by Clare Naylor
“Mirri Moncur,” he said. “We only want one picture.”
“Wrong house,” Kate said, “sorry.” And she hurried back down the side of the house. She’d have to nip into Leonard’s kitchen and pinch a pint of milk from his fridge. She didn’t feel up to facing twenty paparazzi, even if they were after some ancient movie star whom Kate had presumed was long dead of an overdose or something. Mirri Moncur. It was only as Kate pushed open the kitchen door that it dawned on her that Mirri Moncur could easily have been the woman who had come into her shed yesterday. Mirabelle. Mirabelle Moncur. Kate stopped and gazed into the fridge for a long moment, forgetting totally about the milk and wondering how such a weird chain of events might be related. The woman yesterday had looked familiar. Mirabelle could easily be shortened to Mirri. And wasn’t that old actress—Kate struggled to remember her story, knowing only that it involved being very beautiful once and then either dead or reclusive—wasn’t she a famous French film star? But even so, why were the press outside Leonard’s house, even if it had been Mirri Moncur in her shed yesterday?
“Got me.” Kate gave up the conundrum and pulled a pint of milk from Leonard’s fridge to pour into a jug. Enough for a day’s tea and a drop to spare in case . . . well, in case Jake came around this evening and wanted milk in his coffee tomorrow morning. As Kate helped herself to half the pint—she drank a lot of tea; it alleviated thirst, boredom, loneliness, and provided a welcome respite from trying to get the color of a blue whippet she’d been painting just right—she noticed a pile of post on the table in front of her and glanced through to see whether any of it was hers. For once none of the envelopes looked brown. In fact it was her favorite kind of post—the stiff, white, square-enveloped sort that heralded weddings, parties, christenings, or other excuses to spend money on a new dress that she could ill afford. But Kate quickly noticed that most of the envelopes had already been opened, so it clearly wasn’t her post after all. She thought it odd that Leonard hadn’t, as he usually did, opened his letters in his office several hours ago and already responded before she could drag her lazy behind out of bed.
Kate was just about to pick up the milk jug and leave when she spotted a very, very grand-looking crest at the top of one of the stiff cards. Now, Kate wasn’t accustomed to getting letters from dukes and barons, but she did recognize a very important coat of arms when she saw one—working in the gallery, she’d become familiar with the clout of a title, even if it was vaunted by someone whose wallet was as empty as his often mesmerizingly inbred brain. And as she ran her finger over the embossed crest, it bumped along like a very uncomfortable road. Up down, up down. Maybe this was Leonard’s invitation to the queen’s garden party, Kate thought. If it was, she’d have to do something to get him out of the canary cords; there was no way they were appropriate attire for meeting Her Majesty. But as she looked closely at the card, trying to get the gist of what it said without officially prying, Kate was surprised to see that it started with My darling lady . . .
Surely not from the queen to Leonard then? Perhaps from Leonard to a queen, but that was a different matter. Kate couldn’t help herself. Her curiosity got the better of her, so she read on.
My darling lady,
It has been such a very long time! I have missed your charming ways enormously. I have missed your wickedness and laughter and I very much hope that if you are in England, as a little bird tells me you are, you will come and have tea with me at the palace.
With much love
And the letter was finished off with a signature of such grandness that Kate found it impossible to read. Though she imagined that it was written by no less a person than the heir to the throne. She wondered if perhaps Leonard had robbed a museum and taken some ancient artifact—until she noted that it had been written only two days ago. But who was the darling lady in question?
“Ah, good. I was going to come and find you if you didn’t arrive soon.” Kate looked up and saw, not Mirabelle Moncur actually, but a bunch of lilies so vast that the bearer was obscured. Kate bristled and hastily averted her prying eyes from the letter, but it was too late. “Oh, you’ve seen my letter. Isn’t it sweet to be remembered by an old friend? We had a liaison, but that was many years ago.” The bunch of lilies was laid on the table, and Kate saw the equally exotic Mirabelle Moncur where they had been.
“I was looking for my post, actually. I didn’t expect to find someone else’s here,” Kate said defensively as she took in Mirabelle’s penetrating green eyes, which exactly matched the color of her silk robe, which was only just managing to conceal her extraordinary breasts.
