The Goddess Rules

by Clare Naylor

  Louis? she wondered. My Louis? It couldn’t be. There was a photograph of this Louis and it wasn’t her Louis. This Louis had a face that she would have bowed down before and worshipped. Really, he looked like he ought to be commanding armies in the ancient world. His nose slightly Roman and noble; aquiline was the word, she thought. And his eyes were black. Even though the picture was in black and white she could tell this. There was no distinction between pupil and iris. All black, as if you looked in them and would be turned to stone or vapor. And his skin was like marble and his lips wide and yet not generous. Quite hardened in fact. Good God, Louis, razing cities to the ground, in a laurel crown, his profile on a gold coin, would take no prisoners. Kate moved her face closer to the picture but then pulled away. She checked the photo credit:

  LOUIS ATWOOD, CONCEPTUAL ARTIST.

  BY PHILIP BERRYMAN

  Was this really Louis? Kate felt a sort of shiver down her spine. In the photo Louis was standing against a wall. More stone. His legs were long in black jeans, and his shoulders surprisingly broad under his T-shirt. The way he loped around in real life, Kate assumed he’d be quite scrawny under his layers. But he didn’t look that way in this picture. Kate looked at the rest of the article on Britain’s Most Promising. She bypassed a series of brilliant young historians and musicians—no Jake—and sat up cross-legged on her bed to contemplate the revelation. Deeply, wildly sexy, he looked. But then she knew how photos could lie. And the Louis whom she had known for almost a third of her life, the Louis who had flicked through her canvases yesterday, wasn’t the same man. Which was just as well. She was intimidated enough by his clearly brilliant reputation in the art world, she didn’t need to be reduced to a monosyllabic twit because she had a crush on him. And funnily enough, as she put the magazine on one side to take back to her shed later, she didn’t feel half so unsettled about what had happened with Jake as she had ten minutes ago.

  Chapter Eleven

  “Have you really never had your portrait done since Picasso?” Kate asked Mirri as she timidly fed Bébé his prawns from her fingers.

  “Not a photograph or a portrait. Barely a paparazzo picture, really.” Mirri was working through some financial statements for her wildlife charities, which Kate had been impressed to learn she handled personally; not a penny that was meant for a lion went astray. “It’s not that I care, simply that I don’t have time for such vanities.”

  “Would you mind if I did some sketches of you. While you worked?” Kate asked.

  “Not at all. As long as Bébé is completed before the summer you can do whatever you like,” Mirri said without lifting her eyes from the morass of figures. Certainly the image of Mirri with her half-moon reading glasses on and a slight frown on her face was a world removed from the iconic woman the world had known more than twenty years ago. In this light, as she sat on the edge of her bed, wearing a gold-colored caftan with one foot perched beneath her, she was a different woman entirely from the parted-lipped, heavy-lidded creature that she had been in her goddess years. Gone was the lush cleavage, momentarily at least, and in its place was a serious-hearted campaigner for animal welfare.

  “How much money does the trust make in a year, say?” Kate asked as she won Bébé’s momentary acceptance with a final, juicy prawn and then tentatively allowed him to lick her fingers clean with his pink sandpaper tongue.

  “Last year it was seventeen million worldwide.” Mirri scratched some sums into the margin of her sheet, and Kate couldn’t resist making a lightning-swift impression of her engrossed face on her notebook.

  “That’s a huge amount,” Kate replied as she captured a wayward lock escaping from the hastily bunched ponytail, which Mirri had secured with a chewed ballpoint pen.

  “We need more. The animals are dying. The poachers are still out there. I buy more land, they find new ways to invade it. Bigger guns.”

  “So it’s basically a wildlife reserve.” Kate hadn’t really understood the magnitude of Mirri’s commitment to her cause before now. She had just assumed that she was some eccentric old star who preferred cats to people and slept with the odd, glamorous big kitten on her bed. It was part of the general look, she’d assumed. Merely an inevitable and slightly hackneyed fate for a onetime legend. You either got a bad face-lift and carried on acting and showing off until your eyes grew so tight with surgery that you couldn’t see and everyone assumed that you had died years ago anyway, or you did cats. But this was quite serious business.

