The Goddess Rules

by Clare Naylor

  And finally, in a desperate moment, Kate bought a love spell from a witchcraft website. She had burned a candle every day and night on an altar that consisted of Jake’s guitar plectrum and a photograph of him in a pub in Scotland. So now, as she looked at Tanya’s expectant face, Kate felt her toes curl a bit because although she was still in love with Jake, she was no longer in the insane phase of mourning. That shameless period where the only way to get by is to believe in the supernatural and focus on your chakras. Men, in the same phase of mourning, simply have sex a lot. With other women. But straight after the breakup with Jake, Kate had been prepared to try anything. She had also gone to Harvey Nichols, where the shop assistant had handed her a bag with an eight-hundred-pound dress in it. Which wasn’t witchcraft but felt so good that it should have been.

  “I don’t really think that it was one of the spells working,” Kate conceded. “I think it was more because it was his birthday and the idea of not having sex would have made him a monumental failure in his own eyes,” she added pragmatically. If there was one thing that she had learned during her relationship with Jake, it was pragmatism. Which is not the same as good things like learning to give unconditionally or learning to share your deepest dreams with another person. But it was something, she supposed.

  “A sympathy fuck?” Tanya asked, horrified.

  “No, I think he really wanted to do it,” Kate reasoned.

  “Good God, Kate, I meant you gave him a sympathy fuck.”

  “Oh, right.” Kate nodded. Though she wasn’t sure that it was the case. She had been just as in need of last night’s exchange as Jake had. If not more. After all, it had been Jake who had walked out of her life. Not the other way around.

  “So, what, you guys went out to dinner and then . . . ?” Tanya prompted.

  “We didn’t go out to dinner at all. Actually.” Kate began to look sheepish. “Not dinner. No. He called by on his way home the next morning. Just to say hello.” Read have sex for “say hello.”

  “And then he invited you to dinner? Right?”

  “Why are you so obsessed with dinner, Tan?” Kate asked disingenuously.

  “It’s a euphemism for Jake taking you seriously. To prove he wasn’t just calling back so he could scratch his birthday itch. See?” Tanya was reluctant to make Kate suffer any more than necessary. It would probably take about two days, she estimated, for Kate to realize she’d made a huge mistake in backpedaling with Jake to a time when she was vulnerable, at his mercy, and unspeakably unhappy.

  “Tanya, I’m still in love with him.”

  “I know, sweetie.” Tanya let out a deep sigh. “And everyone’s allowed to slip up once in a while. But you know that if you got back together with him, it wouldn’t be any different from before.”

  “Before was okay.” Kate thought of the way Jake had kissed her face all over last night. At least thirty times. She knew that he loved her. He was just confused.

  “He was mean to you,” Tanya reminded her.

  “That was just his sense of humor.”

  “Except it wasn’t funny.”

  “He made me laugh.”

  “He would go for days without calling you. Then freak out if you complained.”

  “He wrote songs for me.”

  “He never once told you he loved you.”

  “His parents were divorced. He has a hard time with emotions. It doesn’t mean he doesn’t feel it,” Kate persevered.

  “He said he was emotionally incapable of buying you flowers.”

  “The sex was amazing.”

  “That’s a moot point. We’re talking about love.” Tanya focused her wide blue gaze on Kate.

  “It didn’t feel like a moot point last night. In fact, it felt like the whole point.”

  “Except, Kate, you’re not the sort of girl who’s capable of detaching. Sex love love sex. It’s all mixed up like a pint of sick where you’re concerned.”

  “Thanks for equating my love life with vomit.” Kate bit her lip and looked down at her cell phone, which she knew would be viewed as closely and regularly as the Mona Lisa hanging in the Louvre in the next few days until Jake called.

  “Jake’s a lovable tosser.” Tanya drained her coffee cup. “Leave him for someone who can’t do any better. What about Joss Armstrong? I really think that if Robbie and I invited you both over to dinner, you’d get on like a house on fire.”

  “He’s not my type.”

  “Meaning he might make you happy.”

  “Meaning he’d never make me smile.”

  “The offer stands. I know he fancies you. After Robbie’s birthday party he asked who you were.” Tanya nodded cheerily.