“Oh, I’m living here now,” the woman said as she went to the fridge and pulled out a bottle of champagne. “Leonard and I used to be lovers.”
“You did?” Kate said incredulously. For all the obvious reasons. Like Leonard’s being gay.
“I liked his eyes,” Mirri mused, suggesting to Kate that this alone was enough. That liking a man’s eyes meant that no matter how married he might be, what his sexual orientation was, and regardless of whether he liked your eyes or not, you got to sleep with him. Not in Kate’s world, that was for sure. Kate generally had to talk herself into liking abstract bits of a man such as his wrists, or the way he laughed loudly at jokes or had once read a book. Men with nice eyes were generally reserved for girls who spent their days with their nails in a manicure bowl rather than painting biscuit-colored dog fur.
“I see,” said Kate as she watched this stranger pour herself a generous glass of Leonard’s finest vintage champagne and then put a slice of bread in the toaster.
“So when will you be able to make a start?” she said, resting against the counter and appraising Kate carefully.
“Start?”
“Painting Bébé. He’s caught up on all his sleep now, after his dreadful time in quarantine, so we want to start as soon as possible.”
“I’m sorry but I’m a bit lost,” Kate said as she tried to piece everything together. “You’re a friend, sorry, ex-lover of Leonard’s, and you’ve moved in and you’d like me to paint your cat. Is that correct?”
“Yes yes, really you are very slow, aren’t you?” Mirabelle Moncur said as she slathered her toast in at least an inch of butter. “Come and see us at four o’clock on the top floor and we’ll see whether Bébé likes you or not. After all, it’s really up to him.”
“I see . . . well . . .” But before Kate could protest about the absurdity of being interviewed by a rude woman and her cat, Mirabelle Moncur had picked up the ringing telephone.
“Ah, my darling Charles, so sweet of you to invite me for tea. Of course I’d love to come, though it will have to be next week, I’m so terribly busy right now, in fact I’m just dashing out, but call back later and we’ll arrange it, d’accord?” And with that the woman hung up, on whom Kate dreaded to think. But one thing was for sure, she was lying through her teeth. She wasn’t dashing anywhere. She was settling herself down at Leonard’s kitchen table as casually as you like, with a copy of Le Monde, some toast and marmalade, and a glass of champagne. Kate was just about to turn on her heel and leave when she felt something tap her ankle. She glanced down but there was nothing there, though she knew that she hadn’t been imagining it. So she leaned down to see what it was; maybe the famous Bébé. But just as she put her face under the table, a very un-cat-sized paw shot out and batted her hair. Kate screamed and shot up, which served only to make the animal barrel out from under the table and pounce on her feet.
“Holy shit,” Kate yelled, and backed herself into a corner of the room. “That’s not a cat, it’s a tiger,” she went on breathlessly as she tried to keep the animal at bay.
Mirri, who didn’t lift her head from the front page of her newspaper, simply hissed, “Bébé, leave her alone. Come here.” She clicked her fingers near the ground and the cub bounded back on himself and toward the clicking fingers, which he proceeded to lick. “And he is a lion, not a tiger. Which you should remember when you paint him
. Or he will be very upset. Won’t you?” Bébé was then scooped up by Mirabelle and kissed as if he were a relative arriving at an airport after twenty years abroad.
“Well, I think perhaps you should have warned me,” Kate said crossly. She was slightly shocked but in truth she was much more embarrassed. She’d reacted like a complete idiot. And now, as she watched the adorable and unutterably beautiful animal rub noses with his owner, she felt a bit jealous. She wanted to stay and play but she’d made a fool of herself. Perhaps if Mirabelle were a more gracious human being, she would have stayed. And she had clearly forgotten that Kate even existed, because seconds later she lowered Bébé back onto the floor, lit up a cigarette, and proceeded to blow the smoke right in Kate’s face with a force that could have lifted the rooftops off houses. Hurricane Mirabelle, it seemed, had arrived!
