The Goddess Rules

by Clare Naylor

  “Well it sounds like you had a damned good time. Whether you’re pregnant or not,” Kate said.

  “And you know it’s all because of what Mirri said,” Tanya told her.

  “Mirri?” Kate wondered how she might fit into this particular story.

  “That night. At your party. She told Robbie that if we wanted to get pregnant then we needed to have fabulous, exciting sex. Apparently you’re much more likely to conceive if you have a mind-blowing orgasm. One-night stands are supposed to be the best time to get pregnant—for that reason.”

  “Well, I never.” Kate’s eyes widened. “And Mirri told Robbie this?”

  “Apparently she told him to”—Tanya leaned across the table in a conspiratorial way—“fuck me senseless.”

  “Sounds like Mirri’s kind of advice.” Kate nodded. “So when are you going to take a test?”

  “I’m going to give it another week. Just so I don’t get too carried away. Then I’ll tell Robbie.”

  “Well, fingers crossed.” Kate held her hands in the air. “Though I don’t know who I’ll eat sushi with if you get pregnant. It’ll be a real drag.” Kate winked and Tanya smiled, hardly daring to hope that she might soon have to forgo yellowfin sashimi.

  “Mirri, it’s me.” Kate made her way up the stairs of Leonard’s house later that evening. She’d put Tanya in a taxi, locked up her brand-new, desperately scruffy house, and come back to Leonard’s. She was dying to stay at the flat but it wasn’t anywhere near ready yet. And though Kate didn’t want to admit it she was slightly disappointed with Jake, who even though he’d played three gigs last week said he hadn’t enough money to pay the plasterer who needed to come and fix up the holes in the walls before they could so much as spend the night there.

  “Come in,” Mirri called out as Kate gave the bedroom door a perfunctory tap.

  “I just came to see if there was any post,” she asked. Mirri was working at her desk, doubtless looking at endless columns of figures for the trust. She put her pen down and stretched her hands above her head when Kate walked in and sat on the bed.

  “Oh, I’ve been here too long.” She stood up and took a few paces around the room, then went to draw the curtains. “No post,” she said. “Just bills and an invitation to a Moroccan theme party in Somerset. Which I shall live without.”

  “Maybe he’s away,” Kate said with very little conviction.

  Two weeks ago Kate had sat down with Mirri and they’d written a note to Nick Sheridan. It was very simple and didn’t hint at anything other than friendship. It had read:

  Dear Nick,

  You may remember that some years ago we met at the wedding of my friend Tony. In fact I saw some footage of the wedding recently and was reminded of you. I’m currently in England for the summer and in between business am finding some time for pleasure. It would be lovely to catch up with you, perhaps for tea one day.

  With warmest wishes,

  Mirabelle Moncur

  It may have been a brief note but my God it had taken an age to write. Kate and Mirri had sat through packets of biscuits, cups of tea, countless drafts, and what felt like the rise and fall of whole empires before they got it right. There had been poetic and quite morbid French-notes; there had been very dry, unfriendly English-notes; there had been love-declaring versions; even one that was an almost fully realized autobiography of France’s greatest sex goddess. But in the end they’d prosaically opted for short and sweet. Despite the hours they’d put in, however, they still hadn’t heard back from Nick Sheridan.

  “They have offices in Tokyo. I saw it on the website,” Kate told Mirri for the sixth time in as many days.

  “It obviously wasn’t fate after all,” Mirri said as she dropped down into her armchair and drew her legs into her chest. “Though it’s a little irritating that I got rid of Jonah. I’m missing his cock. Still, at least Isabella has the benefit of it now.” She shrugged.

  “I still can’t believe you did that,” Kate said. Two weeks ago, the day before she posted the note to Nick, Mirri had experienced a huge pang of conscience and thrown a dinner party for her prettiest goddaughter to meet Jonah. That way if anything happened with Nick, her faithful young Jonah would be wonderfully taken care of. And as Mirri knew only too well, there was no way he wouldn’t fall for her. Isabella was twenty-eight years old, her mother was a dead poetess, and her father was a South American arms dealer who was a great friend of Mirri’s in the 1970s. He still contributed a very generous donation to the trust every year.

