by Clare Naylor
“I was thinking that you shouldn’t put up with a man like that. You’re not unattractive. Although your clothes are wrong.”
“My clothes?”
“Those trousers? You were perhaps going to repair a drain?” Mirri asked.
“It’s called fashion. It’s something young people tend to enjoy.” Kate sucked air in through her mouth and looked pointedly at Mirri Moncur’s slightly turkeyish neck.
“Oh, I’m not criticizing you.” Mirri smiled. “I just find it amusing that so many young women complain of not finding a husband yet they dress as if they don’t need one. See? If you look as if you can unblock your own drain, a man will not feel wanted or needed.”
“That’s an interesting view of the casual clothing phenomenon. I’ll be sure to alert the Gap to the implications of the mass production of cargo pants on the institution of marriage.”
“Oh, you’re too serious. I just think there’s nothing wrong with looking pretty.” Mirri eased her long blond mermaid hair back over her shoulder.
“Nor do I. But I think the connection between trousers and husbands is tenuous. And it didn’t do Jennifer Aniston’s chances any harm when it came to nabbing Brad Pitt.”
“This Pitt is not a man. He’s a girl with facial hair. No substance.”
“I think a lot of women would disagree with you.” Kate was losing her patience now; the woman was clearly mad. “If you don’t want to discuss the painting, then I really ought to go and do some work.”
“I think oils.” Mirri bent down to kiss her pet on the nose. “Women may disagree with me about this Brad Pitt but this is why there is no romance left in the world. What has he to offer that a lesbian lover doesn’t?” Mirri argued in her perfectly irrational, perfectly confident French way.
“Well, I think maybe . . .” Kate shook her head impatiently.
“Oh, apart from the cock. They all have the cock. But do they know what to do with it?” This was a rhetorical question. And one look at Kate told Mirri Moncur that her visitor was not qualified to answer it. Kate suspected as much herself, too. Much as she hated to admit it. “No, because women are all fair and good and charming and dying to fix their own drains and take responsibility for their own orgasms so there’s no point in the man even trying to be a man anymore. See?” Mirri lit up a cigarette with her omnipresent lighter. “We have castrated them. It’s too sad.”
“I love men.” Kate tried to sound liberal and on top of the argument.
“No, you love the wrong man. You love a slug who isn’t capable of loving you back,” Mirri pronounced.
“He’s my boyfriend,” Kate lied. “And I really take exception to you commenting on something you know absolutely nothing about.” She knew that was becoming irritatingly bolshy but there was something about Mirri Moncur that brought this side out in her.
“I’ll tell you everything you need to know about . . . what’s his name?”
“Jake.”
“Jake.” Mirri took a long drag on her cigarette. “He is weak. Maybe because he has the small cock. Maybe because he doesn’t like his mother. Really it’s irrelevant. He’s weak and he thinks that because you love him, you are even weaker. So he is mean to you. He won’t call you. He doesn’t care whether you call him. But if you do, he thinks you’re foolish.”
“You don’t know the first thing about Jake,” Kate said, not able to look Mirri in the eye. “He loved me. He wrote songs for me . . .”
“He’s not good enough for you.” Mirri stubbed her cigarette out on an ashtray on her bedside table.
“I see” was all that Kate could manage. She knew it was true. It was so close to the bone that she thought she might be sick. At which point Mirri Moncur abandoned her perfectly executed tour de Jake and changed the subject. “So how long will it take you to paint this picture?”
“About a month,” Kate said blankly. Then, with her blood boiling, she added, “Which should give you just long enough to hang out with Jonah Sinclair.”
“Ah. Mr. Sinclair.” Mirri smiled and nodded at the memory.
“You might think that my judgment’s bad. But yours isn’t much better. He’s married, you know?” Kate had decided that an eye for and eye and a tooth for a tooth was the best way forward.
“Oh, yes yes, of course I know,” Mirri said in a blasé way as she flipped through Kate’s sketches.
“Don’t you think that’s a bit off?” Kate asked.
“Off?” Mirri didn’t understand the implication.
“Off color. Wrong. He’s got children, too. A few, I think.”
“Darling, I’m not the one cheating on my wife.” Mirri shrugged.