“Okay, I’ve found it. Here she is. ‘Mirabelle Moncur. Otherwise known as Mirri Moncur. Goddess of the Silver Screen. The most beautiful woman in the world,’ ” Kate read aloud from the slick white computer screen in front of her. “ ‘Mirabelle, onetime sex kitten, 1960s icon, and lover of every man she tossed her blond mane at, was married three times, appeared in fourteen movies, and retired at the age of forty. The woman who was reputed to have slept with over two hundred men, whose garden was once showered with a million roses from a lover’s helicopter, finally decided that she preferred wildcats to wild oats and went to live in Africa on a wildlife reserve, where she still resides in seclusion from the world’s media.’ ”
“So she’s definitely not dead then?” Tanya, who was sitting next to Kate at the computer, asked.
“Unfortunately not,” Kate said as she clicked onto a stunning black-and-white photograph of the legendary beauty. “She’s sitting in my kitchen eating the marmalade I bought from Fortnum at Christmas.” Kate had finally fled the smoke-filled kitchen when it became apparent that Mirabelle had said all she intended to say to her. She’d then braved the doorstepping paparazzi—who now appeared to have the correct house after all, and were clearly not going to go away until they’d had the first shot in twenty years of Mirabelle Moncur—and gone to her friend Tanya’s house across the park.
Tanya was Kate’s greatest and oldest friend. She was also so pretty, it was wrong. Not just morally wrong that one person should lay claim to the prettiness jackpot quite so unequivocally, but wrong because it just wasn’t right to be that pretty anymore. It wasn’t very now, to be quite honest. To be a true modern beauty required a delicately broken nose, the grainy skin of a party girl, the breasts of a showgirl, and lips so swollen, they looked as if they’d been attacked by a swarm of Japanese killer hornets. But Tanya was truly flawless. She looked like a digitally enhanced Grace Kelly—blue of eye, pink of lip, and hair so softly, wavily blond that people, not just men either, often got the urge to bury their faces in it. Most of them resisted. When they didn’t, her equally beautiful husband, Robbie, would appear by her side and look down on them from his six foot three in threadbare socks and smile until the offender realized that this wasn’t a dream, and then he or she would skulk back to ordinary life in a bit of a daze. Naturally, Robbie was as rich as chocolate mousse.
They were also the happiest couple that Kate knew. He was the publisher of a deeply worthy website devoted to all issues green and unpleasant—if it involved offshore dumping of chemical waste, pesticides in cucumbers, or genetically modified anything, Robbie was the man to take an interest. Not only was he brilliant and handsome, he wanted to save the world. Kate would have hated them if she didn’t know them. But thankfully she and Tanya had met way back when—one summer when both girls were working for peanuts in galleries in Cork Street. They’d both just left art college, and they used to hover outside the back doors of their respective galleries having a sneaky fag beneath the shadow of the dustbins.
One day Kate threw her cigarette butt over her shoulder. It soared up, up, and away over the mountains of rubbish in the Dumpsters and landed in Tanya’s hair, thankfully only singeing a few locks. Thus began a summer of sore feet, stroppy heiresses, indecent proposals from married oil magnates, and—most significantly—a new friendship. The girls would sit on a bench in Bond Street, share sandwiches, and invent shopping lists so grand and jewel-encrusted from the windows of Asprey and Bulgari that they were invariably late back into their galleries and got filthy stares all afternoon from their bosses. Still, in Tanya’s case at least, the filthy stares were replaced by obsequious (and bewildered) smiles when the most eligible and sought-after bachelor in just about every hemisphere you’d care to mention slouched casually into Tanya’s gallery one rainy summer afternoon in search of a small Picasso. And the moment he set foot on the shiny parquet floor, it was obvious that Tanya wasn’t long for the sore-feet, gallery-girl business. Instead a whirlwind of long dinners, weekends of being whisked off down winding country roads to grand houses, and giggly evenings of getting to know one another gave way to snap snap in the newspapers, horror horror that Robbie Hirst was marrying the daughter of a schoolteacher and a doctor’s receptionist (albeit a pretty one), and the pop pop of corks at their low-key but exclusive Chelsea registry office, then on to the Ritz wedding. And nobody had looked back since. The only dark specter looming in the background of the fairy tale was that thus far, and not for want of trying, the Hirsts had not had a baby. But as everyone reassured them, often protesting a little too much for the couple’s liking—there was plenty of time yet.
