by Clare Naylor
“Darling, do you think you ought to have that G and T?” Tanya asked, a little concerned by her friend’s flagrantly mad behavior.
“Hang on a minute. Can we start again?” Robbie asked. “Who’s the madwoman in the attic?”
“Oh, she’s some decrepit film star called Mirri Moncur who’s staying with Leonard. If she stays another day I’m moving out,” Kate said bitterly. “Does Joss have his own place, by the way? That would be a distinct bonus.”
“Mirri Moncur. My God, what’s she doing staying with Leonard?” Robbie was suddenly much less laconic than usual. In fact, he was positively overexcited.
“They had sex in the sixties,” Tanya informed him.
“Everyone had sex in the sixties,” Robbie said. “Is that the real Mirabelle Moncur?”
“Well, if she were only a hologram I’d be much happier,” Kate said. “But unfortunately yes, she’s real.”
“Can I meet her?” Robbie was sitting on the edge of his chair. “I can’t believe you’re both being so cool about this. Kate, Mirri Moncur is staying with you. Why did nobody tell me?”
“Why would we? She’s just some washed-up actress.” Tanya sat back in her chair and picked up her phone. “So, Kate, you really want to go on a date with Joss? Because I’ll call him right now if you do.”
“Yes I do,” Kate said decisively. “I have to break the Jake habit sooner or later, don’t I? And it’s not that I was paying any attention whatsoever to Mirri’s advice, but when you said that I was being stupid . . .”
“I said delusional, Kate, not stupid,” Tanya said guiltily.
“Same thing, anyway . . .”
“Would you two just stop talking a minute please?” The girls looked up at Robbie, who was standing in his long jeans and lilac rugby socks in the middle of the room, holding a remote control in his hand. They stopped talking at once.
“Watch this,” he said with unusual authority for such a mild man, sliding a DVD into the player and clicking a button on the remote. Then he pulled down the blinds on the sitting room windows and plunged the room into darkness. Moments later Kate and Tanya watched as a black-and-white movie began.
“What is this?” Tanya whispered loudly to her husband, who had perched himself importantly on the arm of her chair, his eyes riveted to the screen.
“Ssshhhh. You’ll see,” he said. And they did. As the credits began to roll, the words
MIRABELLE MONCUR
came up on the screen in large white letters and were followed by the flash of what seemed like several hundred exotic and implausible names of French actors. Then, just as the girls were about to go to sleep, the film began. With a young woman lying naked on a bed fast asleep.
“Wow, look at that cinematography.” Robbie leaned back on Tanya’s chair.
“Ssssh,” said Tanya, who was trying to concentrate on the subtitles flashing across the screen.
“Look at that body,” said Kate, who had curled her legs underneath her in a bid to get comfortable.
The woman on the screen was quite simply the most stunning creature that any of them had ever seen. She couldn’t have been any more than nineteen years old, but she literally steamed with sexuality, and as she stalked about the bedroom in the movie, the camera clinging to her naked curves more closely than any underwear could have done, Kate, Tanya, and Robbie watched in awed silence. They continued to be mesmerized for the next three hours and ten minutes as the naked girl acquired clothes and lovers and experienced heartbreak and isolation and just about every sort of misery that the French could dream up. And boy, were they good at that. By the end of the film, when it was definitely twilight beyond the curtains, the three of them were totally wrung out emotionally. When the screen finally flashed to black and Robbie reached for his remote control and pressed STOP, Kate rubbed her eyes.
“Oh my God,” she said as she stretched her legs out in front of her. “That was incredible.”
“She’s amazing,” Tanya said as she went to the window and pulled back the curtains.
“And you think she’s some washed-up old starlet?” Robbie asked.
“I’d have slept with her,” Tanya said. Robbie raised his eyebrows.
“Well, just because she was the most beautiful woman ever doesn’t mean that she’s not really annoying to live with,” Kate said. “But I will admit she’s pretty impressive. She was an amazing actress, too.”
