Elegance and Innocence (6 page)

‘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 façade 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

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 crêpe-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.