by Clare Naylor
“Actually it had crossed my mind,” Kate spluttered between laughs.
“What had?” How dare Kate not take her seriously? She’d been taking Kate’s fury seriously since the day she’d seduced Jake. And now the girl was laughing in her face.
“I was going to paint horns on you.” Kate bit her lip to control her laughter.
“You were not,” Mirri protested crossly.
Kate nodded. “I was.”
The two women looked at one another again before both gave way to demented, snorting howls of mirth that drifted through the house and out into the garden.
“Are we friends again then?” Mirri asked, wiping the tears from her face.
“I think we probably are,” Kate said as she finally got her breath back. Mirri took Kate’s hands and then caught her in her arms. They hugged one another tight.
“I’d much rather have you in my life than Jake,” Kate said in Mirri’s ear.
“Am I supposed to be flattered?” Mirri pulled back a little and smiled.
“Well, yes, actually, because as you probably know, he’s a great kisser.” Kate threw herself onto the bed and lay on her side, her hand propping up her head.
“Ah, this is true.” Mirri grimaced at the recollection of what she’d done. “But I have had much, much better.”
“Me, too,” Kate announced.
“You? Really? Who?” Mirri was surprised.
“Louis.”
“Lovely Louis?”
“Mais oui.” Kate smirked. Then a look of sadness washed over her face. “Well, it was fun while it lasted anyway.”
“You should go after him,” Mirri said seriously.
“Somebody else already has. She’s called Grace. She’s got hair like Julie Christie.”
“Ugh, Julie Christie. Who cares about her hair?” Mirri waved her hand dismissively.
“No, it’s too late. But that’s okay. I’m taking a breather from men.”
“Can I show you something?” Mirri asked.
“Yes.” Kate rolled over onto her stomach and watched as Mirri walked over to her dressing table. She pulled something out of her top drawer. “This arrived yesterday.” She handed Kate a cream envelope.
“From Nick?” Kate sat up on the bed and crossed her legs. “Is it?”
Mirri stood still and nodded.
“Can I read it?” Kate carefully opened the envelope and took out the creamy card notelet with a red border.
“Of course you can read it.” Mirri waited expectantly.
“He wants to meet up,” Kate told her.
“I know.”
“Next time he’s in London.”
“I know.”
“He wants to take you for tea,” Kate continued. “He can’t tell you how delighted he was to hear from you.”
“Isn’t it exciting?” Mirri clapped her hands together.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because you weren’t speaking to me,” Mirri pointed out.
“I’m sorry.”
“No, I’m sorry,” Mirri reiterated. “Now what on earth am I going to say to him on the telephone? What am I going to say to him when I see him? Shall I tell him I’m in love with him? Pretend that I just want to have tea? And what—” Mirri looked truly anxious. “—what shall I wear?”
At which point Kate burst into fresh peals of laughter. “Oh my God, don’t tell me that I have to spend the rest of my life worrying about things like that,” she groaned. “Am I really going to get to sixty and be as superficial as I am now?”
“Probably not, darling.” Mirri looked at her disdainfully. “I’m sure when you get to sixty your hair will be gray, your stomach will be held at bay by your enormous beige knickers, and your nanny-goat beard will have little bits of your lunch stuck in it.”
“That’s disgusting,” Kate yelled. “Anyway I think you’re wrong. I think I’m going to be every bit as tarty and muttonish as you.”
“Muttonish?” Mirri asked quizzically.
“Mutton dressed as lamb.” Kate smiled cheekily. “Just like you.”
When the day of Mirri’s date with Nick arrived she didn’t look remotely muttonish. She had tied her hair back in a ponytail with just a few wisps falling out, a rose-colored scarf knotted around her neck, and a raincoat.
“Is it okay?” Mirri asked.
“You look perfect,” Kate said, “like you should be meeting your lover at a railway station.”
“Well, I am meeting him in St. James’s Park for elevenses, it’s almost as romantic.” Mirri looked at herself one more time in the mirror. “He’s going to think I look so old,” she lamented.
