by Clare Naylor
If, on the other hand, the passerby was one of the straight-shouldered, soft-cheeked yogic beauties emerging from Triyoga after a heart-opening pranayama session, then she’d be looking straight ahead and catch sight of the legendary visage of Mirabelle Moncur first. This would cause a blink, a fear that all the alternate-nostril breathing she’d just done was more than mildly intoxicating as her teacher had suggested, and she had actually lost her mind. Mirabelle Moncur seen in public for the first time in years. The yoga princess would at once check out Mirri from head to toe—to see whether she was in as great shape as herself—and as she was doing so, she’d catch sight of Bébé and know that it was in fact Mirri Moncur, as nobody else would have the bottle, or style, to take a lion cub for a walk at six thirty on a Wednesday evening in the city. But whichever sight you saw first—Mirri or Bébé—it was still pretty remarkable. And certainly contributed to the three-car pileup at the junction of Regents Park Road and the argument between a married couple outside the fish-and-chip shop when the husband clocked the onetime goddess strolling with her snub nose in the air and without a care in the world.
Among the heads that Mirri caused to swivel that evening was that of Jonah Sinclair, an Academy Award–winning young actor who lived in an ivy-covered house in nearby Chalcot Square. Jonah had a pretty, makeup-artist wife and what seemed like several hundred children, but was in reality only about four. He was always pictured very sexily in the newspapers as part of a supercool, white-toothed, impenetrable family unit. But to those in the film industry he was known as Shagger Sinclair. It was often said that he was having affairs not just with every single woman on his particular film set but also the actress on the set of the movie that was shooting down the road. Fortunately for him and his wife, the press had him pegged as a family man, which was probably just to save Fleet Street from the exhausting task of taking seedy photographs and running stories on all his infidelities. Because even the usually insatiable British media would have limped home in second place with the energy it required to report even half of Jonah’s peccadilloes.
At thirty-two years old Jonah was one of those actors who look fabulous on screen but in real life is so scruffy you wouldn’t necessarily want to wipe the floor with him, let alone brave his treacherously unshaven face to kiss him. But he had spied Mirri Moncur and, as an avid movie-head, recognized her immediately. So lion by her side or no lion by her side, he was not going to let something as dangerous as a killer species come between him and sex with possibly the only woman in the world who could rival him in the Notches on Bedposts open heat. In fact, as he watched Mirri walk by the park bench where he was sitting, Jonah’s rather crusty trousers sprang to life for the first time since his lunch with a flirty journalist all of four hours ago.
Jonah had been reading the newspaper with a can of McEwan’s Export by his side—the lager was favored by tramps for its strength and cheapness—but he stopped as Mirri Moncur prowled past in her pretty dress and sandals with her chin high and her bottom seemingly even higher.
“Oy,” he shouted out. Naturally she ignored him.
“ ’Scuse me.” He coughed and put down his newspaper. Mirri pranced on, her balletic steps just as elegant as the feline paces of Bébé. She had spent a lifetime sneering down her nose at unwanted attention and occasionally slapping its face. She was hardly about to stop and give the time of day to some disgusting bum. Until there was a tap on her shoulder. Mirri swung around and gave Jonah Sinclair a hatchet stare so tough, it could have felled acres of forest.
“I’m Jonah Sinclair.” He moved his can of beer into his left hand and freed up his right one to shake Mirri’s. He even wiped it thoughtfully down his trouser leg before he proffered it. Mirri glared at his hand, his revolting can of beer, and his matted hair and turned her back on him, setting off again on her evening walk across the narrow paths of Primrose Hill.