  “He’s a pussycat,” Mirri was fond of saying, though if his firecracker daughter was anything to go by, Kate doubted it. Isabella was studying for her Ph.D. in philosophy at Cambridge and was about as spiritual as General Pinochet. She blew into dinner in a black mood because of the London traffic, even though she had a driver, and practically declared war on Jonah when he helped himself to the last piece of lobster. Needless to say he hardly noticed because Isabella had black eyes, caramel-colored hair, and the tiniest, prettiest hands Kate had ever seen. In fact, she would have asked Isabella if she could paint them but she was terrified of her, and by the end of dinner one of them was also firmly attached to Jonah’s inner thigh. She spoke with a barely perceptible lisp, and the day after the dinner party she and Jonah had flown to her grandmother’s avocado plantation in Venezuela to get to know one another better, and possibly to throw things at one another. The avocados must have provided ample and ready ammunition, Kate imagined.

  “I don’t mind. I never gave Isabella very much so as my goddaughter it’s the least I can do. Make sure her education is finished off in the best way possible,” Mirri told Kate.

  “Are they back?” Kate asked.

  “Tomorrow. I hear that Jonah’s wife has finally found herself a lover so everybody is happy, no?”

  “Perhaps.” Kate was skeptical of French marriages, though if she were married to Jonah she suspected she’d have done just that a long time ago.

  “So what shall we do about Nick?” Kate asked.

  “I think we need to take a day trip,” Mirri replied. “Now that I have no lover I’m bored. We’ll go and see his house. See if he’s there. If not, then good. If so, then I’ll kill myself,” she said matter-of-factly.

  “My God, you’re going to stalk him?” Kate was surprised. Up until now Mirri had barely had the will to stick the stamp on the envelope to write to the man. Now she was planning to take a flask of coffee and a baseball cap and camp in a car outside his house until he showed. Practically.

  “I have a friend in the same village. A girl I knew from school who married an English banker and they retired there,” Mirri declared.

  “Do you?” Kate wondered why she hadn’t mentioned this before; it was the perfect foil for them.

  “Of course not. But you believed it. So a man definitely will.” She waved her hand in the air dismissively. “What are you doing tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Yes? I think make hay while the sun shines, non?” Mirri went into the bathroom to brush her teeth.

  “Okay. I’ll come. I’m supposed to be going in to finish off with Louis but he’s never there anyway. I’ll go in for an hour or so first thing and shuffle my paints around then we’ll set off.” Kate sighed. “Do you think Leonard will let us borrow his car?” Kate had never driven the Aston Martin in the garage—in fact, she’d seen it only a few times—but she suspected that he might be reluctant to let a Parisian woman and a girl who mostly traveled by bicycle and bus take his precious car out for the day.

  “He will if we don’t tell him.” Mirri grinned wickedly. “I’ll pick you up from the gallery. And we’ll take Bébé.”

  The next morning Kate caught the tube into work at dawn. She arrived before the night security guard had finished his shift and had to turn the lights on in her studio. She’d been working hard on the polar bears and had even spent a couple of weekends in the studio recently, she suspected as a way of assuaging her guilt over what had
happened with Louis. Also, because she had never quite gotten over the idea that he had just hired her so that he might be better placed to pursue her, she wanted to make it brilliant. So that he wouldn’t regret his decision no matter what the motivation had been. And the piece was done. It was staggeringly, mind-blowingly enormous, and when you entered the vast white space it had real impact. Clearly Louis had known what he wanted and his vision had been spot-on. There was no question that he deserved every accolade he received for his talent. Jake, on the other hand, wasn’t exactly thrilled that Kate had been putting in extra hours but was consoled by how much she was being paid to do it.

  Kate made her way through the silent corridors toward the back of the building where her studio was. She pushed open the door.

  “Louis?” As she flipped the switch she spotted Louis sitting on a windowsill near the painting.

