The Goddess Rules (19 page)

“I’ll call you,” Jake said.

“ ’Bye, Jake.” Kate put her foot on the pedal and negotiated her way back across Ladbroke Grove.

“I miss you,” she thought he said, but she couldn’t be sure because a white van and a Citroën were both blasting her with their horns as she narrowly escaped unscathed from the middle of the road.

When Kate finally arrived at Louis’s she hopped off her bike, locked it up on the lamppost outside, and looked at her watch. She was only ten and a half minutes late. She rang the doorbell and pulled her underwear, which had twisted itself all around her body, back into place. As she looked up at the house she saw that it was painted a drab gray color and looked like an old firehouse or bakery. Certainly it had once served some purpose and was the only stand-alone house as far as Kate could see. The others were run-down warehouses or terraces of flats and peeling stucco-fronted buildings.

“Kate?” The buzzer came to life and she tried to look human in case Louis’s entry phone actually worked and he could see her.

“It’s me.” She coughed. She wondered if there was some proper thing to say into those machines that everybody else knew and she didn’t. Some snappy phrase she wasn’t party to.

“Come up.” Kate heaved open the heavy front door and made her way up Louis’s shabby staircase. The carpet was worn; mildew was making its way up the wall. Pieces of a motorbike littered the carpet. This wasn’t exactly what she’d expected. Kate found it surprising how few people really had the lifestyle you imagined they would. She always thought she was the only one who hadn’t gotten it together by her late twenties. The only one who didn’t yet own the hell pad she wanted—the bath she could lure lovers into, the chandeliers, the light, airy rooms dotted with occasional pieces of her work, definitely her zebra. It was a dream but it kept her going. And she knew that someday it had to happen, or she’d end up raising her fantasy family of three children in Leonard’s shed. Which simply wasn’t practical, and was probably barely legal.

So all in all it was always a relief to discover that nobody really seemed to have life as sorted as she envisaged. Louis, despite his achingly hip status, still lived the life of the student she’d known—in a run-down house in the wrong part of Ladbroke Grove with a bad carpet. Well, at least they still had something in common, she thought with relief. That was, until she walked through the door at the top of the staircase and clocked all the swirling neon lights on the walls, the twisted and sinister wooden sculptures, and an enormous table completely covered in shavings of metal, planks of wood, blowtorches, and an electronic sander. She wasn’t Larry Gagosian but she imagined this was Louis’s workbench and not another piece of art. Though to her eye it looked good enough to exhibit. Kate loved mess and paraphernalia. She loved the bottles and brushes and scalpels and lacquers. It made her heart soften to just be in a studio among tools.

“Louis, I love your workshop,” was the first thing she said as Louis stood back and let her in the door, a welder’s mask over his face.

He lifted it and grinned. “Me, too.”

Kate turned away from the magnificent workbench toward him and remembered herself. “Sorry I’m a bit late. I ran into Jake outside Rough Trade.”

“Sounds about right,” he said sourly.

“Oh, no, you’d have been proud. I told him where to get off actually,” she said as she lifted an old mallet with a rusting orange head and looked lovingly at it. “God, I’m jealous you get to do all this.”

“Yeah, just like the old days in metalwork, eh?” he said as he dumped his mask on the table and wiped his hands down his wrecked blue overalls. “Only without the nutty chick at the next bench trying to maim me all the time.”

“Oh, you can’t just forgive and forget, can you, Louis Alcott?” Kate said as she ran her fingers over his chipped, abused wooden bench.

“It’s hard when you’re scarred for life.” He raised a mischievous eyebrow.

“You are not,” she shrieked. “Show me.” And with that she moved closer to him and stood on her tiptoes to examine the offending brow. “Can’t see a thing,” she declared before taking a step back to the bench, hoisting herself up, and sitting on it, her feet dangling above the floor.

“Well, if you bothered to look properly, in the light, I think you’d see your evil handiwork pretty clearly,” he said with mock pomposity.

“Rubbish,” Kate said. Louis then positioned himself in front of her face with the light full on his face. Kate finally conceded and looked at him.

“Am I right?” he demanded. Kate squinted at his dark eyebrow as he held his bangs back with his hand, and she saw that there was a definite balding patch and a white slice of scar through the outside corner of his eyebrow.

“Oh,” she said.

