Elegance

Elegance Kathleen Tessaro An enchanting novel brimming with poignancy, humour, enchantment and insight, this is a stunning debut. Imagine an Audrey Hepburn film in the present day…It was a slim, grey volume entitled Elegance…Louise Canova is at a crossroads in her life. Her marriage is faltering and the insecurities of adolescence have returned to haunt her. Browsing in a second-hand bookshop, she stumbles across a faded grey volume. Written by the formidable French fashion expert, Madame Genevieve Antoine Dariaux, Elegance is an encyclopedia of style. It promises to transform plain women into creatures of poise at all times. And from Accessories to Zippers, there is nothing that Madame Dariaux can’t advise upon – including inattentive husbands, false friends, and the powerful bond between mothers and daughters.When Louise vows to follow Madame’s advice, her life is transformed in ways she never imagined. Within the book’s pages lie clues to her own past. And as she begins to unravel them, she discovers a courage she never dreamt possible.However, everything, even elegance, has its price.Starting with A and finishing with Z, Elegance is a unique journey of timeless fashion, true friendship, and the rare, unexpected gift of love. KATHLEEN TESSARO ELEGANCE Copyright (#ud0d9374f-b5cc-51bc-ae76-537c20386e38) 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. HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/) Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2003 Copyright © Kathleen Tessaro 2003 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. Kathleen Tessaro asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work 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 ebook 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 ebooks 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 Source ISBN: 9780007151424 Ebook Edition © JUNE 2009 ISBN: 9780007330768 Version: 2016–12–12 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_f4ee6afe-4fb4-5e53-84d7-67e905d179da) To my friend and mentor, Jill Robinson. Table of Contents Title Page (#u3a0981b5-857d-5e16-8c6d-e7b747ae5ab8) Copyright (#uc4726d49-56f2-57cf-9eff-02c7a717b6b5) Dedication (#u93e1005a-1d47-533a-82d7-c9a7f4e8550a) Preface (#u471d7f9a-e5c6-50c7-b735-8e76daa3a8e9) What is Elegance? (#u8b5283b7-f16a-5f23-bb56-666cde566433) Chapter 1 - A: Accessories (#ub62ec4ee-fbfa-5986-b718-12fe4ae8b5ca) Chapter 2 - B: Beauty (#u7ac9733a-d0d8-514e-8c08-a8c6ad91efe7) Chapter 3 - C: Comfort (#u7e7d76ed-8298-5794-bb5a-fcbedcb6fe8b) Chapter 4 - D: Daughters (#ub402a5ee-f073-5fc0-b85e-24b29735e2ac) Chapter 5 - E: Expecting (#uce55670a-4817-502c-90ce-60aa572eaee7) Chapter 6 - F: Fur (#ue143c0cc-7f34-5a9d-9395-c48f541f1a09) Chapter 7 - G: Girl friends (#ufbcecd97-f254-578f-8d3c-a0afc11693bf) Chapter 8 - H: Husbands (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 9 - I: Ideal Wardrobe (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 10 - J: Jewellery (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 11 - K: Knitwear (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 12 - L: Lingerie (#litres_trial_promo) Chapter 13 - M: Make-up (#litres_trial_promo) 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) Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo) Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo) About the Author (#litres_trial_promo) Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) Preface (#ulink_cec7a0d4-28ac-54a8-9a19-16474d0b91e4) 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_ce35d1fd-63d7-5ff0-9f3a-d4b5446a5c84) 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_2f272424-be80-5018-9544-cf2cee0f2534) 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_23d7d9aa-29a0-5029-875f-8d57bedc623d) 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_dd231414-0f78-5740-80b8-1f9004a31ace) 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_a1e145a8-8430-5192-b590-b9bcccf6ee64) 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_ed46b41d-e450-53f7-b82c-ef73c75e3188) 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_9d04edd5-11bc-5b8c-baf0-788d8145447a) 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_a50af5ae-82c6-5fe6-b12b-a6238d1223cd) 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. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/raznoe-17535493/elegance/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. 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