  “I have a cat to paint. I don’t think I’ve got time for a relationship.”

  “I’m talking about dinner.”

  “Thanks for trying, Tan.”

  “You’ve got an eyelash on your cheek.” Tanya leaned forward and gently flicked the lash onto the back of her hand for Kate to blow and make a wish.

  “Here goes.” Kate blew the eyelash away and closed her eyes. She should have wished that she could be like Tanya. Happy with a good man. Someone like Joss Armstrong who had almost-sandy hair, brown eyes, athletic parts, and a degree in philosophy. She knew that Joss was very good news. But instead she wished for what she knew. She wished that she’d be having hot sex with Jake again very soon. That they’d be knocking back vodka shots together at his local bar until she couldn’t feel her legs. That sometime in the near future she’d be lounging on his sofa painting her toenails silver while he played records for her. Because that was all Kate was interested in. Career? Money? Joss Armstrong? Third World debt? Important art? No, just Jake.

  “So what’s this Mirabelle Moncur character doing here anyway?” Tanya asked. “Did she come all this way to have her cat painted by you?”

  “Oh, yeah, didn’t you know, people travel far and wide to have their pets put in oils by Kate Disney?” She laughed. “Truly, I’ve no idea. But Leonard’s never mentioned her before and she claims to have been his lover. So your guess is as good as mine.”

  Chapter Three

  “Darling, I came to tell you that we have a visitor.” Leonard, dressed today in a lilac sweater and tweed trousers, stood awkwardly in the doorway of Kate’s shed as she scrubbed her hands clean. Since she’d arrived back from Tanya’s her phone hadn’t so much as winked at her with a text message, let alone heralded a call from Jake, so she’d immersed herself in a brush-cleaning scheme of such epic proportions that she was now out of turps, and, it seemed, most of the skin on her knuckles. Still, as she laid her brushes out to dry on the windowsill of the shed, the sable bristles gleamed in the late-afternoon sunlight and she felt a sense of satisfaction that lifted her spirits at least an inch off the floor.

  “Ah yes, Madame Moncur. We’ve already met. I met her lion as well. In the kitchen this morning.”

  “I feared you might have.” Leonard walked over to the stuffed zebra in the corner and stroked him. “Sorry I wasn’t here to warn you and make the introductions—only she didn’t really tell me that she was coming at all.”

  “She just showed up?” Clearly Kate and Jake weren’t the only victims of Mirabelle’s unannounced arrivals.

  “I mentioned to her in a letter a month ago that you were living with me and that you painted animals and she sent a reply suggesting that she might like a portrait done and, lo and behold, I come home this morning and there she is, on my lounge chair without her top on.” Leonard still bore the look of surprise, but he was too much of a gentleman to ever complain. “Anyway, it’s a delight to see her. She really is a very dear old friend.”

  “How dear, exactly?” Kate rubbed a ton of lotion into her hands and raised a cheeky eyebrow at Leonard.

  “What do you mean?” Leonard sat back in Kate’s armchair and looked a little uncomfortable.

  “Were you really lovers?” she asked, not for a moment expecting him to say that they were. She just thought that M
irabelle was the kind of woman who lied unconscionably about anything that came to mind.

  “Is that what she told you?” Leonard looked serious.

  “Yup.”

  “Actually we were.”

  “Oh, you were not.” At which point Kate stopped rubbing cream into her hands.

  “I was.” As far as Kate knew, Leonard had never so much as held hands with a woman. That he might have had sex with one of the greatest female icons of all time, next to Helen of Troy, was incomprehensible. He liked only very hirsute, very dark, very handsome men. And never a hair under six feet tall. “Did she drug you?” Kate giggled as she pulled on her sneakers.

  “The year was nineteen hundred and sixty-seven. Biarritz. I’d had three glasses of red wine and she began to squeeze my knee beneath the dinner table. At first I thought it was her second husband feeling me up. He was a terribly attractive Italian gentleman.” Kate pretended to organize her canvases. She knew that if she paid too much attention to Leonard’s story he’d become self-conscious and cut it short. So she feigned nonchalance as his very proper English tones clipped around the edges of the tale of his seduction by Mirabelle Moncur. “Then she began purring something in French in my ear and her hand moved upward, as it were.”