“So you admit it now, do you?” He dropped his hair back and looked at Kate, but neither of them seemed to realize how close they were to one another, because each instantly pulled away. Then, as Kate tried to banish the overwhelming thought she’d just had—that Louis’s skin was the smoothest golden color she’d ever seen, that his nose was so much finer close up, and that his eyes were green as uncut emeralds—she shoved him in the ribs with her elbow.

“Okay, I admit it. You’re hideously scarred. It’s very unfortunate, but there’s nothing I can do about it. Apart from offer you the use of my shed so you can go and live like Quasimodo for the rest of your life.” She jumped down off the workbench and went over to the sink where Louis’s grubby kettle stood, covered in big, inky black fingerprints. “Now, if you’re not going to be a good host then I’ll make
myself
a cup of tea.”

“Well, Esmeralda, as you’re making one, mine’s two sugars,” he said, moving toward an ornate, limed-oak French door at the end of the workshop. “But you might want to use the other kitchen, unless you like great big chunks of lime scale in your tea and mugs with indelible black rings inside.”

“Yeah, I was wondering whether the health and safety officer had been around lately.” Kate lifted a stained teaspoon from a moldy saucer.

“Through here.” Louis held open the door and Kate ducked under his arm to enter. “We can get this polar bear thing straight, too, without all those tools tempting you to ruin my looks again in a jealous rage.”

“Yeah, right.” Kate laughed as she stood in the hallway of what was clearly the rest of Louis’s house. “Wow, Louis. This is yours?” she said, staggered at the vast and beautiful corridor that lay before her.

“Where did you think I lived?” he asked as he led her through to the kitchen. “Oh, yeah, I forgot, the bell tower.”

“Go to hell, Louis.” She laughed and followed him. She wondered why she’d been so convinced that she and Louis hadn’t really much of a friendship left anymore. They still laughed at one another’s dumb jokes like old mates; there wasn’t a hint of awkwardness really.

“So you want me to lace your tea with arsenic, do you?” he asked.

“Perfect,” Kate said. “Then I can poke around your flat first, discover all your dark secrets, and you can kill me. Does that work?”

“Help yourself,” Louis said as he filled the slick silver kettle from the tap and waved a hand at the rest of the flat. “Leave no drawer left unturned.”

“Fantastic,” Kate said, “license to snoop. Thanks.” She shot Louis an excited look and headed out of the kitchen and into the corridor. Unlike the fluorescently lit studio, this part of the house was darker and cavernous and was essentially a row of rooms strung together like a beaded necklace—one room led to another, all linked by adjoining wide doorways with no door. So that as Kate stood at the top of the corridor she could see all the way through to the bedroom at the end—albeit very distantly, as it was a pretty enormous flat. First was the sitting room whose walls were lined with disturbing but very important-looking paintings and rich damson-colored velvet sofas and chairs; a bowl of sweetpeas on a low coffee table gave the room a friendly air, and dark cherrywood floorboards ran throughout the flat. The air smelled of darkly exotic white flowers. Light flooded through the vast bay windows and from a balcony at the end of the corridor, off the bedroom.
This
was a house. A grown-up’s house, no less. Kate realized that she alone did live a stunted life. Leonard had a great place. Tanya and Robbie had a great place. Louis had a great place. She had a shed.

Kate leaned forward and peered through into the next room, calling out as she went, “Louis, I love it. I never realized that you had any taste.” She heard a snort in the kitchen and moved through into a dining room with a newspaper strewn across the large, imposing table and the remnants of some toast. The table could easily have seated ten, and Kate wondered whether Louis ever actually entertained here—certainly she and Jake had never been invited to dine chez Louis, though she wasn’t about to ask why. She already knew the answer. Next came a sage-green room that was like a library, with leather-bound red volumes lining the walls and an ancient writing desk covered in invitations and what she thought of as gentleman’s notepaper—thick cream sheets with Louis’s name and address at the top, bordered in olive green. It was all so seductively male that for a moment Kate yearned to be a man and read
The Times
and play poker in the evenings and smoke cigars.

