by Clare Naylor
“Louis?” she called out when she saw that he wasn’t there. The door to the flat was wide open so she walked toward it.
“Louis, it’s me.” She tapped her knuckle on the door to the flat in a perfunctory way and walked on in. But as she was about to put her head around the kitchen door she saw not Louis, but a woman emerging from the office.
“Oh, I thought you were Louis. He’s gone out to buy some milk.” She had a low, soothing American accent and was clearly surprised to see a strange woman in the hallway.
“I’m Kate, a friend of Louis,” Kate said, then added, “We’re working together on the Tate project.”
“Right.” The woman nodded. “He’s told me about that.” Kate looked at the stranger and took it all in. Not only was she wearing Louis’s shirt over her jeans, with the buttons undone to the point of indecency, she was also extremely beautiful and slightly older than Kate. And Louis, for that matter. She wasn’t cute or sweet or pretty and she wasn’t fragile, either. She was quite simply beautiful, with the face of a woman—a wide straight mouth, intense brown eyes that seemed to understand everything, a delicate, serious nose, and slightly ruffled brown hair with heavy, Julie Christie bangs.
“But if he’s not here I’ll come back later.” Kate began to back out the door. Standing beside this woman made her feel utterly wretched. Kate had a tear-streaked face and had come running to Louis out of a pathetic sense that he might actually want her and make her feel better. But looking at the woman in front of her, Kate completely understood everything that she herself wasn’t—she wasn’t smart, she wasn’t interesting, and she had just taken for granted this man who could clearly do so much better than Kate. Kate was the lame girl who thought that the world revolved around her and really nobody was that interested—not her friend Mirri, not her fiancé, and now not even Louis it seemed.
“You can wait.” There was no way this woman would ever flake on Louis. Neither did she feel insecure about Kate. She was so at ease with herself that Kate just wanted to run away. And grow up. She’d lost Louis to this self-assured, beautiful creature and she suddenly determined that this was the last thing she’d ever lose. She’d lost everything and now she was done with losing and losers. For good.
Kate hurried down the stairs and out onto the street, banging the door shut behind her. But as she was about to catch a bus to who knows where she saw Louis walking up the sidewalk with a plastic carrier bag in his hand. She was going to do an about-face and scurry off in the other direction but she remembered her resolution. No more losers—and that included herself.
“Louis,” she said as she got closer to him. She held her hand up in a small wave. “I just called by at yours.”
“You did?” he asked, computing the facts. “I wasn’t there.”
“No, I met . . .” Kate hadn’t even asked the woman’s name.
“Grace.”
“Exactly,” Kate said. “Anyway it’s fine. I just came around to say that . . . well . . . it doesn’t matter anymore.”
“What doesn’t matter anymore?” he asked, switching his shopping to the other hand.
“It doesn’t matter that I came,” Kate said. But clearly he wasn’t going to let this go too easily. He looked quizzically at her.
“I came to tell you that Jake and I are finally over. For good. Not that it makes any difference to your life at all,” she said, thinking he was probably longing to get back and drink coffee with Grace. Or maybe even have sex with Grace and then drink coffee.
“Of course it makes a difference to my life,” he said with genuine softness.
“Really?” Kate averted her gaze from her feet to his face.
“I care about you too much to see you with a prick like Jake. I want you to be happy.” He rubbed his hand up and down her upper arm.
“Great. Well, there you go, then,” she said, suddenly feeling sick at his avuncular patting of her. There was no doubt about it—Louis was lost, too.
“Was that it?” he asked.
“What?”
“You came all this way to tell me that you’d split up with Jake. Did you want anything else?”
“No, that was it,” Kate said, and faked a big smile. “See you at the opening.”
“Sure thing,” Louis said, and walked on, back to Grace.