  “I also have concerns in Asia and Sri Lanka, but I cannot run these, too. I have people I trust there who take care of the whole thing. Once a year we have a conference in Mozambique. I don’t like to leave too often.”

  “But you came all this way just so that Bébé could be painted?” Kate inquired. It didn’t seem to add up particularly neatly.

  “Leonard is my friend. I have lots of other friends in London. You’re a good painter. I decided to come,” Mirri said, with a note of irritation in her voice.

  But I’m not that good a painter, Kate thought. I’m okay but that story seems a little far-fetched and implausible. Kate also reckoned that if Mirri had simply wanted Bébé’s portrait she would have flown the painter to Africa. Certainly Kate would have gone in a heartbeat. As would a hundred others. No, there was some other reason why Mirri was here, but she had no clue what that might be.

  After about twenty minutes of sketching Mirri, Kate knew that she had to get on with Bébé. Besides which, Mirri had finally put down her pencil and was now on the telephone, making calls in French at breakneck speed. Shouting, laughing, with lots of “Merde” and “Non?” thrown in. So Kate worked laboriously on Bébé’s eyes, which she had to admit were sheer perfection. So ferocious and yet with moments of complete sweetness.

  “Oh, now, darling, don’t fall asleep on me,” Kate said, plucking up the courage to hand Bébé a toy mouse that she’d picked up at the pet shop last week. It had catnip in it and worked like a charm. He was roused from his sleep, and though Kate suffered a left hand covered in scratches and nips, with just enough blood drawn to be stingingly uncomfortable, she and Bébé were actually having fun together.

  “So when is your next date?” Mirri hung up the phone and released her hair from the pen. She was no longer the international woman of business as she began to paint her fingernails. “I am seeing Jonah tonight and it would be such fun if you had a date, too.”

  “I’m not sure. I gave Jake short shrift earlier. He came around and tried to apologize but I wouldn’t listen. You’d have been proud.” Kate stroked Bébé’s ears.

  “Très bien,” Mirri said, “Now what about that vicar the other night who was clearly homosexual?”

  “Blew him off, too.” Kate puffed out her chest. “But really, I’m pretty busy, so unless someone comes knocking I’m going to concentrate on work for a while.”

  “You are creative. You need passion in your life.” Mirri was letting Bébé play with her hair, which she was dangling in his face, much to his delight.

  “But do you know what’s so strange?” Kate asked.

  “Non.”

  “Well, I was looking at this magazine at lunch when I saw a photograph of the guy who actually did come knocking on my shed door. You know, the one Leonard sent?”

  “With the nice black hair?”

  “Louis.”

  “A French name.”

  “He’s very, very odd, though,” Kate said, “not my type at all. I mean he barely speaks.”

  “I always like a man who doesn’t say too much.” Mirri laughed and buried her face in Bébé’s fur.

  “Speak for yourself. I happen to like a conversation from time to time.”

  “Invite him to dinner,” Mirri ordered. “I’d like to meet him.”

  “I can’t invite him to dinner to be vetted by a woman who isn’t even my mother,” Kate complained. “Besides which, I told you. He’s not my type.”

  “Oh, he’s handsome, is that what you mean?” Mirri laug
hed sarcastically.

  “Well he didn’t look especially handsome in real life, if that’s what you mean. He’s just a bit hunched and terrified.”

  “But he looked good in the photograph?”

  “He looked great in the photograph.” Kate shrugged, as if it made no difference at all. “So you and Jonah are getting quite serious.”

  “Jonah is very keen to please. I like him. I am not in love with him.”

  “How do you stop yourself from falling in love?” Kate asked, because whatever the secret was, she’d like to buy a couple of bagfuls of it.

  “Practice,” Mirri said. “So you had better get going.”

  “The only thing I’m going to get going on is my work.” And with that Kate got to her feet, shook out her legs—which were heavy with pins and needles—and patted Bébé goodbye. He didn’t exactly growl at her, just stared a bit witheringly.

