The Goddess Rules (20 page)

“I’m really sorry, but I just can’t do it this afternoon.” She bit her lip apologetically. “It’s a friend who I’ve promised to help out . . . with . . . with something . . .” She sounded unconvinced even to herself but she couldn’t exactly give him full details about having promised to go with Tanya to the hospital for her laparoscopy to see if there was any medical reason why she was failing to conceive. It was just a bit too much information.

“Sure, okay. Of course,” Louis said. “Well, maybe another time then.”

“I can do it tomorrow afternoon,” Kate said hurriedly, to prove that she wasn’t unwilling, just unable. “I have a session with Mirri and Bébé first thing and then I’m all yours.”

“Okay, great.” Louis said. “Shall I meet you there? At the Tate?”

“Perfect. About two?” Kate stood up with her cup in her hand. Even though she hadn’t quite finished her coffee, it was clear that their meeting was at an end. They’d fallen back into behaving with the awkwardness of strangers, and all the silliness from earlier had vanished. Kate couldn’t wait to get out.

“Great.” Louis stood and ushered her through the rooms and back into his studio. “Tomorrow it is then.” He stood at the top of the staircase, with his glossy black bangs falling in his eyes and his loose jeans hanging frayed over bare feet. Kate suddenly felt like the least cool girl in school. Louis was this hip, forward-thinking conceptual artist with an entrée to every party or club he couldn’t be bothered to attend who hung out with beautiful, interesting girls. She was the hangover from his college days. The friend you couldn’t quite bear to take to Goodwill. Like the great aunt who painted pictures of bulldogs and kittens, which you hung on your wall only when she was coming around to visit. Try as she might to reassure herself that she made people happy with her paintings of their pets, Kate felt like a huge nerd right now.

“Yeah, see you tomorrow,” she said dumbly. When she closed the front door she unclenched her knuckles to reveal four red crescents printed on either palm where her fingernails had dug in. Something about Louis made her nervous. She wondered if his not speaking very much was actually a tactic, a way of making people think he was deep and enigmatic. Unlike Kate, whose chatter seemed to bulge from her conversation like an overstuffed sofa most of the time. She closed her mind off to the thought that tomorrow she’d have to find something to talk to him about once their banter went into remission. Perhaps tonight she’d read up on postmodernism for some pointers.

Chapter Fifteen

Thankfully for Kate she had no time to dwell on her inadequacies. She had to make it back to Tanya’s in Belsize Park or she’d miss the appointment. So without so much as a thought for her personal safety, she hared out into the chaos of Ladbroke Grove traffic once more and set off back through the park. Thankfully Jake was no longer propping up the doorway of Rough Trade, but Kate kept her head down anyway, in case he emerged from a bar or car or petrol station.

“Darling, I’m on my way,” Kate yelled down her phone once she was out of harm’s way and in the relative quiet of the park.

“You’re not cycling and talking are you, Kate?” Tanya asked disapprovingly.

“I can’t hear you, there’s wind in my earpiece,” Kate shouted, in order to avoid a telling-off. “I’ll be there in fifteen. I might need to borrow a T-shirt, though, I’m a bit sweaty.”

“Lovely,” Tanya said. “I’ll dig one out.” Kate hoped for a Chloe piece or maybe even Balenciaga.

“Gotta dash or I’ll get killed.” She put her phone in the back pocket of her skirt as a policeman looked fit to arrest her. She smiled at him and pedaled off madly.

Tanya was waiting by the large front window of her house with a nervous smile on her face. She rushed to the door when Kate sped up the drive on her bike and chained it to the drainpipe.

“I’ve got you a top out. It ought to fit.” Tanya ushered Kate in the front door and into her hallway, which was practically bursting with sunlight filtering through the stained-glass window above the door.

“Thanks. Are you driving?” Kate said as she pulled off her grubby T-shirt and screwed it into a ball.

“I thought we’d take a cab. I’ve got one coming in a minute or so.” Tanya was shifting her weight from foot to foot.