It wasn’t that there weren’t a million things that Kate had wanted to ask Louis about Grace, it was just that there was no point. It suddenly seemed to her that she had no right whatsoever to know whether he’d been seeing her for six hours or six months and if he was in love with her and whether he’d simply made the moves on Kate for old times’ sake. None of it was going to make any difference to the fact that Kate had well and truly fucked up. Somehow she didn’t even feel as if she needed to ask Jake and Mirri for explanations anymore, either. From the moment she took Jake back it seemed inevitable that things were going to end up like this. She’d had her doubts and she’d ignored them. Mirri had tried to persuade her that she deserved better than Jake but to Kate’s mind she deserved every bit of misfortune that she’d gotten. She’d lacked the courage to do what she knew in her heart was the right thing, and now she had to live with the consequences.
Kate walked toward the bus stop and decided that she was going to face the music. She caught the bus back to Primrose Hill and Leonard’s house. She walked down the path as she’d so innocently done a few hours ago and took a deep breath as she approached the shed.
“Kate, can we talk?” She heard Mirri’s voice from somewhere down the garden. She reluctantly looked up and saw her sitting in the hammock. She’d changed and was wearing jeans and a baggy T-shirt. It was the least sexy Kate had ever seen her look.
“There’s nothing to say,” Kate said, and made a beeline for the shed door.
“Please. I want to explain,” Mirri called out. Kate stopped and waited to hear more. “Come here. Please.”
“You’re wasting your time. I know what happened and nothing’s going to change what I think of you or that shit-for-brains ex-fiancé of mine. Has he gone, by the way?” Kate looked apprehensively down the garden and toward the house. If both of them were lying in wait for her she’d lock herself in the shed and never come out again.
“I knew exactly what I was doing,” Mirri said.
Kate looked at her with some interest. “Which makes it even worse.” She decided that she wanted to hear Mirri’s excuse. She didn’t want to look the bitch in the eye but she was suddenly curious. She walked over toward the hammock and stood up against a tree. She had to be standing—she had the moral high ground and she wanted the literal high ground, too.
“You didn’t love Jake. You told me so—,” Mirri began.
“For God’s sake, I was going to marry him. We had a house. I wear his ring.” Kate noticed that the ring was still there when she looked at her hand.
“Of course you didn’t tell me you didn’t love him in a straightforward, honest way. That wouldn’t be English of you. But I knew you didn’t. And you knew you didn’t.” Mirri fired Kate a challenging look. “Tell me that you were in love with him then.”
“I was going to marry him” was all that Kate could manage to say.
“Exactly. You needed to be set free. And I watched you and I hoped that you’d be able to do it but you couldn’t. You’re too nice. Too sweet. And luckily for you I’m not. So I did it for you. He was in your shed taking the pictures you’ve painted, looking at them with no sense of appreciation—which is the way I’ve seen him look at you—and I went to confront him.”
“Why was he taking my pictures?” Kate was puzzled.
“Because he was too cheap to buy his aunt a birthday gift and he is used to taking things from you. Has he paid anything for the deposit on your house?” Mirri asked. Kate shook her head. “Has he paid for the builder? The electrician? The plumber? No, because he thinks you’ll take care of him. Which is fine. It may even be the modern way, what do I know? But what is most wrong is that there’s one thing
you have asked of him. You have asked him to be faithful. To not break your heart. Am I right?”
“It’s not as if he was serially unfaithful. He just liked a pretty girl,” Kate said defensively.
“Maybe,” Mirri said sagely. “But I wasn’t sure that he wasn’t going to cause you pain again. So I had to see for myself.”
“Oh right,” Kate said sarcastically. “So you decided to seduce him yourself.”
“Yes.”
“No,” Kate screamed at Mirri now. She felt anger pouring from her but Mirri remained calm. “I’ll tell you how it was. You are a bitter, envious woman whose one hope of love has turned to dust and you couldn’t bear to see me happy. I was engaged to a man, I had a future, and you were jealous.”