  “I didn’t know you came in this early.” He stood up and ran a hand through his hair. It wasn’t clear to Kate whether he’d been there a minute or all night.

  “I don’t usually.” She didn’t want to let on how strange she found it that he was there. “I just wanted to get some things finished while it’s quiet.”

  “Then I’ll go.” Louis bent down for his bag, which was on the floor beside his feet. “I just wanted to check out the piece. Try to hold the whole exhibition in my head one last time before I start to prepare the space.”

  “Stay if you need to,” Kate said, hoping that he wouldn’t. “I don’t mind you being there while I work.”

  Louis sat back down on the windowsill and looked at the polar bear again. “It works, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah. I think it does. You’re great at that. I couldn’t begin to imagine it when you first talked about it. But now I completely get it. I was just painting by numbers,” Kate said, with sincerity.

  “So how’s things?” Louis asked. “Wedding plans going well?” Kate looked carefully at his face for signs of sarcasm but found none.

  “Fine,” she said quietly. Louis wanted to hear more. And looking in his eyes she felt oddly compelled to tell him. “It’s okay. I mean, Jake . . . well, he’s Jake. You know. Sometimes he’s good and sweet.” She paused before continuing. “And then sometimes I don’t think it matters that it’s me he’s with, just as long as someone will laugh at his jokes and tell him his songs are great. And if that happens to be me then it’s fine by him.” Kate didn’t expect to say this and she couldn’t be sure that she wasn’t just trying to get Louis to feel better, by letting him think that maybe she’d made a mistake. But she did mean what she said.

  “That’s tough,” he said without much emotion.

  “Yeah. It’s like I know exactly what I love about Jake. But I don’t think that he has a clue what makes him love me. Apart from the fact that I love him.” Kate laughed as lightly as she could. She’d never said that before. But she realized now that it was true.

  “But you do love him? You’re going to marry him?”

  “I know you think that I’m taking the easy way out, Louis. But it was the only decision I could make.”

  “I understand,” Louis said flatly. Then he stopped looking at her, he stopped watching her rub the hardened tips of her brushes against the palms of her hands, unwrapping the colors she’d made yesterday, and he stood up again. “I’ve got to go. We should talk about moving the piece over to the Tate in the next few days. If I don’t catch you here I’ll give you a call,” he said without looking her in the eye.

  “Great,” Kate said. Then she felt a sudden fear of him leaving. She didn’t want him to go from the room. “Louis?”

  “Yeah?” He turned and caught her eye. She was almost knocked sideways with the memory of the kiss they’d had that last night after dinner at his flat. After she’d lain in his bath and wanted to drift away on bubbles and his voice reading to her. Right now she wanted to walk over to him slowly and bury her face in his sweater, breathing in Louis and all the love he had for her. She needed to be fortified by him. But she couldn’t. She’d cut him out of her life and her future. He was waiting for her to ask him a question but she couldn’t. She gave her head a hurried shake.

  “It’s okay. I’ll figure it out.” She dismissed him. He shrugged and walked out of the room.

  “Mirri, do you think it matters that I don’t know what Jake sees in me?” Kate asked as they finally made it onto the motorway in Leonard’s car. As they’d driven through the traffic in London it had attracted more attention from men than Mirabelle Moncur’s bare breasts ever had. Kate had declared the fact depressing. Mirri simply revved up the engine and left the admirers with exhaust fumes in their nostrils.

  “Of course you know what he sees in you—he thinks you’re beautiful, sexy, and interesting. That’s what you tell me every time I ask you this question anyway,” Mirri said as she moved up into fifth gear.

  “But those aren’t things you see in someone. They’re things that exist. I just worry that he doesn’t get me.” Kate sucked in her lips and dug her teeth into them. “Sometimes it feels like I’m just there. That he can’t see all the things about me that make me me.”