“Nice arse,” he murmured as she walked away. At which point Mirri stopped in her tracks and turned to face him again. This time she took him in properly. She could tell by his audacity that he was probably worth a second look. Her appraisal began with his feet: sneakers, which she thought lazy style-wise but definitely youthful. And she liked a young man. They had stamina. Then his trousers: grubby, for sure, but well cut. She paused and, in the way an antiques dealer might appraise a fine piece of porcelain, she looked at the discernible bulge in his expensive pants. She pursed her lips, giving nothing away. Then she took in his shirt in a cursory way, little of interest to her there; checked out his arms with a little more care, she liked a well-shaped wrist. She noted the watch. The man wasn’t a tramp. He wasn’t even a banker on his day off. This man was much, much wealthier than that.
Having been the recipient of expensive jewelry and fine watches from men since the day she cast off her spectacles and dental braces at the age of seventeen, Mirri could distinguish between a run-of-the-mill Cartier or Patek Philippe and the Superwatch, the type of which only nine are made every year by a decaying Swiss gentleman in a garret. They cost as much as a small castle in the Scottish Highlands. Jonah was wearing a Superwatch. Intrigued, Mirri raised her eyelashes and looked him square in the eyes. Which, despite his mucky appearance, were clear and sharply focused on hers.
“You’re whom?” she said, betraying not a whit of interest in the answer.
“Jonah Sinclair.” He was smiling now, and Mirri suspected at once that he was an actor. He had a mouth that was created for the big screen: symmetrical and generous and made for uttering lines that you wanted to hear whispered in your ear when the lights went down.
“Would you like to buy me dinner?” Mirri offered charitably, but still without a smile or a handshake.
“Sure.” Jonah nodded, relieved that this particular ship had come in. And so easily, too, as it turned out. He’d thought for one awful moment that the hottest woman he’d seen all day, hell if not all week, was going to turn him down. “So what you doing in this neck of the woods?” he asked as he walked by her side, a respectful distance away, back toward the High Street.
“Neck of the woods?” Mirri looked puzzled, for even though she’d dated Michael Caine for a few months when she was twenty-five she had never really spoken to him enough to get the hang of cockney accents.
“You live in Africa, don’t you?” Jonah asked reverentially.
“How you know this?” Mirri always pretended to know less English than she really did when she was being chatted up. As well as being great for seduction, her heavy French accent also meant she didn’t have to speak any more than was absolutely necessary and could get on with the business at hand. Which for Mirri was crucial, it was the whole point.
“Mirabelle Moncur. I’m a huge fan of yours,” he told her. “I’ve seen all your films.”
“Ah, and I assume you’re an actor, too. Though I’ve seen none of your films and never heard of you.”
“Actually I am, you’re right,” replied Jonah, not even slightly perturbed, only turned on by the fact that she was the only person in the Coca-Cola-drinking world who wasn’t aware that not only could Jonah Sinclair convincingly act his way out of a paper bag, but he was also the highest-grossing box-office actor. Ever. “Now, I was thinking we could go to this restaurant called Manna. They do great vegetarian.” Years of being a total dog automatically stopped him from adding so my wife tells me at the end of such sentences.
“Vegetables?” Mirri scowled.
“You love animals, right?” Jonah looked down at Bébé, from whom he’d carefully stood as far away as possible.
“And I love to eat them.” Mirri looked at Jonah and wished he’d behave as carelessly as his clothing; she wasn’t in the mood for an overly solicitous man tonight. She’d hoped from his “nice arse” remark that he’d be rougher than he now seemed. She groaned to herself. She usually made a point of not dating actors for this very reason. You thought you were getting one thing and ended up with whatever it was they thought you wanted, rather than what you rea
lly wanted. She decided to nip the niceties in the bud.
“We’ll go to Lemonia and then maybe we’ll fuck,” Mirri decided. And Jonah, after a second of openmouthed shock, relaxed visibly.
“Cool.” He smiled and began to swagger a bit. “So do we take the cat, too, or do you want to drop it off home first?”
“The owner of the restaurant will look after him for me. She’s very nice. Well, she was twenty years ago, I suppose things are still the same. That’s the thing about England, plus ça change. You can go away for twenty years and when you come back all is just the same as when you left.”
