Elegance and Innocence: 2-Book Collection

Elegance and Innocence: 2-Book Collection Kathleen Tessaro ‘Elegance is a fantastic book . . . funny, moving, tongue in cheek’ Cat DeeleyELEGANCELouise Canova is at a crossroads in her life. Browsing in a second-hand bookshop, she stumbles across a faded grey volume. Written by a formidable French fashion expert, Elegance is an encyclopedia of style. Within the book's pages Louise discovers a courage she never thought possible. For true elegance cannot be attained until she is comfortable in her own skin: only then might love flourish.INNOCENCEIt's 1987 and Evie is leaving home for the first time, headed for London to study acting. Along with her fellow students and roommates, Imogene (a born again Laura Ashley poster child and frustrated virgin) and Robbie (native New Yorker, budding bohemian, and very much not a virgin), Evie's determined to make her mark both on stage and off. But then life and love intervene. And everything changes. KATHLEEN TESSARO ELEGANCE and INNOCENCE Copyright (#ulink_9b0fd661-11da-58de-8cbd-df673d438264) This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental. Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk) Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2003, 2005 Copyright © Kathleen Tessaro 2003, 2005 Kathleen Tessaro asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work Lines from ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, taken from Collected Poems 1909–1962 by T.S. Eliot, reproduced by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd. Extracts from Elegance by Genevieve Antoine Dariaux, published by Frederick Muller, reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books. Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2013 ISBN 9780007548514 Version: 2017-12-08 HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication. Contents Cover (#u7f681418-6140-55ad-b39c-7a5d79bc9a44) Title Page (#u6154b102-2366-517e-b552-1bc28da2a916) Copyright (#u4df03399-910a-5b58-a213-d8c3588f648a) Elegance (#u7f681418-6140-55ad-b39c-7a5d79bc9a44) Innocence (#litres_trial_promo) Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo) Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) (#ulink_f00c4f52-906d-5021-99b7-293bb9f403a1) KATHLEEN TESSARO ELEGANCE I’d like to thank my dear friends Maria and Gavin for their inspiration and encouragement, all the girls at the Tuesday Night Wimpole Street Writers Workshop for teaching me how it’s done, Jonny Geller, Lynne Drew, and the entire team at HarperCollins, William Morrow and Curtis Brown for their support and vision. I’d also like to thank the London office of Wellington Management and Stephen McDermott in particular, who saved my manuscript from the ether more than once. Dedication (#ulink_c329d387-a806-511d-805d-d23b18227b84) To my friend and mentor, Jill Robinson. Contents Cover (#u7f681418-6140-55ad-b39c-7a5d79bc9a44) Title Page (#u6154b102-2366-517e-b552-1bc28da2a916) Dedication (#ue13e4c19-34aa-550a-b4fe-aefb83362f4a) Preface (#u292e2231-0e95-55e3-ac31-77be66c821d7) What is Elegance? (#u5b36a8d1-2e8c-5fcc-9a4c-65f0107307f9) Chapter 1 - A: Accessories (#uce0274fd-436a-554a-ab54-4c3230d73911) Chapter 2 - B: Beauty (#u8fde96e4-c73b-5905-a495-bbf1bdf7a883) Chapter 3 - C: Comfort (#u89949ed9-9db6-566e-bcd7-749d0ca0e9a8) Chapter 4 - D: Daughters (#u5e7d009c-cbac-51a5-b064-6a0b04265887) Chapter 5 - E: Expecting (#ub9afe5f4-74e3-5ea9-b975-51f919175185) Chapter 6 - F: Fur (#ubb393c94-b1fa-5cbf-8404-5068318432f3) Chapter 7 - G: Girl friends (#u2d71866e-8f64-5bcd-bfa0-2fb590a01630) Chapter 8 - H: Husbands (#ufd445046-fb7f-57fe-b8a8-4e78d7af5a74) Chapter 9 - I: Ideal Wardrobe (#u3d9920e6-f78b-5ade-a08f-5a77b94aaf7f) Chapter 10 - J: Jewellery (#u014ba182-4f47-5768-90e1-dbbefb92ec79) Chapter 11 - K: Knitwear (#u2cf76a11-810b-5e48-847f-662d5580a81e) Chapter 12 - L: Lingerie (#u90c50cea-2d42-53a1-915f-9687cd698312) Chapter 13 - M: Make-up (#u287d61c9-d3fa-5b09-ab77-69fc0954cad2) Chapter 14 - N: N?glig?es (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 15 - O: Occasions (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 16 - P: Pounds (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 17 - Q: Quality/Quantity (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 18 - R: Restaurants (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 19 - S: Sex (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 20 - T: Tan (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 21 - U: Uniformity (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 22 - V: Veils (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 23 - W: Weekends (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 24 - X: Xmas (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 25 - Y: Yachting (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 26 - Z: Zips (#litres_trial_promo) Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo) Preface (#ulink_f21ed581-5eb0-5c5b-9460-01ff74d6fd66) It’s a freezing cold night in February and my husband and I are standing outside the National Portrait Gallery in Trafalgar Square. ‘Here we are,’ he says. But neither of us moves. ‘Look,’ he bargains with me, ‘if it’s dreadful, we’ll just leave. We’ll stay for one drink and go. We’ll use a code word: potato. When you want to go, just say the word potato in a sentence and then I’ll know you want to leave. OK?’ ‘I could always just tell you I want to leave,’ I point out. He frowns at me. ‘Louise, I know you don’t want to do this, but you could at least make an effort. She’s my mother, for Christ’s sake and I promised we’d come. It’s not every day that you’re part of a major photographic exhibition. Besides, she really likes you. She’s always saying how the three of us ought to get together.’ The three of us. I sigh and stare at my feet. I’m dying to say it: potato. Potato, potato, potato. I know it’s a complete clich? to hate your mother-in-law. And I abhor a clich?. But when your mother-in-law is a former model from the 1950s, who specializes in reducing you to a blithering pulp each time you see her, then there is really only one word that springs to mind. And that word is potato. He wraps an arm around me. ‘This really isn’t a big deal, Pumpkin.’ I wish he wouldn’t call me pumpkin. But there are some things you do, if not for love, then at least for a quiet life. Besides, we’d paid for a cab, he’d had a shave, and I was wearing a long grey dress I normally kept in a plastic dry cleaning bag. We’d come too far to turn back now. I lift my head and force a smile. ‘All right, let’s go.’ We walk past the two vast security guards and step inside. I strip off my brown woolly overcoat and hand it to the coat check attendant, discreetly passing my hand over my tummy for a spot check. I can feel the gentle protrusion. Too much pasta tonight. Comfort food. Comfort eating. Why tonight, of all nights? I try to suck it in but it requires too much effort. So I give up. I hold out my hand. He takes it, and together we walk into the cool, white world of the Twentieth Century Galleries. The buzz and hum of the crowd engulfs us as we make our way across the pale marble floor. Young men and women, dressed in crisp white shirts, swing by balancing trays of champagne and in an alcove a jazz trio are plucking out the sophisticated rhythms of ‘Mack the Knife’. Breathe, I remind myself, just breathe. And then I see them: the photographs. Rows and rows of stunning black and white portraits and fashion shots, a collection of the famous photographer Horst’s work from the 1930s through to the late sixties, mounted against the stark white walls, smooth and silvery in their finish. The flawless, aloof faces gaze back at me. I long to linger, to lose myself in the world of the pictures. However, my husband grips my shoulder and propels me forward, waving to his mother, Mona, who’s standing with a group of stylish older women at the bar. ‘Hello!’ he shouts, suddenly animated, coming over all jolly and larger than life. The tired, silent man in the cab is replaced by a dazzling, gregarious, social raconteur. Mona spots us and waves back, a little half scooping royal wave, the signal for us to join her. Turning our shoulders sideways, we squeeze through the crowd, negotiating drinks and lit cigarettes. As we come into range I pull a face that I hope passes as a smile. She is wonderfully, fantastically, superhumanly preserved. Her abundant silver-white hair is swept back from her face in an elaborate chignon, making her cheekbones appear even more prominent and her eyes feline. She holds herself perfectly straight, as if she spent her entire childhood nailed to a board, and her black trouser suit betrays the causal elegance of Donna Karan’s tailoring. The women around her are all cut from the same, expensive cloth and I suspect we’re about to join a kind of ageing models’ reunion. ‘Darling!’ She takes her son’s arm and kisses him on both cheeks. ‘I’m so pleased you could make it!’ My husband gives her a little squeeze. ‘We wouldn’t miss it for the world, would we, Louise?’ ‘Certainly not!’ I sound just that bit too bright to be authentic. She acknowledges me with a brisk nod of the head, then turns her attention back to her son. ‘How’s the play, darling? You must be exhausted! I saw Gerald and Rita the other day; they said you were the best Constantine they’d ever seen. Did I tell you that?’ She turns to her collection of friends. ‘My son’s in The Seagull at the National! If you ever want tickets, you must let me know.’ He holds his hands up. ‘It’s completely sold out. There’s not a thing I can do.’ Out comes the lower lip. ‘Not even for me?’ ‘Well,’ he relents, ‘I can try.’ She lights a cigarette. ‘Good boy. Oh, let me introduce you, this is Carmen, she’s the one with the elephants on the far wall over there and this is Dorian, you’ll recognize at least her back from the famous corset shot, and Penny, well, you were the face of 1959, weren’t you!’ We all laugh and Penny sighs wistfully, extracting a packet of Dunhill’s from her bag. ‘Those were the days! Lend me a light, Mona?’ Mona passes her a gold, engraved lighter and my husband shakes his head. ‘Mums, you promised to stop.’ ‘But darling, it’s the only way to keep your figure, isn’t that right, girls?’ Their heads bob up and down in unison behind a thick cloud of smoke. And then it happens; I’m spotted. ‘And this must be your wiiiiiiife!’ Penny gasps, turning her attention to me. Spreading her arms wide, she shakes her head in disbelief and for one horrible moment it looks as if I’m expected to walk into them. I dither stupidly and am about to take a step forward when she suddenly contracts in delight. ‘You are adoooooorable!’ she coos, turning to the others for affirmation. ‘Isn’t she just adoooooooooooorable?’ I stand there, grinning idiotically, while they stare at me. My husband comes to the rescue. ‘Can I get you ladies another drink?’ He tries to attract the bartender’s attention. ‘Oh, you perfect angel!’ Mona smoothes down his hair with her hand. ‘Champagne all around!’ ‘And you?’ He turns to me. ‘Oh yes, champagne, why not?’ Mona takes my arm proprietorially. She gives it a little cuddle, the kind of disarming squeeze your best friend used to give you when you were ten that made your heart leap. My heart leaps now at this unexpected show of affection and I half hate myself for it. I’ve been here before and I know it’s dangerous to allow yourself to be seduced by her, even for a second. ‘Now, Louise,’ she has a voice of surprising power and depth, ‘tell me how you’re doing. I want to hear everything!’ ‘Well …’ My mind races, desperately flicking through the facts of my life for some worthy gem. The other women look up at me expectantly. ‘Things are good, Mona … really good.’ ‘And your parents? How’s the weather in Pittsburgh? Louise is from Pittsburgh,’ she mouths, sotto voce. ‘They’re well, thank you.’ She nods. I feel like a contestant being introduced on an afternoon quiz show and like any good quiz show host, she helps to jog me along when I dry up. ‘And are you working right now?’ She says the word ‘working’ with the kind of subtle significance that all showbiz people do; there is, after all, a world of difference between ‘working’ and having a job when you’re in ‘the profession’. I know all this but refuse to play along. ‘Well, yes. I’m still with the Phoenix Theatre Company.’ ‘Is it an acting job? Our Louise fancies herself as a bit of an actress,’ she offers, by way of an explanation. ‘Well, I was an actress,’ I blunder. No matter how hard I try, she always catches me out. ‘I mean, I haven’t really worked in a while. And no, this isn’t an acting job, it’s working front of house, in the box office.’ ‘I see,’ she smiles, as if she can discern a deeper meaning I’m not aware of. And then Dorian asks the most dreaded question of all. ‘Have we seen you in anything?’ ‘Well, of course I’ve done the odd commercial.’ I try to sound casual, shrugging my shoulders as if to imply ‘who hasn’t?’ ‘Really?’ She arches an eyebrow in a perfect impersonation of a woman impressed. ‘What commercials?’ Damn. ‘Well …’ I try to think. ‘There was the Reader’s Digest Sweepstakes Campaign. You may have caught me in that one.’ She stares at me blankly. ‘You know, the one where they’re all flying around in a hot air balloon over England, drinking champagne and searching for the winners. I was the one on the left holding a map and pointing to Luton.’ ‘Ah ha.’ She’s being polite. ‘Well, that sounds fun.’ ‘And now you’re working in the box office.’ Mona wraps the whole thing up in a clean, little package. ‘Yes, well, I’ve got a couple of things in the pipeline, so to speak … but right now that’s what I’m doing.’ I want my arm back quite badly now. She gives it another little squeeze. ‘It is a difficult profession, darling. Best to know your limitations. I always advise young women to avoid it like the plague. The simple truth is, it takes more discipline and sacrifice than most modern girls are willing to put up with. Have you seen my picture?’ Keep smiling, I tell myself. If you keep smiling, she’ll never know that you want her to die. ‘No, I haven’t had much of a chance to look around yet; we’ve only just got here.’ ‘Here, allow me.’ And she pulls me over to a large photograph of her from the 1950s. She’s incredibly young, almost unrecognizable, except for the distinctive, almond shape of the eyes and the famous cheekbones, which remain untouched by time. She’s leaning with her back pressed against a classical pillar, her face turned slightly to the camera, half in shadow, half in light. Her pale hair falls in artfully styled curls over her shoulders and she’s wearing a strapless gown of closely fitted layers of flowing silk chiffon. It’s labelled, ‘Vogue, 1956.’ ‘What do you think?’ she asks, eyeing me carefully. ‘I think it’s beautiful,’ I say, truthfully. ‘You have taste.’ She smiles. A press photographer recognizes her and asks if he can take her picture. ‘Story of my life!’ she laughs and I make my escape while she poses. I look around the crowded room for my husband. Finally I spot him, laughing with a group of people in the corner. He has two glasses of champagne in his hands and as I make my way over, he looks up and catches my eye. I smile and he says something, turns and walks towards me before I can join them. ‘Who are they?’ I ask, as he hands me a glass. ‘No one, just some people from one of these theatre clubs. They recognized me from the play.’ He guides me back towards the photographs. ‘How are you getting on with Mums?’ ‘Oh, fine,’ I lie. ‘Just fine.’ I turn back and look but they’re gone, swallowed by the ever shifting crowd. ‘Didn’t you want to introduce me?’ He laughs and pats my bottom, which I hate and which he only ever seems to do in public. ‘No, not at all! Don’t be so paranoid. To be frank, they’re a bit, shall we say, over-enthusiastic. I don’t want them boring my charming wife, now do I?’ ‘And who might that be?’ I sound much more acerbic than I’d intended. He pats my bottom again and ignores me. We pause in front of a photograph of a woman smoking a cigarette, her eyes hidden by the brim of her hat. She leans, waiting in a doorway on a dark, abandoned street. It must’ve been taken just after the Second World War. There’s something unsettling in the contrast of the shattered surroundings and the pristine perfection of her crisp, tailored suit. ‘Now that’s style,’ my husband sighs. Suddenly it’s too hot. I feel overwhelmed by the crush of people, the smoke, and the sound of too many over-animated conversations. Mona’s waving to us again but I allow my husband to walk over to her and make my way into a smaller, less crowded room off the main gallery instead. There’s a flat, wooden bench in the centre. I sit down and close my eyes. It’s foolish to get so tense. In another hour, it will all be over. Mona will have had her moment of glory and we’ll be safely on our way back home. The thing to do is relax. Enjoy myself. I open my eyes and take a deep breath. The walls are lined with portraits – Picasso, Coco Chanel, Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant – rows and rows of meticulous, glamorous faces. The eyes are darker, more penetrating than normal eyes, the noses straighter, more refined. I allow myself to slip into a sort of meditative state, a spell brought on by witnessing such an excess of beauty. And then I spot a portrait I don’t recognize, a woman with gleaming dark hair, parted in the middle and arranged in a mass of black curls around her face. Her features are distinctive; high cheekbones, a Cupid’s-bow mouth and very black, intelligent eyes. Leaning forward, with her cheek lightly resting against her hand, she looks as if we’ve happened to catch her in the middle of the most engaging conversation of her life. Her dress, a simple bias-cut sheath, is made from a light satin that shimmers against the dull material of the settee and her only jewellery is a single strand of perfectly matched pearls. She’s not the most famous face or even the most attractive, but for some reason she’s undoubtedly the most compelling. I get up and cross the room. The name reads: Genevieve Dariaux, Paris, 1934. However, my solitude is brief. ‘There you are! Mona’s sent us to find you.’ Penny comes strolling in on the arm of my reluctant husband. Stay calm, I remind myself, taking a much-needed gulp of my champagne. ‘Hello, Penny, just enjoying the exhibition.’ She leans forward and waggles a finger in my face. ‘You know, Louise, you’re very, very naughty!’ She winks at my husband. ‘I don’t know how you can let her drink! You’re both as bad as each other!’ My husband and I exchange looks. Come again? She leans in further and drops her voice to a stage whisper. ‘I must say, you look amazing! And this,’ she continues, feeling the fabric of my dress gingerly between her thumb and forefinger, ‘this really isn’t too bad at all. I mean, most of them look like absolute tents but this one’s really quite cute. My daughter’s due in May and she’s desperate for something like this that she can just pad about in.’ I feel the blood draining away from my head. She smiles at both of us. ‘You must be soooooooooooo pleased!’ I swallow hard. ‘I’m not pregnant.’ She wrinkles her brow in confusion. ‘I’m sorry?’ ‘I am not pregnant,’ I repeat, louder this time. My husband laughs nervously. ‘You’ll be the first to know when she is, I can assure you!’ ‘No, I think I will,’ I say, and he laughs again, slightly hysterical now. Penny continues to gape at me in amazement. ‘But that dress … I’m sorry, I mean, it’s just …’ I turn to my husband. ‘Honey?’ He seems to have found a point of fascination on the floor. ‘Humm?’ ‘Potato.’ I don’t know what I thought he’d do, defend me somehow or at least look sympathetic. But instead he continues to stare at his shoes. ‘OK.’ I turn and walk away. I feel like I’m having an out-of-body experience but somehow manage to gain the safety of the 1oo. A couple of girls are fixing their make-up as I enter, so I make a beeline for an empty stall and lock the door. I wait, with my back pressed against the cool metal and close my eyes. No one ever died of humiliation, I remind myself. If that were true, I’d have been dead years ago. Finally, they leave. I unlock the door and stand in front of the mirror. Like any normal woman, I look in the mirror every day, when I brush my teeth or wash my face or comb my hair. It’s just I tend to look at myself in pieces and avoid joining them all up together. I don’t know why; it just feels safer that way. But tonight I force myself to look at the whole thing. And suddenly I see how the bits and pieces add up to someone I’m not familiar with, someone I never intended to be. My hair needs a trim and I should really dye it to get rid of those prematurely grey strands. Incredibly fine and ashen coloured, it drapes listlessly around my head, forced to one side by a faux tortoiseshell clip. My face, always pale, is unnaturally white. Not ivory or alabaster but rather devoid of any colour at all, like some deep sea animal that’s never encountered the sun. Against it, the bright red smear of lipstick I’ve applied seems garish and my mouth far too big – like a gaping, scarlet gash across the bottom third of my face. The heat of the crowd has made me sweat; my nose is glistening, my cheeks are shiny and flushed but I haven’t any powder. And my favourite dress, despite being dry cleaned, has gone hopelessly bobbly and is, now that we’re being honest, shapeless in a way that was fashionable five years ago, though definitely out of style now. I remember feeling sexy and confident in it when it used to just skim the contours of my figure, suggesting a sylph-like sensuality. Now that I’m ten pounds heavier, the effect is not the same. To finish it all off, my shoes, a pair of practical, flat Mary Janes with Velcro fastenings, make my ankles look like two thick tree trunks. Faded and scuffed, they’re everyday shoes, at least two years old, and really too worn to be seen anywhere but inside my own house. I’m forced to conclude that the whole effect does rather shout, ‘Pregnant woman’. Or, more precisely, ‘This is the best I can do under the circumstances.’ I stare at my reflection in alarm. No, this person isn’t really me. It’s all just a terrible mistake – a Bermuda Triangle of Bad Hair day meets Bad Dress day, meets Hippie Shoes from Hell. I need to calm down, centre myself. I try an experiment. ‘Hi, my name’s Louise Canova. I’m thirty-two years old and I’m not pregnant.’ My voice echoes around the empty loo. This isn’t working. My heart is pounding and I’m starting to panic. I close my eyes and will myself to concentrate, to think positive thoughts, but instead the images of a thousand glossy black and white faces crowd my mind. It’s like I’m not even of the same species. Suddenly the door behind me opens and Mona walks in. Triple fucking potato. She leans dramatically against the basin. ‘Louise, I’ve just heard. Listen, she didn’t mean anything, I’m sure, and besides, she’s blind as a bat.’ Why does he have to tell her everything? ‘Thanks, Mona, I appreciate it.’ ‘Still,’ she comes up behind me and pushes my hair back from my face with two carefully manicured fingers, ‘if you like, I could give you the name of my hairdresser, he’s really very reasonable.’ My husband is waiting when I come out. He hands me my coat and we leave the party in silence, finding ourselves standing in the same spot in Trafalgar Square less than thirty minutes after we arrived. Scanning the street for any sign of a cab, he takes a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and lights one. ‘What are you doing?’ I ask. ‘Smoking,’ he says. (My husband doesn’t smoke.) I leave it. The yellow light of a cab lurches towards us from a distance and I wave wildly at it. It’s misting now. The cab slows down and we get in. My husband throws himself heavily against the back seat then leans forward again to pull down the window. Suddenly I want to make him laugh, to cuddle him, or rather to be cuddled. After all, what does it matter what I look like or what anyone else thinks? He still loves me. I reach over and put my hand over his. ‘Sweetheart? Do you … do you really think I look OK?’ He takes my hand and gives it a squeeze. ‘Listen, Pumpkin, you look just fine. Exactly the way you always do. Don’t pay any attention to her. She’s probably just jealous because you’re young and married.’ ‘Yes,’ I agree hollowly, though it’s not quite the effusive sea of compliments I’d hoped for. He squeezes my hand again and kisses my forehead. ‘Besides, you know I don’t care about all that rubbish.’ The cab speeds on into the darkness and as I sit there, with the cold wind blowing against my face, a single, violent thought occurs to me. Yes, but I do. What is Elegance? (#ulink_c43646bd-bc9c-565c-93bd-3bead513a37b) It is a sort of harmony that rather resembles beauty with the difference that the latter is more often a gift of nature and the former a result of art. If I may be permitted to use a high-sounding word for such a minor art, I would say that to transform a plain woman into an elegant one is my mission in life. —Genevieve Antoine Dariaux It was a slim, grey volume entitled Elegance. It was buried between a fat, obviously untouched tome on the history of the French monarchy and a dog-eared paperback edition of D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love. Longer and thinner than the other books on the shelf, it rose above its modest surroundings with a disdainful authority, the embossed letters of its title sparkling against the silver satin cover like a glittering gold coin just below the surface of a rushing brook. My husband claims I have an unhealthy obsession with second-hand bookshops. That I spend too much time daydreaming altogether. But either you intrinsically understand the attraction of searching for hidden treasure amongst rows of dusty shelves or you don’t; it’s a passion, bordering on a spiritual illness, which cannot be explained to the unafflicted. True, they’re not for the faint of heart. Wild and chaotic, capricious and frustrating, there are certain physical laws that govern second-hand bookstores and, like gravity, they’re pretty much non-negotiable. Paperback editions of D. H. Lawrence must constitute no less than 55 per cent of all stock in any shop. Natural law also dictates that the remaining 45 per cent consists of at least two shelves’ worth of literary criticism on Paradise Lost, and there should always be an entire room in the basement devoted to military history which, by sheer coincidence, will be haunted by a man in his seventies. (Personal studies prove it’s the same man. No matter how quickly you move from one bookshop to the next, he’s always there. He’s forgotten something about the war that no book can contain, but like a figure in Greek mythology, is doomed to spend his days wandering from basement room to basement room, searching through memoirs of the best/worst days of his life.) Modern booksellers can’t really compete with these eccentric charms. They keep regular hours, have central heating and are staffed by freshly scrubbed young people in black tee-shirts. They’re devoid both of basement rooms and fallen Greek heroes in smelly tweeds. You’ll find no dogs or cats curled up next to ancient space heaters like familiars nor the intoxicating smell of mould and mildew that could emanate equally from the unevenly stacked volumes or from the owner himself. People visit Waterstone’s and leave. But second-hand bookshops have pilgrims. The words ‘out of print’ are a call to arms for those who seek a Holy Grail made of paper and ink. I reach up and carefully remove the book from its shelf. Sitting down on a stack of military history books (they will migrate if you’re not careful), I open to the title page. Elegance By Genevieve Antoine Dariaux it announces in elaborate script and then, underneath: A complete guide for every woman who wants tobe well and properly dressed on all occasions. Dariaux. I know that name. Could it be the same woman I saw in the photo? As I leaf through the book, the faint fragrance of jasmine perfume floats from its yellowed pages. Written in 1964, it appears to be a kind of encyclopaedia, with entries for every known fashion dilemma starting with A and going through to Z. I’ve never before encountered anything quite like it. I flip through the pages in search of a photo of the author. And there, on the back cover, my efforts are rewarded. She looks to be in her late fifties, with classic, even features and heavily lacquered white hair – Margaret Thatcher hair before it had a career of its own. But the same black, intelligent eyes gleam back at me; I recognize the distinctive, imperious set of her mouth and there, luminous against the fitted black cardigan she’s wearing, is the trade-mark strand of impeccably matched pearls. Madame Georges Antoine Dariaux, the caption below the photo reads. She doesn’t look directly at the camera with the same beguiling candour of her earlier portrait, but rather beyond it, as if she’s too polite to challenge our gaze. Older now, she’s naturally more discreet, and discretion is, after all, the cornerstone of elegance. I turn back eagerly to the preface. Elegance is rare in the modern world, largely because it requires precision, attention to detail, and the careful development of a delicate taste in all forms of manners and style. In short, it does not come easily to most women and never will. However, in my 30-year career as the directress of the Nina Ricci Salon in Paris, my life has been devoted to advising our clients and helping them to selectwhat is most flattering. Some are exquisitely beautiful and really need no assistance from me at all. I enjoy admiring them as one enjoys admiring a work of art, but they are not the clients I cherish the most. No, the ones that I am fondest of are those who have neither the time nor the experience necessary to succeed in the art of being well-dressed. For these women, I am willing to turn my imagination inside out. Now, would you like to play a little game of Pygmalion? If you have a little confidence in me, let me share with you some practical ideas on one of the surest ways of making the most of yourself – through elegance, your own elegance. At last, I have found my Holy Grail. It’s only 4 pm, but it’s already growing dark when I leave the shop. I weave through the streets; down Bell Street, over Marble Arch, across St James’s and then into Westminster, clutching my magical parcel. Big Ben chimes in the background as I push open the door and am greeted by the sound of a Hoover. My husband is home. There’s something about the persistent, draining, incessancy of domesticity that signals a call to arms for my husband. (Those who know him only as a rising star of the London stage are, in fact, blind to his most astonishing talents.) Each day finds him bravely battling the enemies of filth, disorder, untidiness and decay with renewed determination. A resourceful soul, he can transform any sort of disarray into a clean, habitable environment, usually in under half an hour. He can’t hear me as I come in, so I poke my head into the living room where he is furiously forcing the vacuum over the parquet wood floor (he claims to be able to actually see the dust settling on it, so remarkable is his sensitivity to that sort of thing) and shout to him. ‘Hey!’ Switching off the Hoover, he rests his arms against its handle, with the same masculine ease of a television cowboy leaning on a fence. He is a man in his element, setting the world to rights. ‘Hey yourself. What’ve you been up to?’ ‘Oh, nothing really,’ I fib, concealing the brown paper parcel behind my back. In the face of my husband’s never-ending schedule of home improvements, spending an afternoon ferreting around old bookshops seems like a kind of betrayal. ‘Did you return that lampshade?’ ‘Ah, yes …’ I confirm, ‘but I couldn’t find anything better, so they gave me a credit note.’ He sighs, and we both look mournfully at the pale marble lamp Mona gave us a month ago. In every marriage there are certain ties that bind. Much more substantial than the actual marriage vows, these are the real-life, unspoken forces that keep it glued together, day in and day out, year after year, through endless trial and adversity. For some people it’s their social ambitions, for others their children. But in our case, the pursuit of the perfect lampshade will do. We are bound, my husband and I, by a complete, relentless commitment to the interior decoration of our home. And this lamp is the delinquent, drug-addicted teenager that threatens to destroy our domestic bliss by refusing to coordinate with any ready-made lampshade from a reasonably priced store. It’s incredibly heavy and almost impossible to lift. We are doomed to a Sisyphean fate: forever purchasing lampshades we will only return the next day. My husband shakes his head. ‘We’re going to have to go to Harrods,’ he says gravely. Harrods is always a last resort. There will be no ‘reasonable’ lampshades at Harrods. ‘But you know what?’ he adds, his face brightening. ‘You can come with me and we’ll make a day of it if you like.’ ‘Sure,’ I smile. Lampshade Day – certain to be right up there with the Great Garden Trellis Outing and the Afternoon of a Dozen Shower Hoses. ‘Wouldn’t miss it for the world.’ ‘Great.’ He forces one of the windows open, relishing the gust of cool air. ‘Of course, you’ll be glad to know I’ve had considerably more success here while you were away.’ ‘Really?’ ‘You know those pigeons that roost on the drainpipe just above the bedroom window?’ ‘Yeah …’ I lie. ‘Well, I’ve attached some barbed wire around the pipe. That’s the last we’ll see of them!’ I’m still trying to place these pigeons. ‘Well done you!’ ‘And that’s not all. I’ve got some fantastic ideas for draining the garden path which I’m going to draw up during the interval tonight. Maybe I can show them to you later?’ ‘Sounds brilliant. Listen, I’m just going to do some reading in the other room. Maybe you’ll look in on me before you go?’ He nods, surveying the living room contentedly. ‘It’s all coming together, Louie. I mean, the place is really starting to shape up. All we need is that lampshade.’ I watch as he switches the Hoover back on. There is always one more lampshade, one more set of authentic looking faux-Georgian fire utensils, one more non-slip natural hessian runner carpet. Like Daisy’s green light in the Great Gatsby, these things call to us with the promise of a final, lasting happiness, yet somehow remain forever out of reach. Retreating into the bedroom, I close the door, kick off my shoes and curl up on the bed. The bed is enormous. It’s actually two single beds that are joined in the centre. ‘Zipped and Linked’ is what the man at John Lewis called it. We needed a bed that was big enough so that we wouldn’t disturb each other in the night: my husband twitches like a dog and I can’t bear noise or any sort of movement. ‘You are sure you want to sleep together?’ the salesman had asked when we briefed him of our requirements. But my husband was adamant. ‘We’ve only just been married,’ he informed the offending fellow haughtily, implying a kind of rampant, newlywed sex life that could only just be contained within the confines of a solidly made double bed. So now he twitches away somewhere west of me and I slumber, comatose, half a mile to the east. Climbing underneath the duvet, I remove the delicate volume from its brown paper bag. I’m on the verge of something very big, very real. This is it. I open to Chapter One. And the next thing I know, I’m asleep. When I wake up, he’s already gone to the theatre. There’s a note on the kitchen table. ‘Were snoring, so didn’t bother to wake you.’ My husband is nothing, if not concise. This is bad. The truth is, I sleep far too much – wake up late, take naps in the afternoon, go to bed early. I live with one foot dangling in a dark, warm, pool of unconsciousness, ready at any moment to slide into oblivion. But it’s just a little bit anti-social, all this sleeping, so I try to hide it. I make toast. (I believe that’s what’s known as cooking for one.) Then climb back on board the bed. Turning to the first letter in the alphabet, I try not to get butter on the pages. A Accessories (#ulink_802ec850-1b8e-553b-b0b7-8199d6d78791) You can always tell the character of a woman by the care and attention she lavishes upon the details of her dress. The accessories worn with an outfit – gloves, hat, shoes, and handbag – are among the most important elements of an elegant appearance. A modest dress or suit can triple its face value when worn with an elegant hat, bag, gloves, and shoes, while a designer’s original can lose much of its prestige if its accessories have been carelessly selected. It is indispensable to own a complete set of accessories in black and, if possible, another in brown, plus a pair of beige shoes and a beige straw handbag for the summer. With this basic minimum, almost any combination is attractive. Of course, it would be ideal to have each set of accessories in two different versions: one for sport and the other dressy. And in this regard I cannot restrain myself from expressing the dismay I feel when I see a woman carry an alligator handbag with a dressyensemble merely because she has paid an enormous sum of money for it. Alligator is strictly for sports or travel, shoes as well as bags, and this respected reptile should be permitted to retire every evening at 5 pm. And here, as in no other department, quality is essential. Be strict with yourself. Save. Economize on food if you must (believe me, it will do you good!) but not on your handbags or shoes. Refuse to be seduced by anything that isn’t first rate. The saying, ‘I cannot afford to buy cheaply,’ was never so true. Although I am far from rich, I have bought my handbags for years from Herm?s, Germaine Guerin, and Roberta. And without exception, I have ended up by giving away all the cheap little novelty bags that I found irresistible at first. The same is true of shoes and gloves. I realize that all of this may seem rather austere, and even very expensive. But these efforts are one of the keys, one of the Open Sesames that unlock the door to elegance. I look down at my own handbag crumpled in a heap on the floor. It’s a navy Gap rucksack – the kind that seems to attract bits of dried biscuit to the bottom, even if you haven’t eaten a biscuit in months. Needless to say, it could do with a wash. Or a glass of milk. I wonder if it qualifies as a sports bag. I can remember purchasing it in the ‘Back to School’ department several seasons ago and feeling quite elated that I’d managed to resolve all my handbag dilemmas in a single swoop. It would never occur to me to buy more than one bag, in more than one colour or style. The only other one I own is a squashed maroon leather shoulder bag I bought in the sale from Hobbs four years ago. The leather has worn away and the framework of the bag is exposed; however I’m too attached to it to throw it away. I keep pretending that I’m going to have it repaired, even though it’s gone out of style. The more I think of it, the more hard pressed I am to think of any accessories I own that might be described as even remotely stylish, let alone first rate. Certainly not the collection of woolly brown and grey berets I live in, so practical because they won’t blow off your head during the windy London winters and because they’re invaluable for those days (always on the increase) when I haven’t washed or even combed my hair. I like to think of them as ‘emergency hair’. I find myself gazing at my feet, or rather at the pair of well-worn beige plimsolls that adorn them. It’s been raining and they’re soaked through. The fabric’s worn away above my big toe and I catch a glimpse of the green and red Christmas socks underneath. (My mother sent me those.) I give my big toe a little wiggle. My nose is running and as I fumble for a tissue in my raincoat pocket, I discover a pair of mismatched black gloves I found on the floor of a movie theatre two weeks ago. They seemed like quite a find at the time but suddenly it’s clear, even to me, that I’ve obviously not been lavishing enough care and attention on the details of my dress. Elegance may be in the details but my situation appears to be a little more serious than that. Clearly, drastic action is needed. I resolve, in an unprecedented burst of enthusiasm, to begin my transformation with a thorough cleansing of my closet. Systematically working my way through, I’ll weed out the elements that don’t flatter me. And then I’ll be free to construct a new, improved look around those that do. Fine, let’s get cracking! I fling open my closet door with a dramatic sweep of my arms and nearly pass out from hopelessness. I possess a rail of items gleaned from second-hand clothing stores all over the country. Everything in front of me symbolizes an element of compromise. Skirts that fit around the waist but flare out like something Maria Von Trapp would wear. Piles of itchy or slightly moth-eaten woolly jumpers – not one of them in my size. Coats in strange fabrics or suit jackets with no matching skirts bought simply because they fit and that in itself is an event. But that’s not the scariest thing. No, the thing that completely stuns me is the colour. Or rather the lack of it. When did I decide that brown was the new black, grey, scarlet, navy and just about any other shade you can name? What would the Colour Me Beautiful girls make of that? Or Freud, for that matter? I stare in fascinated longing at the bold, crimson drawing room of the house across the street but my own walls are magnolia. Matte magnolia, to be precise. And now here it is: the dreadful consequences of playing it safe. I have the wardrobe of an eighty-year-old Irish man. That is, an eighty-year-old Irish man who doesn’t care what he looks like. However, I won’t be put off. I open my underwear drawer. I dump the entire contents on the floor. I sift through the piles of runned and not too runned tights (the only kind I own), the baggy knickers, the ones with the elastic showing, and the bras I should never have put in the washing machine which now have bits of deadly under-wire poking through them. I diligently make piles of keeps and non-keeps. Done. I go to the kitchen, grab a black bin liner and begin to fill it. A strange, unfamiliar energy infuses me and before I know it, I’m working my way through the rest of my clothes. Piles of ugly, vague, brown garments rapidly disappear. I throw away jumpers, jackets, and every last one of the Sound of Music skirts. Here’s another bin liner: in go the worn out shoes, the natty scarves. Now the maroon leather handbag from Hobbs. I can buy a new one. Beads of perspiration run down my face and in my cupboard empty hangers clash together like wind chimes. I tie the tops of the bags together and drag them out to the garbage bins at the back of the building. It’s dark; I feel like a criminal destroying the evidence of a particularly gory crime. Finally, I stand in front of my near empty wardrobe and survey the result of all this effort. A pale pink Oxford shirt swings from the rail, a single black skirt, a navy fitted pinafore dress. On the floor in front of me, there’s a small pile of just about wearable underwear. This is it. This is now the basis of my new wardrobe, my new identity and my new life. I take a Post-it from the desk in the corner, write on it in bright red marker, and stick it on the corner of the wardrobe mirror. ‘Never be seduced by anything that isn’t first rate,’ it reminds me. No, never again. I’m on the train headed for Brondesbury Park to see my therapist. It’s my husband’s idea; he thinks there’s something wrong with me. After we were married, I began to have recurring nightmares. I’d wake up screaming, convinced there was a man at the foot of the bed. The room would be exactly the way it was in waking life and then all of a sudden, he’d be there, leaning over me. I’d chase him away but he’d return every night without fail. After a while, my husband learnt to sleep through these nightly terrors, but when I started to cry during the day and couldn’t stop, he put his foot down. He explained to me that I had too many feelings and I’d better do something about it. When I get to my therapist’s house, I ring the bell and am admitted into a waiting room, which is really part of a hallway with a chair and a coffee table. There are three magazines and have been ever since I started therapy two years ago: one House and Garden from spring 1997, and two copies of National Geographic. I can recite the contents of all of them. However, I pick up the copy of House and Garden and look again at the cottage transformed into a treasure trove of Swedish antiques using nothing but Ikea furniture and a few paint effects. I’m falling asleep when the door finally opens, and Mrs P asks me to step inside. I take off my coat and sit on the edge of the daybed that is her version of a couch. The room is muted, sterile. Even the landscapes on the walls have an eerie calmness, like lobotomized Van Gogh’s – no wild, swirly, passionate mayhem here. I like to think that behind the glass door that separates her office from the rest of the house, there lies an explosion of primitive phallic art and dangerous modern furniture in a riot of vivid colours. The chances are slim but I live in hope. Mrs P is middle aged and German. Like me, her fashion sense lacks a certain savoir-faire. Today she’s wearing a cream-coloured skirt with a pair of knee-highs, and when she sits down, I can see where the elastic pinches her leg, causing a red, swollen roll of flesh just under the knee. The German thing doesn’t help. Every time she asks me something, I feel like we’re enacting a badly-scripted interrogation scene from a World War Two film. This may or may not be the root of our communication problems. I sit there and she stares at me from behind her square-rimmed glasses. We’ve come to the impasse: part of our weekly routine. I grin sheepishly. ‘I think I’ll sit up today,’ I say. Mrs P blinks at me, unmoved. ‘And why would you like to do that?’ ‘I want to see you.’ ‘And why do you want to do that?’ she repeats. They always want to know why; there’s not really a lot of difference between a therapist and a four-year-old. ‘I don’t like to be alone. I feel alone when I’m lying down.’ ‘But you’re not alone,’ she points out. ‘I’m here.’ ‘Yes, but I can’t see you.’ I’m starting to feel really frustrated. ‘So,’ she adjusts her glasses further back on her nose, ‘you need to “see” someone in order not to feel alone?’ She’s speaking to me in italics, throwing my words back at me, the way therapists do. I won’t be bullied. ‘No, not always. But if I’m going to talk to you, I’d rather be looking at you.’ And with that, I push myself back on the daybed so that I’m leaning against the wall. I start to pick at the bobbles in the white chenille throw that covers the bed. (I’m intimately acquainted with these bobbles.) Three or four minutes drag past in silence. ‘You do not trust me,’ she says at last. ‘No, I don’t trust you,’ I agree, not so much because I believe it to be true but because she says it is and after all, she is my therapist. ‘I think you need more sessions,’ she sighs. Whenever I don’t do what she wants me to do, I need more sessions. There were whole months when I had to come every day. This is normally as far as we get; for two years we’ve been arguing about whether or not I should be allowed to sit up on the daybed. But today I have something to tell her. ‘I bought a book yesterday. It’s called Elegance.’ ‘Is it a novel?’ ‘No, it’s a kind of self-help book, a guide that tells you how you can become elegant.’ She raises an eyebrow. ‘And what does “becoming elegant” mean to you?’ ‘Being chic, sophisticated. You know, like Audrey Hepburn or Grace Kelly.’ ‘And why is that important?’ I feel suddenly frivolous and girly – like a female member of the Communist Party caught reading an issue of Vogue. ‘Well, I don’t know that it’s important but it’s worth striving for, don’t you think?’ And then I spot her beige, orthopaedic sandals. Maybe not. I take another tack. ‘What I mean is, they were always pulled together, never unseemly or dishevelled in any way. Every time you saw them, they were perfectly groomed, faultlessly dressed.’ ‘And is that what you would like, to be “pulled together, never unseemly or dishevelled in any way”?’ I think a moment. ‘Yes,’ I say at last. ‘I’d love to be clean and chic and not such a terrible mess all the time.’ ‘I see.’ She nods her head. ‘You are not clean. That makes you dirty. Not chic. That makes you unfashionable. And a terrible mess. Not just a mess, but a terrible mess. So, you feel you are unattractive.’ She makes everything sound so much worse than it is. Still, she has a point. ‘Well, no, I don’t feel very attractive,’ I admit, wincing inwardly as I say it. ‘The truth is, I feel the opposite of attractive. Like it doesn’t matter what I look like.’ She peers at me over the top of her glasses. ‘And why doesn’t it matter what you look like?’ A thick wave of unconsciousness swims up to meet me. ‘Because … I don’t know … because it just doesn’t matter.’ I try unsuccessfully to stifle a yawn. ‘But surely your husband notices,’ she insists. I wonder what she means by ‘notices’. Is this some kind of euphemism? Does her husband ‘notice’ her in her knee-highs and skirt? ‘No, no he’s not that way,’ I explain, pushing the unwelcome vision of them ‘noticing’ each other from my mind. ‘He’s really not interested in that sort of thing.’ My eyelids are at half-mast now; it feels like they weigh a ton. ‘And what sort of thing is that?’ ‘I don’t know … bodies, appearances, clothes.’ ‘And how does that make you feel?’ she persists. ‘That he is not interested in your body, your appearance, or your clothes?’ I think for a moment. ‘Tired,’ I conclude. ‘It makes me feel tired. Anyway, why should he be interested in those things? He loves me for who I am, not the way I look.’ I’m sinking further and further into the daybed like a deflating balloon. ‘Yes, but love is not just a feeling,’ she continues, undeterred. ‘Or an idea. It’s completely natural that there is a physical side too. You are young. You are attractive. You are … falling asleep, am I right?’ I pull myself up with a jerk. ‘No, no I’m fine. Just a little drowsy. Late night last night.’ I don’t know why I bother to lie. Perhaps what she says is true: I don’t trust her. ‘Well, in any case, time is up for today.’ As soon as she says it, I start to revive. I leave, head straight to the newsagent’s on the corner and buy two Kit Kats. I eat them in rapid succession, waiting for the train. I’ll never get this therapy gig. Can’t wait till I’m cured and have been given some sort of certificate I can show my husband. A disembodied voice comes over the intercom to announce that, due to signalling problems, the next southbound train will be in twelve minutes. I sit down on a bench in the corner and take the copy of Elegance from my bag. A gust of wind rustles through it and the book falls open on a page from the preface. From my earliest childhood, one of my principal preoccupations was to be well dressed, a somewhat precocious ambition that was encouraged by my mother, who was extremely fashion-conscious herself. Together we would go to the dressmaker and select combinations of fabrics and styles that ensured our outfits were entirely original and impossible to copy. I think of my own mother and of how she hated shopping, dressing up or looking at herself in mirrors. Not only did she not aspire to elegance, but I believe she suspected it as a pursuit. It was at odds with the aesthetics of her strict Catholic upbringing, belonging as it did to the world of movie stars, debutantes and divorcees. Pale and bespectacled, with short dark hair she cut herself, she preferred to spend most of her time in Birkenstocks and plain, loose trousers, maybe because in the male dominated world of science in which she excelled, fashion was of little practical use. However, in text book Freudian fashion, her unlived dreams and ambitions spilt out onto my sister and me. She longed for us to become professional ballet dancers, paragons of grace and discipline, and we trained for hours every day after school to that end. She indulged us in bizarre shopping trips, made more surreal by the fact that we rarely seemed to buy any actual children’s clothes. It was as if she was taking us shopping for her alter ego. It’s a Saturday morning. My mother’s just picked me up from ballet class and we’re in Kaufmanns department store in Pittsburgh. I’m about twelve, but already I’m sporting a pair of high heels, ‘wedgies’ to be exact, with thick crepe soles and a denim wrap-around skirt, just like my idol, Farrah Fawcett in ‘Charlie’s Angels’. Like all the girls in ballet school, I want to look like a prima ballerina. We cake on tons of foundation, eyeliner and mascara and roll our eyes around like silent film stars on acid. We’re dying swans with our exaggerated posture, ridiculous turnouts, and scraped back hair-dos. It never occurs to us that make-up that’s meant to read on stage to the last row of the Metropolitan Opera House might not be suitable for street wear. My mother and I are shopping in the eveningwear section. It’s 10:30 in the morning and we’re looking at sequins and taffeta. She’s going to a formal Christmas party with my father and we’re here to shop for her, but she can’t bear to look at herself or try anything on. I carry gown after gown into the changing room, where she’s slumped on the stool in her bra and girdle, cradling her head in her hands. ‘You put them on,’ she says and I do, preening and posing like a midget version of Maria Callas. My mother is a ghost, thin and shorn next to my drag act. ‘You’re so slim,’ she says, as I shimmy into a pink sequined sheath dress. ‘You look good in everything.’ We spend hours wading through piles of silk and satin and in the end she buys me a black sequined top and a cream coloured marabou jacket at vast expense, which I wear over my school uniform, despite the fact that it lands me in detention for a month. My mother buys nothing. And after we shop, we go to the chocolate counter and buy a pound box of Godiva chocolates, which we eat on our way back home in the car. My mother and I don’t do lunch. Lunch is, after all, fattening. So we sit in the front seat of the car, not looking at one another, cramming chocolate into our mouths instead. By the time we get home, the excitement of shopping is gone. Vanished. Mom is suddenly furiously angry and I’m filled with fear and shame. She gets out, slams the car door and strides across the garage into the house, where I can hear her yelling at my brother. She yells for no reason – because a towel is badly folded or because the television is on. She yells because she hates herself; because she’s spent $300 on evening clothes for a twelve-year-old; because she’s so livid she can’t contain it any more. She throws something but misses. I hear her storm upstairs and slam her bedroom door. Getting out of the car with my bags, I take the now empty chocolate box with me. It’s important that no one should see it. And I walk, or rather waddle the way dancers do, into the house. My brother’s there, crying, and there’s a pile of glass and plastic that used to be a clock around him on the floor. He looks at me with my Kaufmanns bags and the Godiva chocolate box and I know that he hates me. I stick my chin in the air and walk on. I am a bad person. I am a very bad person. My mother doesn’t go to the Christmas party. She has an argument with my father and spends the evening locked in her room instead. Closing the book, I get up and walk down to the end of the platform. In the corner, where the cement gives way to rubble and grass, I turn and throw up the two Kit Kat bars. The light is softly dimming and I notice, as I wipe my fingers on a clean tissue, that the birds are singing, the way they do sometimes at dusk on early spring evenings. They sound impossibly hopeful. And suddenly it occurs to me, that maybe my mother and I have something in common. Maybe I come from a long line of women who felt like a terrible mess. B Beauty (#ulink_27e75fa6-2c73-502a-aaad-d0e38b18e6f9) Since time began, women have sought after beauty with all the passion and vigour of Menelaus pursuing Helen into Troy and often with similarly violent results. And why shouldn’t they? Being beautiful has always been synonymous with owning the world on a string and what girl would not wish that? Sadly though, only God and nature can make a beautiful woman and, to be perfectly frank, most of us do not and never will fall into that exclusive category. Perhaps you think I am being a little hard? Maybe I am. But I am of the philosophy that it is best to face the facts about oneself, especially the most unpleasant ones, early on in life and make peace with them rather than to waste years in nervous agitation pursuing goals and expectations far beyond our reach. Besides which, being beautiful is no guarantee of happiness in this world. I have known many beautiful women whose own inelegance and lack of breedingrendered them so hopelessly unattractive, that it would’ve been simpler and less painful for them if they had been born plain. A woman must have a very strong character not to become distracted by her own unnatural power to excite attention everywhere she goes. And there is nothing more tragic than the sight of a badly ageing beauty who never had to develop her wit or imagination in order to amuse her companions or who always relied upon the excellence of her figure rather than the elegance of her clothes to make an impression. They are poor company and almost invariably develop ‘champagne chins’. While beauty, in its purest physical form, is nature’s gift alone to bestow, elegance, grace and style are infinitely more democratic. A little discipline and a discerning eye, along with a generous helping of good humour and effort, are all that’s needed to cultivate these admirable qualities. And a plain girl who spends a little time in honest self-reflection and who applies herself with diligence to the improvement of her mind and character, will awake soon enough to discover that she has blossomed into a fully fledged swan. The time she spent alone and undistracted by the world will fortify her, the discipline she learnt will carry her into old age with grace and courage, and above all, she will possess compassion, whichnever fails to make a woman more attractive to those around her. I reach across to my bedside table and pick up the Post-its and a pen, while taking another sip of my tea. Of all the pleasures in this world, reading in bed in the morning with a fresh, steaming mug of tea has to be the most luxurious. I prod the mountain of pillows behind me into a more yielding shape and lean back. To be beautiful. There are days when I feel fairly confident that I’m attractive but am I or could I ever be beautiful? Or am I one of those women who are better off facing up to the ‘unpleasant facts of life’? It’s not really a question a girl should ponder before nine in the morning, still suffering from bed head and wearing her favourite faded Snoopy night-shirt. (I couldn’t quite bring myself to throw it away.) I push it from my thoughts and resolutely peel off another Post-it. ‘Beauty is no guarantee of happiness,’ I write firmly, ‘strive instead for elegance, grace and style’, and then paste it next to the other one on the wardrobe mirror. My husband, who’s getting dressed to do a radio play at the BBC, sighs wearily. ‘I sincerely hope we’re not going to become one of those “happy-clappy households” with charming little inspirational signs posted everywhere.’ He reaches for a pair of navy chinos and a worn Oxford shirt his mother bought him two Christmases ago. ‘I don’t want our home looking like the Sunday school meeting room of a church hall.’ ‘And what would you know about Sunday school meeting rooms?’ I parry lightly. ‘Anyway, when you close the wardrobe door you can’t even see them.’ ‘Still,’ he persists, slipping his feet into a pair of ancient loafers, ‘I think that’s enough. I don’t want to dress in the morning faced with a thousand slogans declaring “I am enough” and “This too shall pass” or whatever pop self-help jargon is being bounced around these days.’ ‘Fine,’ I say, more to end the conversation than anything. ‘I’ll keep them to myself.’ And it occurs to me that if he’s going to be out all day, it’s a perfect opportunity to renew my membership at our local gym. Bending down, I search underneath the bed until I locate my old gym bag, covered in dust, complete with a pair of twisted old trainers still lurking inside. Perfect. But my husband hasn’t finished yet. He removes the most recent Post-it and examines it more closely. ‘“Beauty is no guarantee of happiness – strive instead for elegance, grace and style.” What’s all this about, Louie? You’re not going all funny, are you? How are things going with your therapist?’ I’m certain I still own a pair of sweatpants somewhere and there must be a matching sock for this one. I rummage through the laundry basket. ‘No, I’m not going funny,’ I assure him, as I sift through piles of dirty clothes, ‘and things are fine with my therapist. I’m just trying to make the most of myself, that’s all. It’s something I’m doing for me.’ He looks unconvinced, so I change my tack. ‘What I mean to say is, I just want you to be proud of me.’ His face softens. ‘But, Pumpkin, I’m already proud of you. You’re a very good girl,’ he says, kissing my forehead and patting me lightly on the head. ‘You’re a very good girl and a very good Pumpkin.’ ‘Yes, thank you,’ I say, smiling back at him. ‘Only, would you mind terribly not calling me Pumpkin?’ He looks at me as if I’d just slapped him across the face. ‘Not call you Pumpkin? What’s wrong with Pumpkin?’ ‘Well, I know you mean it as a term of endearment but it’s just so fat sounding. So round and heavy. Couldn’t we have another name? What if you called me something like Sweetheart, or Angel or … or, I don’t know, what about Beauty?’ He frowns at me. ‘OK, well, what about Pretty? My Pretty? That’s nice, isn’t it?’ ‘I’ve always called you Pumpkin. You are my Pumpkin,’ he says firmly. ‘Yes, I know, but we’re allowed to change a nickname, aren’t we?’ I try to pacify him by wrapping my arms around him but he sidesteps me and reaches over to pull his jacket from the back of the bedroom chair. ‘You can’t just make up a new nickname because you feel like it. After all, I’m the one who has to say it. And “My Pretty” sounds like a pantomime pirate.’ ‘Yes, fine. But all I’m asking is that perhaps I could have a more attractive nickname … I don’t know … if it has to be a food then what about Sweet Pea? A pea is a lot smaller than a pumpkin.’ ‘I am not some ageing Southern belle, Louise.’ And he sighs, pressing his fingers to his forehead and closing his eyes to concentrate. ‘Right,’ he says at last, ‘what about Sausage? It’s my final offer.’ ‘Sausage!’ ‘I’m English. You knew that when you married me. I cannot call my wife Sweet Pea or Sugar or My Little Dumpling or any of the other gourmet, internationally recognized terms of endearment.’ ‘But you can call me Sausage?’ ‘Well, not just Sausage. My Little Sausage.’ He smiles. ‘I think it’s sweet.’ Now it’s my turn to look unconvinced. He shrugs his shoulders. ‘Besides which, I really don’t have time for this right now. I must be going.’ He strides into the hallway and grabs his script from the small round table by the door. Leaning forward, he plants a quick kiss on my forehead. ‘I’ll see you when I get back tonight, Sausage.’ The door slams shut. I walk back into the bedroom and stare at the dusty gym bag and curly old trainers. What’s the point of going to all this effort if at the end of it, I’m still not beautiful and the most flattering thing my husband can think to call me is Sausage? The siren song of the duvet begins to call me, luring me back into bed, away from the gym and this pointless pursuit of self-improvement. After all, I have only a few precious hours on my own to spend in a state of complete oblivion before he returns. My breathing begins to slow and my eyelids droop. And then I see it, the little yellow Post-it my husband was examining earlier, floating like a butterfly near my pillow. ‘Beauty is no guarantee of happiness – strive instead for elegance, grace and style.’ I pick it up and paste it back on the mirror. ‘I am not a pumpkin,’ I say to my reflection. ‘Or a sausage.’ And I pick up my gym bag and leave the bedroom as quickly as possible. While I still can. C Comfort (#ulink_cd1b749e-a978-5cb8-a8b7-25293fa8def0) The idea of comfort has invaded every domain; it is one of the categorical imperatives of modern life. We can no longer bear the thought of the slightest restriction, physical or moral, and many of the details which were considered to be a mark of elegance some years ago are condemned today for reasons of comfort. Down with stiff collars, starched shirts, cumbersome hats, and heavy chignons! Practically the only die-hards to resist are women’s shoes. However, if women continue to seek comfort above all twenty-four hours a day, twelve months a year, they may eventually find that they have allowed themselves to become slaves to the cr?pe-rubber sole, nylon from head to toe, pre-digested meals, organized travel, functional uniformity, and general stultification. When comfort becomes an end in itself, it is the Public Enemy Number One of elegance. It’s 7:15 on Friday morning and I’m getting ready for work. Although part of me still clings to the dream of being an actress, I earn my real money selling tickets in the box office of a small, self-producing playhouse in Charing Cross. My husband is asleep on the other side of the bed and I get dressed in the dark. There’s not a lot left in my wardrobe to choose from so I put on the navy pinafore dress and the pink Oxford shirt. The dress is figure hugging and very tight, which is why I haven’t worn it in years. As I zip it up, my spine becomes erect, encased in the rigidly tailored bodice. I try to revert to my normal, semi-slouched posture and nearly asphyxiate myself. Next, I slip into a pair of dark brown stilettos I wore at my wedding. They’re the only pair of high heels left after the Great Cull, and suddenly I’m tottering around the flat like a little Marilyn Monroe. After so many days in cheap plimsolls and baggy chinos, it feels very unusual. I comb my hair into a side-parting, pin it back with a rhinestone clip and then apply a soft red lipstick. Leaving the flat, I catch a glimpse of my reflection in the hall mirror. Who is this woman? I’m going to be late. But what I fail to take on board is the tremendous restriction of movement created by pairing a long, straight skirt with a pair of high, strappy heels. This ensemble is fine for staggering around the flat but obviously not meant for long-haul journeys. The faster I try to walk, the more I look like a wind up doll. The only way to move forward at all is to transfer my weight in a slow, rolling motion from one hip to the next. The dress is now in control; it dictates when I arrive at work and how. So, I sashay forth precariously, swaying gently as I go. There’s something about a slow moving female in the middle of rush hour traffic. Everyone, everything changes. And I discover that moving slowly is one of the most powerful things you can do. It’s different from being infirm or depressed. The dress makes sure I’m bolt upright, imbuing me with a look of haughty dignity, as if I’m above petty concerns like being at work on time. I appear to be walking because it amuses me, not because I have to. And in the sea of darting pedestrians around me, I have become majestic. If you’re going to walk that slowly, you might as well smile. And here’s where it gets really interesting. Cab drivers slow down, even though their light is green, just to let me cross the road. The policemen in front of the Houses of Parliament say, ‘Good morning’ and tip their hats. And the tourists who cluster so frustratingly in front of Big Ben with their cameras step aside politely, as if they’ve suddenly found themselves in the middle of a great big living room and they’ve only just discovered it belongs to me. Yes, the world is my living room and I’m a gracious hostess passing through, checking to see if everyone’s all right. I have a look around. That’s another advantage of moving slowly, plenty of time for browsing. The air is delicate and sharp, the sunlight crisp and wholly benevolent. Breathing deeply, or rather, as deeply as the dress permits, a strange, unfamiliar awareness descends upon me. Everything’s all right. Everything really is all right. As I saunter into the theatre foyer, my heart’s pounding and my cheeks are flushed. I notice my hand as it pushes against the brass plate of the box office door; it seems small and delicate and pretty. For a moment, I’m not quite sure it’s mine. But it is mine. And it is small and delicate and pretty. Colin’s there, waiting for me. I have the keys to the box office door. ‘Well, look at you!’ he says, kissing me on each cheek. I smile archly. ‘Whatever can you be referring to, Mr Riley?’ I unlock the door and switch on the lights. ‘Whatever, indeed! Let’s put the kettle on and then I want to hear all about it!’ Something amazing has happened. I’m no longer invisible. Colin’s my best friend. He doesn’t know it, but he is. He’s always chiding me about how unapproachable and distant I am, but in fact, he knows more about me than my therapist and husband combined. A reformed ‘West End Wendy’, he used to be a dancer in Cats until a tendon injury put his spandex unitard days firmly behind him. He can still do an impressive pirouette when he wants to but now he contents himself with teaching seated aerobics to the over-sixties in his local community centre (he loves it because they all call him ‘The Young Man’) and working part-time in the box office with me. We share not only a love of dance and theatre, but also a very similar Catholic upbringing, with what sounds like exactly the same sadistic nuns (or their relations) rapping our knuckles on different sides of the Atlantic. ‘So you got dressed today! What’s this all about? Having an affair?’ He automatically examines the inside of the kettle for encroaching lime scale. The office kettle is de-scaled twice weekly and the mugs sanitized with bleach when Colin’s bored. We’re used to coffee that both fizzes and removes the stains from your teeth. ‘Hardly!’ I switch on my computer. He takes a small plastic bag out of his rucksack, removes two well-wrapped plastic containers and pops them in the fridge. ‘What’s for lunch today, Col?’ That’s another one of his passions; he can’t resist food that’s been marked down in supermarkets because the sell-by date has nearly gone. Consequently, his lunches consist of daring taste sensations, dictated by the contents of Tesco’s reduced section. ‘Today we have a fantastic piece of roasted lamb that’s only just slipped by its expiry date but smelled fine this morning, and a small salad of roast peppers, rocket, and new potatoes – although the rocket’s not as lively as I’d like it to be. But then you can’t have everything.’ Colin’s a good cook but you have to have a cast-iron stomach to dine at his house. ‘So,’ he looks me up and down, ‘what’s the story? You look amazing. Coffee or tea?’ ‘Coffee, please, easy on the bleach. There’s nothing to tell, really. I cleaned out my closet, and this is what I had left. You like?’ ‘Very much so, Ouise.’ (He always calls me Ouise, pronounced ‘weez-y’, the name Louise being too long and complicated to say in its entirety.) ‘And it’s about time. I was beginning to fear for your sex life. What does Himself think?’ ‘He hasn’t seen me today, he was asleep. And you know I have no sex life. I’m married.’ ‘Well, I’d buy yourself some extra condoms, darling, and be prepared to walk bow-legged for a few days. He’s going to think it’s Christmas!’ ‘Colin Riley! Don’t be wicked!’ I laugh. ‘Remember, the Baby Jesus can hear you!’ But inside I feel strange, almost sick. I don’t know if I want to go there again. But that’s another dangerous thing about being Catholic; we believe in miracles. When I get home that evening, I decide to give it a go. After all, it’s been a long time. The flat is empty, but I spot my husband poking about in the back garden, wearing a pair of rubber gloves. Sneaking into the bathroom, I fix my hair and adjust my make-up. It’s so rare that I do this. It’s so rare that I even try to be interesting to him any more. I’m not quite sure what to do with myself or how to begin, so I go into the living room and perch on the edge of the sofa. It’s like waiting in a doctor’s surgery. My husband and I puzzle over this room; obsess about it. We spend endless hours trying to rearrange it so that it feels warm, comfortable and inviting. We make drawings, sketch plans, cut out little paper models to scale and move them around on pieces of paper with all the intensity of two world-class chess masters. But the result is the same. Wind howls around the sofa. An ocean of parquet stretches between the green armchair and the coffee table. (I’ve seen guests land on their stomachs reaching for a cup of tea.) And the dining room table lurks in the corner like an instrument of torture rescued from the Spanish Inquisition. (Dinner parties confirm this to be true.) I pick up a magazine and am flicking through the pages when he comes in. ‘Hello!’ he calls. ‘Hey, I’m in here!’ My throat is tight so it comes out a bit higher than normal. He pokes his head round the corner. Still wearing the rubber gloves, he’s now got the bedroom waste-bin in his hands. ‘Louise,’ he begins. ‘Yes?’ I rise slowly so he can see the full glory of my form-fitting dress, smiling in a playful, naughty way. It’s a risk. Either I look like a complete sex goddess or Jack Nicholson in The Shining. My husband stands immobilized. He looks cute and confused in his faded, baggy sweatpants. I giggle and take a step forward. ‘Yes,’ I say again, only softer this time, like I’m answering a question, not asking one. We’re standing quite close now; there’s only the waste-bin between us. I can smell the damp warmth of his hair and the clean, fresh perfume of the clothing softener we use on his sweatshirt. I gaze into his eyes and for a moment everything shifts and melts. I’m smiling for real now, with my whole being and I know I don’t look like Jack Nicholson. Raising my hand, my pretty, delicate hand, I move forward to caress the gentle slope of his cheek, when suddenly I see something that stops me. As my hand draws closer, his body tenses. He’s standing just there in front of me, but somehow, without ever moving, he begins to recede. A look sweeps across his face, hardening his features into a fa?ade of detachment. It’s the look of every child who has been forced to endure an unpleasant but unavoidable physical punishment; a spontaneous expression of utter resignation. I step back in amazement, my hand poised in the air like a Sindy doll. My husband looks up in surprise and our eyes meet. The air around us condenses into a vacuum, thick with shame and humiliation, impossible to endure. My husband is the first to recover, his face a mask of indignation. He holds up the waste-bin. ‘Louise, what is this?’ I look at the contents of the bin. I’m staring at it but I seem to have a hard time seeing it. ‘Garbage.’ That’s the best I can come up with. He reaches in, pulls out a printer paper box and wields it aloft. ‘And this?’ He’s really got me now. ‘More garbage?’ He rolls his eyes and sighs the sigh of all sighs. The ‘shall I repeat this for the mentally impaired?’ sigh. ‘All right, look.’ He places the crumpled box back into the bin. ‘Now what do you see?’ My eyes are welling up with tears. I blink them back. ‘I see a box in a bin.’ ‘No, Louise, what you see is a box taking up the whole of the bin. Every single bit of room.’ ‘So what? It’s a bin. Empty it!’ I despise him. There’s no way I’m going to cry. Ever. ‘And who’s going to do that? Me, that’s who.’ ‘Not necessarily.’ ‘Please!’ He rolls his eyes again. I’m married to a Jewish mother. ‘You don’t have to. You don’t have to be the self-appointed garbage monitor. Somehow we’d survive.’ ‘You just don’t get it, do you? All I’m asking is that when you have an extra large piece of rubbish, could you please use the kitchen bin. All right? Is that understood?’ ‘An extra large piece of rubbish.’ ‘Yes. And don’t be that way, you know exactly what I’m talking about.’ ‘Of course.’ I feel cold. I want to climb under the covers and go to sleep. ‘So, we’re in agreement?’ ‘Yes, large garbage in big bin. Understood.’ ‘It’s not much to ask.’ ‘No, it certainly isn’t.’ He turns to go, but pauses when he reaches the door. ‘That dress …’ he begins. ‘Yes?’ Heat rushes to my face and I wish I weren’t so pale, so transparent. ‘It’s … what I mean to say is, you look very nice.’ I stare at him across the sea of parquet. ‘Thank you.’ ‘But if you want to change into something more suitable, maybe we can start clearing that path in the garden. After all, it’s really a job we should do together.’ He lingers by the doorway, waiting for some sort of response. There’s nothing to say. ‘Well, whenever you’re ready, then.’ He turns and walks back into the garden. And I am alone. That night, I stay up and read, searching for clues through the pages of Elegance. There must be a way out of this. Someone as wise and experienced as Madame Dariaux must be able to advise me. I’m certain, quite certain, it wasn’t always this way. If I can just find the key, the moment I should’ve turned left instead of right or said yes instead of no, then I’ll be able to understand what I did wrong. And then the rest is easy. I simply reverse it. D Daughters (#ulink_b9939e2c-5e41-5036-b485-d884f0540a83) Little daughters are understandably the pride and joy of their mothers, but they are very often also, alas, the reflection of their mother’s inelegance. When you see a poor child all ringletted, beribboned, and loaded down with a handbag, an umbrella, and earrings, or wearing cr?pe-soled shoes with a velvet dress, you can be certain that her mother hasn’t the slightest bit of taste. It is a serious handicap to be brought up this way, because a child must be endowed with a very strong personality of her own in order to rid herself of the bad habits that have been inculcated during her early years. The more simply a little girl is dressed – sweaters and skirts in the winter, Empire-style cotton dresses in the summer – the more chic she is. It is never too early to learn that discretion and simplicity are the foundations of elegance. When I was about nine, I was taken out of my Catholic day school and sent to an all girls’ preparatory school. There I met Lisa Finegold, who became my best friend for a year and a half and my fashion idol for a lifetime. Her mother, Nancy, was from New York, which made her sophisticated. Pencil thin, with long brown hair and elegant features, she moved as if she were made of fine bone china. My own mother was experimenting with unisex dressing that year, to my intense mortification. She’d read a book on Communist China and been so impressed by the austerity of their lifestyle, that she emulated it by wearing the same red tartan trouser suit every day for a month. (This was in the seventies). While Nancy Finegold never ventured from the house in anything but stilettos, my mother regularly rounded us all up for long, rigorous hikes in the woods, dressed in thick moccasins she’d made herself and one of her favourite Greenpeace tee-shirts. I longed for her to grow her hair long and even dug out an old wig she’d bought in the sixties but she stubbornly refused to alter her trademark crop. ‘It’s not that important,’ she’d say. But I couldn’t help secretly wishing she was from New York and made of bone china too. Lisa had her own bedroom, complete with a huge, extra frilly canopy bed, just like in Gone With the Wind. It had pillows covered in lace that you didn’t sleep on; they were just for show. Rows of beautiful china dolls were carefully seated along her mantelpiece and in the corner stood a mahogany and glass display case filled with her collection of porcelain miniatures. Then there were Lisa’s clothes, which her mother bought in massive shopping sprees in New York. Most of them were dry clean only and hung on silk-covered hangers in neat rows. Everything was pressed, clean and, more amazingly, the right size. She didn’t own a single hand-me-down. Until I met Lisa, all my friends were exactly like me. We shared rooms begrudgingly with our siblings, drawing invisible lines down the centre of the floor, not unlike the battle lines of the Civil War, in a vain effort to gain some autonomy and an identity of our own. We slept in bunk beds on pillows you put your head on and could drool over and that were machine washable for when you got sick. Even the furniture was made out of hard-wearing, wipeable surfaces, the kind of furnishings you could jump off of or on to without a second thought. And our collections were living: spiders, slugs, bugs, and worms. They were displayed in jars and cardboard boxes stored in the cool mud underneath the porch steps in the back yard. There are many back-yard badges of courage, of which touching and capturing a gigantic slug after a thunderstorm is only one. During recess, Lisa and I would link arms and walk round the edge of the playground in endless circles (Lisa never ran or played tag or did anything involving sweat), and I would ply her for more and more details about her day. I dreamt regularly of my own parents dying in a horrible car accident and, at the height of my inconsolable grief, being adopted by the Finegolds and becoming Lisa’s sister. The first time Lisa asked me home to play, I felt like I’d fallen into a dream world. The housekeeper answered the door and was wearing an apron, just like Alice on the Brady Bunch. She made us lunch and not only was it hot, but it consisted of spaghetti and home-made sauce she’d actually cooked herself – not out of a jar. If that wasn’t enough, we even had tapioca pudding for dessert, which was sweet and bumply and, Lisa claimed, made with frog’s eggs, which is why she wouldn’t touch it and why I got two helpings. Finally we went up to Lisa’s room and sat on the bed. It was quite a concoction when fully made; you couldn’t really touch it without ruining the effect, so we sat along the edge, not in the middle. Lisa smoothed down the folds of her skirt and looked bored. (This was her most attractive quality, her incredible capacity for boredom.) ‘Why don’t we play dolls?’ I suggested, eagerly eyeing her marvellous collection. I’d already chosen which ones would be ballerinas and which ones would be possessed by the devil. The Exorcist had come out that year and although we were too young to see it, my brother and sister and I were fascinated by the idea of being possessed, vomiting green stuff, and speaking in scary voices. Also, it contrasted nicely with the ballet theme. ‘Why don’t we make the ones with dark hair be possessed and all the blonde ones ballerinas?’ There was a moment’s silence and Lisa looked at me like I was an idiot. ‘Or the other way around?’ I was flexible. ‘You don’t play with them,’ she said. ‘You just look at them.’ I wanted to ask why but my desire to impress her prevented me from calling attention to the fact that I wasn’t completely au fait with the etiquette of owning china dolls. ‘Oh yeah. Right. OK, well, why don’t we make a miniature world underneath the bed? We can take all the miniatures out of the cabinet and if we get some green tissues, we can make a pond and then we can use the bedside table and it’s like they go into the World of the Giants …’ I could tell by the pained expression on her face that I was losing her. ‘Louise,’ she began, and then stopped. Lisa couldn’t explain her world to me any better than I could understand it. And she had never had to before. Finally, like a child reciting a catechism, she said, ‘Some things are to look at, not to touch.’ ‘Oh.’ I didn’t get it at all. She smiled at me. So I smiled back. We sat there smiling at each other, both thinking the other insane. ‘I know,’ she said at last. ‘Let’s go up to the attic and dress the dog in baby clothes.’ Luckily, there are some human experiences that transcend cultural divides. Then one day, the Finegolds invited me out to dinner. In honour of the occasion, I wore my best dress, which was made to my exact specifications by Grandma Irene. We chose the pattern and the material together, a crisp white cotton covered in bright blue and red flowers, and she made little cap sleeves trimmed with lace and smocked the front of it by hand. I brought the dress to school with me on a hanger and hung it in my locker. Occasionally, I’d show it to one of the other girls but I wanted it to be a surprise for Lisa, certain that once she saw me in it, she’d come up with the idea of us being sisters all on her own. After school we went to her house and played, which, that day, consisted of taking all the miniature figures out of the glass cabinet, looking at them and then putting them back in exactly the same way. After a while, we heard someone come in and Lisa said, ‘It’s time to get ready.’ We put on our dresses, brushed each other’s hair and went downstairs. Lisa didn’t say anything about my dress and I didn’t say anything about hers, which was in black velvet with a creamy satin sash. It was understood that we both looked fabulous. In the kitchen we found Dr Finegold eating tapioca pudding from a serving bowl in the refrigerator. Tall and slim, with black, wavy hair, a romantic moustache and soft, dark eyes, he was easily the most beautiful man I’d ever seen. He owned an enormous collection of tortoises that he kept in various tanks and plastic pools in the basement, which I thought were cool but Lisa thought were gross. And best of all, he loved to play the piano. ‘Daddy, don’t do that,’ Lisa admonished half-heartedly. (Even her parents were just minor irritations.) ‘Our little secret,’ he said, tossing the spoon into the sink. ‘I know; why don’t I play you girls a little tune?’ We went into the living room and he began to play. I danced around the piano and we laughed, egging each other on. I’d turn a pirouette and he’d shout, ‘Go on, do another one!’ He’d do a massive run and I’d clap and make him do it again. Lisa wasn’t very good at dancing; it was part of her whole horror of physical activity, so she stood by the side of the piano, sulking and being bored. Dr Finegold sang ‘Mona Lisa’, which I thought was hysterical and Lisa ignored him. All in all, we had a great time. We didn’t even hear Nancy come in but suddenly she was there and Dr Finegold stopped playing. I stood beaming and panting to catch my breath. This was it, I’d just turned four pirouettes and was wearing the most beautiful dress in the world. If ever they were going to want to adopt me, it was now. Nancy Finegold stood in silence in the doorway. ‘I think you girls ought to get ready,’ she said at last. ‘We are ready, Mama.’ Lisa’s voice was unusually quiet. She turned to me. ‘Is that what you’re wearing?’ I nodded. Was this a trick question? She turned her back to me and spoke to Lisa. ‘Don’t you have something she could borrow?’ I felt myself go cold; the way you do when someone talks about you as if you were a chair. ‘Nan!’ Dr Finegold interrupted. She registered him with distaste. ‘Don’t be so dramatic, Mel.’ Bending down to examine my dress more closely, she smiled sweetly. ‘That dress is fine, Louise, but Lisa has one that will be better.’ ‘Mom!’ The horror on Lisa’s face was unmistakable; she’d obviously never been asked to share anything before. Nancy Finegold was a genius trapped in a world of idiots. She sighed in exasperation, rolling her eyes in the grown-up version of Lisa’s favourite expression. ‘All right, fine! What about a cardigan then?’ Dr Finegold walked away and Lisa stared dejectedly at the floor. In her full-length mink coat and slender high heels, Nancy seemed too thin to stand upright for long. Her huge brown eyes scanned the room for any sign of affirmation or weakness and, finding nothing, she opened her mouth to speak but nothing came out. She closed it again in such a way that she reminded me of a ventriloquist’s dummy and for one terrible moment I thought I would laugh. Her exquisite hands clenched in frustration and then fell limply by her side, the gold bangles rattling against one another, as if someone had suddenly let go of the strings. I couldn’t bear it. ‘I’ll wear a cardigan,’ I offered. She stared at me for a moment and then smiled, triumphant. She gave Lisa a shove. ‘Go on. Run upstairs and grab one of your blue cardigans.’ Lisa extracted herself with all the speed of one of my giant slugs. Now there was just the two of us. I stared at her, but she didn’t look at me. Instead, she knelt down and pulled up my knee socks, folding the tops over in two perfectly even strips. I could smell her perfume, her hairspray and the musky, almost aluminium scent of the fur coat she wore as she smoothed down my hair with her hand. I had wanted to be touched by her for months, to run up and wrap my arms around her, to bury my head against her shoulder and tell her how much I loved her. And now, at last, I was the whole focus of her attention. And I couldn’t move. Some things are to look at, not to touch. Nancy Finegold was one of them. We went out to dinner and I wore the cardigan. My father came to pick me up in the old brown family station wagon and when I jumped in the front seat, I felt free and very, very old. ‘How’d it go, Pea?’ he asked. ‘Did they like your dress?’ ‘I don’t think they understood it, Da.’ He laughed. ‘What’s there to understand?’ ‘Everything,’ I said. Absolutely everything. E Expecting (#ulink_2c6d8e9e-c6fc-53f6-8f33-1a7dbd2fd265) The period during which a woman is expecting a baby is not always, it must be admitted, the most propitious one for elegance. A bad complexion, an expanding waistline, a silhouette becoming a bit awkward towards the end, all add up to an image that is not always a joy to contemplate in the mirror. But since almost every woman is obliged to go through it at one time or another, it is better to accept the situation with good humour and to make the most of it. A good plan is to buy only a few things for your maternity wardrobe and to wear the same dresses over and over again until you are quite fed up with them. This way you can give them away afterwards without the slightest regret. Above all, don’t try to have them taken in at the seams after you have recovered your normal figure. The clothes you have worn throughout these long months will disgust you for the rest of your days. My husband and I are entertaining friends, a couple we haven’t seen in a long time. We haven’t seen them because they have children, twin girls. My husband and I don’t do children very well; no matter how much we try to hide it, we’re clearly horrified. I keep staring at them like I’m going to pass out and he’s permanently on guard, brandishing a washing up cloth like he’s ready to mop up toxic waste. Very quickly the couple feel as if they’ve defiled the sanitized sanctuary of our pristine living room and decide that the twins need to go home for a nap after only forty-five minutes in our company. Everyone’s relieved, even the babies, who are only nine months old. Their faces noticeably relax as they’re loaded into the car. Our friends are all having children now; we’re the odd ones out. They’ve stopped asking us about it; stopped smiling and saying, ‘But surely someday you’ll want a family.’ By now it’s obvious that only an act of God could make us parents. We wave to them as they drive away, and then walk back into our barren household – the one with the dust-free living room and the bed the size of Kansas. ‘Thank God that’s over,’ my husband says, bending down to pick up something from the floor. It’s a single, pale blue baby sock, still warm and smelling of baby. He hands it to me. I don’t know what to do with it or where to put it, so I throw it away. ‘Yes,’ I agree. ‘Thank God.’ The first time I was pregnant, I was sixteen and it was before the creation of home pregnancy tests. I had to see a doctor to tell me what I already knew. You don’t have to have been pregnant before to know that there’s something strange going on. I was throwing up in the mornings and, in fact, all through the day and I started noticing strange discharges I’d never encountered before. Things smelled different, tasted wrong, and I’d gone off pizza. For the first time in my life, I was forced into paying attention to my body. I was possessed, like in The Invasion of the Body Snatchers and it wasn’t going to go away. I couldn’t go to the family physician – not to the same man who’d vaccinated me against smallpox and measured my growth against a chart on the wall covered with smiling, cartoon animals. I was sick but I had to hide it. But by now I was used to hiding all the most important facts of my day. I was used to hiding the fact that I threw up my food after each meal by going upstairs to the guest bathroom and sticking my fingers down my throat. I was used to hiding the little black speed pills I took every morning, the ones I bought from Sarah Blatz, a fat, red-headed girl who played on the girls’ field-hockey team and who was prescribed them by her doctor to lose weight. And I was used to hiding where I went in the evenings from my parents, what I did and especially who with. My friend Mary took me to see her doctor, a female physician in another part of town. She had a growth chart on her wall too, but she’d never measured me before, so that was OK. Mary was frightened; she wasn’t used to concealing things or maybe she was just used to covering up all the normal things, like that she’d gone all the way with her boyfriend, the one she’d been going steady with for a year and a half, or that she’d got drunk at a friend’s party last Saturday and had to spend the night. I didn’t have a boyfriend; I got pregnant from a guy who never called again and I was drunk every Saturday night. After school, Mary drove me to the doctor’s in her mother’s custom built silver Cadillac, the one with the horn that played the theme from The Godfather when you pressed it. (Her father was in the meat trade.) Every once in a while she’d press it and we’d laugh; more out of politeness than anything else. She was obviously trying her best to cheer me up and I was grateful for her kindness. The doctor took a blood test and examined me as I sat in my little paper gown on the crinkly paper strip that covered the examining table. The office was on the 7th floor of a modern block, overlooking the traffic that led into the mall below. I concentrated on the pale blue of the sky as she felt my breasts and shook her head sadly. ‘They’re pregnanty,’ she announced. ‘We’ll get the test back tomorrow, but I can tell you right now, you’re pregnant.’ I know, I thought. I know. Mary wanted me to tell her mom because that’s what she would do. But I knew I’d have to do the rest on my own. I made an appointment, but had to wait another month before I could have the abortion. In the meantime, I told my parents I had an ulcer, which they believed without questioning. Every morning at around 4:30 am, I was sick. And every morning, my father woke up at 4:15 and made me a small bowl of porridge to settle my stomach, which he placed by the side of my bed. Then he’d pad off upstairs in his red robe, feeling his way in the darkness to catch another hour and a half’s sleep. He never asked if he should do that; he just did it. Like so many things in our house, even acts of kindness occurred in silence. I wondered if he would do the same thing if he knew the truth. I think he would. My skin got bad and my mouth tasted metallic. In my locker at school, I kept an enormous box of saltines, which I ate in the hundreds. My diet diminished to saltines, mashed potatoes, and porridge. Anything else was just too exciting. No matter how much I ate, I still got sick. And no matter how often I threw up, I was still hungry. I was more afraid of gaining weight than of being pregnant. The operation cost two hundred and thirty dollars. My parents gave me two hundred dollars in cash after I managed to convince them that I needed a new winter coat and the rest of it I paid for out of my allowance. Finally the day came, a Saturday morning in early March. It was raining, softly misting when I left the house. I told my parents I was going to go shopping with my friend Anne and then I drove myself to the clinic and checked in. It was early, around 9 am. The waiting room was full of flowered cushions, pleasant prints, and bright, soft colours. There were little clusters of people – a young couple holding hands and whispering to each other, a girl with her family. They’d obviously tried to make the waiting room as sympathetic and normal looking as possible, but despite that, no one wanted to look at one another. You had to meet with a counsellor before you did it. They took us in one at a time, in such a way that you never passed any of the other women in the hall. I was led into a little office where a young woman with short brown hair was waiting for me. I cannot remember her name or how she introduced herself but I can remember her deliberate, almost institutionalized kindness. And I recall her asking if I was alone and saying ‘yes’. My mouth was dry and sticky. The office was like a closet, with no windows. There was a table and two chairs and a chart on the wall with a diagram of the female anatomy. Even here they’d done their best to make it seem normal and wholesome by painting the walls pink. It was like a beauty parlour for abortions. There were no sounds at all in the room, no traffic noise, no distant conversations. Just the woman and me. ‘I’m here to tell you about the operation and what to expect,’ she began. I nodded. She took out a red plastic model of a uterus cut in half. ‘This is a model of a uterus,’ she said. I nodded again. I wondered where she’d got it, what kind of company made these sorts of things, and what other models they had in their catalogue. She started to talk and point at the model. I could hear her voice, and see her hands moving, but my mind had gone numb. I just stared at the plastic uterus, thinking how red it was and how a real one couldn’t possibly be that red. ‘Excuse me,’ I interrupted, after a while. ‘I’m going to be sick.’ ‘Of course,’ she said. I went and threw up in a little cubical next door. There seemed to be cubicles everywhere – clean, little rooms filled with women throwing up. When I came back, she continued where she left off. She was obviously used to people throwing up in the middle of her presentation. ‘During the operation, what we will do is remove the lining of the uterus, creating a kind of non-biological miscarriage. You will have all the symptoms of a miscarriage – heavy bleeding, cramps, and hormonal imbalance. This will make you feel a little more fragile than normal. It’s important for you to rest afterwards and take it easy for a few days. Is someone coming to pick you up?’ I stared at her. ‘Did you drive yourself?’ she repeated. The room was perfectly still. She had no make-up on. I tried to imagine her in a bar, talking to a stranger, way past closing time. I couldn’t. She waited. She was used to waiting. I started to open my mouth; it tasted like yellow sick. I closed it again and tried to swallow. ‘Would you like some water?’ I shook my head; it would only make me throw up again. ‘You don’t have to do this,’ she said at last. She was looking at me with her clean, fresh face, the face of a mother on a children’s aspirin commercial. I started to cry and she was used to that too. I hated myself because I knew we would all be doing it. She passed me a Kleenex. Twenty minutes from now, she’d be passing a Kleenex to someone else, the girl with the boyfriend perhaps. ‘Maybe you’d like to think about it some more,’ she offered. Freedom of choice. ‘No.’ I was done crying. ‘I’ve made up my mind.’ It was exactly as she said it would be. An hour later I was lying in a hospital version of a La-Z-y Boy chair, drinking sugary tea and eating biscuits. Four hours later I was shopping for a new winter coat with my friend Anne, using a credit card I’d stolen from my parents. ‘Your ulcer seems to be better,’ my father remarked a week later. ‘Yes, Da. I believe it’s gone.’ And it is gone. Until the next time. There’s a coat that hangs in the front hall cloakroom of my parents’ house. It’s a single-breasted, navy blue winter coat; a classic cut in immaculate condition. It’s been there for years but no one’s noticed. It has never been worn. F Fur (#ulink_86cf2519-fcc9-5ab6-8302-ea1261e82e5c) If women are honest with themselves, they would admit that the fascination they feel for furs is not only due to the warmth they provide. After all, a fur is never just a fur – it is also, more than any other garment I can think of, a symbol, and a mink coat is the most easily identifiable symbol of them all. It stands for achievement, both for the man who bought it and the woman who wears it, as well as status and undeniable luxury. It has been said with a great deal of truth that a mink is the feminine Legion of Honour. Furs are important milestones in a woman’s life, and in general they are purchased only after a great deal of thought and many comparisons. So make your selection with care. After all, men come and go but a good fur is a destiny. There’s a story about a famous opera diva rehearsing for a production of Tosca at the Met. At the end of the rehearsal, she sends her dresser to collect her things and the poor woman comes back clutching a black wool coat. The star is appalled. She tosses her head and fixes the woman with an icy stare. ‘Honey, you know I don’t wear no cloth coats!’ Divas and minks have a lot in common. You have to kill something to make a mink. Its beauty is horrible to behold. Divas are like that too. And while you don’t have to be a diva to wear a mink, it helps. I got my first mink when I was nineteen years old. It was given to me by a friend of my mother’s, whose own mother had recently died of Alzheimer’s. She’d been a tiny woman and no one else in the family could wear the coat. Or wanted to. It was a full-length mink; glossy, heavy, stinking of musk when it rained. It was the most un-PC garment it was possible to own. And yet it had both authority and a powerful, threatening, glamour. People reacted violently to it; they were infuriated, offended, jealous, or lustful. It was a coat of almost biblical symbolism. It hid nothing, accommodated no one. If you hated it, it was there to be hated. If you loved it, it couldn’t care less. The very thing that made it repulsive was the same thing that gave it its splendour. And it fitted me like a glove. The trouble with a coat like that is it can take over your life; dominate your whole personality. If you don’t know who you are, you can easily become a mink coat. I had a boyfriend at the time. He’d been a car thief in high school and was now two years ahead of me in drama school. He wore a denim jacket that had been in police chases, that still had bloodstains on it from when he’d been arrested. Badly worn, it hung together in places by threads. We looked like brother and sister, he and I, with the same pale hair and green eyes. Neither of us knew who we were or who we wanted to be, so we became actors. We spent our nights eating at an all night diner called Chief’s, he in his threadbare denim and me in my mink, smoking cigarettes, drinking beer with our eggs, and arguing about iambic pentameter and if Pinter was really a genius or just a fraud. We were going to be great actors, famous and rich. We made up stories about ourselves, wore costumes, acted in scenes. And we were our own favourite characters. Only, I was always the mink and he was always the denim jacket. We met wearing them, parted wearing them and despite all the drinking, fucking, and fighting, we just couldn’t manage to take them off. He performed Romeo in his end of term project with a black eye. He got it smashing in the face of a man who propositioned me in an all night drinking club over the Christmas break. It was three o’clock in the morning. We’d been drinking since six. The man had said something I hadn’t quite heard and then all of a sudden we were outside in the bitter cold. They rolled around in the frozen black snow in the middle of the road, punching and kicking, blood forming pale pink pools between the patches of dark grit. A crowd gathered and cheered them on; shouting and jeering – full of exactly the kind of people you’d expect to be strolling around at three in the morning. I hated to be upstaged. Pulling the mink around me tightly, I walked away, staggering in my high heels over the snowdrifts to the car. We were doing a close up, just the mink and me, when I saw him running towards me, limping. His nose was bleeding and his knuckles smashed. The guy had been wearing a ring and the side of his face was cut. ‘You cunt!’ he shouted across the car park. ‘You filthy, fucking cunt!’ So, we’re starting with Mamet. DENIM JACKET: I fucking defend your fucking honour and you fucking walk away! MINK: Get in the car. DENIM JACKET: Fuck you! MINK: Get in the fucking car! DENIM JACKET: I said, fuck you! Or maybe you didn’t fucking hear me. Maybe you were too busy walking the fuck away! MINK: I didn’t ask you to fight him, did I? DENIM JACKET: No man takes that. MINK: It was about me! DENIM JACKET: No man fucking takes that, understand? You’re my girlfriend. A man says something to you, he says it to me. Understand? MINK: Fuck you! DENIM JACKET: Fuck you too. (Pinter pause.) DENIM JACKET: You walked away. MINK: I couldn’t watch you do it, Baby. (Tears welling up in eyes; gin tears; three o’clock in the morning tears.) I just couldn’t watch you get hurt. (Grabs me by the shoulders; moving rapidly into Tennessee Williams territory now.) DENIM JACKET: You gotta have faith in me, Louie. Please. (Bloody head on mink.) I need you to have faith in me. (sotto voce) I need you, Baby. I need you. (Curtain.) Only the curtain never fell. We broke up just before I came to England, exhausted. I discovered I wasn’t a diva, that I didn’t have the endurance for grand opera. And there are only so many ways you can say ‘Fuck you’ to someone before you start to really mean it. I had imagined that passion, drama, and love were all one and the same – proof that the others existed. But the opposite was true: drama and passion are just very clever disguises for a love that has never taken root. I gave the mink away to a friend in New York. It was a heavy coat to wear and I was relieved to get rid of it. But very soon after it was gone, I began to feel that something was missing. I thought I could change my character as easily as I could change my coat. But I’ve been searching for the right one ever since. G Girl Friends (#ulink_49dbc846-d870-52ce-a954-cbdc635d6da8) It is a good idea never to go shopping for clothes with a girl friend. Since she is often an unwitting rival as well, she will unconsciously demolish everything that suits you best. Even if she is the most loyal friend in the world, if she simply adores you, and if her only desire is for you to be the most beautiful, I remain just as firm in my opinion: shop alone, and turn only to specialists for guidance. Although they may not be unmercenary, at least they are not emotionally involved. I particularly dread these kinds of girl friends: 1. The one who wants to be just like you, who is struck by the same love-at-first-sight for the same dress, who excuses herself in advance by saying, ‘I hope you don’t mind, darling, and anyway, we don’t go out together very much, and we can alwaystelephone beforehand to make sure we don’t wear it at the same time, etc. etc.… You are furious but don’t dare show it and you return the dress the next day. 2. The friend with a more modest budget than yours, who couldn’t dream of buying the same kind of clothes as you (the truth is that she dreams of nothing else). Perhaps you think it is a real treat for her to go shopping with you. Personally, I call it mental cruelty, and I am always painfully embarrassed by the role of second fiddle that certain women reserve for their best friend. Besides, her presence is of absolutely no use to you at all, because this kind of friend always approves of everything you select, and will agree with even greater enthusiasm if it happens to be something that isn’t very becoming. 3. Finally, the friend who lives for clothes and whose advice you seek. This spoilt and self-confident woman will monopolize the attention of the shop assistants, who are quick to scent a good customer. You find yourself forgotten by everybody, trying to decide what looks best not on you, but on your friend. Moral: Always shop alone. Women who shop with their friends may be popular, but elegant they are NOT. I’m on my way to Notting Hill to see a friend I write with, Nicki Sands. We began working on a screenplay together about a year ago. Neither of us is really a writer, which is probably why we aren’t making a lot of progress on the project. We meet up religiously twice a week, loitering around in a kind of career cul-de-sac. However, writing does provide us with a useful alibi, instantly deflecting any embarrassing questions such as, ‘So, what do you do?’ Nicki used to be a model in the late seventies and early eighties and now she lives with a record producer in an enormous double-fronted house in Notting Hill. They openly despise one another. Neither one of them is obliged to work, so they while away the hours wandering from room to room, looking for new ways to torture each other. I arrive around 10:30 to find Nicki and Dan milling about in their Santa Fe style kitchen. They own a cappuccino machine that neither of them can work and are standing in front of the faux adobe woodburning hearth and indoor barbecue unit holding their empty cups. Every once in a while, one of them will have a go and the other will provide a running commentary. ‘That’s right, put the coffee in and turn the knob … No! No, no, no, no, no!’ ‘Shut up!’ ‘Jesus, you’re doing it wrong again!’ ‘No, I’m not!’ ‘Steam, there’s meant to be steam!’ ‘Shut up! What is it with you?’ ‘What is it with me? What is it? I’ve been up since six and I still haven’t had a fucking cup of coffee!’ Reading the instructions is considered cheating. After a while, Dan gives up and makes a Nescaf?. The three-hundred-pound triumph of Italian engineering has won again. Nicki and I decide to go out for coffee and discuss plot development. But what we really do is sit in Tom’s, a caf? and organic food shop around the corner, and hash over Nicki’s failing relationship in detail. ‘He thinks he looks young!’ she hisses at me, leaning dramatically across the table, as if discretion were a consideration. ‘I mean, he said to me the other day, “I don’t think I look a day past thirty-five.” I nearly choked on my cappuccino!’ (They must have been out.) She’s speaking to me but her eyes never leave the door, just in case someone thinner, prettier, or more chic walks in. This almost never happens. I’m just beginning to confide in her that I think maybe my husband and I might have a serious problem too, when suddenly she screams, grabs my arm violently and yanks me across the table. ‘My God! Louise!’ she gasps. ‘That’s the handbag I was telling you about! There!’ I smile and nod. I’m used to Nicki by now. And I’m used to her ignoring me. Nicki is one of those women who only has one girl-friend at a time. She wears friends out with her constant demands for attention but is too competitive to tolerate more than one extra female in her life. I’ve known this for a while. However, cultivating friends has never been my forte. Although I’m perfectly sociable – happy to spend an hour or so in idle chit-chat with any number of people, the thing I’m not terribly good at is the kind of honest self-revelation and shared intimacies that are the backbone of a lasting female friendship. I long to be open and informal, if only my life weren’t such a mess. But now is not the time. After all, if I started confiding my innermost problems to someone, I’d have to do something about them. And I’m not ready for that yet. Someday, when I’ve pulled myself together, maybe I’ll have a real chum of the heart. In the meantime, I’m not expected to share any deep personal confidences with Nicki; I’m only required to show up and tag along. And tagging along will do me just fine. It’s easy, undemanding – we talk about nothing more taxing than new lipstick formulations and, even though I could never afford it, the benefits of Pilates versus Hatha yoga techniques. And there’s a certain amount of glamour involved in these weekly escapes. I enjoy basking in the chaotic splendour and excess of Nicki World, complete with multi-million pound homes, ?100 face cr?mes, and ?4 organic lattes, while clinging perversely to the reassuring knowledge that, for all their money, Nicki and Dan are still incredibly unhappy. When your own life remains a baffling, unresolved puzzle, there are few things more comforting than to be surrounded by fellow struggling souls. When we’ve downed enough caffeine to bring us to tears, we walk back to Nicki’s and dump our bags in the Moroccan style living room. Almost everything that Nicki and Dan lose is eventually discovered lying camouflaged against the overwhelming profusion of kilim cushions that populate this room. They’ve even managed to create curtains out of old Oriental carpets, so that sitting in it is like being swallowed by a giant carpet bag. Then we climb up to Nicki’s Victorian study and she sits in front of her computer, which folds out from a unit made to look like an antique dressing table, and I sit on the daybed. The daybed is an original, painfully uncomfortable and obviously designed to keep Victorian ladies very much awake. ‘OK. Right.’ Nicki turns on the computer, clicks into our file and pages down to where we left off. ‘Here we are, page fifteen,’ she announces triumphantly. No matter how much work we do or how often we meet, we’re always on page fifteen. ‘OK, so how did we leave it then?’ I try to gather my enthusiasm. ‘Jan was just about to reveal to Aaron why she’d left home.’ ‘Oh, yeah. Good. And what did we decide about that?’ Nicki checks through the notes we made at coffee. ‘You know, I don’t think we came to any firm conclusions about that one.’ ‘Did we have any ideas?’ She flicks through again. ‘I’m not really seeing anything that can be called a solid idea.’ ‘Oh. OK. Never mind.’ I haul myself out of the sagging centre of the daybed. ‘Right. Let’s get brainstorming!’ The room goes dead. A dog barks somewhere in the distance. Nicki gnaws at a hangnail. Suddenly, like the voice of God, the sound of Dionne Warwick singing ‘Walk On By’ floats down the stairs. Nicki’s on her feet in a flash. ‘My God, I can’t believe he’s doing that now! The bastard!’ ‘Doing what?’ I ask. ‘He’s playing Dionne Warwick!’ she shrieks. Flinging the door open, she screams up the stairs. ‘I know what you’re doing, you bastard! I know what you’re doing!’ ‘My God, Nicki, what’s he doing?’ I’m missing the point badly. ‘He’s exercising!’ she screams, rolling her eyes. ‘Don’t you understand? The bastard will be bouncing all over the treadmill next!’ She cradles her head in her beautifully manicured hands. ‘I’m getting a tension headache. I can feel it right here.’ She points to the top of her left temple. ‘I can’t work this way. I just can’t. Do you mind? I have to get out of here.’ So we go shopping. Shopping with Nicki takes stamina. It takes patience. And it takes great fortitude. I’m fine as long as we stick to coffee shops and her house but as soon as we go shopping, real, proper clothes shopping, the enormous gulf between her life and mine is ruthlessly revealed. Suddenly all the cuddly Hello! glamour and intimacy we’ve shared evaporates and I’m keenly aware of a sharp, insurmountable shift in status. Firstly, she’s tall, incredibly slender, with long legs and a handsome bust. So it’s like, well, like shopping with a model. Secondly, she shops at Prada and Loewe, Harvey Nichols, and Jo Malone – stores well beyond my meagre budget. I’m used to doing my Columbo impression, shambling around the changing rooms of Harvey Nichols in my second-hand trench coat while she parades through the department in her knickers, grabbing piles of garments in all conceivable colours and styles. The shop assistants love her. They look upon me as a badly groomed pet. Occasionally, Nicki encourages me to try something on. There are awful moments, embedded in my memory, of standing in front of a changing-room mirror in a badly fitting dress, my legs unshaven, wearing a pair of worn out plimsolls, only to have Nicki emerge from the neighbouring cubical in exactly the same dress (but a size smaller), looking, yes, like a model. It’s the shop assistants I feel for most. They avert their eyes and smile and lie. The minutes stretch like years while they desperately try to make a sale to one of us, to both of us, and then neither of us. Nicki frowns, pouts and checks for non-existent panty lines while I crawl backwards into the cubical, desperate to hide again under my trench coat and brown beret. Later, I help her carry her bags from the shop. She smiles and pats me on the head and I listen to how hard it is to find clothes that fit when you’re really a size six and nearly five foot nine on the way back home in the car. If she shot me, it would be quicker and less painful. That’s our normal routine, only it’s about to change. Thanks to Madame Dariaux, the next time I meet her, I’m not wearing a brown beret or my second-hand trench. And I’ve already been shopping. By myself. I’ve been thinking about it for a while; building up to it. Normally, I don’t even allow myself to window shop; I tell myself I don’t have the money and therefore it’s torture even to look. Or I tell myself I’m too fat; I’ll shop when I’m taller (when I’m five foot nine and a size six). But ever since I wore the navy pinafore dress into work, Colin’s been hounding me, calling me ‘The Vixen’. And then on Saturday, the most extraordinary thing happened. Someone noticed me. A man. I was on my lunch break and famished. Not just hungry but ravenous. I’d run to Pr?t ? Manger and bought a tuna salad and a chocolate brownie. Then, back in the theatre, I hid inside the empty auditorium, tucked away in one of the ancient red velvet boxes to eat. Eating is, in fact, putting it politely. What I was actually doing was savaging my food, complete with little grunting noises; leaning in close to the plastic container for maximum intake in the minimum amount of time. It was the kind of eating a girl only does on her own, usually in front of the television, dressed in a pair of pyjamas she hasn’t been out of all day. Except, I wasn’t alone; there was someone watching me. I didn’t recognize him. Wearing jeans and a faded blue sweatshirt, he had dark, almost black hair and brown, heavy eyes. He just stood there, hands crammed into his pockets, staring at me. And when I caught sight of him, I nearly choked on a caper. ‘That’s a funny place to eat,’ he smiled. Oh God, a techy, I thought disparagingly. One of those guys who paint scenery while exposing their bum cracks. Piss off and leave me alone. ‘If I go upstairs, they’ll nick my brownie and I’m really hungry,’ I explained curtly. I turned my attention once again to the total annihilation of my feast but he continued to stand there, digging his hands ever deeper into his pockets and rocking back and forth on his heels. ‘Are you new here? I don’t recognize you,’ he continued amiably. ‘No. I work in the box office.’ I finished each sentence like I was finishing the conversation but he lingered on, enduring my silence and indifference. I picked lamely at my food. He was putting me off my stride – I felt self-conscious and all too aware of the fact I was eating my tuna salad with a spoon. He asked me some more questions, about the box office hours and what I thought of the company, but mostly he stared at me. I couldn’t figure out what he was doing but it made me nervous and uncomfortable. Eventually, I threw my salad away and made my excuses. Back in the box office, I ranted to Colin about my ruined lunch. ‘Well, my little Vixen, what do you expect?’ he laughed, pouring me a cup of sugary tea. ‘He likes you.’ ‘Me?! Get real, Col.’ ‘Face facts, Ouise. The man fancies you. And by the way, he isn’t just a techy: he’s our new hot-shot director and his name’s Oliver Wendt. Bit of a dish, if you ask me.’ I felt odd – slightly ill, tingly and adolescent. ‘Fancies me?’ I echoed. Colin gave me a hug from behind. ‘Yes, Louise. Fancies you. Better get used to it.’ When I left the theatre at the end of the day, Oliver Wendt was having a cigarette on the front steps of the building. For someone I’d never noticed before, he suddenly seemed to be everywhere. ‘Good night, Louise,’ he called after me. I stopped and turned. ‘You know my name.’ ‘That’s right,’ he said, stubbing the cigarette end out under his heel. ‘And my name’s Oliver, so now you know mine.’ He was looking straight into my eyes. I felt my heart pounding in my chest, echoing around the seemingly hollow recess of my head. I turned away and smiled to myself. ‘Good night, Oliver,’ I called, and as my voice drifted off behind me, I felt sure he was smiling too. I walked home as slowly as I could, reluctant to lose the buzz of adrenaline that coursed through my limbs. And that night, as I lay beside my husband in bed, for once I didn’t fall into a coma of sleep. Sunday I got up early, long before my husband was conscious, and made my way to Oxford Street. I went to Top Shop and wandered around the cavernous store for hours, mesmerized by the video screens, pulsating music, and vast selection of clothing. At last, after trying on what was easily half the stock, I settled on a pair of steely grey, wide-legged trousers and a pale pink, fitted cardigan top. Then, invigorated by my purchases, I walked across the street to Jones and bought a pair of black ankle boots with a kitten heel. And suddenly, in a single afternoon, the thing I had never allowed myself to do was done. The brown beret and second-hand trench coat were gone and I emerged, butterfly-like in all my Top Shop glory. Monday, I’m due to meet Nicki in Tom’s at noon. I get to Tom’s a little late, and Nicki’s already there, guzzling a latte with all the desperation of a junkie. She looks up and I wave. But instead of waving back, she just frowns at me. Something’s wrong with this picture. ‘Sorry I’m late,’ I say, piling my coat on the chair between us. ‘Been here long?’ She’s examining me, her eyes registering every detail of my being. ‘You look different,’ she concludes. ‘Yes,’ I smile, pleased she’s noticed. ‘Those trousers are new!’ This is not an observation but an indignant accusation. ‘Yes.’ I pull out a chair and swivel my hips proudly. ‘When did you go shopping?’ she demands. ‘On Sunday.’ I sit down and a young man with spiky hair and an apron comes over to take my order. ‘And what can I get for you?’ He’s smiling and his eyes are gleaming. Normally I have to wave my hands in the air like an air traffic controller before anyone takes any notice of me, so this makes a nice change. I smile back. ‘What’s good today?’ I ask. ‘Well … there’s the soup, which today is roasted red pepper and avocado, it’s a cold soup but then,’ he winks at me, ‘you seem like a cold soup kinda person.’ ‘Do I indeed!’ I giggle. Nicki can’t stand it. ‘We don’t have time for that! We’ve got work to do.’ ‘I could bring it right away,’ he offers. So accommodating. ‘That would be great, and an orange juice please. Thanks.’ ‘No trouble. Freshly squeezed?’ ‘Of course.’ ‘I should’ve known,’ he smiles. ‘Excuse me!’ Nicki throws her cup down onto the saucer. ‘I ordered something almost twenty minutes ago, if you don’t mind!’ ‘Certainly.’ He winks at me again as he leaves. Nicki’s outraged. ‘The service here is appalling. And the food’s gone right downhill. God, I’ve had enough of this. Come on.’ She slaps a fiver down on the table. ‘Let’s go to Angelo’s instead.’ She pulls on her black Prada duffel coat and storms down the steps. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say to the spiky-haired young man, as I run to catch her up at the door. Nicki’s cooling her heels in the street. ‘Listen, let’s just go home,’ she says. ‘I can make us something to eat.’ ‘Fine,’ I agree and we walk to her house in silence. When we arrive, Dan’s sending a fax in the kitchen. ‘Hey, Louise. You look great! Have you lost weight?’ ‘No, thanks, Dan. Just got some new trousers.’ ‘They’re really cute. Turn around.’ I do a little pirouette and Nicki rolls her eyes. She throws her coat on top of the dog and pushes past us. ‘For God’s sake, Dan. They’re just a pair of trousers,’ she hisses, chucking things out of the fridge onto the counter. ‘Where’d you get them?’ he persists. ‘Dan!’ She pelts some organic, vine grown tomatoes into a wooden bowl. ‘Who cares?’ ‘Top Shop,’ I tell him. ‘Top Shop!’ He stands amazed. ‘My girls shop at Top Shop!’ ‘No, they do not.’ Nicki slams the fridge door. ‘No one you know shops at Top Shop.’ ‘They do now. How much were they?’ ‘Nothing, thirty-five pounds.’ ‘No way!’ The whole concept of buying a garment for as little as thirty-five pounds is new to him. ‘Dan, leave us alone. We’ve got work to do,’ Nicki commands, pointing to the door. But he lingers on, unfazed. ‘Why don’t you shop at Top Shop, Nicks?’ ‘Don’t call me Nicks.’ She’s chopping something with a knife and pieces are flying everywhere. ‘Come on,’ he persists, ‘why don’t you buy a cute pair of trousers like Louise?’ She turns, knife raised, eyes narrowed into two tiny little slits. ‘Because, my darling, I don’t need to shop at Top Shop. I can afford to buy decent clothes from a proper designer. We all do the best we can with what we have and Louise has done very well. It’s not easy for girls on a budget and then of course, certain figures are, shall we say, more challenging than others.’ She turns back and the knife hits the cutting board with a crack. For a moment, there’s absolute silence. Dan stares at Nicki in disbelief. ‘My God, but you’re a rude bitch,’ he says at last. Nicki turns around again and looks at me. Her eyes are dead, like a shark. ‘I didn’t mean it that way. I just meant …’ Dan turns to go. ‘I’m sorry, Louise. I really am.’ ‘Don’t you dare apologize for me!’ she shouts after him. He’s gone and the kitchen is quiet. ‘So.’ She turns to face me, smiling. When she speaks, her voice is like honey. ‘Would you like tuna in your salad?’ ‘No. No, thank you,’ is all I can say. She swivels around and continues chopping. ‘Suit yourself.’ Nicki and I never get beyond page fifteen. We decide we have artistic differences and have gone in different directions. We never noticed it before, but now it’s all we can see. Considering that I used to see her twice a week, I should miss her more than I do. H Husbands (#ulink_e0e9a11a-2b41-51e9-a96a-ba1d7470f211) There are three types of husbands: 1. The Blind Man, who says, ‘Isn’t that a new suit, darling?’ when he at last notices the ensemble you have been wearing for the past two years. There really isn’t any point in discussing him, so let’s leave him in peace. At least he has one advantage: he lets you dress as you please. 2. The Ideal Husband, who notices everything, is genuinely interested in your clothes, makes suggestions, understands fashion, appreciates it, enjoys discussing it, knows just what suits you best and what you need, and admires you more than all the other women in the world. If you possess this dream man, hang on to him. He is extremely rare. 3. The Dictator, who knows far better than you what is becoming to you and decides if the current styles are good or not and which shop or dressmaker you ought to go to. This type of man’s ideas on fashion are sometimes up to date, but most often he has been so impressed with the way his mother used to dress that his taste is, to say the least, about twenty years behind the times. Whatever type of husband you have, my advice is to make the best of it and to try to tame your expectations of him. Even the most devoted man is bound to be distracted at times and forgetful, despite all the efforts you have made to charm him. If you are wise, then you will allow it to pass unnoticed. It is better to develop a strong sense of your own style than to rely too heavily on the opinion of another … even that of your husband. I’m handing my husband, the Blind Man, a fresh cup of tea. I walk across the living room and place his cup on the small round table beside him. He looks up. ‘You’ve lost weight,’ he observes. I stand like a rabbit frozen in the headlights of a car. ‘Yes,’ I concede. And for a moment I think he’s going to notice. For a very long second it looks like he’s going to register the fact slowly but surely everything about me has changed. I’m wearing my hair differently. I’ve bought several new items of clothing. I’ve started to seriously go to the gym. For weeks now I’ve been making dozens of tiny little adjustments and silently waiting for some sort of response. And now here it is; he’s noticed. And then, just as quickly, I don’t want to know. After years of being invisible, the sudden spotlight of my husband’s attention is too much to bear. It infuriates me. As it happens, I’m in luck. ‘Don’t get too thin,’ he says, disappearing again behind the Sunday papers. I breathe a sigh of relief. I’m safe. I pick up the Style section of the Sunday Times and perch on the edge of the sofa with it. Wait a minute. Why is that a relief? What are my motives for changing the way I look if I don’t even want my husband to notice? I’m doing a pretty good imitation of a woman reading the paper, but what I’m really doing is gathering my thoughts about me. I’m changing. Fast. It started off gradually enough, but now it’s snowballing. I can’t explain it; things that were perfectly acceptable a minute ago are suddenly intolerable. At first it was only the clothes but now it’s seeping into everything – the way I eat, sleep, think. I steal a glance at the figure hidden behind a wall of newsprint on the other side of the room. Here’s the rub: can I hide it from him? And do I want to? I can hear him chuckling. ‘That television show Clive’s in has got terrible reviews.’ Clive Foster is my husband’s arch-rival and we hate him. I say ‘we’ because this is part of the glue that keeps the relationship afloat. There’s a kind of camaraderie in tearing successful people down, like a shared hobby. And Clive is one of our favourites. Not only is he a similar physical type to my husband, which means they’re always up for the same roles, but he’s also considerably more successful. If that weren’t reason enough, they’re at present sharing a stage night after night in The Importance of Being Earnest. My husband spends most of the evening trying to upstage him and Clive retaliates by cutting off his laugh lines. It’s an ugly business. But mostly we hate Clive because he’s out there, enthusiastic and determined and that’s deeply threatening to people like us. He laughs again. ‘My God! They’ve even singled him out! “Clive Foster is horrifically miscast in the role of Ellerby”! Splendid!’ ‘Poor Clive,’ I murmur. Poor Clive? Unexpectedly, I feel for Clive. Yes, Clive, who used to be the household embodiment of all that is evil and loathsome. Suddenly, getting what you want, thrusting yourself centre stage and taking risks doesn’t seem so offensive. What is distasteful is the way we hide behind our own sterile mediocrity and take pleasure in the failings of someone who at least has the courage to try. That’s when I start to lose the plot. ‘Poor Clive,’ I say again, only louder this time. The paper comes down and my husband looks at me like I’m crazy. ‘Poor Clive? What, are you mad? The man’s a beast!’ Here’s where I should chime in. But I don’t. ‘And why is that?’ ‘Louie, what’s wrong with you? You know why.’ The paper goes up again. I feel a totally unreasonable fury building inside me. I should let this go. I should allow it to pass unnoticed. But I don’t. ‘Pardon me … I seem to have forgotten exactly why Clive is so offensive.’ No response. Come on, let it go. I pick up the Style section for a second time; then, for reasons beyond my control, put it down again. ‘Is it perhaps because he’s not the way you would like him to be? Because he has the balls to be openly ambitious?’ The paper stays in place; his voice resonates behind it. ‘You’re being ridiculous. I’m not having this conversation with you.’ ‘Not having this conversation? Not having … you don’t get to choose which conversations we have or don’t have!’ The paper remains. ‘I don’t need to talk to you when you’re being unreasonable.’ I can feel myself flushing; my heart is pounding so loudly I almost scream the next words. ‘I’m not unreasonable!’ He snorts from behind the paper. ‘Listen to yourself.’ I lose it. Before I know it, I’m on the other side of the room, tearing at the paper that divides us. My husband stares at me with a mixture of horror and disbelief. When I speak, my voice is hoarse and I have a hard time catching my breath. ‘Don’t you ever ignore me again! Conversations are over when we are done talking. We!’ My hand is crumpling the paper, shredding it. He grabs my wrist. ‘Fuck off,’ he says, matter-of-factly. ‘Fuck off, Louise.’ I reel backward. He’s smoothing back the paper with his hand and I reach forward, grab the whole section and throw it across the room. He’s going to notice me now. ‘If you don’t want to talk to me, why did you marry me in the first place?’ He stares at me in disgust. ‘You call this talking? Is this what you call the art of conversation?’ He turns hyper-English. ‘I’m perfectly happy to talk to you in a calm, reasonable manner.’ ‘No, you’re not! I just tried and all you said is, “I’m not having this conversation with you.” We are never having this conversation. We’ve not had more conversations than anyone I know! And why are you the arbiter of all that’s calm and reasonable? Why can’t we have an unreasonable conversation? Why can’t we say anything we want?’ He’s cold and calm, blinking at me with his pale blue eyes. ‘Like what?’ I start to feel foolish, awkward. And then it comes out – out of nowhere. ‘We never fuck.’ The world melts; goes all Salvador Dali. I’ve reached new heights of absurdity. He laughs at me in amazement. ‘What’s that got to do with Clive or his TV show?’ I’m crazy – I sound crazy. But what I’m saying is true. I say it again. ‘We never fuck.’ He stops laughing, quite suddenly, like Anthony Hopkins playing a psychopath. ‘So what. Plenty of people don’t have sex all the time.’ My breath is slowing and I’m calming down. I say another true thing. ‘You’re not attracted to me.’ He considers this. ‘You’re a very attractive woman, Louise, when you’re not behaving like a banshee.’ He shrugs his shoulders and employs his customer service voice; the one he uses to extract refunds from unwilling sales assistants. ‘I’m sorry that I disappoint you sexually. I obviously don’t have the same sex drive you have.’ The word ‘sex’ hisses with disdain. I feel ashamed for being so base. Only, I’m tired of feeling ashamed. I say one last true thing. ‘I don’t think my sex drive’s unusual.’ He stands, walks to the door and smiles graciously. ‘Then it’s me.’ He does a little half bow. ‘I am The Defective One.’ He rises above me and my brute animal sex drive. I am, after all, common – from Pittsburgh, where people fuck and fight and fart. The Three Fs. ‘Where are you going?’ I sound plaintive and hollow. ‘I’m going into the garden. Unless there’s anything else you’d like to say to me.’ He’s playing the end of a No?l Coward scene. ‘I so enjoy these Sunday morning conversations.’ Fuck No?l Coward. ‘I think we should see a marriage counsellor,’ I blurt out. He looks me up and down. ‘Feel free.’ ‘But we need to go together.’ ‘Louise, you are the one with the problem. My marriage is fine.’ Once again, I find I’m alone in the barren wasteland of the living room. The torn paper is the only evidence of life. The words, ‘If you are wise, then you will allow it to pass unnoticed’ swim around and around in my brain. I’m not wise. But I don’t know why. I go into the bedroom and look out of the window; he’s pulling weeds in the back garden. How can he do that? How can he carry on with basic domestic tasks when everything between us is deteriorating? But he does. I watch him rearranging the garbage bins at the back of the building in order of size and fullness. He does it carefully, earnestly. He needs to. He needs to believe it matters. That he’s protecting us from all sorts of chaos – the chaos of dusty surfaces, the violence of unevenly stacked books, the irreparable damage of a fruit bowl found to contain an onion next to an apple. He’s an errant knight, on a quest to save a lady who doesn’t want to be saved. Who doesn’t even want to be a lady and who’d rather sleep with the dragon than sleep with him. And that’s when it hits me. I go back to the moment when he comments on my weight loss. I freeze-frame it in my mind’s eye. And there, there it is, clear as day. The truth is I don’t want him to notice me, to cuddle me, or touch me, or say how pretty I am. I just want him to leave me alone. After all that, I don’t want to fuck him either. We have both been blind. I’m sitting on the edge of the biggest bed you can buy in the United Kingdom. The zip has come undone, the beds are drifting and soon the walls of the bedroom will not be able to contain the sleeping figures that are floating apart. In the weeks that follow, I become obsessed by Oliver Wendt, otherwise known as The Man Who Can See Me. I spend inordinate amounts of time wandering around the theatre on the off chance that I’ll encounter him and then running away when I do. I find myself lurking, like a stalker, outside his favourite pub, standing across the street in the darkness, glued to the spot by desperate, confused lust. The weird thing is (and I don’t really get this at the time), is that the lust I feel is for myself – the self I see in his eyes. I don’t really want to talk to him, or know him; I just want to be seen by him. ‘Do those reports need to go downstairs? I’ll take them.’ ‘But, Louise, you’ve only just come back from there. We can take them down later.’ ‘Oh, it’s no trouble. No trouble at all.’ And I’m off, roaming around the building like a creature from a fairy tale, doomed by some evil curse to wander the earth forever in search of her own reflection. This continues for a while, we see each other, we stare at each other and I run away. And then one day, when I absolutely can’t stand it any more, I invite myself out for a drink with him. He’s smoking in the foyer. It’s the opening night of a new play and the revolve on the stage isn’t working properly. He’s got all the techies putting in overtime while he works his way through a pack of Marlboro Lights. I’m meant to be gone, or rather, I’m not even meant to be in today, but that’s how it is for me during this time. I find myself ‘popping into work’ for no reason, hanging about in the foyer, walking around the halls, possessed and saucer-eyed, one millimetre away from hysteria at all times. I spot him and then race immediately to the Upper Circle Ladies and check my make-up. Then I check it again. I take deep breaths, pray and then saunter over to my Nemesis. ‘Hey, how are you?’ What this costs me, you’ll never know. My voice is about three octaves higher than normal and my hands are shaking. This doesn’t prevent me, however, from imagining that I’m the sexiest, most alluring creature on the planet and that I’m in fact, part of a living movie, complete with thrilling sound-track, mood lighting, and a cracking script. He eyes me in that way smokers do when they exhale, not quite winking, not quite frowning, just avoiding the stinging smoke of their own fags. ‘Great, Louise. What about you?’ Ah! He speaks! My heart convulses, palpitates, chokes on secondary smoke. ‘I’m, well … I’m thirsty,’ I rejoin, tossing my hair back. ‘That’s how I am.’ He stares at me like I’m demented. ‘Thirsty?’ I smile. How different it is when he looks at me like I’m demented than when my husband does! ‘Yes,’ I persist. ‘Ever so thirsty. One might even say parched.’ And then the penny drops, almost audibly. He laughs and swings the door open. We walk out in the cool evening air and cross the road to his favourite pub. He buys me a drink and we sit on dangerously high barstools, attempting to make conversation. Alas, every relationship has its Waterloo. Conversation proved to be ours. It’s difficult to have a conversation if your basic premise is not to reveal anything about yourself. He asks me a question, for example: where do I come from or what am I doing in London, and I try, in the most charming and amusing way possible, not to tell him point blank that I’m married. I twist my hand around like a claw on the bar, trying to hide my wedding band. I don’t know why I don’t take it off. I guess I can’t. It’s as simple as that. So I sit there, with my hand in a casual fist, giggling maniacally and volleying each question with another one. ‘So, how long have you been in London?’ ‘I don’t know – ages. What’s your favourite colour?’ ‘My favourite colour?’ (It’s charming to be infantile … isn’t it?) He lights another cigarette. ‘Ah … well, that’ll be green, I guess. What about you?’ ‘Hot pink and the colour of gold sequins.’ ‘That’ll be gold, won’t it?’ ‘Well, not really. Not flat gold. I only like sequined gold.’ Oh God, I’m trying way too hard. I shove the claw that passes for my hand into my hair and examine the bottles behind the bar like an alcoholic out of change. Please, please don’t let there be a moment of silence! What can we talk about, what can we …‘What about your father?’ He raises an eyebrow and gives me what I take to be the Look of Total Riveted Fascination. ‘What was he like?’ ‘Old. What about yours?’ That was quick. ‘Honest,’ I say, forlornly, caught off guard. ‘My father’s a very honest man.’ And because I’ve said something true, he looks at me with real interest. ‘That’s a good quality.’ ‘Yes … I suppose it is.’ And I stare at my drink like it’s a crystal ball, going to tell me my future. We last about twenty minutes before Oliver excuses himself on the grounds that the opening night won’t occur if he doesn’t sort a few things out. Like the set. We walk back as slowly as possible without actually stopping in the middle of the road. ‘So, when can I buy you a real drink?’ he ventures, squinting sideways at me through a stream of smoke. ‘I’m … I’m not sure …’ I stammer. Strange as it seems, I’m caught off guard. It’s one thing for me to fantasize and project like a mad woman; it’s quite another for the object of my delusions to respond. And besides, what am I doing? I can’t make a date, I’m married! But there’s another voice in my head, a soft, compelling voice whispering, ‘Hey! What’s the problem? Chill out. It’s not like you’re sleeping with him … you’re … you’re just … having a drink, that’s all. Right?’ And then I’m back in the movie again, trying my best to play the femme fatale. ‘I think I’d like to go somewhere I’ve never been,’ I parry, smouldering at him from behind a sheaf of Veronica Lake hair. The ‘Are you demented?’ look is back. ‘Well,’ he sounds irritated, ‘how am I meant to know where you’ve been?’ Good point. I shrug my shoulders nonchalantly and walk straight into a restaurant hoarding. ‘Oh, Jesus! I’m so sorry! Fuck! What am I doing? I’m apologizing to a wooden sign!’ He watches as I struggle to detach myself from the specials of the day. Once free, he takes my arm with the kind of solicitous authority usually reserved for the elderly and steers me back safely to the theatre entrance. ‘About that drink …’ He waits, but I can’t think. It has to be somewhere perfect, somewhere private, somewhere away from restaurant hoardings and people who know me … He’s starting to get restless. ‘Why don’t I give it some thought?’ I suggest. ‘Please do.’ He smiles and, with that, disappears into the rapidly filling foyer. I stand transfixed on the front steps, my heart pounding, palms sweating. The crowd engulfs me, swirling around me like fast moving water around a stone in a brook. I’ve done it. I’ve taken hold of my life and, for better or worse, nothing will ever be the same again. A week later, I drop a small note into Oliver Wendt’s mailbox. In the bottom right hand corner of an emerald green card I’ve written, I’ve never been to the Ritz The days pass and I hear nothing. Nothing at all. I Ideal Wardrobe (#ulink_7c35ba2c-90fe-5c92-9958-97ddafdc8409) For an Elegant Woman: 9 am. Tweed skirts in the brown autumn shades and harmonizing sweaters, worn under a fur coat of one of the casual varieties. Brown shoes with medium heels and a capacious brown alligator bag. (A really elegant woman never wears black in the morning.) 1 pm.A fur-trimmed suit in a plain colour (neither brown nor black) and a matching fur hat. Underneath the jacket, a harmonizing sweater, jersey blouse, or sleeveless dress. 3 pm.A wool dress in a becoming shade that matches or contrasts with: A pretty town coat in a vivid colour. 6 pm.A black wool dress, not very d?collet?. It will take you everywhere, from the bistro to the theatre, stopping en route for all the informal dinner parties on your social calendar. 7 pm.A black cr?pe dress, this one quite d?collet?, for more formal dinners and more elegant restaurants. A white mink hat. 8 pm.A matching coat and dress that is called a ‘cocktail ensemble’ in Paris, but in reality is often far too dressy for the occasion, although perfect for theatre first nights and elegant black-tie dinner parties. 10 pm.A long formal evening dress that can be worn all the year round (which means you should avoid velvet and prints). 9 am and I’m at the top of Whitehall, wearing a navy gabardine suit, with a brown V-necked knitted top from Kookai and a pair of black T-bar shoes. The Kookai top is beautifully form fitting but has a tendency to unravel under the arms. Must remember to keep my jacket on. Am popping into Sushi Express for my breakfast – a fruit smoothie and an order of green tea to take away. Part of my new regime. I will not eat sugar today. I will not. I buy an extra banana, just in case. The sun is blinding as I race across the street to catch the light. I’m good at running in high-heeled shoes now – I have to be. I’ve been promoted to manager in the box office and spend all day running up and down the stairs between the window in the lobby and the office upstairs. A bit of a wild-card candidate for the job, no one was more surprised than I was when I got it. It’s been a huge boost to my self-confidence. And the constant activity is a godsend. My husband and I have, as far as I can tell, stopped talking. The new job makes it easier for us to pretend that we are too busy or just too tired to communicate. Neither of us is ready to hear what the other has to say. 1 pm and I’m in the changing room of the gym, along with about thirty other women, all of whom have only an hour to squeeze themselves into their lycra ensembles, work themselves up into a sweat, shower, dry their hair and tear back to the office. Since I renewed my membership several months ago, I’ve managed, miraculously, to show up four times a week. Not since my dancing days have I pursued any form of fitness with this much success. And it’s starting to show. The gym locker room is also where you learn about the reality of other women’s bodies and wardrobes. We all spend as much time surreptitiously examining one another as we do on the treadmill. Everyone freezes simultaneously as the tall, tanned blonde emerges from the shower. We pretend to be adjusting our hair but really … yes! She does have cellulite! Life is full of surprises. Who would’ve guessed that the newsreader with the Armani suit and the mobile phone attached to her ear (‘I’m at the gym! T-H-E G-Y-M!’), would wear dingy white M&S knickers with a black see-through bra? But the surprise transformation of the week goes to the mousy-haired, be-fringed girl in the 1984 Laura Ashley floral ensemble who undresses to reveal a bright pink silk bra and knicker set with matching garter belt, stockings and a pair of legs that would make Ute Lemper weep. Even the tall blonde stands agape in the centre of the shower room. I pull on a bright blue crop top, a matching pair of stretch trousers and some hideously expensive Nike trainers. I’m sure I burn more calories just trying to squeeze myself into this outfit than the whole workout put together. 