“Sure was.” Robbie looked very pleased with himself. “So when can I come around for dinner and meet her?”
“Oh, you’ll have to get to the back of the queue. Behind Jonah Sinclair and the Royals,” Kate told Robbie.
“I’m more than happy to stand in line. I’d have to be pretty inventive to get noticed, though. One of her lovers used to shower her garden in red roses every day from his helicopter.”
“Yes, but that kind of thing would never happen in real life,” Kate said wistfully. Right now she’d settle for a bunch of the things in some cheap cellophane wrapping.
“It might, but I’m not sure Jake’s your man.” Robbie guided Kate down the corridor toward the kitchen where Tanya was.
“Now, darling, are you staying for supper?” Tanya called out. “Only I think that we should brief you on Joss a bit. Before your date.” Robbie and Kate, who were just walking in the kitchen door, looked at one another suspiciously.
“Isn’t it better if Kate’s a bit more spontaneous?” Robbie asked, and kissed Tanya on the back of the head as she unloaded some celery and bacon from the fridge. “If she gets to know him herself?”
“Oh, you’re such a spoilsport, Rob,” Tanya moaned. “We can tell her that he prefers women to be quite conservatively dressed, though, can’t we? I mean, it’s only fair.”
“Well, I’m hardly the miniskirt type, am I?” Kate said as she pulled at her combat pants to demonstrate her point.
“That’s true,” Robbie said grimly, but before Kate could leap to attack him for the implied criticism, he’d moved on. “And by the way, do you still mean to tell me that Mirabelle Moncur doesn’t know what she’s talking about when it comes to men?”
“Yeah, Rob might be right about that,” Tanya said as she heaped the vegetables into a saucepan to make the only thing she could cook—soup.
“Just because she’s had loads of experience doesn’t mean she’s an expert,” Kate argued. Even though she had to admit to herself that Mirri had been depressingly accurate about Jake. “Anyway, where do you think that Joss will take me? I haven’t been taken out since . . . Well, actually I don’t think I’ve ever been taken out. Jake and I just went out. And before him the men I dated couldn’t afford to take women out. So this is a whole new thing for me,” Kate said with forced optimism while Rob and Tanya looked at her with what they hoped was affection but was really ill-concealed pity.
Mirabelle Moncur was not feeling like the most beautiful, experienced woman in world when she looked in the mirror that evening. She was too busy pulling her hair back from her face with the palm of her hand to examine the gray roots beneath the blond. She’d have to find a bottle of bleach soon or things would get ugly. Because quite aside from the possibility of the world (and that included her cats and friends as well as the paparazzi and the curious millions) noticing her gray hair, Mirri was much more concerned that she herself would have to face up to the irreversible onset of old age. She hadn’t quite come to terms with the possibility that there hadn’t been a single naturally blond hair left on her head for years.
Strangely enough, she’d begun to go gray at thirty-five, which isn’t old age by anyone’s standards, but at that time it had been only the odd hair here and there and she’d just pulled them out by the roots with irritation and asked her hairdresser to make her blonder. There had, though, come a point somewhere around her forty-fifth birthday, just after she’d moved to Africa, when she’d made what she considered “the decision”—either to grow old gracefully as God intended, to embrace the graying and the fading and the wi
dening of herself as being as much a part of nature as the seasons, the rain, the elephants who pulled up the lettuce that she persisted in trying to grow in her garden, or—and the alternative required almost as much courage and certainly more commitment—to fight it. To fill her life with the bottles and facialists and creams and exercise regimes that would hold it all together until the day the embalmer came and let her off the hook. Thankfully the effort paid off, and by the time she was bleached and tinted and taken her daily walk and applied the lipstick, she looked pretty stunning. And not just “for her age.” She looked stunning by anyone’s standards. Her top secret, though, the trick she never let anyone in on, was smoking and eating butter. By doing these things that she loved and could never have the discipline to give up, she also fooled everyone into thinking that she was oblivious to vanity. That she didn’t spare a second thought about her looks, and it was this, above all other things, that she believed made her an attractive woman at the age of sixty. Certainly attractive enough to cause Jonah Sinclair to call her four times today and beg her to go to dinner with him.
