemed like several hundred exotic and implausible names of French actors. Then, just as the girls were about to go to sleep, the film began. With a young woman lying naked on a bed fast asleep.

“Wow, look at that cinematography.” Robbie leaned back on Tanya’s chair.

“Ssssh,” said Tanya, who was trying to concentrate on the subtitles flashing across the screen.

“Look at that body,” said Kate, who had curled her legs underneath her in a bid to get comfortable.

The woman on the screen was quite simply the most stunning creature that any of them had ever seen. She couldn’t have been any more than nineteen years old, but she literally steamed with sexuality, and as she stalked about the bedroom in the movie, the camera clinging to her naked curves more closely than any underwear could have done, Kate, Tanya, and Robbie watched in awed silence. They continued to be mesmerized for the next three hours and ten minutes as the naked girl acquired clothes and lovers and experienced heartbreak and isolation and just about every sort of misery that the French could dream up. And boy, were they good at that. By the end of the film, when it was definitely twilight beyond the curtains, the three of them were totally wrung out emotionally. When the screen finally flashed to black and Robbie reached for his remote control and pressed
STOP
, Kate rubbed her eyes.

“Oh my God,” she said as she stretched her legs out in front of her. “That was incredible.”

“She’s amazing,” Tanya said as she went to the window and pulled back the curtains.

“And you think she’s some washed-up old starlet?” Robbie asked.

“I’d have slept with her,” Tanya said. Robbie raised his eyebrows.

“Well, just because she was the most beautiful woman ever doesn’t mean that she’s not really annoying to live with,” Kate said. “But I will admit she’s pretty impressive. She was an amazing actress, too.”

“Sure was.” Robbie looked very pleased with himself. “So when can I come around for dinner and meet her?”

“Oh, you’ll have to get to the back of the queue. Behind Jonah Sinclair and the Royals,” Kate told Robbie.

“I’m more than happy to stand in line. I’d have to be pretty inventive to get noticed, though. One of her lovers used to shower her garden in red roses every day from his helicopter.”

“Yes, but that kind of thing would never happen in real life,” Kate said wistfully. Right now she’d settle for a bunch of the things in some cheap cellophane wrapping.

“It might, but I’m not sure Jake’s your man.” Robbie guided Kate down the corridor toward the kitchen where Tanya was.

“Now, darling, are you staying for supper?” Tanya called out. “Only I think that we should brief you on Joss a bit. Before your date.” Robbie and Kate, who were just walking in the kitchen door, looked at one another suspiciously.

“Isn’t it better if Kate’s a bit more spontaneous?” Robbie asked, and kissed Tanya on the back of the head as she unloaded some celery and bacon from the fridge. “If she gets to know him herself?”

“Oh, you’re such a spoilsport, Rob,” Tanya moaned. “We can tell her that he prefers women to be quite conservatively dressed, though, can’t we? I mean, it’s only fair.”

“Well, I’m hardly the miniskirt type, am I?” Kate said as she pulled at her combat pants to demonstrate her point.

“That’s true,” Robbie said grimly, but before Kate could leap to attack him for the implied criticism, he’d moved on. “And by the way, do you still mean to tell me that Mirabelle Moncur doesn’t know what she’s talking about when it comes to men?”

“Yeah, Rob might be right about that,” Tanya said as she heaped the vegetables into a saucepan to make the only thing she could cook—soup.

“Just because she’s had loads of experience doesn’t mean she’s an expert,” Kate argued. Even though she had to admit to herself that Mirri had been depressingly accurate about Jake. “Anyway, where do you think that Joss will take me? I haven’t been taken out since . . . Well, actually I don’t think I’ve ever been taken out. Jake and I just
went
out. And before him the men I dated couldn’t
afford
to take women out. So this is a whole new thing for me,” Kate said with forced optimism while Rob and Tanya looked at her with what they hoped was affection but was really ill-concealed pity.

Mirabelle Moncur was not feeling like the most beautiful, experienced woman in world when she looked in the mirror that evening. She was too busy pulling her hair back from her face with the palm of her hand to examine the gray roots beneath the blond. She’d have to find a bottle of bleach soon or things would get ugly. Because quite aside from the possibility of the world (and that included her cats and friends as well as the paparazzi and the curious millions) noticing her gray hair, Mirri was much more concerned that she
herself
would have to face up to the irreversible onset of old age. She hadn’t quite come to terms with the possibility that there hadn’t been a single naturally blond hair left on her head for years.

Strangely enough, she’d begun to go gray at thirty-five, which isn’t old age by anyone’s standards, but at that time it had been only the odd hair here and there and she’d just pulled them out by the roots with irritation and asked her hairdresser to make her blonder. There had, though, come a point somewhere around her forty-fifth birthday, just after she’d moved to Africa, when she’d made what she considered “the decision”—either to grow old gracefully as God intended, to embrace the graying and the fading and the widening of herself as being as much a part of nature as the seasons, the rain, the elephants who pulled up the lettuce that she persisted in trying to grow in her garden, or—and the alternative required almost as much courage and certainly more commitment—to fight it. To fill her life with the bottles and facialists and creams and exercise regimes that would hold it all together until the day the embalmer came and let her off the hook. Thankfully the effort paid off, and by the time she was bleached and tinted and taken her daily walk and applied the lipstick, she looked pretty stunning. And not just “for her age.” She looked stunning by anyone’s standards. Her top secret, though, the trick she never let anyone in on, was smoking and eating butter. By doing these things that she loved and could never have the discipline to give up, she also fooled everyone into thinking that she was oblivious to vanity. That she didn’t spare a second thought about her looks, and it was this, above all other things, that she believed made her an attractive woman at the age of sixty. Certainly attractive enough to cause Jonah Sinclair to call her four times today and beg her to go to dinner with him.