“I know, but isn’t it bad karma or something? I mean, I always think that if I were married and some tart—” Kate checked herself. “—some other woman came along and had an affair with my husband I’d be miserable. I wouldn’t necessarily want to make anyone else that miserable.”
“And you would blame the single, unattached woman who had never made a vow to be faithful to anyone? Rather than the married man who was cheating on his wife who had made that vow?” Mirri was rearranging a vase of antique lilac roses she’d picked from the garden yesterday afternoon.
“No, but I’d just be worried that if I ran off with someone else’s husband then someday my karma would come back and bite me on the bum and some woman would run off with my husband.”
“Oh, I see.” Mirri turned and looked at Kate quite seriously, then in a light way, like a young girl who’s just realized that Santa Claus does exist after all, added, “But I’m not married. And I don’t want a husband. So that’s fine.”
“Yes, but . . .” Kate was about to expand on her objections when she realized she was wasting her breath. Mirri was as likely to feel guilty about her fling with Jonah as she was to become a Carmelite nun. “I just feel sorry for his poor wife.”
“Then she should take a lover, too. Everyone would be happy.”
“Typical French,” Kate mumbled to her pencil and carried on sketching. “So we’re decided on oils, are we? I can do watercolor. And we haven’t even discussed the background.”
“Oh, oils, oils. I was once painted by Picasso, you know.” Mirri pressed her nose into Bébé’s neck. “He said, ‘I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.’ This is beautiful, non?”
“Isn’t it,” Kate said, wondering what would happen if she painted Bébé as a spoiled fat cat and Mirri as a black-hearted Jezebel. “Did you sleep with Picasso?”
“Of course,” Mirri said, and turned languorously onto her back on the bed. “Short men don’t have as far to go down.” She laughed throatily and pulled a packet of cigarettes from her nearby handbag. “Have you ever slept with a short man?”
“No, I don’t think I have.” Kate didn’t add, though, that almost every other physical shortcoming in a man was represented on her list of conquests.
“They are very good. They have a lot to prove so they try very hard.” She sat up and looked at Kate carefully. “You need good sex, my darling. It will make you happy.”
“So how was Picasso. I mean the important stuff. Like his art. Not his dick. How was the portrait?” Kate decided that if she got involved in a debate with Mirri about her sorely lacking sex life she would skewer someone with a sharp pencil. It was like being told by a bossy shop assistant that you look great in a sweater you can’t afford. Highly annoying.
“The painting sucked. Wow, it was bad.” Mirri laughed. “He was in his bad phase.”
“Is it in a gallery?”
“No, it’s in my kitchen in Mozambique.”
“Shouldn’t it be preserved? In a gallery?” Kate asked, concerned.
“No, I should be preserved. The painting should be thrown out. But one day I’ll sell it to save an elephant. I tell you, ma choux, you would stop worrying about such things if you were having good sex. People who are angry and resentful and full of judgment of others, they are simply not getting enough sex. I see it time a
nd time again. If we all had good sex there would be no wars, no divorce, no sadness.”
“Mirri, please, can we just not discuss this anymore. It’s distracting. And like I said, quite unprofessional.” Kate was now bored of the subject. Jesus, this woman needed to go to Sex Addicts Anonymous.
“Did The Slug give you orgasms?” Mirri asked.
“If by ‘The Slug’ you mean Jake—” Kate looked inquiringly at Mirri, who nodded yes, she meant Jake.
“Yes, actually. All the time. Every time,” Kate blurted out.
“Good. Then it was just love he didn’t give you?” Mirri shook her head disapprovingly, and Kate chewed incredulously on her pencil and tried not to cry.
“I’ll be back at eleven tomorrow morning to paint your pet,” she choked out as she stood up and gathered her things together. “If I haven’t killed myself.”
Chapter Five
“Dad, have you seen my Sex Pistols CD?” Ella asked. She was nine but Nick had let her have the album for Christmas because she was mad about the song “Who Killed Bambi?” He made a conscious effort to be as liberal a father as possible so that his daughters would always feel that they could tell him anything. Though at twelve Jasmine was pushing the boundaries of his laissez faire approach to parenting—she had gone to a birthday party last week and had her ears pierced despite a very firm edict that demanded she wait until she was thirteen. She also insisted on wearing a bra despite him yelling at her, “Take that thing off and don’t put it back on until you’ve got tits.” He’d wondered afterward if he’d been too harsh. But she’d taken it off for a few hours, at least.