“I can’t, I have dinner with a friend tonight,” she had said unapologetically. Jonah was sweet and they’d had a perfectly nice time in the hammock, but when you’d been wined and dined and made love to by as many Jonahs as Mirri had, it barely seemed worth putting on your lipstick for. But Jonah, to whose ears such words were music, was charmingly, amusingly persistent. Eventually she gave in because he made her laugh with his outrageous begging.
“No matter what happens to me in the rest of my life, if I don’t get to take you out to dinner tonight and kiss your cheek—just your cheek, by the way—one last time, well, then I’ll die an unfulfilled man. I’ll sit in my armchair smoking my pipe, looking out the window at the age of eighty, and remember the woman I never had,” he had complained down the phone.
“You had me last night.” Mirri had taken a drag on her cigarette and smiled as she wandered around her room, stroked Bébé, and caressed the rug with her toes.
“Ah, but last night I didn’t know that I was going to have you. It wasn’t the same. I need to know beforehand. That way I can commit it to memory and play it over and over again for the rest of my days.”
“Maybe you should just bring a video camera,” Mirri joked.
“You’re so cynical. Don’t you understand that these things are once in a lifetime?” he said, with an edge of humor in his voice. Mirri laughed and resisted telling him that on the contrary, they’d happened many times in her life and she’d forgotten most of them, even the ones that had been videotaped.
“Okay, if you must. I need to eat, I suppose.”
“Darling, you’re so romantic and you make me feel so good about myself.” Jonah laughed loudly. “I’ll pick you up at eight.”
“Okay.” Mirri feigned indifference and was suddenly glad that she’d be seeing him again. She liked to dress up and be flirted with.
“Thank you, by the way,” Jonah said, and hung up.
So now Mirri had to find a headscarf for the evening. She’d find a hairdresser tomorrow. Thankfully she’d been famed for her pioneering fashion in her day, so whatever she wore was seen as a style statement rather the desperate remedy it really was. In fact, she’d been amused yesterday to find herself wandering down Bond Street and noticing the sundresses and capri pants and hot pants of her youth in all the store windows. And she wasn’t wrong in thinking that forty years later she was still influencing what women wore. Even though the world was an entirely different place and she’d been vilified for some of her outfits, now there seemed to be nothing you could do to shock. Which rather disappointed her if she thought about it for too long. No wonder girls like Kate who lived in the shed were so dull. They had nothing to rebel against.
“Tonight you’ll stay at home, my darling,” Mirri said to Bébé as she nuzzled into his neck. “Mummy is going to have a little fun.”
Chapter Seven
Kate’s evening had started out so promisingly. Well, certainly in the respect that she had enjoyed a lovely shower, and the sky had glowed with the pale pink of the setting sun above her. She’d even bothered to slather on a slick of body lotion in case her shins got lucky later and collided with Joss’s caressing hands. To boot she was also doing an admirable job of keeping the memory of Jake at bay. And she wore a very nice, clean denim skirt, a rather neat pink cashmere sweater, and even conceded to some beaded flip-flops instead of her usual sneakers, bearing in mind what Tanya had said about Joss liking his dates on the conservative side. She was doing all she could to promote goodwill.
“Are you going to church?” Leonard had asked when she emerged from her shed carrying a fake Kelly bag that she’d picked up at Camden Market years ago.
“No,” she said quite huffily; she’d been quite impressed with her respectability when she’d checked out her reflection in the glass panes of her shed. “I have a date.” Leonard was sitting with Mirri drinking Pimm’s on the lawn. They had polished off half a pitcher and were smiling inanely at her. Mirri was very done up and was looking Kate up and down with her usual expression of incomprehension.
“Is he a vicar, then?” Leonard grinned cheekily.