“Oh, come on, Kate.” Mirri was genuinely shocked. It hadn’t occurred to her that Kate could even begin to construe things this way. “You know that’s not true. You’re like a daughter to me,” she said, for the first time voicing a feeling about Kate that she’d had since she’d arrived. She’d felt protective of her and frustrated by her bad decisions, but she had firmly believed that she wanted only the best for this girl who was so unlike herself, yet perhaps had all the qualities of selflessness and naÏveté that Mirri lacked. In a way they were like the perfect pair. But it dawned on Mirri now that maybe Kate had never seen things this way. Sure, she’d seen Mirri as a helpful friend at times, but Kate didn’t need a mother. She had one. It was Mirri who wanted a daughter.
“You are nothing like a mother to me,” Kate said in a hard, even tone. “A mother would never behave like you’ve done. You’re so self-obsessed that you wouldn’t know how to think about another human being. That’s why the only creatures you can actually persuade to love you are animals.”
“Kate, you can’t say that.” Mirri looked as if she’d been slapped around the face.
“The truth hurts, doesn’t it?” Kate said. “And I know that Jake was a cheating bastard, I wasn’t as stupid as you thought I was. But I also wanted to believe in something and I wanted to be part of something and he was a chance for me to have that. Which may not have been the most noble, pure reason for getting married but it’s as good as most people’s reasons.”
“I’m sorry,” Mirri said.
“Yeah, well, it’s fine. If you’re really sorry you can do something for me,” Kate said, pushing herself away from the tree trunk with her hands.
“I’ll do whatever you want me to,” Mirri promised.
“Great. Then wait here.”
Five minutes later Kate walked out onto the lawn carrying a bundle of bed linen in her arms.
“What’s this?” Mirri had been expecting a more profound gesture.
“It’s my laundry. If you’re sorry then the least you can do is clean up your mess.” Kate dropped the pile to the floor beside Mirri. “I don’t iron the sheets, by the way. Just the pillowcases and the duvet cover.”
“But Kate . . . ,” Mirri called out as Kate strolled back to her shed with a satisfied spring in her step.
“Tomorrow’s fine to bring them back. I’ve got a spare set,” Kate called out without turning around. Then closed the shed door behind her for the night.
Chapter Twenty-six
For a whole week Kate had managed to resist Mirri’s charms, flowers, apologies, excuses, and even a box of chocolates from Fortnum and Mason. She had flatly refused to carry on with the portrait of Mirri, suggesting that Lucian Freud might be delighted to take up where Kate had left off. Even Leonard had been down to the shed, sheepishly looking for the magic formula that would persuade Kate to pick up her brushes again. But she wouldn’t budge. She’d accepted the loss of her relationship with Jake, and in a way she had even accepted that in the long run, and totally inadvertently, it really did seem as if Mirri might have done Kate a favor. But what she couldn’t accept was the betrayal of her friendship with Mirri. She had grown to love Mirri in a way far beyond the way she loved the men who’d come and gone over the summer. Kate had learned to be adventurous and exacting of herself and she’d learned to let go and have fun. And even though she’d fallen at the last hurdle—by accepting Jake when really she didn’t even want him—she’d still come a long way thanks to Mirri. And now her idol had been shattered and her feet of clay well and truly exposed. It wasn’t so much that she felt betrayed as she was just disappointed.
“You don’t have to speak to her. Just come and finish the painting. It’s very important to her.” Leonard had cornered Kate in the kitchen. She’d tried to wait for Mirri to leave the house each day, or for the curtains to be drawn on the top floor, which meant that Mirri was taking her siesta, and then she’d bomb up to the house and collect her post, show her face to Leonard, or raid the fridge. So far she’d avoided Mirri. But now it seemed she had enlisted him as messenger.
“I don’t want to be in the same room as her,” Kate said.
“Don’t you think you’re being a bit sanctimonious?” Leonard asked in a concerned way. “You’ve admitted to me that seeing the back of Jake was secretly what you wanted. And misguided though Mirabelle might have been—her intentions weren’t bad.”
“I can’t do it.”
“Ah, well, I tried.” Leonard shook his head ruefully. “I’ll be sad to see the back of her, though. I know she can be a royal pain in the backside but she’s brought a bit of life back to this place. The pair of you have.”
