The Goddess Rules (18 page)

Chapter Fourteen

By Tuesday Kate had made a considerable amount of progress on her secret portrait of Mirri. She had taken her sketches to her shed and was transposing them onto canvas. When she was finished she would turn it toward the wall to dry, and on more than one occasion she’d slid it behind the wardrobe when she’d heard footsteps outside the shed, or Mirri and Jonah chatting in the garden. She didn’t know exactly why she was keeping it a secret, but somewhere she felt that she was transgressing a trust by actually beginning a full-blown portrait when Mirri had only granted her permission to sketch her. She also suspected that if and when Mirri saw the very honest job that Kate was making of her, she might have heart failure. Because even though in Kate’s eyes Mirri just became more and more beautiful by the day, as Kate began to realize what a remarkable person she was, Kate knew that her subject wouldn’t want to be confronted with the graphic vision of lines and living that Kate saw in her face.

“You keep on drawing me with this terrible frown on my face,” Mirri had complained as she continued to run the Moncur Trust from Leonard’s guest bedroom. Most mornings she sat at the kidney-shaped dressing table, her pencils and calculator mingling with the antique silver hairbrushes and strings of pearls in porcelain bowls, and scribbled away.

“I thought you said you weren’t vain,” Kate retorted as she positioned her chair by the wall where she could catch Mirri in profile.

“But neither am I stupid.” Mirri rolled her eyes and put down her pen. “I have no desire to look like a hag. Are you finished with Bébé?”

“Yup, I’m finished for today. He’s getting agitated with being stared at so much. He’s got sitter’s fatigue.”

“Very well then.” Mirri sat up straight and pretended to be beaten into submission. “I will sit for you for a short time. Okay?”

“Oh, Mirri, thank you, thank you.” Kate leapt up and began arranging the eiderdown on the bed so that she’d get Mirri at just the right angle. “Now, could you just sit here? And look as natural as possible. What I was thinking was that I’d keep a couple of the trademark sex symbol characteristics, like the hair and the dark, heavy eyes, but that in between I’d allow the years to show, the living, the caring . . .”

“The lines?” Mirri scowled.

“They’re just laugh lines.” Kate perched on her chair close to the end of the bed and waited for Mirri to feel at ease.

“My lines are very deep. Nothing’s
that
funny,” Mirri said with a deadpan look at Kate.

“Maybe you want to think about Africa or something,” Kate said helpfully. “You know, something that means a lot to you. Something you love.” What Kate really wanted was for the expression that had registered on Mirri’s face that day when she was talking about the time she’d been in love, to surface again.

“I try not to think too hard, I don’t believe that it’s very good for you,” Mirri said, and looked out the bedroom window, onto the garden, as Kate made mark after mark on the paper, furiously trying to convey the essence of Mirri on her page.

For twenty minutes or so Kate was lost in the picture. She was lost in Mirri’s face. Then her neck began to ache so she rested her pencil for a moment and pushed her chin into her chest, stretching out her shoulders. But when she looked up again she caught the look. The one that wasn’t about Africa or Bébé or even Mirri being mournful about lost youth and fading beauty. It was a much more distant look than that, and Kate knew what she was thinking about. For a moment she was taken aback because it was such a haunted expression that all Kate could think of was that this woman’s life was going to slip by without her ever being truly happy. Then, out of some sense of guilt at having partially unearthed the secret, Kate gently coughed to let Mirri know that they were done and that she could stop dwelling on whatever thoughts she’d been having. Though later, when Kate thought more about it, she wondered if this wasn’t just what happened when you painted portraits of people instead of animals. She’d never really done it before, she’d only ever attempted life drawing at art school when she was pretty callow. In those days she’d also been much more concerned with getting a limb right than conveying the personality through her drawing. Perhaps this was simply how it was when it came to painting people.

“I’m done, thanks,” Kate said quietly to Mirri, who snapped back to herself and shook her hair back over her shoulders.