“Don’t be nervous, it’s just routine, right?” Kate asked as she pulled Tanya’s T-shirt—a very understatedly beautiful Dries Van Noten, she noted with delight—over her head. She could actually use a new bra, too, she thought as she caught sight of her rather dubious number in the mirror. It was the old rule of thumb that dictated that once you painted the baseboard, the rest of the room looked rather shabby. Kate simply had to look at an item of Tanya’s clothing to realize that she was a nonsensical sartorial mess. And despite her new subscription to Mirri’s way of doing things—the disheveled, careless messy way—she suspected that tatty, graying underwear did not fall into even Mirri’s category.

“Well, yes. But God, Kate, I’m petrified. What if something really terrible is wrong with me? What if they say there’s no hope of me ever conceiving?” Tanya closed her eyes miserably and Kate went to hug her. “I didn’t sleep a wink last night. Robbie had a meeting at seven this morning. God knows how he got up.”

“Sweetheart, there’s always hope. They’re just doctors. And if they say that all’s fine, then great. It just may take a bit more time before you and Robbie have a child. And even if they say that there is something wrong. Well, what do they know? They make mistakes all the time.” Kate stroked her friend’s hair gently and then looked at her face.

“Do you promise?” Tanya, who was always so indomitable, so practical, was so desperate for reassurance that Kate was overcome with the urge to take away her pain.

“Darling, it’s never the end of the road with these things. We both know of a million people who’ve been told that they can never have babies and then by some miracle they do. It happens every day. I had a friend who went away on holiday right after the doctors told her that she was infertile—she and her husband got drunk, went skydiving, and had the wildest time and guess what? She got pregnant. Good God, look at Cherie Blair. She got pregnant at forty-five. Madonna did it at forty-two. You’ve got an absolute age to go yet even if there is something wrong. Science will catch up with you or something like that.”

“I hope so.” Tanya looked defeated for a moment and then jumped when the cab honked loudly in the street outside. “Better get going.”

“Tell you what, in no time you’re going to be cursing the afternoons you spent worrying about silly things like this,” Kate said brightly. “Because you won’t have a moment to spare between nappies and bottles and sore nipples.”

“God, I hope you’re right.” Tanya smiled weakly.

“Just don’t come complaining to me,” Kate said drily as she climbed into the cab beside her friend. “Because I’ll be off raging like a rock star with one of my many lovers. Or more likely on my yacht in Saint-Tropez with an indecently young boyfriend.”

“Really?” Tanya asked, still too tense to be completely with it.

“Hardly, considering that when I woke up this morning I discovered new lines down the side of my nose.” Kate groaned. “I’ve discovered this whole new place to have wrinkles. Nobody I’ve ever met has them there. But look, I do.”

“No you do not.” Tanya smiled as Kate forced her new wrinkles into her friend’s line of vision. Then she added, “Oh, God, you’re right. You do. How weird. I’ve never seen lines there before.”

“Thank you,” Kate said matter-of-factly. “Now I do have to fill you in on a couple of minor happenings in my life,” she went on coyly, trying her best to take her friend’s mind off the tube-in-the-belly-button ordeal that they were hurtling toward.

“I wondered why I hadn’t heard from you for a few days. I thought you were engrossed in the portrait,” Tanya said as she fastened her seat belt.

“Capri, darling,” Kate said excitedly. Tanya gave the requisite look of surprise, and Kate’s tale of making love in swimming pools was the perfect device to stop Tanya from noticing the angry lanes of stationary traffic making them late for her appointment. When they finally pulled up outside the hospital, it was too late to worry.

“Eleven pounds forty, please, love,” the cabbie said to Tanya, who looked up at the imposing red brick of the hospital with dread on her face.

“Thanks.” Tanya paid and the girls got out. “Promise it’ll be okay, Kate?” she said as she pressed Kate’s hand hard between her hot, pale fingers.

“How can it not be, sweetheart? You’re going to be the best mother in the world. I know it,” Kate promised.

When Kate arrived home, having left Tanya at the hospital when Robbie arrived to sit with her, she went inside to lie down and cool off. The air was thick and muggy and she felt as though she’d spent the entire day in traffic, inhaling blue hazy fumes, her skin getting stickier and grimier by the second. She had no plans for the evening except to take a cool shower and maybe do a bit of work on one of the portraits. Suddenly she had more work to do than she could handle, which was not something she was going to complain about in a hurry. As she glanced at the floor she noticed that there was an envelope lying there behind the door. She wasn’t sure she could muster the energy to pick it up, but eventually she unpeeled herself and practically crawled toward it. She saw immediately that it was Jake’s handwriting. With surprisingly little curiosity she tore it open and found a CD with a pale blue Post-it note attached. It read:

Have dinner with me tomorrow, angel?

