by Clare Naylor
“Ah, so Kate wants to go to Italy?” Mirri asked.
“Well, I don’t know. I haven’t asked her.” He looked up impatiently at Mirri. “It’s supposed to be a surprise, you see.”
“But it’d be so much more romantic to take her somewhere that she’d always wanted to go.”
“Probably. I think she’ll like Italy,” he said, and pulled out a painting of some tulips. They were ordinary but Aunt Catherine would probably like them.
“Jake, how do you feel about Kate?” Mirri was looking down at her toes, which were painted glossy fuchsia. She didn’t want him to see that she was trying to catch him out.
“Kate? Well, I’m marrying her, aren’t I?” he said casually as he set the tulip painting on one side. Mirri nodded, unconvinced. “Which means I love her. Kate’s the kind of woman you should marry. She’s great. She cares for me. I don’t know what I’d do without her.”
“Does she bring magic into your life?” Mirri looked him in the eye now.
He blinked and then frowned for a moment. “Magic?”
Mirri nodded again.
“Yeah, I mean. Probably.” Then he was hit with a thought. “Especially in bed. She’s great in bed. I mean she looks really sweet but she’s a rocket.” He nodded in a satisfied way. “Especially lately.”
“And she’s the only woman you’re interested in?” Mirri asked as she uncrossed her legs and leaned back onto her arms.
“Yeah, pretty much. I mean I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t think there were some cute chicks out there, but . . . well, I’m marrying her. She’s getting what she wanted.”
“Isn’t it what you want, too?”
“God, what are you, a shrink?” Jake pretended to be lighthearted but Mirri was getting under his skin now. He hadn’t a clue what her game was but he knew, in the way women were so bloody good at, that she was playing with him. “I love Kate. When we weren’t together I missed her and I asked her to marry me, which means that I want to be with her. What’s your problem?”
“You know that if you marry her she’ll expect you to be faithful for the rest of your life, don’t you?” Mirri raised an eyebrow at Jake.
“Maybe.”
“No, she will. She believes you’ve changed. That all those nights she knew you were out with other women are behind you.”
“Well, they are,” Jake said defiantly. “At least for now.”
“But not forever?” Mirri gave him a coquettish look. She didn’t want to do this, but she knew that he needed to be needled a bit more. She had to know whether Jake had really changed, and there was nothing else for it.
“Well, I mean . . . maybe not forever . . .” Now he was looking at Mirri in a different way. The knot of her sarong, which was only an inch or two above her cleavage, had loosened. Her hair was spilling out of the clip it was in and tendrils hung about her face.
“I could never manage to be faithful,” Mirri said with her most kittenish pout. “That’s why I stopped getting married.”
“Why do you think I haven’t taken the plunge before now?” Jake said, his smiled glued to Mirri’s diaphanous sarong, which was slit open to the thigh. “But Kate’s great. She’ll forgive me if I mess up. That’s why I love her.”
“Sex is like eating sweets,” Mirri said, echoing a line she’d once had to say in a movie. “I can never have enough and yet I get bored of the same one for too long—I prefer to have the whole shop to choose from.” At which point Mirri stood up and walked over to where Jake stood, rooted to the spot.
“I know what you mean,” he said as she fixed her hooded, goddess eyes on him. Eyes that despite the years were still as suggestive of unspeakable things as they ever had been.
“I thought so,” Mirri said as she waited for him to come to her.
Kate was planning to go straight home and get ready for Jake’s aunt Catherine’s birthday, where she was supposed to be meeting all the family members she’d never encountered—soon to be her own family. But as she cycled along Regents Park Road she couldn’t resist stopping in a shop selling the smallest, cutest baby cardigans she’d ever seen. She rode up to the window and stared in for a few minutes at hats, booties, and dresses. Then she thought better of buying any of them. Perhaps it was bad luck to buy clothes at this early stage of someone’s pregnancy. Maybe she’d wait. She spotted a blue gingham dress with lace culottes and nearly died at how sweet it was. She couldn’t help wishing that Tanya would have a girl, immoral though it might be to want anything other than a healthy baby. As she got on her bike again and cycled up the hill to Leonard’s she also wondered whether she and Jake might have children before too long. She and Tanya could have babies together and do all the things that she got so irritated at other mothers for doing—like talk about baby yoga all day and take screaming children to cafés—it was a whole new world. For the first time in days Kate felt excited again about getting married. She’d found an outfit that looked great, she and Jake were going to have a rosy future in the new flat and maybe even have babies—despite what Mirri preached, and what Kate on some level believed—it didn’t seem to be the soft, smug option in life at all, just a really natural, normal idea.