“Dad?” Ella came into the room with dripping black hair and a sodden bubblegum-pink bathing suit.
“Have you looked in my car?” he asked, without glancing up from the newspaper.
“Yes,” she said, as though he were the slowest, most stupid human being she’d ever come across.
“Have you asked your sister?” He tore his eyes from The Times and smiled at the desperation on his youngest daughter’s face.
“Dad,” she groaned.
“Okay, come on, let’s look in your room.” Nick put down his paper, picked up the wet little hand, and led her out of the drawing room into the hallway. “And where’s your towel? I thought I told you not to come into the house dripping water like that. Look at your lips, they’re blue.”
“I’m not cold. I’m really warm,” the shivering little body that was trotting beside him promised.
“You’re mad,” he said, and chased Ella up the stairs, shrieking her head off.
Sometimes Nick felt too old to have such lively young children. He was sixty-one and looked it. He’d married Jessica, their mother, when he suddenly found himself hurtling toward the fifty mark with nothing to show for his life except for the spectacular buildings he’d designed all over the world and a large cellar of extremely fine wines. He’d only bought this place, his beautiful house in Oxfordshire, with its swimming pool and paddocks for the ponies and walled vegetable gardens, because a family was supposed to have a place to live, right? Before Jessica came along it had never occurred to him that he might want a home. But now he was glad he had one. He had his library of architectural books, his friends came to stay for weekends with their children, and he had begun to see the point of something other than work.
“Here it is.” Ella turned around and waved the CD in the air as if it were buried treasure.
“Terrific,” Nick said, leaving his daughter to her music. “Now, ten minutes, and then it’s lunch, okay? Don’t go getting back in the pool.”
“ ’Kay,” she said absentmindedly as her father carefully negotiated the minefield of Barbie dolls and Groovy Girls on the way out of her bedroom.
While Nick waited for their lunch guests to arrive, he returned to the drawing room and his newspapers for one last moment of peace and quiet. He settled down in an armchair and picked up The Times from the floor, hoping he’d at least make it through the financial pages. Underneath it, though, was something that caught his eye, a headline in the Daily Mail that read:
MIRABELLE RINGS THE CHANGES
He lifted the paper carefully off the floor and squinted closely at the picture beneath it. Mirabelle Moncur clambering over a garden fence, her sundress bunched up in her hands, with a lion cub beside her. Nick’s heart stopped in his chest. He could no longer hear its beat. Hollow and still, he became able only to move his eyes down the thick black lines of words.
Reclusive star of the silver screen Mirabelle Moncur was sighted in public for the first time in many years yesterday—scaling a fence in London’s Primrose Hill with a lion cub on a lead. The eccentric wildlife campaigner and former actress is not thought to have visited Britain for twenty-five years. She is staying with old friend Leonard Ross in his luxury London home. When asked about his exotic houseguest, Mr Ross declined to comment. Miss Moncur, who was married three times, is thought to be in London on business.
Nick held the picture in his hand and looked again at the photograph. It could have been taken twenty-five years ago. Mirri’s hair cascaded over her shoulders, and her legs looked as lithe as they always did.
“Dad, they’re here. Can we just have one last swim before lunch?” Jasmine had shoved her head around the door and was waiting for a reply. Actually she was waiting for a yes. “Dad, are you deaf?”
“What?” Nick looked up at his daughter and found himself propelled headlong down the decades back into the present. His daughter wanted to go for a swim. Before lunch. “Yes,” he said.
Jasmine stared at him for a moment, certain that she’d misheard. She was never allowed to go for a swim this close to lunch because her hair always dripped on the table. “Really?” she asked.
Nick didn’t answer this time. He was somewhere else entirely. Different place. Different time. And the way it felt when he looked down at the familiar woman in the newspaper on his knee, he’d been a different person then, too.
“All-righty,” Jasmine said under her breath, in case he changed his mind, then bolted from the room and back out into the garden in delight.
Kate almost ran from Mirri’s room. In fact, if she’d had in mind a place to run to, she would have. But the worst part about this whole thing was that she couldn’t run from what was in her head.