“Thank goodness, it made me feel like an actress again. All the staring, the prying. If it weren’t you, I wouldn’t do it. Ugh.”

“It is amazing of you to do this for me,” Kate said gratefully. “I mean, it’s one thing I’ve never had the courage to do. Draw a person. And I’m not sure I’ll be good at it, but I’m glad you trust me.”

“It’s fine,” Mirri said. “Now I have to get on with work and phone calls, if you don’t mind.”

“Oh sure. I’m going. I’ve got to go and meet Louis. Remember?”

“I know Louis.” Mirri smiled teasingly, but she wasn’t her usual boisterous self, berating Kate for not being attracted to him. “I hope it goes well, darling.”

“See you later.” Kate stroked the fur under Bébé’s collar and left. She closed the door quietly on Mirri’s room and went down the stairs.

“Good morning’s work?” Lenoard was at the bottom of the stairs opening a vast cardboard box with a Stanley knife.

“Really good, thanks,” Kate said, wondering if she ought to ask Leonard if he knew anything about some man Mirri had met thirty years ago, but thinking better of it. What would she do anyway? Go and confront Mirri about it? Hardly. And what would be the point now? He could even be dead. God, that’d be terrible. Maybe he had died tragically and that’s why Mirri never found out if she was in love with him. Kate decided that letting sleeping dogs lie was the best thing she could do. Though it didn’t quell her curiosity much.

“What’ve you got there?” Kate asked as she held back the edges of the box so that Leonard could begin removing the Styrofoam squiggles that were spilling from the sides.

“A wonderful Henry Moore.” Leonard dug deep with a look of sheer joy on his face, and Kate thought just how blessed they both were to do what they loved. She with her painting—which, granted, she thought was a bit tacky and not exactly the last word in artistic brilliance, but she did enjoy it when she was actually doing it—and Leonard with his passion for his collecting and selling. “Want to stay and have a peep?” he asked with the excitement of a child with a new bicycle.

“I’d love to but I’ve got to be somewhere.” Kate pushed a hand through the Styrofoam and felt the top of the sculpture. “Actually I’m meeting Louis,” Kate said as she made her way past the mess on the stairway.

“Oh, yes,” Leonard said distractedly, “Sounds like it might be a fun project.”

“Maybe.” Kate sounded dubious. “Though I think what he wants is pretty huge. I’m not sure that he’s not overestimating my talent.” Then, pointing to a smaller box, she asked, “Is that another Henry Moore?”

“That? No, that’s some old Super Eight footage that I just had transferred to DVD,” Leonard replied while knee-deep in fake snow. “Some funny ones from the sixties and seventies. I thought that Mirri and I might have a look later.”

“Cool,” Kate said, thinking that she might check them out herself. “Is Dad in any of them?”

“I honestly don’t know, dear. If he is I’ll tell you.”

“Great. See you later, Leonard. I’ll come and look at the sculptures,” Kate said, and glanced at her watch. Twenty-five minutes to make it to Louis’s.

It wasn’t until she was on her bike, cycling through Regents Park, that it dawned on Kate that she was nervous about the Louis project. Sure, they’d been at art college together and he knew her talents, but he was in a different league now. He sold work to international collectors and he was fêted by both the critics and the public, and even if he claimed that what he was after was perfectly simple, Kate still wasn’t convinced that he wasn’t just hiring her out of sympathy. Plus, things felt awkward between them. It was as if he’d moved from their shared past, and they didn’t really have much in common anymore. He had these glossy girlfriends and while Kate knew everything there was to know about portraiture—she’d gone to the Rembrandt exhibition at the National Gallery at least once a week the whole time it was on; she was also very well versed in Scottish colorists, Victorian painters, and could probably write a book on Augustus John—she wasn’t exactly Miss Tate Modern. In fact, she barely knew a thing that had happened to art since 1940. It had just never been her scene. Whereas Louis was now the poster boy of the modern art scene. They were worlds apart these days.

