The Goddess Rules (35 page)

“Don’t tell me you’ve gone English on us?” His laugh was as soft as his eyes.

“Never.” She relaxed a little as he put his hand on her forearm. “But do you think they serve café au lait?”

“I expect so,” he said, then confided, “We’ve become quite smart around here. Quite cosmopolitan.”

“No?” Mirri pretended to be horrified and the two of them melted into the secret laughter of lovers as effortlessly as if they’d been breakfasting together since the day they met.

“So tell me.” Mirri braced herself for the worst as she dropped a sugar lump into her coffee. “Are you married to the same woman as all those years ago?” Nick pensively narrowed his eyes. Mirri watched the swirls of coffee spiral into nothingness in the middle of her cup. She waited for what felt like another thirty years.

“No.” He looked out through the windows and onto the park beyond as if the past were located somewhere beyond the trees. “We were engaged when you and I said our goodbyes, weren’t we? Cecilia and I?”

“I believe so,” Mirri said. Why was it that men seemed to have such appalling memories for the things that mattered most to women? “And then she became pregnant.”

“So she did.” He drew in his breath and remained focused on the view. “Well, she didn’t, as a matter of fact. Although she told me that she had. I think she wanted to secure me at all costs. By which time we had been through a lot of hoo-ha and you had left and”—he turned to Mirri, who realized with relief that he hadn’t forgotten a thing—“it was too late. We didn’t get married, but by the time we’d broken it off”—Nick turned to Mirri as if assessing how honest he ought to be—“well, by that time you’d met someone else,” he said very matter-of-factly.

“I had?” Mirri was surprised, and also desperate to know what happened next in his life.

“I read it in the newspaper.
The Times
no less.” He pretended to be impressed. “They said that you were engaged to be married to a Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist and had moved to Mississippi to live in his colonial home.”

Now it was Mirri who seemed not to remember something important. She cast her mind back. “Oh my God, him,” she said with disbelief. “You know I can hardly remember his name. I stayed for two weeks and got so tired of his sitting all day in his study and then playing poker all night that I left. In fact, I walked with my suitcase through the fields and past the swamps all the way to the nearest town to catch a train home and never saw him again.” She marveled at the memory. “You know, he probably thinks I am still waiting for him on the porch.”

“That was it? That was the news that haunted me for years afterward?”

He was being surprisingly candid, she thought. “You were haunted?”

“I was. For a long time. And then I threw myself into work and then, well, then I got married . . .” He played with the handle of his spoon. Mirri had just begun to think that she was home and dry. That he had never been able to fill her place, that he’d been as faithful to her memory as Jay Gatsby was to Daisy, and that he’d felt the same as her for all these years. And now, this blow.

“Of course you did,” she said as lightly as she could manage.

“I did. And I have two beautiful little girls . . . well, they’re horrors actually . . . but I like them.” Mirri saw her past and her future collapse in on her like a house of cards. “Anyway, of course it seems that I’m not cut out as the uxorious type at all because Jessica, probably quite rightly, left me. Apparently I’m difficult.” He smiled. Mirri smiled, too. When she’d first walked in she wasn’t sure how much she still liked him; her expectations were too unearthly to know how she’d felt. But in the last few minutes, since they’d been chatting, she knew that he was the same. That he was the man who would be able to make her feel secure and happy. More so now than he had when they’d first met, in fact, and it now looked as if maybe there was a chance. Could he really be as single as she was? And as difficult to live with? She stopped herself from getting carried away but all her Continental ardor made her want to fling herself at him. Though equally she was as shy as a girl anticipating her first kiss.

“I’m impossible,” she boasted.

“A sweet-looking creature like you? I don’t believe it,” he teased. She laughed and lowered her head. “You are pure trouble, Miss Moncur. I can tell.”

“Moi?”
She treated him to her dirtiest laugh.

“Oh, yes. Absolutely.” He shook his head and gave her a despairing smile. Then seemed to become serious. “But then your young boyfriend might know more about that than me.”

“Boyfriend?” Mirri was beginning to feel like a slut—forgetting lovers like this. “Who?”

“I’ve admired you from afar for a long time,” he told her, “and I’ve found the newspapers to be most informative. I believe he’s a young actor.”

“Jonah. Ah, Jonah.” Mirri was delighted to dispel another misconception, albeit erroneously. “He goes out with my goddaughter, actually.”

“The press, eh? Never let the truth get in the way of a good story, do they?” He seemed thrilled by this revelation.

Never let the truth get in the way of a good romance,
Mirri thought. If this romance was going to go anywhere, she’d tell him about Jonah eventually, but right now she was keen to seem as good as gold.