Kate leaned over her handlebars to open the catch on the garden gate. She cycled through and closed it behind her. The sun was bright over the garden and Bébé was lying asleep on the lounge chair beneath the cherry tree.
“Hey, Bébé, where’s your mummy?” Kate swung her leg over her bike, hopped off, and propped it against a tree. Mirri couldn’t be far away if Bébé was on his own. She wandered over and kneeled on the grass next to him as she gave him a stroke behind the ears. She looked up to see if Mirri was fixing herself a G&T in the kitchen, but it didn’t look like it. “Wait here, I’ll go and make sure she hasn’t forgotten you.” Kate kissed him on the head before heading for the house. It wasn’t a very sensible thing to do, leaving an endangered and potentially dangerous species wandering the garden alone. “Mirri, it’s me. Are you there?” she called as she went into the kitchen. But the house seemed to be empty. A bottle of suntan lotion lay on the kitchen table with its top off, and the familiar sound of Mirri shouting down the phone in French from the top floor couldn’t be heard.
“How do you want me?” Mirri said as she lay back on Kate’s bed and watched Jake strip off his shirt.
“Christ, you’re sexy,” Jake breathed and watched as Mirri devoured him with her eyes. With one hand she unknotted the sarong, which fell open to reveal her voluptuous, freckled breasts.
“Come over here.” She beckoned to him with her finger. Jake stepped out of his jeans and across the floor. Mirri wanted to get this out of the way before Kate came home. She didn’t really want Kate to find them—just to be able to tell her about it later. She’d be hurt enough when she heard, but Mirri felt it was a necessary step. Though when Jake sat down on the edge of the bed and leaned down to kiss her lips she wondered at the wisdom of it. She’d kissed more men in her life than she’d had cigarettes almost, it was practically her profession as an actress and her hobby as a woman, but kissing Jake wasn’t easy. Not because he wasn’t cute—Mirri found him surprisingly sexy as he lightly brushed his lips against hers and stroked her stomach with the back of his hand, it was no wonder Kate was so hooked on him, she thought as her nipples hardened to his touch—but she found it difficult to do this because for the first time ever Mirri understood how awful it felt to betray someone. Kate had become a friend, one of the few people whose spirit Mirri admired, and now she was doing something designed to hurt her. She wondered whether she should put a stop to it.
“You know, I’m not sure . . . ,” she murmured in Jake’s ear as he moved his hand over the front of her bikini bottoms.
“It’s okay. Kate won’t be back for ages,” he said. “She’s shopping for a wedding dress.”
When he said that, Mirri suddenly opened her eyes and saw him leaning toward her, his eyes closed in pleasure, his naked body so close to hers.
; “We can’t,” she said. She had a flashback to the day that she’d first come into this shed. She’d stood at the bottom of the bed and watched as Kate and Jake had sex. She hadn’t liked him the first time she met him and she liked him even less now. He might have been a romantic but it didn’t stop him from being far too careless of Kate’s feelings. Sure, Mirri knew that in a way he really loved her. He believed that she was the only girl for him. It was simply that Kate deserved so much better. Mirri put her hand up to his chest to stop him from going any further. “Let’s not, Jake,” she said. He opened his eyes and at first appeared bewildered, but then he saw on her face exactly what it was they were doing.
“Maybe you’re right,” he said, and paused for a second with his hand on Mirri’s cheek.