“You’ll probably think the same about him.”
“Do you think we’ll have anything to talk about?” She turned to Kate and squeezed her hand nervously.
“You’ve never had a problem talking before.” Kate was trying to get Mirri out the door and into the waiting taxi. She looked at her watch. “You’re going to be late. At this rate he’ll have left.”
“I wouldn’t mind. I don’t think I want to go. What do I want a man for anyway?” Mirri fussed with her scarf.
“You don’t. You’ve had plenty of men. You just want this one in particular.” Kate opened the front door to usher her out.
“Or not.”
“Only one way to find out.” Kate was about to give Mirri a good-luck kiss on the cheek when she clutched Kate’s hand again.
“Please come,” Mirri pleaded.
“I can’t. It’s a date.”
“No, just take me to the door. Then you can see what he looks like and whether he seems to be happy to see me and—”
“Okay, I’ll come to the door. But I’m not going to spy on you. If you can’t tell whether he likes you or not with all your experience, then you should just give up and go back to the cats forever.” Kate grinned and pulled a jacket off the coat stand by the door.
“Thank you, thank you.” Mirri tugged Kate by the hand and out the door.
The taxi pulled up on the mall and its engine hummed while Kate tried to eject Mirri from the back. “You have to get out,” she hissed, “he might be walking down to the restaurant, too, and watching, and you don’t want to look like a fourteen-year-old.”
“I’d kill to look like a fourteen-year-old.” Mirri remained glued to her seat. “Can you see him?”
“I don’t know and I’m not about to look because it’s silly. You’ll see him for yourself when you get out and meet him like you’re supposed to.” Then Kate turned to the taxi driver, who had already done his “Eh, ain’t you that Catherine Deneuf?”—which hadn’t made him popular with one of the passengers in the back.
“How much do we owe you?” Kate asked.
“Fifteen quid.” He pointed to the meter, which had just ticked over another forty pence as Mirri dragged her heels. Kate had decided to get out in the park and go for a walk while Mirri had her date. And afterward they’d meet up for a debrief. Unless of course Mirri was having her debrief elsewhere, in which case Kate would just get the tube home. Finally Mirri budged from her seat and Kate practically dragged her along the path toward the Inn the Park restaurant, with its turf roof and shadowy verandas.
“Have fun,” she said, and then vanished into the verdant, jungle-like lushness of the rainy park.
“Mirabelle?” A man in the corner of the room, in a navy-blue sweater, with dark hair graying slightly around the ears and temples, stood up as Mirri walked hesitantly through the doors of the restaurant. He had a newspaper open on the table in front of him and beckoned her with a generous smile. Mirri raised her hand in a gesture of recognition, although she didn’t recognize him even slightly, and meandered through the small tables toward him. As she stood before him her hands shook. She didn’t feel as though she were “coming home” or any of the things she had imagined might happen in his presence again. She simply felt a rush of nausea.
“Nick.” She was going to clasp him by the hand when he took h
er shoulders and looked into her eyes and then at her face as though he wanted to memorize everything. In fact, he was really just remembering. Then, without warning, he hugged her into such a bear-like grip that her scarf slid around her neck and her arms were clamped to her sides. Which was just as well, because she didn’t know whether she would have returned the gesture even if she had been capable.
“Oh my God.” He pulled away and looked at her. “I can’t believe it’s you.” Then he checked himself. “Sit down, sit down, now, what can I get you?”
“Oh, well, tea will be fine,” Mirri said politely. She stole a surreptitious glance at him as she repositioned her scarf and slipped off her raincoat. He was taller and broader than she’d remembered—she’d shrunk him over the years to the point of being able to fit him into her pocket—but then maybe he’d also grown in stature, which always made men seem larger. His eyes were the softest, warmest brown and his face was tanned in a countryside way that was much more fly-fishing than yachting on the Costa Smeralda. And the feathery breaks of gray in his black hair just made him look more appealing and watchable than he ever had been at thirty. Mirri cursed men for the glamour they always seemed to acquire with age. Then she noticed he was stirring his tea and unabashedly staring at her, so she had to hope that she still had a few of her charms left.