  “Poor Leonard.” Kate turned and bit her lip to stop herself from laughing.

  “Precisely. Well, she insisted that if I were an English gentleman as I seemed, I would walk her home. I don’t know what became of the Italian film director husband. I think perhaps he was having it away with a young novelist who was at dinner, too. Not that Mirri cared. She’d set her cap at me.” Leonard looked up and scowled at Kate, warning her not to laugh.

  “She told me it was your eyes that did it.”

  “Unfortunately it wasn’t only my eyes she wanted.” Leonard shook his head. “So I walked her home. As I’d been brought up to do. And when I got to her gate she began walking a few paces ahead of me. Half dancing, half walking. She used to be a dancer when she was younger. She still has a very haughty demeanor.”

  “I’d noticed,” Kate muttered, nodding for Leonard to continue.

  “Well, first she took off her scarf and draped it around my neck. Then off came her skirt.” Leonard pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed at his brow. “She did have absolutely splendid legs. Rather like Michelangelo’s David, you know. Muscular. Rather boyish hips. Well, I was beginning to find the whole thing rather intriguing. Then she began to tug at my tie. In the manner of a kitten, cheeky but rather charming.”

  “Leonard, you fancied her.”

  “She had a certain charm.”

  “Wow.” Kate was impressed. This was a miracle of biblical proportions.

  “Anyway she pawed at my tie. Dropped it to the ground. Then she proceeded to unbutton her blouse. Needless to say she wasn’t wearing a brassiere.”

  “Needless to say,” Kate echoed.

  “And then, well, before you know it we’re standing naked beside her kitchen table and she’s, well . . . perched on the table and she’s got her legs wrapped around me and, well, what could I do?”

  “You could have told her that she wasn’t your type. To put it mildly,” Kate suggested.

  “She did smell rather wonderful, too. Rather feral. If that’s not too crass a word.” Leonard was back in 1967 and quite enjoying the trip down memory lane, Kate suspected.

  “Woo hoo!”

  “Indeed. There was a lot of woo hoo for the next two days, as a matter of fact. Mirabelle Moncur was not known for letting her conquests escape until she had drunk the cup dry. Then she used to toss them carelessly back into the real world. Often they were found stumbling around the streets of Biarritz days later. Spent and bewildered.”

  “Holy moley.” Kate whistled. She’d heard of man-eaters but this should have been a wildlife documentary all on its own. “So what happened to you?” she asked, wondering how it was that Leonard had emerged not only alive but also as a friend of this woman.

  “Well, as I was gathering up my trousers and tie on the third day and she was sitting looking very bored on her veranda painting her toenails, I thanked her for having me to stay.”

  “Ever the gentleman,” Kate interrupted fondly.

  “Indeed. And then I said it had been a most novel experience as I’d never been with a woman before.”

  “And?”

  “She said, ‘You are ’omosexual?’ And I replied, ’Mais oui, madame.’ At which point she let forth a peal of laughter, spilled nail polish all over her dress, and hugged me like a long-lost brother. And we’ve been firm friends ever since.” Leonard took a deep breath and uncrossed his legs, signaling the end of the story. “I think she was enormously flattered and amused. As I said, she has a great sense of humor.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.” Kate leaned down and planted a kiss on Leonard’s forehead. “That completely cheered me up. Thank you.”

  “Were you miserable, my dear?” Leonard stood up and made for the door. It was five o’clock and no word from Jake.

  “I don’t seem to have the same effect on men I sleep with as Mirabelle Moncur.”

  “Beauty is a terrible curse, Kate. It usually comes in inverse proportion to happiness.” Leonard let himself out of the shed. “I’ve spoken to Mirri and she’d love to have supper with us this evening. If you’re available, so you two can get to know one another properly and talk about the painting.”

  “All right,” Kate agreed, “I’ll give her another chance. I’m sure we just got off on the wrong foot.”

  “Good, good. Come up at about seven, then. I’ll rustle up something special.”