“I am.” Mirri was about to take hold of the corner of her sarong and cover herself when the door swung open. Kate walked into the dimly lit shed from the bright sunlight.
“God, Mirri, I’m sorry,” Kate said, assuming that Mirri and Jonah had for some unknown reason appropriated her shed.
Then Jake called out, “Kate!” He spun around before she had a chance to duck out again and leave them to it.
“Jake?” As her eyes adjusted, Kate stared uncomprehendingly at him. He shuffled off Mirri, leaving her naked on Kate’s bed, and stood in suspended animation for a moment as he couldn’t seem to decide whether to grab Kate or his boxer shorts.
“Kate, this isn’t . . .” He watched as the look of bewilderment on her face failed to shift.
Kate looked from Mirri to Jake and then Jake to Mirri but nothing seemed to add up. “What were you doing?” she asked, as if they might have been watching the news.
“Kate. I know what you think.” Jake grabbed his boxer shorts and thrust his legs into them. Then he pulled on his jeans. “But it wasn’t anything it was just . . .” Mirri sat up on the bed and grabbed her sarong. She wrapped it tautly around her body and though she knew she probably ought to leave Kate and Jake to sort this out between them she was too furious with him.
“Of course it was something,” Mirri said as she stood up. “If you weren’t such a pathetic man you’d tell her the truth. You’d tell your fiancée that we were about to fuck.”
“You what?” Kate said. It was as if she hadn’t seen them lying naked on top of one another a moment ago.
“It wasn’t like that . . .” Jake went toward Kate with his hand out.
She ignored it and took a step backward. “You and Jake were having sex?” She was looking directly at Mirri now; Jake didn’t even seem to concern her.
“I’ll talk to you about it later,” Mirri said as she walked contemptuously by Jake and then shrugged at Kate. She wasn’t hypocritical enough to pretend to be sorry; she’d achieved what she’d wanted in a way. She just hadn’t expected to feel as horrified at having hurt another person as she felt for having hurt Kate.
“Where are you going?” Kate said as Mirri walked past her.
“To the house.”
“Oh, no, you’re not,” Kate suddenly exploded in Mirri’s face. “You’re not going anywhere until you explain to me why when I walked in you were about to have sex with my fiancé.”
“Why don’t you ask him?” Mirri pointed at Jake, who was shaking his head from side to side with a pained expression on his face.
“You’re my friend,” Kate said.
“I know, and I’m sorry that you saw us. I meant to stop but . . .”
“You’re sorry that I saw you? But not that you were having sex with my boyfriend?” Kate’s face was contorted with pain. “How could you?” She turned to Jake. “How could both of you do this to me?”
Jake and Mirri steadfastly refused to look at one another. Jake was looking at the ground and Mirri was attempting to look Kate in the eye, though that wasn’t as easy as she’d imagined, either.
“You didn’t really want to marry him,” Mirri said in her most measured voice. “And I knew that he wasn’t ever going to be right for you. He loves you but not in the way you should be loved.”
“So you decided to sleep with him?” Kate said. And in that second, the realization of what had actually just happened on her bed seemed to dawn on her. She looked to her rumpled duvet, she looked at Jake’s discarded shirt on the floor and the two people in the world who were closest to her, and she walked out, still clutching her bag as she had been when she’d walked in.
Chapter Twenty-five
Kate sat on a bench at the top of Primrose Hill and stared numbly at the view. She looked at the London Eye in the distance but no emotion registered with her. She thought about the night that she and Louis had stood on the bridge and drunk champagne but she felt nothing. She thought about her father—about what he’d say to her now if he were here, about how much he’d loved her and wanted to protect her, about the fact that she’d never see him again—but still she didn’t feel. She didn’t feel sadness or pain. Then she thought about Mirri and Jake again, how they’d stood defiantly in front of her and not even apologized. She understood very clearly that she was no longer getting married, that the ring on her finger didn’t mean what it had done half an hour ago, and that she and Jake would never live together in the flat now, but for some baffling reason she didn’t seem to be hurt by these thoughts. Nothing Kate could think right now seemed to touch her. It was like watching one of those hospital dramas where someone’s been paralyzed and they’re sticking pins into his body and he doesn’t flinch. Kate couldn’t feel a thing.