So Kate vowed to herself to keep it simple with Louis. He had his life and she had hers and she’d let him know that he wasn’t obliged to hire her for old times’ sake. It was perfectly natural that people grew apart; it happened every day. There are just some friends whom you can’t move forward with—the ones you can reminisce with for an hour or so and then you had to make your excuses and leave. Kate suspected that Louis and she had become friends like this. Anyway, it didn’t matter, she didn’t need to hang out with anybody right now—she had so much work to do. And though she hadn’t had any pangs for Felix since their wonderful two days away, despite his having left her a very sweet text message a couple of days ago, what their fling had made her think about was that maybe she wasn’t going to be getting married anytime soon. She’d always imagined in the back of her mind, even if she’d never quite admitted it to herself, that when the man came so would the house and the car and the school fees. They’d magically be part of the package. But since she’d put Jake out her mind and begun to see the point of casual sex—not to mention the fact that there wasn’t a suitable knight on a thundering-hooved charger to be spied anywhere on the horizon—then she was going to be just fine on her own. She would have to make enough money to support herself and also to move out of the shed by the end of the summer, when it would cease to be an eccentric place to live and instead become a one-way ticket to pneumonia and rheumatism.

Kate hadn’t really fathomed just how far it was to get to Louis’s new place. It wasn’t exactly a skip and a jump. By the time she got to Notting Hill she was more than a bit damp around the edges: Her skirt was sticking to her legs, and the back of her neck was sweating madly. God only knew what she looked like. She’d also gotten oil all the way up one leg because the chain had caught on her shin as she stopped sharply at a traffic light in Camden. She hoped, with her new faith in not trying too hard, that she might look like Mirri’s proverbial dirty girl. Then she caught sight of herself in the window of a shop and noticed she looked more like a demented mechanic with a bad female wig. Oh, well, in and out. She’d get her instructions from Louis, find out how much he was planning to pay her, and then leave. But as she began to count up her savings in her head and do the math as to how much money she could make by September, she heard someone call out her name.

“Kate?” She sailed dangerously out of control down Ladbroke Grove as she tried to look over her shoulder. It was a man’s voice. She thought maybe she’d ignore it—she was late enough as it was without stopping for some vague acquaintance—but the man shouted out louder this time, “Kate, it’s me.” She turned and saw Jake, standing outside Rough Trade Records with a cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth. She waved a hand in the air and contemplated not stopping, but his face was full of expectation. “Hey, how are you, angel?” Damn it. Now she had to stop. She slowed down and did a U-turn in the middle of the road.

“Hi, Jake,” she said, a little irritated by having her stride broken like this. She was supposed to be at Louis’s three minutes ago. God it was typical, wasn’t it. She’d spent the past three years walking by places where she might casually bump into her so-called boyfriend and now, when she was trying very hard to make him her ex, he’d apparently turned into a bloody leprechaun, popping up with a daft grin on his face wherever she turned.

“You look wild.” Jake was staring at her in a slightly disconcerting way. She kept her distance, though and didn’t attempt to shuffle close enough on her bike to give him even a polite kiss. But she did try to flatten her hair with one hand and hold the handlebar with the other.

“Ha. Well I’m a bit late actually. “

“About the other day, angel—”

“Jake, you really don’t have to go through that again. You apologized. I accepted your apology. We broke up. Again. Not much more to it, is there?” She smiled a bit sadly. It wasn’t as though seeing Jake was easy. Just because she was moving on, didn’t mean whatever it was about Jake that had made a fool of her for the past few years had gone away completely. She still felt shaky as she looked at him and she still felt the pain in her heart—whether it was vestigial or not. Neither did it help that he looked like he always looked. Handsome and louche and relaxed with his sunglasses on and the gentle thud of reggae music all around him. But, thankfully, her fright, fight, or flight hormones were racing around inside her body with all that cycling and her lateness for her appointment with Louis, so it was easy for her to just keep going. “I’d better be off,” she said before he could reach for her hand and hold it gently or brush her hair back from her face or something killing like that.