“But it’s good, isn’t it, if she wants to commission you?” Tanya reasoned with Kate. “I mean, if you paint one cat well, there’s a whole bunch more animals to do out in Africa or wherever.”
“I just don’t like her,” Kate said as the girls left Tanya’s study and headed for the kitchen. Which was a brisk three-minute walk away through the vast, Belsize Park house. Because not only were the girls’ love lives a world apart, but their homes were so incomprehensible to the other that each time one of them visited the other’s place, it felt like an adventure to a strange, undiscovered land. Tanya, cushioned by riches and love, was deprived of the disaster that for many people is everyday life. And she was always riveted to hear what life was like in Kate’s world of boyfriends and living in sheds and getting dumped and having a drawer stuffed with unopened bank statements. So her trips to Kate’s world were filled with wide-eyed, grass-is-always-greener-type admiration for her friend’s fabulously bohemian existence.
“Is that a snail?” Tanya would try not to sound too impressed as she watched one of the many creatures that inhabited Kate’s shed amble leisurely across the floorboards. Equally, when Kate came to Tanya’s house she would run her fingers over the smooth granite surfaces, slide her hands along curved glass walls, and marvel at the five stories of light-infused, vaulting-ceilinged rooms filled with spectacular art, and long for marriage and a future of never having to worry again about not having someone to spend New Year’s Eve with.
“Kate, what are you talking about? You’re never fussy about what work you take on. And it’s not like you’d have to paint her. It’s her cat.”
“I don’t know, she’s just not particularly nice. In fact, she’s a rude old cow and if she ever comes into my home again without knocking, I’ll put her and Bébé on the first banana boat back to Mozambique.”
“She’s that bad?”
“She walked in on me and Jake having sex yesterday.”
“What?” Tanya froze in midair as she was handing Kate her drink.
“Oh yeah. That,” Kate replied sheepishly. She’d been meaning to get around to telling Tanya about her and Jake being back together, but she’d been waiting for the right moment. Like one when Tanya wasn’t listening so she couldn’t be disapproving and disappointed and worried about Kate. “I didn’t mention it, did I?”
“You had sex with Jake?” Tanya put the glass back on the counter and looked incredulously at Kate. “Wait a minute, you saw Jake? You spoke to Jake? You had sex with Jake?”
“Did you ma
ke this barley water yourself?” Kate asked, picking up her drink and hiding her shame behind the rim of the glass.
“Tell me. Everything.” Tanya glared at Kate.
“Not much to tell,” Kate said, trying to make light of the incident but unable to prevent a thrilled grin from spreading slowly across her face when she remembered that she and Jake were on-again.
“I can’t believe you slept with him.” Tanya shook her head as she navigated her way through the French doors, out onto the terrace, and into a garden chair without once taking her eyes off her friend.
“Nor can I, really,” said Kate, who followed obediently in her wake. “I haven’t had a second to think about it. I’ve been too preoccupied with Mirabelle Moncur and the parade of Louis Vuitton steamer trunks that were arriving on Leonard’s doorstep when I left. Honestly, it’s like Rose Dawson in Titanic.” Kate followed Tanya’s lead and sat down. “I hope she’s not planning on staying too long.”
“So Jake,” Tanya reminded her. “What happened? Did he call? Did he show up unannounced? Do you think one of your spells worked?”
Kate looked a bit embarrassed by the last suggestion. When she and Jake had first broken up, Kate visited a psychic who told her that they were two sides of the jagged heart who’d been together in a past life. Which actually made her stop crying for thirty-seven hours. Then she’d had her tarot cards read and they told her that she was currently experiencing widowhood, female sadness, embarrassment, absence, sterility, mourning, and separation. Which was such an impressive list of bad things that even in a spectacularly pessimistic moment, Kate might have struggled to dream up such curses. But she learned her bitter lesson. He who lives by the Harrow Road dies by the Harrow Road. Meaning if you go to cheap, nasty fortune-tellers in run-down parts of town, you can’t expect them to speak of untold riches and love everlasting.