Later on, however, as she sat in Nick’s car, hitching a lift back to Primrose Hill, Mirri suddenly got the urge to be anything but good. They’d stayed in the restaurant for a long, boozy lunch and talked nonstop until the last of the customers had gone and they’d drunk so much peppermint tea that they felt they might drown if they consumed another drop. Then they’d ventured out into the park, gasped in the fresh air after hours in the stuffy restaurant, and wandered around. They’d pointed at the ducks, laughed at strange people, and had eventually collapsed onto a bench to draw breath. It was then that their date seemed, inevitably, to be over: They’d toyed with the idea of going to a gallery or to Harrods to look at strange, expensive things, but they’d decided against it as they were both shattered with the excitement of the day, like two-year-olds after a playdate. While Mirri was in no doubt that this was just the beginning of everything, they still decided that Nick would drive her home before heading back to Oxford where his gardener’s wife was babysitting for his girls.

“Maybe I won’t go to Primrose Hill,” Mirri said suddenly as they waited in comfortable silence at a red light.

“Are you thinking a hotel?” Nick asked cheekily. Mirri loved the way he wasn’t afraid to say what was on his mind; he was open about his feelings for her, even though as yet they hadn’t done more than hold hands as they walked around the duck pond.

“No,” she replied prudishly, “I’m just thinking that I don’t want the day to end. So maybe I’ll come back with you to Oxfordshire.”

“Really?” He was thrilled.

“Would that be okay?”

“Okay?” he repeated, putting his foot on the brake and accelerating madly along Holland Park Road so that Mirri was flung back into her seat. “That’s the best idea anyone’s ever had.”

Kate had never received a phone call from Mirri suggesting they meet up so that she could hear all about it. In fact, she’d never received any phone call at all and it was now two in the morning. She’d waited up in Leonard’s sitting room, watching TV, and she was beginning to worry. Leonard had gone to bed hours ago, with a smirk on his face at the idea of Mirri on a date with Nick Sheridan. At first Mirri had wanted the whole thing kept quiet because really she hadn’t enjoyed any of the buildup to meeting up with him again. But Kate assumed, by eight o’clock, that their relationship was official because technically they were on their third date already—elevenses, lunch, and now, presumably, dinner. Crafty old Mirri—how to have sex on the first date without it being a travesty of
The Rules.
Still, it didn’t stop her from being slightly worried as to whether Mirri was okay or not. There was after all nothing on Nick Sheridan’s slick website to suggest that he might not be an ax murderer. Kate dispelled her paranoia and turned off the TV. She took a shortbread from the tin on the way out and headed back to her shed.

As she sat on her bed, listening to the BBC World Service and munching her biscuit, she had a searing sense of loneliness. Mirri was out on a date and if all went well, and Kate prayed that it would, she’d soon be in love and out of commission as a friend. There were no longer any suitable distractions in terms of men in her life. She’d well and truly dispensed with Jake, that was for sure—apparently he’d gone to Thailand with his two young cousins for a month—so where did she go from here? She rummaged in her drawer for an old photograph that she knew was there. Kate and Louis about five years ago. She had no idea where they were or what they’d been doing or even who’d taken the picture, but they were both pouting in an outrageous and silly way, with their heads together. Kate looked dumb as they come, but Louis looked exquisitely beautiful. He was all cheekbones and sexy eyes and she wanted to be with him so badly right now that she felt as if she’d been punched in the stomach.

How could she have been so stupid? First of all not to have noticed him when he was right on her doorstep for all those years, but then to finally see him and be crazy about him and yet walk away. She flipped the picture onto her bedside table and turned off her lamp. Where might he be now? she wondered. Probably in bed, fast asleep, or not, with Grace. Kate wondered whether there’d ever be another chance with him. Not now but maybe in twenty or thirty years’ time. Certainly she could never make a move. Maybe they’d have friendship, though. That would be something. A poor second compared to the dreams of him sharing the next part of her life with her—the really big part—the traveling and the family and building lives together. Still, as she drifted off to sleep the thing that seemed to matter most was something that Mirri had said about Nick—that it didn’t matter whether you were with a person sometimes, if it was a true love then you felt better for simply knowing that person existed in the world, with or without you.

“Darling, wake up. It’s me,” Mirri whispered. Kate opened her eyes and flinched as the bright dawn light flooded in.

“What’s going on?” Kate lay the back of her hand over her face. “What time is it?”

“I have no idea.” Mirri was sitting on the edge of Kate’s bed, still wearing her raincoat, exactly as she had been when Kate left her yesterday outside the restaurant. Only as Kate opened her eyes she noticed that her hair was considerably more lived in than it had been then.

Kate shuffled up in bed so that she was half sitting and propped against a pillow. “Where have you been? Do you have any idea how worried I was about you?” she said in her semicoherent morning voice. “I thought something terrible might have happened.”

“Darling. It’s so sweet that you care.” Mirri swooned back onto the bed as if she were Doris Day in pink pajamas, not the most bewitching sex kitten of the last hundred years.

“It was completely inconsiderate of you,” Kate grumbled. Then she rubbed her eyes and straightened the pillow behind her, getting into position for the good stuff. “So come on, tell me, how was it?” she demanded bossily, as if she were Mirri’s mother.