  “Have fun with Jonah. Don’t do anything I would,” Kate said, and made her way back to her shed, armed with enough sketches of Bébé to keep her employed, and enough of Mirri to keep her stimulated. She’d always wanted to do what she thought of as “proper portraits”—that is, pictures of people. People with expressions, emotions, tragedies etched onto their faces. She’d mastered animals a long time ago. She’d managed to capture mischief in their faces; she was able to give them a haunting sadness, even, if they had that air about them. But it was a limited range of emotion that she was required to capture in pets. Much to her dismay, she’d never met a dog who had left his wife for a homosexual affair, or a cat who had shot her lover, or even a jealous rabbit. Though if she did, she imagined that she’d know straight away and be able to portray it perfectly in oils.

  Jake sat on his sofa with the Manchester United versus Everton on the television set and his guitar on his knee. He strummed through a few chords of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” and then put his instrument to one side, deciding that as it was four o’clock in the afternoon it was perfectly fine for him to have his first drink of the day. He picked up the bottle of Glenfiddich and then put it back when he saw that there was only a fine layer of golden liquid left on the bottom. Clearly he’d polished that off last night when he’d been watching Unforgiven. The film had left him depressed and when it had finished at three A.M. he hadn’t really wanted to even make his way upstairs to bed. Instead he’d put out his cigarette, pulled his jacket over him, and fallen asleep on the sofa. And today he had a pain in his stomach and one in his neck and he hadn’t been able to shake off the stupid funk that Clint Eastwood had left him in.

  “Bollocks,” he moaned, as he realized that he’d have to go out and buy some more fags and another bottle of Scotch if he was going to make it through the evening.

  “Hey man, we’re going to see a band in Kilburn. Coming?” a friend had called up and asked him half an hour ago.

  “Thanks, buddy, but I’m feeling lousy. Maybe I’ll come up later, but can’t promise anything.”

  “There’s a poker game at Seb’s tomorrow, too,” his friend had persisted.

  “Yeah, yeah, let me know.” Jake was similarly unenthused. Which was saying something. Whatever virus he had, whatever Clint had done to him, it was pretty tough if it meant that he’d have to miss a poker game.

  When Kate walked in the door of her shed, she noticed that her phone was blinking. She picked it up and, with a lurch of her stomach that was more Pavlovian than real, wondered if Jake had called. Though she knew logically that he was gone from her life, the old habits died hard. There were certainly moments when she found herself wondering which pub he was at, whose party he had been to last night, and she’d long to be sitting on his knee in the Groucho Club, laughing and drinking red wine and listening to one of his ridiculous stories as he had everyone in fits of laughter. She let out a deep sigh and pressed the button for her voice mail.

  “You have two new messages. First message sent at eleven twenty-three A.M.” There followed a long pause. Not a murmur. Clearly it was a hang-up. Kate clicked forward to the next message, but it was the same buzzing silence. Oh, well. She checked the number but it wasn’t Jake, out of his mind with love and calling just to hear her voice. It was a number she didn’t recognize. A West London number by the look of it. Oh, well. She put the phone down and went to wash her hands, which were still a bit fishy and catty from her session with Bébé and the prawns. As she hunted for a hand towel in the old cupboard in the corner of the shed, there was a knock at the door.

  “Hang on,” Kate called out. “Just coming.” As she couldn’t find a towel, she flicked her hands dry and went to answer the door.

  “Hi there.” It was Louis, with his olive-green parka on again. This time, though, with a nod to the weather—which was so scorching that Leonard’s lawn was turning yellow and mottled in places—he had it unzipped to reveal a baggy black T-shirt. His hair was all over his face.

  “Louis.” Kate dried her hand on her skirt and kissed him on both cheeks. He didn’t look very at ease standing on her doorstep. “Come in. Come in.”

  “Oh, I erm . . . well I can’t really stop . . . I was just passing and I thought I’d call by and bring you . . .” He struggled for a moment with his hand in his pocket and then produced a slightly balding square of white fur. Kate looked down at it, clasped between his dirty but very slim fingers. “This.”

  “Your nails are as filthy as mine,” Kate remarked.

  “Yeah, yeah they are.” He turned his hand palm up and hid his grotty digits. “Occupational hazard.” Still he held out a hand, proffering the square of fur to Kate, who didn’t know whether to admire it, run from it, or take it from his slightly shaky grip.