In fact, for a moment she wanted to be Louis. She looked over her shoulder to see if he might be following her but there was no sign of him, just the clatter of cups in the kitchen. She took another step into the office, vaguely conscious that she was looking for some giveaway as to Louis’s private life—a photograph in a heavy silver frame perhaps, showing one of the hothouse girls. But though she peered keenly, she found nothing. Eventually, when she had spent a suspiciously long time in the office, she wandered into the next room, which was covered in silver swimming pool tiles. A giant Victorian bathtub sat in the middle of the floor complete with claw feet. Little else cluttered the room apart from some dusty apothecary jars filled with colored liquids. Then, just as Kate was about to lift the lid off one of the potions, she realized that the room beyond was the bedroom—a brilliantly light room with a huge bed strewn with cushions, pillows, and stone gray linen. The paintings here were beautiful and serene, not like the disturbing ones in the sitting room, and the bed, out of keeping with the rest of the flat, was unmade. Kate looked past it onto a small deck, which was home to pots of lavender and camellias. It was overhung by an ancient lilac tree in full bloom. She turned back and looked through the flat with a sense of complete awe. She had never imagined this of Louis. He was a scruffy, nail-biting, mumbling guy who happened to have a phenomenal talent for contemporary art and who got her jokes. But this was something else. She couldn’t help but wonder whether Louis ever had women back to his gray linen bed. As her mind began to wander and she thought of him bringing one of the short-skirted media darlings back here to spend the night, she heard his footsteps in the hallway outside the kitchen.

“Kate?” he called out. For some reason Kate felt embarrassed to be in his bedroom, even though she’d been very blunt about her intentions to snoop shamelessly. Suddenly, with the place being so tasteful and with Louis not quite being the person she thought she knew, she felt slightly gauche. She was about to dart through to the bathroom, but then she’d have to make a sudden move and it might look as though she really had been poking around in his underwear drawer.

“Here,” she said, and dashed out onto the balcony where there were no underpants to incriminate her. “Just admiring the view,” she added dreamily. But then she looked down and noticed that the view was in fact quite a rank one of the canal, with its filthy brown water and bicycle wheels strewing the banks.

“It only smells when the wind’s blowing.” Louis gave her a slightly puzzled look as he put two cups of coffee onto a dilapidated garden table and sat down.

“Did you do the flat yourself?”

“Yeah, mostly. I got a bit of help with the towels and stuff. I think you have to unless you’re truly gay,” he said, voicing a thought that had occurred to Kate only a split second before—that any man with such fabulous taste must be gay.

“Yeah, right.” Kate hastily picked up her coffee and took a sip, burning her lips in the process. “From a designer?” She winced.

“From a girlfriend actually,” Louis said calmly. For some reason Kate was surprised—she hadn’t expected Louis to have a girlfriend and she certainly hadn’t expected him to be open about the fact. That wasn’t the point of Louis. He was someone who was interested in her life but who generally kept his own under wraps. She didn’t really want to ask him about it but she felt she ought to, now he’d mentioned it.

“So tell me about your girlfriend,” she said as lightly as she could muster.

“Oh, we’re not together anymore.” He looked awkwardly into his coffee. “She was a florist.”

Of course she was,
Kate wanted to say,
with pretty petal skin and rosebud lips, slightly bohemian but in a sweet way.
Kate felt a twinge of something in her stomach. How easy other girls seemed to have it—they didn’t struggle with men who couldn’t love them like Jake, they undoubtedly lived in normal houses and they dated funny men like Louis and tied bunches of tulips together with colored braid and polka-dot tissue paper for a living. Kate felt a stab of envy.

“That’s nice,” she said, wondering whether the sweetpeas in the sitting room had come from her. Probably. “So what about the piece, Louis. What is it that you want me to do exactly?”

“Right, the piece.” Louis tore his thoughts away from the sweetpea girl and looked out at the canal for inspiration. “I’ll need the sketched piece by a week on Tuesday, if that’s okay. And what I really wanted to talk to you about was working in the gallery on it. It’s going to be at least twenty feet wide and eight feet high. I think maybe you should paint it on site. How do you feel about that?”

“Well, I mean it sounds fine. I suppose. It’s Tate Modern isn’t it?” Kate asked.

“Yeah, it’s at Millbank. We’d actually be working in a space next door but close enough that we’re virtually on site for the purposes of installation,” he said. “In fact, I was thinking that maybe we could go down there this afternoon and look at the space. Give you a feel for it,” he finished, slightly uneasily. Kate wanted to say yes, because he’d clearly been a bit embarrassed to ask, but she simply couldn’t.