Elegance

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.