Mirri smiled for the first time, pleased that Jonah had relaxed enough to drape his arm around her neck and brush her face with stubble as he muttered, “I meant what I said about your arse, y’know? But your tits are fucking unbelievable, too.”
“So what about you and Jake?” Leonard was laying out wineglasses on the pale yellow linen tablecloth in his orangery. The old glass-and-stone room was one of Kate’s favorite parts of Leonard’s amazing house, but thanks to the generally useless nature of the English weather it was only a viable place to be for about three weeks of the year—on a clear, crisp, warm summer’s night. The rest of the time it was damp, smelled of mold, and was freezing cold. But this evening it had the air of a favorite old dress that had been brought out of mothballs and tissue paper for a special occasion—the mossy bricks were warmed from a day of sun, the light of the sunset cast an apricot glow over the flaking paint, and the Victorian pineapple tree, the palms, and the cascading ferns lent a smell of dewy greenness to the air. Kate bunched her damp, newly washed hair into a ponytail and helped Leonard lay the silver out next to the place mats.
“Oh, I think possibly it was a red herring,” she said, not giving away the black depths of disappointment she felt in the pit of her stomach about Jake not having called. “It was his birthday. I thought things had changed . . .” She responded to Leonard’s gentle look of disbelief by adding, “He told me that he loved me, Leonard. He’d never done that before. That’s why I thought it was different this time . . .” Kate needlessly rearranged the already perfect flowers on the table. “Anyway, it was obviously a one-off. I won’t call him. I promise.”
“Darling, as you know, you can do whatever you wish. But just be careful. Jake is a very charming and alluring man . . . but he is also what I would call a cad. And for want of a more original expression, a leopard doesn’t change his spots.”
“I know, I know. But no harm done, hey? I’m still in one piece.” Kate shook back her ponytail and smiled, to prove her bravery to Leonard. But really she knew that this wasn’t the end of it. Sure, she’d pretend to the others—to Tanya and Leonard—that she’d washed her hands of him, but really how could she? Jake loved her more than he loved anyone or anything; he just loved differently from other people. But she knew there would come a day when he was worn out. When he wanted to settle down. And Kate was all he knew and all he trusted—he’d be with her. Eventually. In the meantime she just had to ensure that when Jake was stepping all over her, it was because she was his rock and not his doormat. At times she wasn’t sure that he understood the difference.
To tell the truth, when Mirri asked Jonah to take her to dinner she had clean forgotten that Leonard was making supper for her and that she was supposed to be meeting the rather charmless painter girl who lived in the shed. And to be even more truthful, even if she had remembered, it probably wouldn’t have made a scrap of difference. Mirri hadn’t been in such a glorious position as this for a long time and she wasn’t going to throw it away just because she’d made an arrangement. Leonard had known her for years—he was used to her vanishing into the night. After all, that had been how they’d met. And when she did remember, somewhere toward the end of the main course, that he was cooking lamb shanks back at the house, she simply vowed to take him to the opera to make up for it. There was just no way she was going to let Jonah Sinclair disappear down the road now she’d found him. She was in the mood for him, and like all appetites, hers may have disappeared by tomorrow. Besides which, it had been years since she’d met a man in this way. Of course, she’d had her lovers in Africa—even though she lived hundreds of miles from anywhere, there had always been a handsome twenty-two-year-old on sabbatical from his American university or a passing journalist who came to interview her for his drab magazine about endangered species. She’d even had an affair with the vet last year, which was not as much fun as she’d hoped, because his wife had found out, but needs must be met, even in the African bush. Consequently the frisson of her encounter with Jonah was deliciously appealing to Mirri, and though she had originally intended their dinner to be a mere formality, not much more than a precursor to the fingers-on-lips and hands-on-zips routine of later, they were actually enjoying themselves.