“Don’t tell me you’ve gone English on us?” His laugh was as soft as his eyes.
“Never.” She relaxed a little as he put his hand on her forearm. “But do you think they serve café au lait?”
“I expect so,” he said, then confided, “We’ve become quite smart around here. Quite cosmopolitan.”
“No?” Mirri pretended to be horrified and the two of them melted into the secret laughter of lovers as effortlessly as if they’d been breakfasting together since the day they met.
“So tell me.” Mirri braced herself for the worst as she dropped a sugar lump into her coffee. “Are you married to the same woman as all those years ago?” Nick pensively narrowed his eyes. Mirri watched the swirls of coffee spiral into nothingness in the middle of her cup. She waited for what felt like another thirty years.
“No.” He looked out through the windows and onto the park beyond as if the past were located somewhere beyond the trees. “We were engaged when you and I said our goodbyes, weren’t we? Cecilia and I?”
“I believe so,” Mirri said. Why was it that men seemed to have such appalling memories for the things that mattered most to women? “And then she became pregnant.”
“So she did.” He drew in his breath and remained focused on the view. “Well, she didn’t, as a matter of fact. Although she told me that she had. I think she wanted to secure me at all costs. By which time we had been through a lot of hoo-ha and you had left and”—he turned to Mirri, who realized with relief that he hadn’t forgotten a thing—“it was too late. We didn’t get married, but by the time we’d broken it off”—Nick turned to Mirri as if assessing how honest he ought to be—“well, by that time you’d met someone else,” he said very matter-of-factly.
“I had?” Mirri was surprised, and also desperate to know what happened next in his life.
“I read it in the newspaper. The Times no less.” He pretended to be impressed. “They said that you were engaged to be married to a Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist and had moved to Mississippi to live in his colonial home.”
Now it was Mirri who seemed not to remember something important. She cast her mind back. “Oh my God, him,” she said with disbelief. “You know I can hardly remember his name. I stayed for two weeks and got so tired of his sitting all day in his study and then playing poker all night that I left. In fact, I walked with my suitcase through the fields and past the swamps all the way to the nearest town to catch a train home and never saw him again.” She marveled at the memory. “You know, he probably thinks I am still waiting for him on the porch.”
“That was it? That was the news that haunted me for years afterward?”
He was being surprisingly candid, she thought. “You were haunted?”
“I was. For a long time. And then I threw myself into work and then, well, then I got married . . .” He played with the handle of his spoon. Mirri had just begun to think that she was home and dry. That he had never been able to fill her place, that he’d been as faithful to her memory as Jay Gatsby was to Daisy, and that he’d felt the same as her for all these years. And now, this blow.
“Of course you did,” she said as lightly as she could manage.
“I did. And I have two beautiful little girls . . . well, they’re horrors actually . . . but I like them.” Mirri saw her past and her future collapse in on her like a house of cards. “Anyway, of course it seems that I’m not cut out as the uxorious type at all because Jessica, probably quite rightly, left me. Apparently I’m difficult.” He smiled. Mirri smiled, too. When she’d first walked in she wasn’t sure how much she still liked him; her expectations were too unearthly to know how she’d felt. But in the last few minutes, since they’d been chatting, she knew that he was the same. That he was the man who would be able to make her feel secure and happy. More so now than he had when they’d first met, in fact, and it now looked as if maybe there was a chance. Could he really be as single as she was? And as difficult to live with? She stopped herself from getting carried away but all her Continental ardor made her want to fling herself at him. Though equally she was as shy as a girl anticipating her first kiss.
“I’m impossible,” she boasted.
“A sweet-looking creature like you? I don’t believe it,” he teased. She laughed and lowered her head. “You are pure trouble, Miss Moncur. I can tell.”
“Moi?” She treated him to her dirtiest laugh.
“Oh, yes. Absolutely.” He shook his head and gave her a despairing smile. Then seemed to become serious. “But then your young boyfriend might know more about that than me.”