  “It’s ummm . . . it’s a piece of fur.” Kate settled for the obvious.

  “It’s for you,” he said with the simplicity of a child. Louis then flicked his hair back and for a second she caught a glimpse of his eyes, which were the same olive green as his parka, only a bit more dangerous. There was a slightly demonic look about Louis sometimes, she thought as he stood before her with this strange gift. This man was so unlike Jake, who was always at ease, was never lost for a glib aside, and sadly never once shook in her presence.

  “Thanks.” She took it tentatively, and he nearly dropped it as he pulled his hand away in haste. “I’ll, erm . . . well . . . what exactly is it, Louis?”

  “Oh, Christ, didn’t I say?” He pulled the zip up on his coat until his chin vanished. “It’s polar bear fur.”

  “Oh, I love it.” Kate cried as she realized what the whole past two and a half minutes of foot shuffling had been about. “That’s great. So when do you want to start?” she asked, because despite their conversation he still hadn’t called her to confirm the commission.

  “God, yeah, well, I suppose we need to discuss that,” he said as if it had just occurred to him.

  “Well, you could come in now if you like,” she offered. Then suddenly hoped that she’d removed the magazine with Louis in it from her bedside table, where she had put it down after lunch.

  “Oh, no thanks. I’ve got to get going.”

  “Well, maybe we should have a meeting sometime this week?” she said, realizing that if this painting was ever going to get done she’d have to be the proactive party in the deal.

  “Yeah. Come around. I’m at Two Twenty-five Ladbroke Grove now. Just down from the canal.”

  “Tuesday? Wednesday? Thursday?” She guided him gently.

  “Tomorrow,” he said hastily. “Well, unless you can’t. In which case . . . well, then we won’t.”

  “That sounds perfect. I’ll see you tomorrow. Two-ish?”

  “Cool.” Louis nodded and was about to turn away but hastily grabbed her shoulders and gave her a kiss on either cheek.

  “And thanks for the fur,” Kate added. “It’ll be really useful.”

  She smiled and closed the shed door behind her. She loved Louis but God he could be hard work when his work was involved. Probably because he was a proper art
ist.

  By the time Kate had finally transposed her sketches of Bébé onto canvas, by the time she’d gotten just the outline of his beautiful little head right, the sky had imperceptibly left behind the brilliant blue of the afternoon and taken on a rained-on inky hue of night. The sun had sunk behind Leonard’s house several hours ago and when she looked at her watch it was ten o’clock. Kate put her pencil to one side and stretched her arms in front of her, letting out a quiet squeal and then a yawn. The room was practically dark and she’d barely noticed. That was what she called a good day’s work. No matter how much she pretended that she hated what she did, a few hours at the canvas was the best way she could ever find to chase away the black dog of depression, as her father had called it. Man was made to work. As was woman. And it always left Kate feeling elated and invulnerable when she did finally get down to it. She turned on the light, poured herself a glass of orange juice from the fridge, and walked around the shed for a couple of minutes, stretching out her legs and feeling very pleased with herself.

  “Yoohooo.” There was a call from the garden, Mirri no doubt, Kate thought, and went to the door and poked her head out.

  “Hello?” she replied to the dark garden, for she couldn’t see anyone in the blackness of the trees.

  “We thought you were out. Or asleep. But we saw your light just come on, so if you’re not busy then come join us.” As Kate’s eyes adjusted to the dark she spotted the silhouettes of two people on the hammock. One of whom was obviously Mirri; the other, more than likely, Jonah.

  “I’m only coming if you’ve got your clothes on,” Kate said, laughing, as she went toward the voice.

  “Hi there, gorgeous.” A deep sexy voice came from the shadowy figure next to Mirri, and as Kate approached she saw that it was indeed Jonah and Mirri. Not, thankfully, naked, but Jonah had his arm slung over Mirri’s shoulder and she was looking cozy and happy, tucked in close to his side.

  “Hi, Jonah.” Kate settled onto the grass by their feet with her orange juice. “Did you both have a fun evening?”