“Get lost.” Kate smoothed down her skirt primly and made for Leonard’s glass, which was on the table. She took a slug of Pimm’s and replaced it. “He’s a banker and he likes art and Tanya thinks that we’ll get on like a house on fire. He’s husband material apparently,” Kate informed him.
“Why would you want a husband?” Mirri, whose snooty French gaze Kate had been trying to avoid, asked. “They’re very passé.”
“Because I don’t really want to end up a lonely old woman.” Kate claimed victory for herself.
Mirri was undaunted. “Ah, you need a man to take care of you financially. You just want to marry for money,” she said disingenuously.
“Absolutely not. In fact, in the past I’ve been the one to support my boyfriend financially, if you must know.” But Kate instantly regretted saying this when she saw the pitying look on Mirri’s face. And for once she seemed genuine. Kate hurried to sound less pathetic. “What I’m saying is that I’m an independent woman but I still want a husband. I want companionship.”
“I find lovers to be very good companions. And animals and friends, too. But I always found husbands to be the poorest company.” Mirri cast her mind back over the decades and thought how dull her lovers had become as soon as she married them. They suddenly expected her to know where their socks were and what they wanted for dinner. In short, they wanted her to be their mother. “I would never marry again.”
“Well, I intend to choose mine well,” Kate said pointedly.
“I think maybe Kate wants babies,” Leonard, whose face was blushing from the excess of alcohol, blurted out. He was usually much more restrained, but Mirri’s influence seemed to be making him reckless.
“She has years before the babies have to be born,” Mirri said, and pulled a piece of apple from her glass with her fingers. “I just don’t understand why all these young women are interested in is finding husbands and having children. It’s an obsession. My niece in France is the same. It was different when I was young. I had to be married; otherwise I’d have had to live with my parents forever. But now you can live where you like, travel where you like, shave your head, wear no clothes, swim with dolphins, and live in a castle and have babies with your best girlfriends if you want to, but all you all want to do is what my generation fought tooth and nail not to do—think about men’s socks and babies’ nappies.” Mirri shook her head.
Kate was silenced for a moment. She couldn’t deny that what the old tart was saying was true. The one thing that kept her awake with knots in her stomach at four o’clock in the morning was the fear that she might never meet a man who would want to marry her. In fact, she’d officially given herself another two years before she dropped her standards. Then she would settle for someone who didn’t excite her as much as Jake. Someone like J
oss, for instance.
“Well, I don’t see what’s so wrong with wanting stability,” Kate said and was about to leave when Mirri had the last word.
“Nothing, I suppose.” She sucked a mouthful of her drink through a straw. “Just as long as it’s not at the expense of love. Because that would be stupid. And you may be lots of things, Kate, but you’re not stupid.” Mirri smiled knowingly and Kate thought how beautiful she looked. She understood for a moment how men must feel to be on the receiving end of her attention. Because when she said something even vaguely flattering it made you want to jump up and down with delight.
“Thanks. I think,” Kate said disarmed. “Though I’m still keeping my fingers crossed that he’ll be husband material rather than just a shag-on-the-hammock. See you both later.”
“ ’Bye, darling,” Leonard slurred, raising his glass as Kate turned and left.
“She’ll learn.” Mirri smiled to herself. “But she’s got a long way to go.”
Kate had arranged to meet Joss at Brooks. It was a very smart Gentleman’s Club in St. James’s, and she was glad that she’d decided on the conservative route. She put on her best Queen’s English voice for the concierge and smiled like Julie Andrews.
“I’m here to meet Joss Armstrong,” she said.
“Follow me, miss,” the man said without looking at her, but also, rather cleverly, without condescension. That was what was so brilliant about these lovely old English institutions, Kate realized: You really could get away with almost anything because the staff were so unerringly well mannered. Quickie on the sweeping staircase? Not a flicker of interest from the gentlemen in black suits. Leonard was always boasting about the outrageous and debauched behavior that went on in his club. But then Leonard’s club didn’t admit women, so Kate had no way of knowing whether he was telling the truth.