“Boyfriend?” Mirri was beginning to feel like a slut—forgetting lovers like this. “Who?”
“I’ve admired you from afar for a long time,” he told her, “and I’ve found the newspapers to be most informative. I believe he’s a young actor.”
“Jonah. Ah, Jonah.” Mirri was delighted to dispel another misconception, albeit erroneously. “He goes out with my goddaughter, actually.”
“The press, eh? Never let the truth get in the way of a good story, do they?” He seemed thrilled by this revelation.
Never let the truth get in the way of a good romance, Mirri thought. If this romance was going to go anywhere, she’d tell him about Jonah eventually, but right now she was keen to seem as good as gold.
Later on, however, as she sat in Nick’s car, hitching a lift back to Primrose Hill, Mirri suddenly got the urge to be anything but good. They’d stayed in the restaurant for a long, boozy lunch and talked nonstop until the last of the customers had gone and they’d drunk so much peppermint tea that they felt they might drown if they consumed another drop. Then they’d ventured out into the park, gasped in the fresh air after hours in the stuffy restaurant, and wandered around. They’d pointed at the ducks, laughed at strange people, and had eventually collapsed onto a bench to draw breath. It was then that their date seemed, inevitably, to be over: They’d toyed with the idea of going to a gallery or to Harrods to look at strange, expensive things, but they’d decided against it as they were both shattered with the excitement of the day, like two-year-olds after a playdate. While Mirri was in no doubt that this was just the beginning of everything, they still decided that Nick would drive her home before heading back to Oxford where his gardener’s wife was babysitting for his girls.
“Maybe I won’t go to Primrose Hill,” Mirri said suddenly as they waited in comfortable silence at a red light.
“Are you thinking a hotel?” Nick asked cheekily. Mirri loved the way he wasn’t afraid to say what was on his mind; he was open about his feelings for her, even though as yet they hadn’t done more than hold hands as they walked around the duck pon
d.
“No,” she replied prudishly, “I’m just thinking that I don’t want the day to end. So maybe I’ll come back with you to Oxfordshire.”
“Really?” He was thrilled.
“Would that be okay?”
“Okay?” he repeated, putting his foot on the brake and accelerating madly along Holland Park Road so that Mirri was flung back into her seat. “That’s the best idea anyone’s ever had.”
Kate had never received a phone call from Mirri suggesting they meet up so that she could hear all about it. In fact, she’d never received any phone call at all and it was now two in the morning. She’d waited up in Leonard’s sitting room, watching TV, and she was beginning to worry. Leonard had gone to bed hours ago, with a smirk on his face at the idea of Mirri on a date with Nick Sheridan. At first Mirri had wanted the whole thing kept quiet because really she hadn’t enjoyed any of the buildup to meeting up with him again. But Kate assumed, by eight o’clock, that their relationship was official because technically they were on their third date already—elevenses, lunch, and now, presumably, dinner. Crafty old Mirri—how to have sex on the first date without it being a travesty of The Rules. Still, it didn’t stop her from being slightly worried as to whether Mirri was okay or not. There was after all nothing on Nick Sheridan’s slick website to suggest that he might not be an ax murderer. Kate dispelled her paranoia and turned off the TV. She took a shortbread from the tin on the way out and headed back to her shed.
As she sat on her bed, listening to the BBC World Service and munching her biscuit, she had a searing sense of loneliness. Mirri was out on a date and if all went well, and Kate prayed that it would, she’d soon be in love and out of commission as a friend. There were no longer any suitable distractions in terms of men in her life. She’d well and truly dispensed with Jake, that was for sure—apparently he’d gone to Thailand with his two young cousins for a month—so where did she go from here? She rummaged in her drawer for an old photograph that she knew was there. Kate and Louis about five years ago. She had no idea where they were or what they’d been doing or even who’d taken the picture, but they were both pouting in an outrageous and silly way, with their heads together. Kate looked dumb as they come, but Louis looked exquisitely beautiful. He was all cheekbones and sexy eyes and she wanted to be with him so badly right now that she felt as if she’d been punched in the stomach.