“Tanya, the weirdest thing’s just happened,” she said into her phone after she’d dialed her friend’s number and gotten voice mail. She remembered that Tanya was in the country so probably had no reception on her phone. “I just went home and found Jake and Mirri in bed together. Anyway, the thing is, I’m all right but I’m sitting on Primrose Hill and I don’t really want to go back there right now so I just wondered whether you kept house keys with any of your neighbors so that I can go around to yours for a bit. To have some space. Give me a call if you get this message.” Kate hung up.
She thought about calling Leonard in Scotland but he’d be out on some grouse moor up to his ears in heather. Besides, there was nothing Leonard could do right now. Kate just wanted somewhere to go. She knew that she was going to have to cry eventually and that her detachment was just an extreme form of shock, and she knew that when she started to cry she didn’t want to be out in the open frightening dog walkers and mothers with push chairs who might think that she was a mad person instead of someone whose world had just been tipped on its axis. She looked out at the skyline for the next half hour while several things occurred to her. They were:
1. Whether Jake thought Mirri was better in bed than her. She found herself genuinely curious.
2. That she wouldn’t be paid to finish Mirri’s portrait now. And even if she was paid, there was no way she’d be able to look at her for a second, let alone stare at her to paint her.
3. She might never get married and have children.
4. She would have to change the sheets on her bed, which was her least favorite domestic chore in the world.
After she’d thought these things she felt her chest begin to tighten in panic and her head begin to throb at the temples. She knew it wouldn’t be long now before her eyes started to prick and tears would push hard from behind her eyeballs. She wanted to go to her flat and sit in her ramshackle shell of a kitchen and cry for as long as it took, but her keys were on the bookshelf in the shed and she couldn’t go back there. Her mum had gone back to the country last night. She had nowhere to go.
When Kate arrived at Louis’s front door she paused a moment before knocking. She was here because he was her oldest friend and the only person she could turn to right now. She wasn’t thinking about how she’d dropped him as soon as Jake came back, she wasn’t thinking about how little sympathy he’d seemed to have for her in the gallery the other day when she’d told him her doubts about marrying Jake. She wasn’t even thinking how all t
he while she’d been trying on wedding dresses to marry Jake and thinking about the future, she actually began wondering what it would be like to be marrying Louis. Louis was the dream, Jake was the prosaic reality. Louis would be the man who would treat her well, who’d help with the children, whom she’d talk to every night into old age; who shared a passion for work and art with her. In comparison, she’d come to realize, Jake was the kind of boyfriend you’re supposed to have as a teenager—badly behaved, rough around the edges, uninterested in you, lazy, and yet for some reason you want to kiss him in the phone box late at night and steal out to see him when your parents are asleep. In short, Jake was the guy who Kate should have grown out of. Louis was the one she should have grown into. But the whole marriage thing had been a red herring and taken her down the wrong street.
Of course, as she stood outside Louis’s front door and anticipated his sympathy, tears began to stream down her face. There was nothing like someone feeling sorry for you to make you dissolve into your own sadness, no matter how stoic you thought you were. And as Kate stood on Ladbroke Grove, with the cars tearing by, she wasn’t conscious that she’d elevated Louis to perfect-man status before Jake had messed things up and proposed to her—she was aware only that Jake and Mirri had just brought her world crashing down around her and the only person she really wanted to see and be with was Louis. He’d make her feel better, no matter what had happened in the past few weeks. She was sure of this.
“Louis, it’s me.” Kate said as the entry phone buzzed. There was a click as the front door opened. Kate pushed the handle and went up the stairs, past the bikes and scrap metal, toward the familiar, fluorescent light of his studio. The door at the top was open and Kate walked in, expecting to find Louis in his jeans, leaning over a bench with a pencil in his hand and a frown on his face as he finalized the details for the exhibition, which was only ten days away.