Unsurprisingly they discovered that in many ways they were very similar: Both had experienced the adulation of millions, were possessed of similar sexual appetites, and also exhibited flashes of such pampered wickedness that to most people they would have seemed amoral. To each other it was amusing. So a bottle of wine down and after much talk of film directors they’d worked with and how nauseating they found the paparazzi, they still hadn’t even gotten onto the subjects that interested them most—namely themselves.
“So, Mirri, why aren’t you married?” Jonah leaned across the table and fed Mirri a golden ring of calamari. She took a very well-practiced bite, which had half the men in the restaurant distractedly putting forkfuls of aubergine in their ears instead of their mouths.
“Why are you married?” Mirri asked Jonah. “I can’t imagine why you would want to. Unless you want a housekeeper and mother for your children.”
“Well, sure, she does those things. But really . . .” Jonah leaned over and confided theatrically in Mirri’s ear, “being married makes it easier when it comes to other women—they don’t get as heavy, they don’t expect as much, they know where they stand. It’s neater.”
“I suppose. But if you’re honest you don’t need to hide behind anything. That is the neatest way possible,” Mirri told Jonah, who hadn’t enjoyed himself this much for a long time. Here was a woman who was completely unintimidated by him, perhaps even a little bored by him, and he found that enormously sexy.
“So you’re always honest?” he asked her.
“Of course. Life’s too short not to be.” She took a mouthful of red wine.
“I think we should start.” Kate said as she drained the last drop of what was probably her third glass of wine. She’d been picking at the bread for the past half hour and was in danger of not having the appetite for even an olive if she ate any more. The sun had set and the garden had all but sunk into darkness; the only light now came from the flickering candles dotted around the still-pristine table.
Leonard looked at his watch. “I hope she’s okay. That she’s not hiding in an alleyway somewhere from the paparazzi.”
“She doesn’t strike me as a woman who would hide in an alleyway from anything.” Hunger always made Kate irritable. “Besides which, she has a lion with her. I don’t think she’ll come to much harm.”
“Yes, yes. You’re probably right.” Leonard finally picked up his fork and hesitantly skewered a piece of poached salmon. “Who knows, she may still make it in time for the lamb.”
“She might,” Kate said, not caring whether Mirri Moncur even made it for cornflakes in the morning. As far as Kate was concerned she’d let Leonard down and welshed on a meeting with her, and that was neither kind nor professional. And until Kate had polished off a decent supper, she wasn’t likely to feel any different. “But then again maybe she’s gone to visit her smart friends at the palace. In which case we may never see her again,” she added.
“No need to be catty, my dear. Mirri has nothing against you.”
“I’m sorry, she just seemed a bit full of herself. But then if you’re an actress I suppose that’s your job description.”
“
Indeed. But she does terribly good things for animals, you know. She’s made millions with that wildlife trust of hers. So she can’t be all that bad at heart.” Finally Leonard had managed to shame Kate into silence.
“So how were the auctions this morning?” she asked as she tucked into her dinner. “Any good finds?”
“Very nice set of Regency chairs and a bookcase.” Leonard nodded. “A little overpriced but worth it, I think.” As Leonard discussed the hellish drive back into London from Sussex, Kate stole a peep at her cell phone, which had been nestling in her jacket pocket. If Jake had been asleep with a hangover all day he had to be up by now—it was ten o’clock, after all, and that would have been the longest lie-in in history. But no, the phone wasn’t blinking with a message for her. It was plunged into darkness. Like my heart, she thought morosely and wanted to stab herself with a fork for being such an idiot last night and believing him.
Meanwhile Mirri and Jonah held hands as they collected a much-admired and well-fed Bébé from the restaurant owner and headed back across the park toward Leonard’s place. Mirri, who was in no way interested in a head-on collision with the paparazzi, led her handsome prey through the back gate and onto Primrose Hill. Together with Bébé they stalked through the undergrowth of nettles, over the dried-up grass cuttings and neglected garden canes, and emerged beside Kate’s shed. Mirri noted that no lights were on—the girl was probably still at dinner with Leonard, she thought, with a barely there pang of guilt.