Kate hadn’t fostered enough cynicism toward Jake yet to think how predictable it was for him to be making more moves on her than he’d done in as long as she could remember. In fact, more moves than he’d ever made on her. Instead she turned over the CD case, which he’d scratched three large
XXX
s on, extracted the CD, and slid it into her stereo. She climbed apathetically back onto the bed, thinking that it’d be one of Jake’s compilations that he made for his friends every so often. But instantly she recognized the voice that drifted out as Jake’s. He was singing softly and sweetly the words of a song she loved, “Magnolia” by J. J. Cale. She closed her eyes and listened as he filled the room with words of love.

Magnolia you sweet thing . . .
Got to get back to you, babe. . . .

Inexplicably a tear coursed its way heavily from the outside corner of her eye down into her hair. This song reminded her of how much she had yearned for Jake not so long ago. In fact, not so long ago it would have been simply too achingly painful for her to listen to. Now it was just incredibly sad. The man who had opened so many doors in her life—and slammed so many in her face—was gone for good. Because this time she’d shown him the way out. But now as she cried it was different from the other times. This time there was a faint pleasure in the feeling of loss. She’d loved Jake but now she was free. Though clearly he wasn’t aware of that fact. She picked up her phone and sent him a heavyhearted text.

You know that I can’t. Kxx

Then she fell asleep on the bed, clutching her phone as Jake’s voice spun endlessly in her stereo.

“Darling, would you mind babysitting for me?” Kate was wrenched from sleep by Mirri, who was standing above her. She had learned that hammering on Kate’s door wasn’t polite, but she hadn’t quite grasped that standing over someone with your hands on your hips while she slept was equally alarming.

“Agh, Mirri.” Kate’s head almost collided with Mirri’s as she sat up. “What?”

“Will you babysit for me? I have to go out tonight,” she said as she sat down on the edge of the bed. Kate rubbed her eyes and leaned over to turn Jake off.

“Yeah. Okay,” she murmured sleepily. “What time is it? Have I been asleep for hours?”

“I saw you come back about an hour ago,” Mirri said. “It’ll just be for a couple of hours in the house while I’m out. I’m not planning to stay long.”

“Where are you going?” Kate rubbed her eyes and wriggled herself up into sitting position. “Anywhere exciting?”

“I have to tell Jonah that he must not leave his wife,” she said matter-of-factly.

“Wow. He’s going to leave her?” Kate was impressed. Much as she didn’t agree with the breaking up of families and such, it was a real coup for a sixty-year-old woman with a bad temper to lure a man away from his wife. Without even trying or wanting to.

“I’m not going to let him. Honestly, I don’t know what he thinks we’ll do together for the rest of the week, let alone our lives. But he’s very sweet and I don’t want to hurt him so I have to try to be, how do you say it?
Diplomatique.
”

“Poor Jonah.” Kate smiled. “It’s quite miserable, really, isn’t it, breaking hearts?”

“It is not so much fun as everyone thinks.” Mirri was dressed in a pair of navy sailor’s pants and a tight T-shirt with her hair tied back in a simple ponytail; she looked more elegant than Kate had ever seen her. Kate guessed it was because she had serious business to attend to. “So whose heart have you been breaking, my dear?” she asked.

“Only The Slug’s. I’m not sure it counts since he’s already shattered mine into a million pieces several times over.”

“How quickly hearts heal.” Mirri smiled knowingly. “Especially when you only
thought
you loved the person.”

“I did love him,” Kate said. Though she wasn’t so sure anymore that the whole thing hadn’t been some absurd and warped game, rather than love. Love was supposed to be so much more. And it was also supposed to be loving, actually, now she came to think of it. “But I saw him in the street today and I really think I’m over him. I told him so but of course he’s decided that he can’t live without me.” This wasn’t strictly true but it was the least Kate deserved after all the rejection. “He wants me to go to dinner tomorrow but I couldn’t even if I was tempted to, because I’m seeing Louis.”