You can’t run from the truth, you see. Kate heard the voice of Mirri Moncur in her mind. Smug and yet horribly unsettling as she hurried down the stairs and into the hallway.
“Ouch!” She crashed shin-first into a vast steamer trunk and two men in blue overalls who were looking gravely at it.
“Careful, love, you’ll hurt yourself tearing around like that.”
“Bit late now,” she said bitterly as she clutched her shin and hobbled back down the garden. Behind the trunk had been another three of the things that Kate could see. How many more things could one woman own, Kate wondered. Unless of course Mirri had simply had Africa covered in Bubble Wrap and shipped over. “Most likely has,” Kate mumbled. Her shins hurt even more when she realized that there was no way that the ghastly woman upstairs, with her out-of-control libido and deep love of her own hair, was going anywhere soon. It’d take her a week to repack her underwear drawer, for heaven’s sake. No, the fact of the matter was that Mirri Moncur was most likely staying for a while, whether Kate painted her stupid cat’s portrait or not. So she’d better get used to the idea. Or move out.
Kate went back to her shed and pulled her phone out of her pocket to see whether maybe it had vibrated with Jake’s call at the precise moment she was bashing into Mirri’s luggage, in which case she would have missed it. It hadn’t. Kate picked it up and dialed.
“Hi, Kate,” Tanya answered.
“Do you think that I’m delusional?”
“What?”
“Do you think that I’m delusional? About Jake?” Kate sat on her bed and waited for her friend to refute her wild notion.
“Well . . .”
“Well?” Ka
te sat up a little straighter. A direct no from Tanya would be enough.
“Darling, I’m actually just at lunch with Robbie’s parents. Can I call you back later?”
“Just say yes or no. Please,” Kate pleaded.
“Kate,” Tanya said uncomfortably.
“Yes or no, Tanny?”
“Yes.”
“No?”
“I’ll call you later, darling, I promise, we’ll talk then.” And Tanya hung up and resumed her lunch with Robbie’s mother and stepfather and, as usual, Lady Hirst was clunkily attempting to steer the topic of conversation around to babies.
“You have to put them down for Eton terribly early these days,” Lady Hirst was saying while topping up her glass. “Practically before they’re conceived.” She laughed at her biting wit and looked pointedly at Tanya over the rim of her glass. Tanya glared at Robbie, who flew to her rescue.
“Mother, are you still using that wretched weed killer on your tomatoes? I can taste it. Why can’t you use manure like a civilized person?”
Kate meanwhile was still on the edge of her bed, blinking in the cold, harsh light of the truth. Not only did Mirri Moncur think that Jake was a waste of space, but apparently so did Kate’s best friend. And really, who was Kate to argue. It wasn’t as if the evidence pointed to any other possibility—her phone was hardly ringing off the hook, and Jake wasn’t exactly prostrate on the grass outside her door. No, sadly the facts seemed to bear out these opinions. Nor was it such a revelation to Kate; it was simply that she’d never heard the truth spoken quite so unequivocally before. Probably because she’d never asked. And the strange thing was that once a truth is spoken, it has, well, the ring of truth about it.
“Right.” Kate stood up and without putting down her pad and pencils, which she’d had in her lap this whole time, grabbed her purse and left the shed. She needed to think, and she knew that the only place she could do that was away from the bed she’d slept in with Jake and the garden shed that her love for him had landed her in.
Ten minutes later Kate was sitting on the top deck of a bus. There was something about motion, she found, that always made you feel better. Once, when she and Jake had split up before, she and Tanya had gone on a road trip to Scotland. Granted, it wasn’t Thelma and Louise in the Arizona desert, but there was something about the fields flashing by, the clumps of trees, the vast gray skies, and finally the heather-quilted Highlands that soothed her. That sense of time and things flying by was like time travel into a future without Jake. Of course when she got home to London she had found him asleep in her sitting room with a bunch of dying carnations on the coffee table by way of an apology and the Scottish Highlands ceased to matter. But she tried to remember that they were always there if ever she needed them. As was Arizona, if the going ever got really tough. The bus to Regents Park, though, was barely one stop, let alone a road trip. Still, it was high above the street, and the people below looked small enough to give life a similar sense of perspective.