3 pm and I’m back in the office, showered, hair not quite dry (competition for the three blow-dryers is fierce) and back in my navy suit. The only difference is, I’ve given up on my black T-bar shoes. There’s only so long a woman can be expected to bounce around on the balls of her feet before someone has to die. The temperature has shot up and my jacket is hanging over the back of my chair, leaving the unravelling Kookai top in full view. I will repair it. I will. Tomorrow. In the meantime, I’ll just get rid of this stray thread that’s hanging down … I watch with a strange sense of detachment as half the remaining sleeve comes undone in my hand. I’m meant to be completing a weekly sales report but have hit my mid-afternoon slump. This is a biological glitch that renders me incredibly depressed between the hours of three and four o’clock each afternoon without fail. My theory is that I’m genetically programmed to have a nap at this time but unfortunately don’t live in a climate that favours siestas. The consequences are dramatic. The will to live seeps away and, instead of focusing on figures and performance breakdowns, I’m visualizing various methods of suicide. Dangling from a rope, passed out on a bed, floating in a stream. Or a drastic haircut. The phone rings on the desk opposite, and as I scramble to get it, my foot catches on an invisible snag in the grey carpet tiles. My stocking runs and I still manage to miss the call. Luckily, Colin puts the kettle on (he’s intuitive in this area) and magicks up a box of Jammie Dodgers. (‘Two for the price of one, darling. Only slightly crushed.’) I desperately grapple for my spare emergency banana and find it at the bottom of my handbag, beaten into a kind of brown pulp. Fuck it. Spirits rise with the sugar intake and Colin assures me that Sin?ad O’Connor was a fluke; that most women would be unable to successfully carry off a shaved head with any real sense of style. Unless they had ambitions of a professional wrestling career. 6 pm never fails to bring with it an inevitable second wind. The malaise that immersed the office at 4:45 – that hopeless hour when going home seems like a cruel, unsubstantiated rumour – evaporates and at 5:55 is replaced by a carnival atmosphere. There’s dancing, singing, the telling of jokes. Colleagues pat each other on the back and hold the door open for one another as they run, laughing and singing, out of the office. The night shift takes over, looking like they’ve just been sentenced to life imprisonment. I’ve got just over an hour to go home and get changed before I’m due at the theatre for the opening night of my husband’s new play. He’s having dinner after the show with his agent and the director and they expect me to be there, proud and supportive in my role as ‘the wife’. I feel a headache coming on just thinking about it. I decide to take off my stockings, as the run is just too bad for public display, and force my swollen feet back inside the T-bar shoes. On goes the jacket and I’m tearing out the door, flapping my way down Whitehall towards home. 7 pm and I’ve had a quick shower and am reapplying my make-up. In an effort to look striking and sophisticated (I was reading Vogue on the loo), I’ve pencilled in my brows with kohl pencil and now look like I have Down’s syndrome. I try to compensate for my uni-brow by applying a thick coat of red lipstick and before I know it, am a dead ringer for Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?. As I’m frantically wiping it all off with wads of toilet roll, it occurs to me that ten minutes before you’re due somewhere is obviously a bad time to experiment with your look. I manage to tone my make-up down to a Joan Crawford level and am searching through my underwear drawer for a pair of matching hold ups. Will I ever get out of the habit of saving runned tights, ‘Just in case’? Finally locate matching pair and step into my new Little Black Dress, a strappy, short Karen Millen design in thick, black stretch satin, which was the very first purchase I made after my promotion. I’m Audrey in this dress and love it more than anything in the world. However, do NOT feel the same way about black T-bar shoes, as I slip them back on my aching feet. Grabbing a little black satin evening bag I found in the sales, I try unsuccessfully to cram the entire contents of my purse inside and then relent, telling myself that it’s OK, I probably won’t need my address book, a needle and thread, and seven tampons for a single evening out. (My period isn’t due for a week.) Force myself to make do with a lipstick, a compact and my change purse, but not before doing a brief visualization exercise I learnt from reading Feel the Fear but Do It Anyway. I’m only fifteen minutes late as I hail a cab to the theatre. 8 pm. I’m standing alone, like a total lemon at the theatre bar, when I magically spot two old friends, Stephan and Carlos. Stephan’s a set designer and Carlos works in the wig department of the RSC. They’re buying and suddenly things start to look up. After all, I’m going to need a few drinks to make it through the entire evening as half of the happiest, non-speaking couple on earth. The bell goes. Go on then, just one more. God, that bartender is cute. 10 pm. Supper with husband’s agent and the director at The Ivy. A little bit tipsy. My husband is still not talking to me (this is Advanced Silence) but did rescue me from drowning in the tub. Don’t normally bathe this much but seems I kept missing my mouth at dinner. May go back to acting. Flirted all night with the director, who couldn’t keep his eyes off me. Think I made quite an impression. 3 am. Wonder what Oliver Wendt is doing and who with. J Jewellery (#ulink_b547e75b-9772-51c3-876d-66f3433b1826) The contents of a woman’s jewellery box are a chronicle of her past; more telling than her underwear drawer, bathroom cabinet or even the contents of her handbag. The story the jewellery box tells is a romance and hopefully for you, it is a grand and passionate one. Jewellery is the only element of an ensemble whose sole purpose is elegance, and elegance in jewellery is a highly individual matter. It is therefore impossible to say that only a particular kind of jewellery should be worn. One thing however is certain: an elegant woman, even if she adores jewellery as much as I do, should never indulge her fancy to the point of resembling a Christmas tree dripping with ornaments. Finally, a word to would-be husbands: an engagement ring is often the only genuine jewel a woman owns, so please, invest in one of a respectable size. The shock of paying for a good quality ring willevaporate the instant you see your thrilled fianc?e proudly displaying it to all of her friends and relations. And secondly, do not underestimate the advantages of buying only from the very best. A ring box from Cartier, Asprey, or Tiffany’s will be prized almost as much as the ring itself. And this is one occasion where you do not want to be accused of economizing! I close the book and lean it softly against my chest. Imagine receiving a box from Cartier or Asprey! As for Tiffany’s, I’ve never been in – not even to browse. I wonder what it looks like inside. Or what it’s like to walk in on the arm of a man who loves you, knowing that when you come out, you’ll be wearing a diamond ring or maybe a sapphire surrounded by brilliants. I gaze at my hand resting on the duvet and try to envisage a sparkling, bright diamond solitaire on my fourth finger. Closing one eye, I concentrate as hard as I can but still, all I see is the pink, slightly wrinkly flesh where my finger and knuckle meet. I look over at my husband, who’s reading in bed next to me, and watch as he furiously gnaws away at a non-existent hangnail on his thumb. He’s reading the evening paper as if it’s written in code, scowling as he diligently scours its pages for clues. He never gave me an engagement ring. It slipped his mind. He had planned to ask me to marry him, but evidently in much the same way that you plan to keep a dental appointment. Later, he claimed not to know that when you propose, it’s customary to present the woman with a ring. I told myself at the time that we were beyond romantic gestures; unorthodox; unique. And we congratulated ourselves for not indulging in any of the common, more banal expressions of love. I even looked up the word romance in the dictionary once, obsessed with justifying its absence from our relationship. ‘A picturesque falsehood,’ I read out, closing the book triumphantly. ‘See, it’s not real. Romance is a lie.’ And he nodded sagely. How reassuring, to know the emptiness surrounding us is real. But, as I sit here, pretending I can see a diamond on my bare finger, it occurs to me that intellect can be a terrible, deceptive thing. I remember the day he asked me to marry him. We were in Paris in the middle of a heatwave. He’d just finished the run of a play where he was a dog, scrabbling around on all fours, and had badly hurt his knee. He was limping around with a stick and I had a cold. The French love suppositories. All the cold medicines seemed to involve inserting something into your bottom, so I preferred to sniffle and sneeze as we stumbled around the great city, determined to absorb its beauty. The relationship had come to a standstill several months ago. I knew he was going to propose because there was nowhere else for it to go and I was deeply irritated that he hadn’t asked me yet. I was tired and ill and wanted to go back to the room, take off my dress and lie down. But I knew he was measuring each place we went as a potential setting for the proposal. So I stumbled on, pretending to find everything charming, lest my bad attitude spoil the moment and delay it further. And I wore a dress because that’s what you wore when someone proposed to you. We drifted through the landscape of Paris, hoping to find on a bench or in a narrow alleyway the reason for our continued association. Eventually we came to sit under the shade of some trees in the Jardins du Luxembourg. ‘You’re not happy,’ he said at last. ‘I’m afraid,’ I conceded. He waited patiently in the stifling heat. ‘Remember when we first met,’ I began, feeling a wave of nausea building, ‘and you had a … a friendship …’ He pressed his eyes closed against the burning sun. ‘That’s over,’ he said. ‘You know that’s over.’ ‘Yes, but it’s what’s behind it that scares me.’ He kept them closed. ‘There’s nothing behind it, Louise. We’ve been all through this.’ But it wouldn’t go away; it was like a third person on the bench between us. ‘I’m only saying, I mean, as a reflection of your true self …’ I persisted. He opened his eyes. ‘There is no “true self”. I am who I make myself to be. It was a normal friendship.’ ‘But you had to break up with him. When we met, you broke up with him. Friends are pleased when you meet someone. They stick around, get to know them. You don’t meet them in the park one wet Wednesday afternoon and quietly inform them that “things have changed”. They don’t disappear – not when they’ve been calling you every day for years …’ He grabbed my wrist. ‘What do you want from me? What is it that you actually want? Do you want me to pretend it never happened? Is that it?’ ‘No, but don’t you understand? How do I know it won’t happen again?’ I tried to pull away, but he held on tightly. ‘Because I won’t let it. I just won’t let it.’ His voice was defiant but his eyes looked exhausted, lost. ‘I promise you, Louise, I promise I won’t let you down.’ He let go and my arm dropped limply by my side. I stared at the sandy walkway. Everything inside me was telling me to leave, to walk away. We’re in Paris. It’s romantic. A French family walks by, complete with small children and grandparents, as if they’d been cued in by an unseen director. I say it quietly, but I say it. ‘What if that’s your true nature. You cannot, no matter how hard you try, deny your true nature.’ He rises slowly and holds out his hand. ‘I’m not going to have this conversation again. Either you accept me the way I am or not. It’s up to you.’ I get up. I tell myself I’m crazy, stupid. He loves me, doesn’t he? He says the words, doesn’t he? I have a cold; I’m being dramatic. And I don’t want to be alone. We walk. We stumble on, into the heat. It never becomes more comfortable. The next night he proposes to me in the middle of Le Pont Des Arts and I accept. I close the book and look again at my husband. He’s completing the crossword, methodically crossing out each clue as he goes, writing the answers in pen. He has kept his promise; he has not let me down. 1. We’ve always lived comfortably, in the best neighbourhoods, often within walking distance of the West End. 2. He has never been rude to me in public or, to the best of my knowledge, unfaithful. 3. He has looked after me, managing the household finances, taking care of me when I’ve been ill, and constantly seeking to improve our home. 4. He does the laundry. I regularly come home to find my clothes neatly folded and stacked on the bed. 5. When he’s working in the West End, he picks up the Sunday papers outside Charing Cross on his way home on Saturday night so that we can stay up late and read them together. 6. We often go for long walks together late at night, all over London, when the city is transformed by stillness. 7. He is a good companion. 8. And he has brought me the perfect cup of tea every morning in bed for the past five years. Who am I to say this isn’t love? The first time I saw him, it was at the opening night party of The Fourth of July. It was my first big professional role and I was ecstatic with the feeling that I’d made it; I’d arrived. The audience had given us a standing ovation and everyone was certain the play would transfer into the West End. I was wearing my favourite red dress, a long swirling concoction of silk cr?pe that flowed and clung to the body. The lilting, pulsating rhythms of Latin music filled the house in Ladbroke Grove where we were celebrating and some of the guys were mixing pitchers of margaritas in the kitchen. The rest of us were dancing on the patio, swaying and turning with our arms outstretched, laughing too loudly in the cool, early autumn air. When he appeared, a gatecrasher from another theatre, tall and slender, with light hair and pale blue eyes, I barely noticed him. He wasn’t my type. He was in a new play at the Albery and doing well for himself. But I had other plans. My live-in boyfriend had cheated on me a few months earlier. I ignored it at the time, but tonight, wearing my red dress and drinking too many margaritas, I was determined to pull. I don’t know how or why I came to be kissing him. But the next morning, nursing a violent hangover and lying very, very still on the cold, flat futon in the bed-sitting studio I shared with my cheating boyfriend, I realized I’d made a mistake. I called to let him know I’d fucked up, that it was just something stupid and to laugh it off but instead he must’ve heard the confusion and fear in my voice. ‘Let’s meet for a coffee,’ he said. ‘Tell me what’s really bothering you. Maybe I can help.’ And so we met in a little Polish tearoom off the Finchley Road, where they served lemon tea in glasses and the air was thick with the fug of goulash soup. It rained and we sat at a tiny corner table and he listened while I told him the whole, sordid tale of my unfaithful boyfriend. I apologized for ‘behaving badly’ and he nodded his head and said it was all understandable under the circumstances. And then we walked, very slowly and for a long time through the quiet streets of West Hampstead. He told me he’d ring me again, to see how I was doing. The next day we met in the outdoor caf? in Regent’s Park. It was too cold to sit outside, but we did anyway. Moving indoors required more commitment than we were prepared to make, so we perched gingerly on the edge of the wooden benches, shivering. And again, I told him things I hadn’t intended telling anyone and he listened. All the feelings that had been bottled up for the past six months came crashing forward and I didn’t think I’d be able to bear it. The day after that we met on the other side of Regent’s Park and walked until we came to a street in Fitzrovia. He stopped and said, ‘This is where my flat is.’ I followed him up the winding stairs and we sat on a sofa in the front room. It was a tiny flat but everything was immaculate, spotless. It was so different from the bed-sitting room I shared with my boyfriend, crammed full of books, papers and clothes. There was space to breathe here; everything was visible. We talked and I cried and told him I didn’t know what to do. He held me, and I stayed curled up in his arms for a very long time. Then we went into his bedroom. The bed was made so tightly, so perfectly, that there were no creases anywhere. The books on the shelf were in alphabetical order. Everything was white – the bedclothes, the carpet, the bookshelf, the desk. He took out a volume of poems. We sat on the bed and he read to me ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. And when he finished, there were tears on his cheeks. And there, in the clean, white, untouched room, we tore at each other’s clothes, grabbing and pulling, twisting the perfect sheets, shattering the silence. When it was over, we dressed again, quickly, without looking at one another, and walked back into the safe neutrality of the park. And, there, under the sheltering boughs of a chestnut tree, an hour after we made love, he told me that he had been thinking … that when he had broken up with his previous girlfriend, it was because he suspected … that he was afraid he might be … well, that there might be something wrong with him. We didn’t speak for weeks after that. The play transferred into the West End. I left my boyfriend and slept on the sofa in a girlfriend’s flat. But every day I thought of him, of how he’d listened to me and held me and how peaceful and serene the cool white world was where he lived. And then he rang. We met in the same outdoor caf?, only this time we moved inside where it was warm. After an embarrassed silence, I started to say, fumbling for words, how I thought we could probably still be friends, when he reached across the table and took hold of my hands. His eyes were feverish and the words came spilling out on top of one another, in a disjointed torrent I struggled to keep up with. Never before had he been so animated, so passionate, or alive. He had just been afraid, he said, he could see that now. For so long – too long – he’d been on his own in the apartment; day after day, just waiting for something to happen, for some sign. He’d been overwhelmed by depression, suicidal even and hadn’t known what to do. Which way to go. The men … he’d tried, but it had repulsed him. He’d been disgusted. Ashamed. But it had all been just a red herring, nothing more than a phantom. The truth, the real truth, was that he had just been afraid to love anyone. But that was over. Now he loved me. He held my hands tighter. He’d tried to forget me, but he couldn’t. I haunted him, whispered to him, thoughts of me swam around in his head day and night. He pulled me closer and looked into my eyes. I’d never know how desperate, how lonely, how hopeless it had all been. Or how I’d changed him. Changed him to the very core. Laughing, suddenly euphoric, he showered my face with kisses and told me how he knew, as soon as he saw me in my bright red dress, that I was the one for him. And how all he wanted to do was to help me, take care of me, look after me. ‘Please, Louise! Rumple the bed sheets! Pile the sink high with dirty dishes! Hang your red dress from the centre of the ceiling in my cold, empty bedroom! But most of all stay.’ I smiled, leant forward and kissed him. He seemed the kindest, most gentle person I had ever known. ‘You look tired,’ Mrs P says, breaking the silence between us. I stare up at the ceiling. ‘I’m not sleeping very well,’ I say at last. She expects me to go on but I don’t. I’m too tired to talk, too tired to do anything but curl up on the dreaded daybed and fall asleep. There’s a tiny spider attempting to scale the elaborate moulding in the corner; I watch as it slips back over the same few inches, again and again. ‘Why do you think you’re sleeping so badly?’ Her voice is frustrated, tense. I feel for her, having to play such an active role in our session. She must’ve imagined herself as a kind of female Freud, curing patients of deep-seated traumas and neuroses. But instead she gets to watch me take a nap. ‘My husband … we’re …’ I yawn and force my eyes to stay open. ‘We’re falling apart. The whole thing is falling apart. And I can’t sleep any more when he’s there.’ ‘What does that mean? “Falling apart?”’ I shift onto my side and pull my knees up towards my chest. I can’t get comfortable. ‘It means the glue that used to stick us together isn’t there any more.’ ‘And what glue is that?’ The answer flashes in my brain almost instantly, but I think a moment longer because it’s not the one I’m expecting. ‘Fear,’ I say. ‘Fear of what?’ The spider tires again. And fails. ‘Fear of being alone.’ She crosses her legs. ‘And what’s wrong with being alone?’ The spider has given up. I watch as it descends slowly from the ceiling on an invisible silk thread. ‘I don’t know. I used to think everything was wrong with being alone. That I would die, kind of literally implode with loneliness. But lately, lately I’m not so sure.’ ‘Louise, do you love your husband?’ Her voice is challenging, hard. I’m quiet for a long time. A gust of wind blows through the open window and the spider wavers, dangling precariously. It couldn’t be more fragile. ‘Love isn’t the point. As a matter of fact, it only makes it more confusing. It’s not a matter of loving or not loving. I’ve changed. And it isn’t enough just to be safe any more.’ ‘And is that what you were before? Safe?’ ‘That’s what I thought. But now I see that I was afraid.’ I close my eyes again; I’m getting a headache. ‘It’s like that thing, that thing that when you know something, you can’t ever go back and pretend you don’t know it. You can never go back to the way you were before.’ ‘But you can move forward,’ she reminds me. Yes, I think. But at what cost? Weeks later, I come home from work to find my husband sitting, still in his overcoat, on the living room sofa. He looks dreadful, as he has done for weeks. By some strange, sick law of nature, as I become more attractive, he declines. It’s as if only one of us is allowed to be appealing at a time. His eyes are ringed with dark circles, his hair wild and unkempt and he seems to have forgotten that razors exist. He should be gone, at the theatre getting ready to go on, but he’s not. He’s here instead. ‘Oh!’ I say when I see him sitting there, staring into the middle distance. ‘You’d better go, hadn’t you?’ But he just looks at me, like some feral animal that’s been trapped in the house by accident. I should feel concern, or worry, but the truth is I’m more irritated than anything else. We have an unspoken agreement, an arrangement that each of us has been honouring for months now: I go to work in the day and he’s gone in the evening when I get home. He’s now on my time and I don’t want him here. But I sit down anyway, in the green chair, and wait. ‘We need to talk,’ he says at last. Here it is; the conversation we’ve been avoiding for months. I feel sick and yet strangely exhilarated, calm even. ‘Fine,’ I agree. ‘You start.’ He stares at me for another long moment and when he speaks, his voice is accusatory. ‘You’re different. You’ve changed. And I feel like I’ve done something wrong but I don’t know what it is. What have I done wrong, Louise? What is it that I’ve done?’ I take a deep breath. ‘You’re right; I have changed but it’s all been good. Surely you can see that?’ ‘All I see is that you’re more concerned with the way you look.’ ‘But that’s good. I look better than ever before – you should be proud of me.’ ‘I liked you better before. You were easier to be around.’ ‘You mean less demanding.’ ‘I mean less vain,’ he contradicts. ‘Less self-obsessed.’ It’s starting to get ugly. I can feel myself baulking at every word he speaks. It’s hard to believe that this is the same man that only six months ago, I would’ve given my right arm to please. ‘You know what, people are supposed to change,’ I remind him. ‘It’s a good thing. You’re just used to me not giving a shit what I look like. The truth is, you like me better when I’m depressed. Well, I don’t want to be depressed any more. I don’t want to spend my whole life hiding and feeling ashamed and apologizing for myself. I have a right to look good and to be happy. And I have a right to change!’ I’m shaking, my whole body quivering with the force of my declaration. ‘Anyway, the problem isn’t about me changing. I think the real problem is that we don’t really want the same things any more.’ ‘Like what?’ He sounds crushed. ‘Like … I don’t know … everything. I mean, we’re not going to have children, right? So what are we going to do? Just sit around in this flat of ours, hunting for the perfect lampshade and growing old?’ ‘Is that really so bad?’ He just doesn’t get it. ‘Yes! Yes, it is that bad! Can’t you see that it’s bad for us to be sitting around here like two pensioners with no surprises, no passion, no hope, just waiting to die? I mean, doesn’t that strike you as bad?’ For a moment it looks as if he’s going to cry, and when he speaks, his voice is hoarse. ‘Is that really the way you see our life together? Is that really what you think? That we’re like two old pensioners?’ I know I’m hurting him. But if we don’t speak honestly now, we never will. ‘Yes, that’s exactly what I think.’ He sits, motionless, cradling his head in his hands. Silence stretches out before us, vast and insurmountable. Then suddenly, quite suddenly, he pulls himself onto his feet and I watch in horror as he crosses the floor and kneels in front of me. ‘I should have done this earlier, Louise. I’m so sorry, I’ve been very selfish.’ He’s looking up at me, his eyes two enormous pools. I feel sick. He reaches in his pocket and pulls out a tiny, clear plastic bag. ‘Perhaps we haven’t been very passionate … I’m not very good at showing you how important you are to me. I’m sorry. I’d like to make it up to you.’ And he puts the little plastic bag into my lap. There, floating amidst the emptiness, are three tiny coloured stones. It’s a surreal moment; I can’t quite figure out how we went from discussing our life together to this bizarre, make-shift proposal. ‘I got them from Hatton Garden. We can have them made into a ring.’ I should say something – act surprised or pleased, but instead I just stare at the packet, unable to form any cohesive thought other than shock and dismay. ‘Louise, I’m here … on my knees before you. I know we’ve been having difficulties. And …’ I have the uneasy feeling he’s rehearsed this; he’s looking down now, taking a pregnant pause. ‘And I want you to have this, to know that I love you, that I’m sorry.’ He looks up at me again. It’s my cue. My head is pounding; say something nice, something conciliatory, it screams at me. But when I speak, my voice is cold and flat. ‘Exactly what do you want me to have? Some coloured stones in a bag?’ He blinks at me. ‘This isn’t a ring, is it?’ ‘Yes, but … but it could be.’ ‘But it isn’t. What kind of stones are these?’ He shakes his head. ‘I don’t know the names.’ And then I find myself doing something very unexpected; I hand the bag back to him. ‘Why don’t you get up,’ I say. He stares at me in amazement. ‘Louise, please!’ ‘Please what?’ I’m suddenly overwhelmingly angry. I want him off the floor. I don’t want to be a part of this charade anymore. It’s offensive. All of it; the stones, the speech. ‘Why are you doing this?’ I demand. ‘Why are you doing this now, after all this time?’ ‘I … I’m doing it because I don’t want you to leave.’ ‘Why?’ I persist. ‘What difference does it make whether I stay or go?’ He just kneels there, staring at me. ‘Be honest, you don’t really want me, do you? I mean, it’s not like you want to touch me, do you?’ ‘I do want to touch you,’ he says, his eyes not meeting mine. ‘Then why don’t you?’ But he just shakes his head, over and over. And I snap. ‘Why are you doing this?’ I shout, my voice so loud and shrill it doesn’t even sound like it’s coming from me. ‘Just tell me! Say it! Why?’ ‘Because,’ he whispers, his hands trembling as they cover his face, ‘I cannot trust myself when you’re gone.’ My husband and I are having a ‘trial separation’. Colin is looking for someone to rent his spare room. I tell him that person is me and he blinks in surprise and asks, wide-eyed, if there’s anything he can do. No, I say, there’s nothing to be done. And of that, I’m sure. It’s been months now – months of conversations, arguments, silences, tears. We have ‘given it one more week’ again and again and again. It’s like trying to amputate a limb with a spoon. We make it to the end of the month, to the end of another excruciating month, and then I move out. It’s a Tuesday. My husband offers to help me pack my bags. ‘I’m not going on holiday,’ I tell him, repulsed and amazed that he can imagine us standing side by side, taking things off hangers and folding them into piles. He stares at me, numbly. ‘I’m leaving you,’ I explain, saying the words slowly and loudly, the way you speak to a deaf person. ‘This is me packing my bags and leaving you.’ But he just blinks. ‘I’ll pay for the cab,’ he says. He reaches for his wallet and examines the notes. I watch as he calculates in his head how much he can spare. He puts back the twenty for later. And I want to hit him, to cry, to tear through the fabric of our life together like it’s a badly painted backdrop and get to the point at last. He fumbles. Pulls out a tenner. And we’ve been here before; we’ve been right here, in this same, exact spot for a very long time. I let him put the money on the table. I turn and walk into the bedroom and take down my suitcase, the one I brought to England when I thought I was going to be a famous actress, and start filling it with clothes. My husband goes out for a walk and when he comes back I’m gone. Colin lives with his flatmate Ria, a glassblower and gallery manager, in South London, beyond the urban chic of Brixton. Gone are the exclusive caf?s and lunchtime concerts of Westminster, replaced by the gaudy splendour of the Streatham Mega Bowl and the late night Mecca Bingo parlour. The cab driver helps me to unload my bags and haul them up the front steps. I ring the bell and the door opens to reveal Colin in his bathrobe, hair wet from the shower and Madonna blaring in the background. I stare at the misshapen collection of bags, suddenly too overwhelming and unwieldy to move. ‘I’m sorry, Col. What am I doing? What have I done?’ He wraps an arm gently around my shoulders. ‘Come inside. Sit down. And I’ll make us a nice, hot cup of tea.’ K Knitwear (#ulink_8c4c2675-27b3-5de8-a81f-249fd1b82767) Few women can resist the temptation of a soft new pullover in a luscious shade, and how right they are! If you feel the cold, as I do, then it is really the only garment that will keep you comfortable and content from morning till night, in all kinds of seasons, in both the country and in town. The sweater is the grand-m?re of the fashion world: warm, loving, and totally forgiving. (Unless, of course, you are afflicted with a very large bust. Then it is in your interest to stick to less clinging fabrics.) Made from silk for the warmer days and of cashmere when it becomes bitter, a good sweater has no rival. And with a little care and attention, it will last years and years without the slightest sign of age. In these whirlwind times of changing fashions, it is reassuring to know that a camel or navy twin set will continue to be elegant for seasons to come. It is a perfect example of the modern trend towards ease and comfort. During the first days at Colin’s, I fall into a kind of stupor, going to work in a daze and returning to spend the evening rolled into a little ball on my bed, crying and staring at the ceiling. The garment of choice during this bleak period is, morbidly enough, a worn navy cashmere jumper of my husband’s. For years I’ve had a clandestine relationship with this jumper, curling into its warm, forgiving softness like a child clings to a favourite blanket. I used to sneak it from his cupboard when he was out at the theatre; racing to return it when I heard his key turn in the lock. I hadn’t intended to steal it and I’m not even sure why I did. It was draped over a chair in the corner of the bedroom and I just slipped it into my case along with the rest of my clothes. It’s his favourite; it will be missed. And maybe that has something to do with it. Perhaps I’m waiting to see which one of us he wants back first. Then the blue envelopes started to come, letters from my husband. I’m sorry … I’ve failed you … so sorry. They go on and on, saturated with regret and remorse, but not one of them asking me to come home. I had expected something more. A grand gesture: he’d appear in a cab in the middle of the night and insist upon taking me home. Or he might ambush me as I left the theatre, his arms filled with roses. Part of me dreads the idea of spotting him, thin and haggard, smoking on a street corner, waiting for me. But I dread even more the empty corners that appear, with haunting regularity, as the days go by, and the consciousness of the resigned ease with which he’s let me go. The letters are not declarations of love or pleas for resolution or even promises for the future but persistent, miserable apologies to which there is really no reply. He’s letting me know, in his own quiet way, that all the street corners will be empty from now on. I sit in my room crying, choking and spluttering, rocking back and forth, blowing my nose on roll after roll of toilet tissue. I cannot go back but I cannot bear to be where I am. Colin tries to coax me out with various culinary delights; nearly new bourbon biscuits, slightly crushed chocolate ?clairs, and chicken korma made fresh from a jar (special offer, two for the price of one). But I’ve lost my appetite. Instead, I stagger down to the Indian shop on the corner to buy single cans of spaghetti, eating them, more often than not, straight from the tin. Even Ria, who’s never met me before and who has more than enough reason to be wary of the obscene lack of mental health in her new flatmate, makes a few tentative overtures. She offers to help me unpack my bags and make my bed up with some pretty linen and even lends me a delicate, 1930s lamp from her collection of prized objects. But it’s no use. I don’t want to unpack my bags. My bed is far too small to bother with pretty sheets and as for decorating the room, who cares. It’s over. I’m finished. Over the years I’ve transformed from a budding, young actress into a bitter, disillusioned box office manager, selling tickets to plays I could have been in. I’m thirty-two years old, living in a broom cupboard with a theatre queen and a spinster. I take a few days off of work. And then a few more. When I do show up, eyes red and swollen from crying, I have the concentration of a three-year-old. The same things must be repeated three and four times before I can take them on board. I make mistakes. My colleagues cover for me, finally delegating simple, manual tasks for me to blunder instead. All decisions seem completely overwhelming, even simple ones, like what kind of sandwich to have for lunch. I side step this quandary by not eating at all. My weight plummets and I can’t find the energy to wash my hair or organize clean shirts. I wear the same dress day after day, like a uniform. But I don’t care. All I want to do is go home, close my bedroom door, and fall asleep in the jumper that still smells of him, feels like him, reminds me of him. And then, well into my third week of unbridled wretchedness, the jumper goes missing. One morning it’s where I left it in a loving, crumpled heap on the corner of my bed and by that afternoon, it’s gone. I search frantically throughout the whole of my tiny room, flinging the contents out of my half unpacked bags and tearing the sheets off my bed. Then I expand my hunt to the living room and its environs, overturning sofa cushions and rifling through the laundry basket. It isn’t until I’ve exhausted every possibility and am bordering on hysteria that it occurs to me; I’m not dealing with a simple case of a misplaced jumper, I’m dealing with a kidnapping. Suspiciously, both of my new flatmates have retired early for the night. I knock on Colin’s door first. ‘It wasn’t me!’ he shouts over his new Robbie Williams CD. ‘But you know about it, you traitor!’ I rage, stamping down the hall to pound on Ria’s door. ‘Ria, I believe you have something that belongs to me and I want it back!’ A tiny, sullen voice answers firmly. ‘No.’ I’m flabbergasted. ‘What do you mean “No”! That’s my jumper! You have to return it!’ ‘No. It’s bad for house morale.’ Now I’m stunned. ‘You cheeky, little fart! How can it be bad for house morale? It’s got nothing to do with house morale!’ I rattle the doorknob threateningly. She opens the door a crack. Five feet tall in her stockinged feet, Ria peers at me like a mischievous elf. ‘It has everything to do with house morale when one person has completely given up even trying to pull themselves together.’ Colin’s head pops out from behind his door too. ‘She has a point, Ouise.’ It’s more than I can bear. My eyes sting and my throat’s so tight, I can hardly breathe. ‘I don’t want to discuss it. Just give it back to me. I’m not in the mood for jokes.’ Ria takes my hand. ‘But, darling, believe me, this … this … over-indulgence is not the way to mend a broken heart. You’re doing yourself more harm than good.’ I pull my hand away. ‘What does it matter what I do, as long as I’m quiet and pay my rent? What difference could it possibly make to you! Why should you care, anyway?’ ‘Louise …’ She’s taken aback but I can’t help myself. ‘Don’t! Don’t even pretend you care about what happens to me! Do you realize … have you even noticed that my own husband hasn’t rung once since I arrived? Do you know what that means? Do you have any idea?’ ‘Honey, I’m sorry …’ ‘He doesn’t want me back!’ I point out to her, tears rolling down my face. ‘He doesn’t even want the fucking jumper back!’ I run into my room and slam the door. I’m acting like a child, throwing a temper tantrum. Shocked as I am at the violence of my reaction, any shred of self control has disappeared. I curl up on the bed, sobbing pathetically into my pillow, beating my fists into the mattress. I’m as powerless and impotent as a child. Suddenly, I’m seized by an overwhelming sense of d?j? vu. And memory from long ago. This isn’t the first time I’ve stolen a jumper. The first one was my father’s; an ancient moss green pullover of his which hung in the laundry room by the garage. He wore it to do chores in but in its heyday, it had been to countless fraternity parties and dates during his college years. It was his constant companion during the long nights of studying for law school and the more it deteriorated, the more he loved it. When my mother finally exiled it from his daily wardrobe, it lingered on, waiting patiently for him, like a once fine show dog grown old in all its shabby, soft splendour. The most enduring image I have of my father, is of distraction. His mind was always elsewhere. A whirlwind of activity, he could lose weight just getting dressed in the morning. ‘I have a list of things to do today,’ was his constant refrain. ‘A list of things to do.’ And he’d be off. He’d set himself heroic, impossible tasks to accomplish. ‘I’ll rewire the house by dinner time.’ (My father was not an electrician.) Or ‘I’m sure there’s a way of building an indoor pool by yourself.’ And then he’d disappear. There was always one more job that had to be done, some final thing that needed urgent attention, one more essential bit of home improvement that absolutely must be completed by dusk. With only his faithful green jumper to keep him warm, he’d vanish into the sunset, never to be seen again, lost in a blur of perpetual motion. It wasn’t easy to get my father’s attention, but you could steal his jumper if you were desperate. Trouble is, we were all desperate and the competition for that jumper was fierce. Traditionally, my mother had first dibs. But she had other, more effective ammunition in her armoury. She had perfected a fail-proof technique to grab my father’s attention that the rest of us could only marvel at. Since my father loved to fix things, she’d deduced that the best way to secure his attention was to be broken. Accordingly, she suffered from strange, debilitating headaches that could strike without a moment’s warning and last anywhere from twenty minutes to two weeks, as required. It was genius. If he was going to be distracted, he could be distracted with her. As a consequence, she pretty much had a copyright on any form of illness in our family. Occasionally my brother or sister would do a weak imitation, a kind of tribute to the master, but it’s hard to compete with someone who isn’t afraid to pass out. Effective as it was, it had its downside. By the year I turned seventeen, my mother had got fed up with the invalid routine. It must have dawned on her that she was worth more and that made her angry. So angry that she stopped talking to my father altogether. It was known as the Year of Silence. It was a dismal time aggravated by their refusal to admit it was happening. ‘Mom, why are you and Dad not talking?’ ‘We are talking. We just don’t have anything to say.’ His voice was on a frequency she no longer registered. Anger hung over the household like a thunderstorm that refused to break, the pressure building day by day. My father still fixed things, probably even more so now that he didn’t have all the diversions of conversation, but my mother greeted each accomplishment with Sphinx-like indifference. We were all horrified to see how easy it was to vanish from her affections. The invisible man had finally disappeared altogether. During this time, my dad and I became friends. We drove into school together in the mornings and there, in the sanctuary of the car, he listened to my endless Bowie compilation tapes and quizzed me about my studies. When I read Dickens, he bought a volume and read it too. And that’s when I started to wear the moss green jumper by the door. One day I came home from school with it on and my mother saw me. ‘Don’t wear that again,’ she warned. She had a way of saying things. I tossed my hair out of my heavily lined eyes. ‘Why not?’ I challenged. My mother said nothing. Her silence could spill out in all directions. ‘What difference does it make to you, Mom,’ I persisted. ‘It’s not like you wear it any more.’ She gave me a look. ‘Just don’t.’ The next day I wore it again. This went on for some weeks. My mother warned me. I ignored her. My father was nowhere to be seen. And then, on my seventeenth birthday, I came home from school with my father and my best friend. My mother was standing in the kitchen with a birthday cake she’d picked up on her way home from work and as I walked in, her face fell. There I was holding my father’s hand, laughing, and wearing the jumper. She brushed past my father, grabbed my arm, her fingernails digging into my flesh, and dragged me into the hall. ‘That doesn’t belong to you!’ she hissed, barely able to control the venom in her voice. ‘Do you understand me? That doesn’t belong to you!’ She stared at me, a strange, fierce stare. At last she let go of my arm. I didn’t wear the jumper after that. It went back on its hook in the laundry room and hung there uneventfully for several months. Then one spring afternoon, I noticed my mother wearing it while she and my dad washed the car. My father was Hoovering the interior, all his attention on the task in hand, and my mother was emptying out a pail of dirty, black water. To anyone else they looked like a normal couple engaging in a traditional Sunday afternoon chore. But I saw a different picture. My mother had given up. The Year of Silence had failed. My father probably didn’t even notice she’d nicked the jumper, he was so intent on completing his list of things to do. But she was back to stealing what she could from him; moments of companionship and the intimacy of the jumper. She was right; it didn’t belong to me. Things you have to steal never do. Now the sun is setting outside. I sit up on my bed and blow my nose. When I open my bedroom door there, neatly folded on the floor, is the navy blue jumper. Stepping over it, I walk into the living room where Colin and Ria are watching a late night chat show about royal impersonators. Colin mutes the sound and they both look up at me. ‘I’m sorry,’ I begin. ‘You were right about the … the jumper thing … it isn’t helping.’ I’m staring at my shoes. I’ve never had to apologize as an adult for having a temper tantrum before. It’s much harder and more humbling than I thought. ‘The truth is, I’m not very good at being on my own …’ Even as I say it, this seems like the understatement of the year. ‘I don’t really know how to … you know, do it.’ For a moment, I think they’re going to laugh. And then Colin reaches out and takes my hand. ‘None of us do. But you’re not alone, Ouise. We’re here and we’ve been where you are now. Two years ago when Alan left me, all I wanted to do was open a vein.’ ‘And believe it or not, I was actually engaged at one time,’ Ria adds quietly. I look at her in surprise. Tiny, capable, emotionally concise, Ria seems above the messy realm of failed relationships. ‘And what did you do when it was over?’ I ask. It’s almost impossible to imagine her wading through the same histrionic wreckage I’m having such difficulty navigating. She smiles at Col. ‘I cried, like you. And then I came here, like you. I knew Colin through a friend of a friend and when Alan left, he needed a housemate. The rest is history.’ Colin gives my hand a little squeeze. ‘Welcome to Mother Riley’s Home for Wayward Women. It gets better, kid. Believe me. The trick is to stay in the game long enough to be around when the good stuff starts happening again. You’ll see. Suit up and show up. Even if you feel like the whole world can see that you’re made of little pieces, badly glued together.’ Ria nods. ‘And, when in doubt, bathe.’ And so, in the absence of any direction of my own, I take their advice. Ria runs me a tub with lavender oil in it while Colin grills us up some sausages and mashes potatoes. He and Ria argue over which CD to listen to (the Goldberg Variations vs. Massive Club Hits Volume 2) and the Bach wins, but only on account of me being suicidal. Colin sets the table with the mismatched silverware and china his favourite grandmother left him when she died. And while I bathe, Ria makes my bed with the pretty linen sheets she offered earlier and even begins to hang up some of my clothes. When I emerge, freshly scrubbed in my bathrobe, they both applaud. That night the bed seems softer and more comfortable than before, the street outside more tranquil. Moonlight shines through the narrow slats of the Venetian blind, forming little rectangles of pale light on the carpet, and the gentle rustling of the wind through the leaves is the only sound to be heard. I fall into a heavy sleep, no doubt induced by the potent combination of a hot bath and sausages, and when I wake up, I feel oddly refreshed, despite the constant, aching heaviness in my heart. After ironing a shirt, I put on a clean trouser suit and catch the bus into work with Colin on time. I may still feel like a hollow shell but at least I don’t look like one. A week later, I post the jumper back to my husband with a brief note. I took this by mistake. Sorry for the inconvenience. As comforting as it’s been, I don’t want it any more. After all, it never really belonged to me. I sit, very deliberately, on the edge of the daybed in my therapist’s office. She’s upped my sessions since I left my husband and the last few times I’ve simply refused to engage in the conversation about lying down. I’ve decided there’s nothing wrong with wanting to sit up and am tired of wasting sessions talking about it. I find my decision liberating but there are consequences, ripples in the dynamic of the relationship that all have to do with status. Mrs P closes the door and sits down. She waits for me to lie down and I don’t. I smile at her but she doesn’t smile back. Instead, she looks at my shoes. ‘Those shoes are very high,’ she says. I’m wearing the pair of black suede T-bar shoes from Bertie. They are high, but also very sexy. ‘Yes, that’s true.’ She can’t take her eyes off these shoes. I cross my legs and one foot dangles elegantly, making my ankle seem fragile and tiny. I love it, but Mrs P seems disturbed. ‘They must be very hard to walk in,’ she adds. ‘They’re fine once you get used to them, not nearly as treacherous as they seem. But no, they’re not really walking shoes,’ I laugh. Her smile is tense. Why are we talking about shoes? Of course, I can’t help but look at her shoes now. They’re from Marks and Spencer’s, the kind you try on while you’re nipping in to buy pre-shelled peas. They’re flat and beige with a cr?pe sole. She catches my eye and shifts her legs defensively. ‘Your fashion sense has changed dramatically,’ she concludes. ‘I think that’s a good thing.’ She peers at me over her glasses. ‘I’m dressing more like a confident woman,’ I explain. ‘And how does a confident woman dress?’ Her voice is challenging. ‘Like she knows she’s a woman and she likes it. Like she expects people to notice her.’ I smooth a crease out of my suit skirt. ‘Also, I have a more demanding job now,’ I remind her, ‘and I’m required to look a bit more professional.’ ‘Yes.’ She nods her head, but gives the impression of being somehow unconvinced. What am I trying to convince her of? ‘So why didn’t you dress “like a confident woman” before?’ ‘Because I wasn’t confident, I suppose. And there was no one there to notice anyway.’ We’ve been down this road before and I don’t like it. Automatically my eyes scan around for the tissues. There they are on the faux mahogany coffee table; all I need to do is reach across. How handy. Do they teach that at psychiatry school – where to place the tissues? If they’re too close, is that considered enabling? ‘What about your husband?’ She’s staring at me but I can’t decipher the look. It’s neither kind nor indifferent. I feel a mass of pressure building in my chest, tearing at my throat. I swallow, breathe, and then I say it, out loud to another person for the first time. ‘My husband is gay.’ It comes out sounding like a very mundane fact, like I’ve said ‘I’ll have some chips.’ This strikes me as odd and I find myself flashing her this funny, little smile, a kind of awkward half smirk. I know it’s inappropriate, but knowing that only seems to fuel it. I try to will the corner of my mouth down with some success but it pops up again, this time accompanied by a little fart of a laugh. My hand shoots up instantly to cover my mouth but it’s too late. The smirk explodes into a fit of giggles, hysterical and oddly hyena-like. Mrs P stares at me impassively. She reminds me of every nun who ever taught me at school. ‘Louise,’ her voice is stone cold sober, ‘why are you laughing?’ I’m six again, in church. ‘I’m not,’ I say, stupidly, pressing my hand into my mouth. ‘Yes, you are.’ ‘No, not any more.’ I straighten up. Think sad thoughts, car crashes, dead parents. Dead parents, dead parents, dead parents. ‘Louise …’ Oh fuck! My face explodes again and I throw myself into a ball on the daybed. ‘Excuse me,’ I stammer. ‘Louise …’ I’m making noises I’ve never even heard before. ‘Louise!’ ‘Yes?’ ‘Why are you laughing?’ I manage to lift my head up. ‘Wouldn’t you?’ I whisper hoarsely. ‘Wouldn’t I what, Louise?’ The temperature seems to have plummeted ten degrees in the last second. I feel small and cold; my voice sounds like a child’s. ‘Laugh if you married a gay man.’ The silence that follows is crushing; it’s the silence of my childhood, my mother’s silence, which isn’t silence at all, but the howling vacuum of the absence of response. She’s looking at me again with that look I can’t quite get and then she says, ‘No. I don’t think I would.’ The light has drained from the sky. My face is wet and my eyes stinging. ‘Try it,’ I mumble, dabbing my eyes with one of the recycled tissues. ‘It’s hysterical.’ ‘What makes you think your husband is gay?’ she asks. I’m tired. I want to go home. ‘He told me. He said he thought he was gay, or at best bisexual when we met.’ I’m leaving here and going straight to the off-licence. ‘But that does not mean he’s gay.’ I’ve got mascara in my eyes and it’s burning. Am I deaf? ‘Pardon?’ ‘I said,’ she repeats, ‘that it doesn’t mean he’s gay.’ Oh. ‘What does it mean then?’ ‘Well.’ She’s the one crossing her legs now. ‘It means that he’s questioning his sexuality, what it means to be a man. It does not mean he’s gay.’ Wait a minute. ‘I’m just telling you what he told me. Don’t you think he knows if he’s gay or not? Also, we didn’t fuck. Don’t you think that’s significant?’ ‘There are many reasons why sexual relations cease in married couples.’ She adjusts her glasses and cocks her head to one side. ‘Why do you think they stopped?’ ‘Well.’ I cock my head too. ‘I think they stopped because my husband is gay and because he’s not interested. Let’s face it, if you want to do something, you usually find a way of doing it. We didn’t fuck because we didn’t want to; it’s as simple as that.’ She arches an eyebrow. ‘So you didn’t want to fuck either.’ ‘Being rejected twenty-four hours a day is not an aphrodisiac. It’s humiliating.’ And then I add, somewhat defensively, ‘There’s nothing wrong with me.’ She cocks her head the other way, like a parrot. ‘And yet you claim to have married a gay man.’ ‘Yeah, well, apart from that.’ What is it with her? This isn’t at all what I expected. I feel like I’ve fallen into an episode of Perry Mason. ‘And I’m not claiming, I’m telling you what I know to be true.’ She’s looking at me over her glasses again. ‘Look,’ I continue, ‘he doesn’t want to be gay, it’s damned inconvenient for him – he’s a very conservative guy, from a very conservative family. And I come along and we fuck and he tells me this thing and I’m so crazy with fear of being alone and I say, “No, you’re not. Look, I’ve fixed you.” And he loves that because that’s his problem solved and we get married and someone’s got to be crazy because you can’t marry a straight woman to a gay man without someone going mad, so it gets to be me. Get it?’ She says nothing. I hate her. ‘Well, I do. And that’s something.’ ‘You seem angry,’ she observes. I’m clutching handfuls of chenille throw in both fists. ‘Angry? Yeah, just slightly. Just slightly pissed off.’ She removes a piece of lint from her skirt. ‘And why do you think that is?’ I can’t believe her. I want to throw things, to rip those lousy pictures off the wall and smash them into her face. ‘Why? Haven’t you heard a thing I’ve said? I’m married to a gay man!’ She considers this. ‘That’s your perception of the situation.’ I can’t stand it. ‘What does that mean, “my perception”? You know what, it’s a lot more than my perception, it’s my experience – my hard-earned experience of the situation, whether you believe it or not. I’m not crazy! My experiences are real. I don’t need you or anyone else to verify them for me. If ever I was crazy, it was when I believed that someone like you, with your … your incredible mediocrity, could help me!’ I’m on my feet. ‘Anger can be very healthy,’ she says. ‘Fuck you,’ I say, putting on my coat. Her kids’ university fees are walking out the door. She stands too. ‘I think we’re making real progress, Louise. But you may be feeling a little unsupported at the moment and we should think about increasing your sessions.’ I turn and take her hand in mine. We’ve never touched before; I feel her recoil but don’t care. ‘Thank you for all your help. Extra sessions won’t be necessary. You’ve taught me that my biggest mistake is giving my power away to people who haven’t got a fucking clue.’ I let go of her hand and it drops limply by her side. She’s speechless. Only she manages to talk anyway. ‘Louise, what are you doing? You can’t finish your therapy just like that! We should discuss this over a series of sessions … we need to resolve the relationship.’ I feel sorry for her; she’s pathetic. ‘No, no we don’t. We don’t need to talk, we don’t need to discuss, or resolve. Send me a bill. Buy yourself a decent pair of shoes. Do something for a change. Talk is cheap.’ I open the door. And walk through it. Why is it easier to walk away in high heels? L Lingerie (#ulink_77a6604c-609e-52a9-810c-4f6b87a37e18) The number of articles worn by a fashionable woman has considerably diminished since the beginning of the century. However, even though a woman’s lingerie may be reduced to two pieces, they should at least be matching. It is the height of negligence to wear a white brassiere with a black girdle, or the reverse. Bright-coloured undergarments are charming, but of course can only be worn under dresses which are opaque or dark. In the summer, it is preferable to stick to white. If you are extremely refined and rich, your underclothes might match the colour of your outer ensemble. Women are making a mistake in neglecting this potential added attraction to their charms. In short: when you dress, think always that later on you will be undressing and in front of whom. After all, nothing betrays a woman more than her lingerie; it is infinitely more revealing than a thousand hours spent on a psychiatrist’s couch. One final word: this is not an area in which you throw discretion to the wind. Do not confuse beautiful lingerie, the kind that supports well and remains fresh, with the cheap, vulgar stuff of men’s magazines. Fascinating? I’m certain. But elegant it is NOT. A man likes to think that his wife is attractive and discerning even when he is not looking, and surely, that is the image you want him to have at all times and the one that will excite his deepest admiration. One day, after I’d hung out my washing on the kitchen drying rack, Ria takes me aside. ‘Louise, what are these?’ She points to a pair of ancient Sloggi briefs that are clinging in grey, exhausted resignation to the line. (No matter how many I toss out, The Curse of The Dingy Knicker haunts me, mysteriously refilling my drawers with shabby pants.) Not since my early childhood, when I was young enough to wet my pants, has anyone called such dramatic attention to my knickers. I look them over closely. ‘Knickers?’ I offer, hesitantly. (Even I have to question their identity.) ‘No,’ she says firmly, taking me by the hand. ‘Those are not knickers. Come with me, I want to show you something.’ And she leads me into her room; a sanctuary not to be violated for anything less than fire, burglary or extreme acts of God. Within its walls she’s created the most wonderful of girly havens. Her bed is antique mahogany, covered in a collection of tapestry cushions and swathes of fabric she’s gleaned from markets all over London. The walls are covered with photographs, and original paintings, and everywhere there are objects chosen to entice and delight: milky bone china cups, slender hand-blown champagne flutes, printed silk scarves, satin Emma Hope slippers, piles of multi-coloured hat boxes and stacks of art books upon which she’s placed scented candles and fresh flowers. The window box is planted with a vast collection of herbs and flowers that perfume the air through the enormous sash window. And, although it’s a small room, Ria has managed by a thousand clever touches to pay tribute to each of the senses which have been deprived during the other ten hours of the day. I watch as she kneels by the bed and pulls out a flat pink box tied with a black silk ribbon from Agent Provocateur. ‘These,’ she says, opening the box carefully, ‘are knickers.’ And there, wrapped in gauzy tissue paper, lie a black lace bra and panty set, hand embroidered throughout with the tiniest, most delicate scarlet poppies. The poppies, flowers of intoxication, of vibrant sensuality, are so minuscule, so exquisitely, mind-achingly small, that they’re nothing but a whispered double entendre, a knowing little wink of a sexual joke. They glow in luminous silk thread against the inky, flat blackness of the hand-finished lace, weaving their way sinuously around the curve of each breast and fanning outward, almost sprouting from the crotch of the panties. Here is lingerie which is cunningly, knowingly erotic, with or without the company of a man. We worship in silence for a moment. ‘Do you actually wear those?’ I whisper. (I don’t know why I’m whispering; maybe because I’ve never had another woman show me her underwear before.) ‘No.’ She places the lid back on the box and carefully re-ties the ribbon. ‘I mean, I hope to some day.’ I’m fascinated. ‘Did you buy them for yourself?’ She blushes. ‘No, someone bought them for me.’ She says it with such finality, that I know it’s pointless to ask who. ‘But in a way,’ she continues quickly, ‘that’s not the point. Of course, not every pair of knickers is going to be gorgeous – you wouldn’t even want that. But …’ and here she looks me sternly in the eye, ‘everything you own should do its job with some semblance of grace and dignity. Underwear isn’t just underwear, Louise; it’s the true garment of your secret sexual self. And nasty knickers completely sabotage your sexual self esteem.’ I nod solemnly and try to figure out why my mother didn’t initiate me into these feminine mysteries years ago. Then I recall the state of her underwear drawer. ‘You have seen greatness,’ Ria smiles. ‘Now please, go and buy some proper pants.’ We walk back into the kitchen to make dinner and I watch in wonder as she unpacks her groceries: tuna steaks she’d selected from the fishmonger, new potatoes authentically covered in black Jersey dirt, fresh mint, fragrant and soft, and perfect raspberries for the dressing on her salad. Ria never does bulk shops; she only buys food on the day, depending on her mood. Preparing each course languidly, in a kind of meditative state, she arranges her plate with careful aesthetic consideration. Everything is specific and sacred in Ria’s world. That’s the mark of a true artist. The most remarkable thing is she’s only cooking for herself. I can imagine going to such trouble for a dinner party or a special occasion, but just for me …? I reach for another tin of Safeway’s own brand ravioli and look up at the drying rack on the ceiling and the worn collection of undergarments that normally fill my lingerie drawer. I can only describe them as ‘Catholic knickers’, that is, garments specially designed to repel the lustful advances of the opposite sex. Ria’s right: I can’t possibly continue to wear them. I think of Madame Dariaux and her enigmatic advice fills my mind, ‘When you dress, think always that later on you will be undressing and in front of whom.’ Undressing. With my husband, that always meant changing into my nightgown in the bathroom and scuttling to bed with the lights out. I close my eyes for a moment and try to imagine slowly undressing in front of Oliver Wendt, his dark eyes watching me steadily through a cloud of silver smoke. But before I know it, the fantasy short-circuits and I’m back in the bathroom again in my Snoopy nightshirt. Right. Actions speak louder than words. I reel the drying rack down from the ceiling, pull the offending articles off the line, and stuff them into the waste bin. There’s no way I’m undressing in front of Oliver Wendt in a pair of grey Sloggi pants. The next day, I head off for Agent Provocateur, in search of a new, improved sexual identity and a decent bra. It proves much more difficult than I imagined. The shop is all hot pink and black lace – a tongue-in-cheek version of a naughty lingerie store. The girls behind the counter are voluptuous, sexy and indifferent, their blouses unbuttoned to expose the curves of their ample bosoms, and the gasping vocals of ‘Je t’aime’ play in the background. Gingerly, I sift through scraps of sheer lace and satin floating on pink silk hangers; tiny slips in pastel candy colours with white marabou trim and matching g-strings, saucy lace bras and suspender belts, boned bustiers that finish just below the breasts, French knickers and sheer peek-a-boo bras. Under the pink glow of the lights, everything has a slightly sinister, Barbiesque feel to it. I don’t know when Ria received the embroidered set she showed me, but they’re gone now. I contemplate a fairly conservative silk camisole and knicker set but cannot bring myself to try them on. The truth is, just looking at it makes me feel shy and awkward, let alone wearing it. After half an hour of loitering about like a dirty old man in a video shop, I leave with nothing. Walking across Soho, I try to recall the last time I had sex and draw a blank. Standing stock still in the centre of Soho Square, I really, really concentrate and still nothing. If this isn’t bad enough, I expand the field to include ‘even with myself’ and my memory remains a flat, empty screen. Apart from my childish fantasies about Oliver Wendt, which always end in a kind of slow fade, Vaseline kiss, I’m nothing more than a kind of second-hand virgin. A prude. Frigid. Depressing as this is (and it is deeply depressing), I’m faced with an even more pressing problem: I’ve chucked away all my knickers. There’s nothing for it. Having failed to identify my sexual self at Agent Provocateur, I have no alternative. Let’s face it, when your secret sexual self resides at Marks and Spencer’s, things are looking pretty grim. I’m dragging myself across town to Marks when the sky begins to darken ominously. I quicken my pace. When the raindrops harden into a torrent of hailstones, I dodge into a doorway for cover. After standing there for several minutes, wincing and pressing myself against the window for protection, I notice that the shop is none other than La Perla. Despite being convinced that my destiny now lies firmly within the walls of a convent, I go in. Now this is lingerie of a completely different class. There’s nothing seedy or vulgar here. The shop itself has the bright, golden sheen of a very expensive pearl, with creamy white walls and pale marble floors. La Perla carries no peek-a-boo bras or crotchless panties and not a hint of black lace or marabou in sight. This is the genuine article. Luxurious lingerie that’s attractive and comfortable enough to wear everyday – if only you could afford it. A man and a woman are shopping together. They’re a handsome couple, youngish and probably Italian, both beautifully dressed in the kind of flawless, casual tailoring the Italians excel at. He’s selecting various panties for her to try on: silk g-strings, hipsters, and the tiniest of thongs, while she’s tossing her long, dark hair and looking rather bored, as if they do this every day and she’d much rather be at home, watching TV. I feel slightly voyeuristic watching them shop but still make a mental note of each item he selects. Is this what men like? But you can’t expect to walk into a shop like La Perla and just browse. Moments after I step across the threshold, a saleswoman descends upon me. Disturbingly, she’s the very image of Madame Dariaux on the back of my book, with the same aristocratic nose, imperious gaze, and sculptural Margaret Thatcher hairstyle. She clears her throat and looks down at me while I stand, gaping up at her. ‘You look as though you may need some help.’ She speaks slowly and carefully, as if she’s weighing even these simple words. I cannot get over the resemblance. ‘I … yes … I need some new knickers, ah, I mean lingerie,’ I stumble, ‘and I can’t decide which ones …’ Before I know it, she’s got her arms around my chest and is measuring me. ‘You are a 32 B and,’ she looks me up and down, ‘I’d say a size 10 should be adequate below. What would you like them for? Are they to go with a specific outfit? A strapless dress, perhaps?’ ‘No, no, just for real life.’ ‘Well then, white is best, I think.’ And she points me away from the exotic silks the Italians are admiring and in the direction of a distinctly modest range. I’m back where I started, but at five times the price. I follow her anyway and she hands me a white bra and a pair of briefs. ‘Would you like to try them on?’ she asks. Oh, hell, why not? ‘Yes. Fine.’ She shows me into a changing cubicle the size of my bedroom, complete with a little white velvet settee and soft, amber lighting. ‘See how you get on,’ she says, closing the curtain brusquely. Just being in the changing room is soothing and relaxing. I sit down on the settee and peel off my coat, shaking the rain from my hair. Then I slip off my shoes and begin to undress. The La Perla pieces fit well, smooth and seamless, and have an attractive clean shape, with tasteful lace detailing. They’re sleek and figure enhancing. But are they sexy? I turn and look at the back view. No problems there. I do a little twirl. Very nice really. I shorten one of the bra straps. Stroking the smooth silk of the cups, I adjust my breasts so that they sit a little bit higher and smile approvingly at my reflection. And that’s when I notice that the curtain hasn’t quite closed and the handsome Italian is watching me, quite unashamedly, while he waits for his wife to emerge. I see him and he sees me. However he doesn’t move or look away. Instead, he smiles very slowly and gives me the slightest nod. His wife is calling him and he answers, quite calmly, without averting his gaze. My heart is pounding, I feel flushed and at the same time unusually languid. My conscious mind protests, ‘How dare he!’ but there’s another, much more mischievous side that’s secretly excited and thrilled. There’s a rattle of the curtain and the sales woman clears her throat outside. ‘What do you think?’ ‘Fine,’ I say, my voice much softer and deeper than normal. She pokes her head round the corner. ‘Um,’ she nods approvingly. ‘Perfect. How many would you like?’ ‘Well …’ I look back in the mirror. The Italian has gone. I buy three sets in white, two in nude, and two in black. I’m overdrawn for a month but it’s worth it. I have, at long last, found my secret sexual self and she’s a little naughtier and a great deal more expensive than I anticipated. Now when I’m dressing, I’m only too happy to think that later on, I’ll be undressing. The only question that remains is, in front of whom? M Make-up (#ulink_ecd6b6e1-9fa0-5dcd-aaac-87e12b3fd5bb) Ah! Wouldn’t it be marvellous if none of us needed it? But, alas, while some beauties are born, most of us are made. Make-up is a kind of clothing for the face, and in the city a woman would no more think of showing herself without make-up than she would care to walk down the street completely undressed. Nothing is more effective for brightening a woman’s visage and putting that final bit of polish to her look than a dash of lipstick, a sweep of black mascara or a rosy hint of rouge. However, while fashions in make-up may come and go, there are some things that remain forever d?class?. To be perfectly frank, too much is always too much. It is worth noting that people are meant to be complimenting you on the beauty of your eyes, not your eye make-up. And if you find you cannot embrace a man without leaving a trail of powder on his suit lapel (an event too hideous for words!), then it’s time to reconsideryour motives, as well as your methods. Make-up is capable of many ingenious enhancements but it will not make you impervious to age or disappointment or a thousand other insecurities that plague the female mind. By all means, be quick to make the most of what make-up can, reasonably, do for your appearance but also be clever enough to know when to stop. Suddenly I wake up one morning to discover, that in addition to dealing with a failed marriage, a new job, a, shall we say, challenging financial independence, and the certainty that I will end up alone for the rest of my life, I now, just as a pi?ce de r?sistance, have the skin of an adolescent girl – pink, oily, and erupting in spots. Not only is my life veering dangerously out of control but now my face is as well. A girl can happily avoid any connection with reality as long as she looks OK. But when that fails, drastic action must be taken. And that means make-up. Lots of it. Rising at daybreak on my day off, I catch a bus into town and arrive at Selfridges’s cosmetic emporium just as the store opens. Hidden behind sunglasses, head bowed, I weave through the maze of displays and bored perfume promotions girls until I arrive at the only cosmetic solution I know for Problem Skin. There’s the same clinical, freshness about the display, the same assistants dressed in white lab coats, the same pale green and frosted glass bottles. After so many years and half way around the world, I’m back where I started. My mother, also a traumatized survivor of teenage acne, first steered me towards an identical counter when I was twelve. She was not about to let me suffer the way she had all those years ago, in the age before oil-free make-up formulations and mildly medicated soap bars. Her hand firmly gripping my shoulder, she guided me through the make-up department of Horne’s Department Store until we arrived in front of the same glowing white stand. ‘Pardon me, my daughter has acne,’ she announced, to my intense mortification. ‘And we’d like to know what you can do about it.’ Of course the worst thing you can do is march up to a sales counter and announce that you need help. The first hour we were there, the make-up assistant, who was at least forty-five and appeared to be wearing all the products in the range at once, insisted on diagnosing my skin type using the then high-tech Skin Analysis Station, which was on a separate little island in the centre of the cosmetics room. It consisted of two high white stools and a plastic, illuminated box with some sliding panels on it, under the headings of Oily, Combination and Dry skin. We sat on the stools and she put on a white lab coat and took out a pad and pen and began asking me a series of very serious questions like, ‘Is your skin dry and flaky?’ To which my mother persisted with the refrain, ‘She’s oily! Oily! She’s got really oily skin!’ The assistant nodded knowingly and slid the panel in the illuminated box over to the pale green, astringent-coloured section marked, ‘Oily’. Then she moved on to the next question. ‘Would you say your pores are small, normal, or large?’ ‘Well, just have a look.’ My mother gave my head a push and the next thing I knew, the assistant and I were staring at each other’s pores. ‘Yes, large,’ she confirmed, just as I was thinking hers were the size of a house. And again she pushed the panel over to the oily section. By now a small crowd was gathering, so novel was the sight of the Skin Analysis Station in action, especially for one so young and so in need of emergency attention. The assistant, deftly playing to the crowd, raised her voice, shouting the next question across the entire ground floor. ‘So, how many times a day do you need to moisturize?’ ‘Moisturize?’ My mother shouted right back. ‘You don’t understand; she’s oily! OILY! The last thing she needs is moisture!’ And the women in the crowd, indeed, even a few of the men in the gentleman’s shoe department across the aisle, shook their heads in sympathy. When every panel had finally, scientifically revealed that, yes, I did indeed have oily skin, the assistant tore the sheet off her pad, removed her lab coat, and led us back in a cloud of perfume to the purchase counter. ‘Fortunately, we have a number of extremely effective products to combat the oily skin condition,’ she began. The next forty-five minutes are a blur. And that’s how I came to look like a twelve-year-old version of Joan Collins. Now, hovering just beyond the jurisdiction of the white lab coated assistants, I’m on the verge of doing it again. I remove my glasses and take a deep breath. Desperate times require desperate measures. An hour later, I’m armed with a new collection of lotions, astringents, smudge-proof foundations, cover-up sticks, oil-removing blotting pads, blushers, a quad of eye shadows (three of which I don’t like) and a free lipstick in a shade I’ll never use. From now on, the words ‘fresh faced’ are just a distant memory. So is the balance in my bank book. However, there are some things that even one’s best Joan Collins impersonation can’t remedy. The next day at work I check my mailbox and discover nothing. Yet again. No note or sign from Oliver Wendt, who I haven’t seen in weeks. What have I done wrong? Upstairs at my desk, I stare blankly at my e-mail screen, replaying the whole sequence of events in my head. Over and over. It’s been ages since I left the note, the note I now seriously regret. I feel like a complete twat. Worse, I still think of him all the time, still wander the halls of the theatre hoping to see him, still fail to find any other man attractive, still cling to this old obsession. If Oliver Wendt can see me, I must exist. This is the philosophical premise upon which I’ve built my new life. And now that I exist, I’m allowed to participate in the whole dynamic of living without apology – to take up space and time, to want things, to reach, to try, to fail. However, it seems impossible to me that I should come this far, make so many changes, and yet miss out on possessing Oliver himself. He’s the prize, the reward I get for so much effort, the reason that I’ve gone to all this trouble. I must love him. I think about him all the time. Or am I really thinking of him thinking of me? Is Oliver merely a reflective surface in which I’ve caught sight of my own image for the first time? Suddenly, my phone rings. Could this be it, at long last? I take a deep breath, my heart pounding as I reach for the receiver. ‘Phoenix Theatre box office,’ I purr, in the smoothest, calmest tones I can manage. ‘How can I help?’ There’s a pause. ‘It’s me,’ my husband says. ‘We need to talk.’ I meet him for lunch at the Spaghetti House restaurant next to the theatre. We’re both unable to conceal our shock at seeing each other. He looks drained, thin and exhausted, and I resemble a pantomime dame. We stand together by the doorway, awkward, uncertain of how to greet each other and afraid to look each other in the eye. Now we’re seated in a corner booth. The food we order arrives and sits there, untouched. After what seems like hours of painful chit-chat and loaded silences, he finally asks, ‘So, what are we going to do?’ This isn’t a subject I’m ready to discuss, although I suspect we both know the answer. I toy with my cutlery, trying to balance my knife on its flat edge. ‘I’m not sure,’ I stall. ‘What would you like to do?’ The knife falls and I catch sight of my reflection in the blade. The distorted face of a fun house mirror stares back at me. ‘I take it you’re not coming back.’ He’s trying to force my hand. It’s all too abrupt, too sudden, and too real. The waiter brings us our coffee. I wrap my hands around the warm china cup for comfort. ‘Nothing’s changed,’ I say at last. I sound vague even to myself. He sighs in frustration. An awkward silence ensues. I pick up my teaspoon and am about to stir in some milk when, again, my image, pale and warped, is reflected back to me in the curved bowl of the spoon. I bury it immediately in the sugar bowl. ‘I’ve been to see a lawyer.’ He’s undeterred by my evasiveness. ‘Just as a precautionary measure.’ I open my mouth to say something. Nothing comes out. ‘Tell me honestly, have you met someone else?’ I look up, startled. And there, in the darkened glass behind him, I see myself again, my face red and flushed, almost unrecognizable behind the mask of make-up. ‘You’re blushing.’ ‘No! No, I’m just shocked that, that you would even think such a thing!’ I fumble, certain he can read my guilty thoughts. ‘Well, then maybe we can repair the damage, don’t you think?’ He reaches across the table and touches my hand. ‘I’m sorry.’ I struggle to push my chair away from the table. ‘I really … really can’t do this right now.’ My head pounds and my hands shake as I reach for my bag. ‘Louise, we need to talk about this!’ ‘Yes, yes, I know.’ I stand up. ‘But please, not now!’ The words trail over my shoulder as I head for the door. I run all the way back to the theatre and into the safety of the Upper Circle Ladies. Splashing my face with water, I fill the palm of my hand with cheap, pink hand soap, and scrub my face clean. My make-up dissolves, mascara running and lipstick smearing to form grotesque shapes. And suddenly I’m sobbing into the warm water. It’s all gone wrong. And all the make-up in the world can’t hide it. That night at home, I lock the door and sit, with my pen and Post-its, making notes of Madame Dariaux’s words of wisdom. If I just concentrate, if I can just get it right, everything will become clear. And I’ll know what to do. The next day at work, I get a call from the foyer to say there’s someone waiting to see me. ‘Is it a man?’ I ask cautiously. ‘Nope.’ The security guard suppresses a burp. ‘It’s some old tart.’ Mona stands imperiously in the centre of the lobby, smoking a cigarette and peering disdainfully at the poster for the season of new lesbian writing we’re hosting next month. She has a grey fox-trimmed cashmere wrap thrown around her shoulders and a tiny green Harrods bag dangling from her wrist. Every inch of me wants to turn and run back up the stairs before she can see me. No such luck. She turns, looks up, and her face expands into a slow, Cheshire cat grin. ‘Louise!’ she cries, as if we’re not so much mother and daughter-in-law as two long lost lovers, and a moment later, I’m enveloped into a full Mona embrace, a kind of suffocation by cashmere and Fracas. When I disengage myself, she holds me at arm’s length and gestures dramatically. ‘But, darling, you’re not well, are you? All this nonsense is clearly making you ill. Look! You’re nothing but skin and bone! Doesn’t that Calvin you’re staying with have any food?’ ‘It’s good to see you, Mona,’ I lie. ‘And it’s Colin; my flatmate’s name is Colin.’ ‘Well, that’s settled! I’m definitely taking you out to lunch! We’ll go anywhere you like – The Ivy, Le Caprice … you name it and we’ll go get some proper food into you!’ She pulls me across the foyer but I manage to twist free. ‘I’m sorry, Mona, but I can’t. I just got on duty and I don’t have another break for ages.’ ‘Well then, a coffee. Just for five minutes.’ Her hand is on the small of my back, pushing me firmly towards the door. I feel like a leaf, small, brown and weightless, being forced downstream in the direction of some treacherous waterfall. In the five years that I’ve known Mona, I’ve never managed to defy her and it doesn’t look as if I’ll be able to start now. We sit in Caf? Nero across the street from the theatre. Mona orders a double espresso and I drink still water, turning the glass bottle around and around, peeling the label off in long strips while she talks. ‘Louise …’ she begins, and I know, just from the tone of her voice, that this is not a conversation I’m going to enjoy. Sensing this, she stops and starts again. ‘First of all, this is for you!’ She places the Harrods bag grandly on the table between us and my whole insides collapse with mortification. ‘Really, you shouldn’t have.’ My voice is as flat as a pancake. The last thing I want to do is have to go through the whole dumb show of pleasure and gratitude in front of Mona. Not today. Not ever. ‘Well, it’s not actually from Harrods … I got it in a little shop in Hampstead but I had the bag at home and I thought it might be fun.’ I’m not sure why it’s fun to make something look like it comes from a different, more expensive store but it does somehow make the whole charade easier to bear; the knowledge that the gift is not, in fact, an extravagant gesture, but only a trinket parading as such. Inside the bag there’s a tiny tissue paper parcel. I unwrap it to discover a silver brooch in the shape of a fish. ‘Oh. How thoughtful. Really, really lovely.’ ‘I thought you might like it, you being a Pisces and all. I don’t know if you believe in that sort of thing but … it’s fun.’ Everything’s fun today. We’re having a wonderful time. ‘How lovely,’ I say again, re-wrapping the fish and putting it back in the Harrods bag. I haven’t got the energy to tell her my birthday’s in June. I peel another bit of the label and watch as she takes a small, enamel vial from her purse and carefully shakes two tiny saccharin tablets into her coffee. Her spoon clips the edge of the cup with a brisk, clicking sound. ‘Well, I won’t ask how you are, Louise; this whole thing has clearly affected you very badly. And of course, I’m here to offer you my help and guidance. There comes a time in every woman’s life when she needs the advice and assistance of, shall we say, a more experienced confidante.’ I continue peeling. She clears her throat. ‘Let me be frank with you. All marriages go through bad patches – that’s just part of the deal, isn’t it? For better or for worse. Am I right?’ She pauses but without effect. ‘Louise, I know my son can be difficult. He’s sensitive, an artist. His father, God rest his soul, was the same way. But you and I are women, we’re the adults here. Am I right? Certainly, we’d all like life to be about romance and flowers and all the rest of it but sometimes it just isn’t that way. There’s a lot more to making a relationship work than just sex!’ She laughs awkwardly. ‘Sometimes marriage is more about kindness, shared interests; a kind of sympathy for one another …’ It’s not working. She stares into the small, black darkness of her coffee for a moment and when she speaks again, her voice is tired and drained. ‘I know my son. I know he’s … difficult. But he does love you, Louise. In his way.’ I stare at the table. She sighs heavily and looks me in the eye. Her voice turns bitter. ‘You’re not making this very easy are you?’ ‘It isn’t easy,’ I say. She smiles, lips stretched across teeth. ‘No, no of course not. But have you thought about where you’re going to go? What you’re going to do? This situation may not be ideal, but after all, you’re old enough to realize that there’s more than one kind of love in the world. You’re going to have to learn to take the rough with the smooth.’ I push the chair away from the table and stand up. ‘I’m sorry, Mona, I really have to go. Thank you very much for the pin.’ She doesn’t move. ‘You’re very welcome, Louise. It’s a pleasure.’ Then she reaches out and grabs my hand. ‘Just think about what I said. Sometimes the best thing to do, the smartest thing, is to just kiss and make up.’ She lets go and I turn and walk out of the coffee shop. That night, Colin and I are riding home on the bus, when he looks at me and says, ‘Stay still, there’s something on your cheek.’ And he reaches out a finger and begins brushing away at something. I recoil violently. ‘Don’t touch it!’ I snap. ‘Just leave it alone.’ But he won’t. ‘No, Ouise, there’s just this little dark mark,’ and he licks his finger, the way your mother used to do when you were a kid, and begins to rub even harder. ‘Hold still, I’ve almost got it.’ But I know what he’s after and it isn’t a mark, it’s a suppurating boil that’s taken a good ten minutes and two different products to hide and now he’s only making it worse. I push him off. ‘Just leave it I said! Can’t you understand English? Get off me!’ The bus lurches up to our stop and I race down the aisle ahead of him, while he struggles, laden with shopping, behind me. ‘What’s got into you, anyway?’ he says, as we clamber off. ‘Why are you so touchy?’ Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/raznoe-17535493/elegance-and-innocence-2-book-collection/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. 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