  In agreeing to dinner Kate had also officially buried the hope that Jake would call today. He probably slept all day, or felt hungover, or had to be at a band rehearsal, or something. He’d call tomorrow. And if not then, definitely by Wednesday, no matter what. Then Kate thought over Leonard’s comment about beauty and happiness as she watched him walk down the garden path. Did he mean that Kate should be grateful she wasn’t beautiful? Or that she was unhappy because she was so damned attractive? She suspected rather miserably that he meant the former.

  As Leonard hummed at the chopping board, arranging sprigs of rosemary for the lamb shanks that he was preparing for the welcome supper, on the top floor of his house Mirabelle Moncur was languishing in her bath, the vetiver mists enveloping her, her disheveled blond hair piled on top of her head and her breasts, still showstoppingly spectacular, submerged beneath the warm, fragrant water. She looked around the room—at the ancient blue carpet on the bathroom floor, the huge, dusty pot of geraniums on the windowsill, and the stack of crossword books by the loo—and realized how much she’d missed England. It had been at least twenty years since she’d been here. She liked the big shabby houses with overstuffed furniture and civilized rituals—like afternoon tea and gin and tonic before dinner and taking walks. In Africa she might get in her Land Rover at sunset and set out for a hair-raising drive—she was, after all, a Parisian, and no amount of living abroad or dating race drivers had ever divested her of the appalling habits of her native city—around her property to check that there weren’t a bunch of poachers lurking or an injured rhino beneath a baobab tree. But nothing, in Mirri’s book, came close to a walk in England. So she decided to reacquaint herself with that ritual and take a stroll before supper. In fact, she’d even take Bébé; the poor thing needed some fresh air and exercise.

  Mirri had thought very carefully about bringing the cub away so soon after the death of his mother last month. Although she’d kept wildcats since she was in her twenties, she’d never removed one from his native environment before. All her cats had been found looking dejected in zoos or in circuses on the outskirts of industrial French towns. When she heard any story of ill treatment or brutality or cramped, dirty cages, she would jump in her car, get out her map, and race to the scene. Once there she would offer the zookeepers or circus owners so much money for the animal that they couldn’t r
efuse her. And if that failed, she was, quite simply, Mirabelle Moncur—the very sight of her, even in civilian clothes of jeans and a half-unbuttoned man’s shirt, would often be all that was needed to persuade them to unlock the poor animal’s cage and help her put the creature in the back of her Citroën estate. She’d then take them back to the house in Biarritz, where they’d join the other strays and refugees—in the eyes of the world she was fast becoming a pampered eccentric, but in reality she was much more St. Francis of Assisi.

  But with Bébé it was different. He’d never known a world outside the game reserve and she wasn’t sure that it was wise to bring him with her to England, but she had consulted the vet at home and grilled him exhaustively before she decided that, on balance, the trauma of being in a city and of enduring the flight from Africa was actually not so great as the trauma of being without her, his surrogate mother, for what might end up being rather a long time. Depending, of course, on how long it was going to take her to complete the business she’d really come to London for. And now she had Bébé here, safely through customs and happily rolling on the damp bath mat beside her, she was determined to make him feel as happy and secure as possible. So just as soon as she got out of the bath, she was going to take him with her for a walk. Just down the road. Not too far, but enough for him to stretch his legs. She knew that she might encounter a bit of curiosity from people, but she would just have to handle that. She’d spent years dealing with unwanted attention, but if you just avoided eye contact you were fine. She’d bypass the paparazzi by going out of the back gate and straight onto Primrose Hill and she’d keep Bébé on the leash she’d ordered from Paris. He’d soon get used to it. And after all, when she was younger she’d rarely left home without Shiva, her first-ever lion cub, prancing fabulously beside her. So where was the harm?

  After her bath Mirri pulled on one of the strappy sundresses that were her trademark in the 1960s and which she still looked a million dollars in, locked Bébé onto his navy-blue Hermès leash, and headed for Primrose Hill. It was a struggle for anyone walking by to make up his mind where to stare. If he was heading home from a nasty day at work or was adding up how much money he owed in bills this month, then he was invariably looking down at the pavement and catching sight of Bébé first. He’d have a second of thinking he was hallucinating, look again, and then, when he realized it was in fact a lion cub on a leash, he’d look up to see if this was part of some circus procession striding down the High Street or whether the zookeeper from nearby Regents Park Zoo was taking his work home to meet the wife and kids.