  “Maybe he can’t. It doesn’t mean he doesn’t love you.” Mirri was uncharacteristically rational and apparently defending Jake. “It’s not very often in this world that we find men who really see something in us that we didn’t know was there. Something better than just prettiness or sexiness. They’re rare.” She pulled out in front of a truck whose driver almost blasted her off the road. Kate wondered if she ought to have driven them. “That’s why we’re doing this today—trying to find Nick Sheridan. I met one man in my life who saw that in me and I have to see if it was real or not.”

  “I think Louis sees it in me,” Kate said starkly as she looked out the window at the white clouds scudding across the sky ahead of them.

  “Really?” Mirri turned to look at Kate, who couldn’t meet her gaze.

  “I saw him in the gallery this morning and I remembered why for those few days I’d been so captivated by him. He looks at me as if he can see into my soul,” Kate said then stuck her tongue out. “God, that sounds ridiculous. I’m picking up all this intense bullshit from you.” She laughed but Mirri didn’t.

  “I know what you mean.”

  “He sees all the things that I don’t really want anyone to see but he accepts them. And he loves me for them. Well at least he did. Before I shattered his faith in me and trampled on him.” Kate winced. She didn’t like to sound pretentious and she liked even less the idea that what she was saying might be undermining the seam of her life—her relationship with Jake—but she carried on. “And the part of me that doesn’t have any faith in myself hates him for loving me for my faults. But the grown-up part of me”—Kate sighed—“the grown-up part of me knows that I shouldn’t even consider being with a man who doesn’t see me in that way.”

  “Like Jake?” Mirri spent as much time looking at Kate as she did at the road, which was pretty hairy. Kate gripped the corners of her seat discreetly.

  “I wanted Louis to run away with me this morning,” Kate confessed. “But only for the briefest second. It’s not real.”

  “Why don’t you break it off with Jake? Ask for some more time?”

  “I can’t. I love him.”

  “Is it how you expected it to be? Being engaged?” Mirri probed.

  “No. But then that’s because I’m beginning to think that I’m fickle. That I can’t be completely happy with what I’ve got,” Kate said dismissively. “Sort of like men are supposed to be.”

  “That’s not men, it’s human nature. But how about maybe what you’ve got isn’t right? It could be that simple.”

  “I blame you.” Kate turned to Mirri and slapped her lightly on the arm.

  “Me?”

  “Before you came along I didn’t know what else there was. I would have stayed with Jake and I’d have been happy to marry him,” Kate said.

  “Darling. Jake would never have asked you
to marry him if I hadn’t come along,” Mirri said, while managing not to sound wildly egotistical. “You’re a different woman now. And that’s why I worry that you can’t just slide back into your old habits with him. It’s like your life with him is a jigsaw and you don’t fit into the hole anymore.”

  “But he’s what I always wanted, Mirri,” Kate said plaintively, wishing they’d never gone down this road. She was surprising herself by saying these things. Until she spoke them they weren’t even half-formed thoughts in her mind. And now, jolted by her run-in with Louis, she seemed to be confiding far too much in Mirri—a woman who didn’t even like Jake, and who certainly wasn’t going to stand up for him. But then perhaps that was subconsciously her intention in telling Mirri, Kate thought. Then she bashed her head on the inside of the car door. She had to stop. Now.

  “Don’t worry too much. Things will work themselves out,” Mirri said as she wound down her window. “I promise.”

  The two women spent half an hour driving around the idyllic village of Letcombe Bassett before they eventually saw a house that resembled the one that Kate had seen online.

  “It has pineapples on the gateposts. I promise,” she said firmly as Mirri dismissed the house as too bourgeois to belong to the man she’d known all those years ago.

  “Well, he’s a successful architect now,” Kate argued. “The chances are he is bourgeois.”

  “Then we have to turn back. This house is large and gray and it gives me the creeps,” she said as she drove on and refused to pull over.

  “You’re being hysterical.” Kate threw her hands in the air. “It’s a house. And I think it’s a bloody beautiful house. I’d kill to live somewhere like that. Now turn back.”

  “I don’t like who he’s become,” Mirri said, and nearly knocked a dog walker and his Labrador off the road and into the hedgerow.