“What do you mean see the back of her?” Kate asked as she plucked a grape from the fruit bowl.
“She’s off back to Africa at the weekend.” Leonard pointed to a British Airways ticket on the table with the rest of the post.
“She’s not?” Kate immediately felt her legs weaken. She knew that whatever she felt about Mirabelle Moncur, she didn’t want her to leave. Not yet anyway. Still, she tried to hide how unsettled the thought had made her. “But why?”
“Well, she came for the portrait of Bébé and you’ve delivered that. And she wanted one of herself, which you quite understandably don’t feel able to complete. So what else is there?”
There’s Nick Sheridan, Kate thought. That’s why she came. But now that dream was shattered for her. Kate felt a deep pang of sadness for Mirri. Strangely she felt much more sorry for her than she did for her own situation. Kate was young and she’d move on, but Mirri—without Nick she’d probably turn her back on the idea of love forever.
“I’ll do it,” Kate said in a split second. “But tell her that it doesn’t mean anything apart from the fact that I’m a professional, I never renege on my promises, and I need the money to pay the mortgage on my new house since my boyfriend and I split up.”
“I shall tell her,” Leonard said with a twinkle in his eye. “And I must say that I couldn’t be happier.”
“It’s a work thing. Not a friendship thing,” Kate reminded him firmly.
“I know, I know, and I can’t wait to see your splendid portrait,” he said as Kate took a handful of biscuits and some strawberries back to her shed.
Chapter Twenty-seven
“You’ve given me a mustache.” Mirri walked over to the easel and scowled as she looked closely at her upper lip in the painting.
“It’s shadow. I’m going to lighten it later,” Kate told her.
“Do I have a mustache?” Mirri walked over to the mirror and tilted her lips toward the light. “I don’t want to be like one of those old women who look like a nanny goat with a beard.”
“Would you mind just sitting down, please?” Kate said in a humorless voice.
“Of course.” Mirri was chastened and sat down in her chair again. “Maybe one day you’d like to see the Picasso?”
“I’ll go to a gallery if I want to see a Picasso. I think Africa’s a bit far to travel. Especially to see a bad one.”
“But it might not be as bad as I think. I mean what do I know? You’d be able to tell me whether it’s really any good or not.”
“I doubt it,” Kate said, and determinedly mixed her paint.
It had been like this for three days now. Mirri trying to make amends and Kate being truculent.
“Do I have to tell you once again that I am sorry for what I did?” Mirri asked with a frustrated sigh.
“No, it’s okay. I heard you the first time,” Kate said. Although she really hadn’t wanted Mirri to leave London she was also stubbornly refusing to acknowledge to herself that she would have been desolate without her around.
“Do you miss Jake?” Mirri asked.
“I wouldn’t have thought you’d have cared whether I did or I didn’t.”
“I care about you. I care that I made you unhappy.” She tried to keep her head in the right position for the portrait.
“Maybe it’s just guilt that you feel,” Kate said dispassionately.
Mirri stared at Kate for a minute before she opened her mouth. “No it’s not, it’s love that I feel.” She stood up and looked as if she might tear her hair out. And if not hers then Kate’s. Kate froze with her paintbrush in hand as her sitter suddenly began to rail at her. “I thought that we were friends. I thought that for once in my life there was a woman I liked who I learned something from. And I thought that I was helping you, which it’s obvious now I wasn’t. But if you continue to be such a stick-in-the-ass, uptight rosbif then I would prefer it if you didn’t finish my picture because right now you’re just trying to punish me and I’m sure you’re planning to paint horns on it.” Mirri was standing right up close to Kate and glowering at her. They glared at one another for a long moment, Kate in a state of shock, but knowing that she deserved to be yelled at, and Mirri with a face like an elastic band that had just snapped.
But as they stood face-to-face, staring one another out, Kate was struck by a massive and irrepressible attack of the giggles. It started as a quiver in her upper lip but became a twitch around her mouth, then it spread to her nose and developed into full-blown hysteria.
Mirri was more furious than ever. “What is so funny?” she demanded.