Elegance and Innocence: 2-Book Collection

Retreating into the bedroom, I close the door, kick off my shoes and curl up on the bed.

The bed is enormous. It’s actually two single beds that are joined in the centre. ‘Zipped and Linked’ is what the man at John Lewis called it. We needed a bed that was big enough so that we wouldn’t disturb each other in the night: my husband twitches like a dog and I can’t bear noise or any sort of movement.

‘You are sure you want to sleep together?’ the salesman had asked when we briefed him of our requirements. But my husband was adamant. ‘We’ve only just been married,’ he informed the offending fellow haughtily, implying a kind of rampant, newlywed sex life that could only just be contained within the confines of a solidly made double bed. So now he twitches away somewhere west of me and I slumber, comatose, half a mile to the east.

Climbing underneath the duvet, I remove the delicate volume from its brown paper bag. I’m on the verge of something very big, very real.

This is it.

I open to Chapter One.

And the next thing I know, I’m asleep.

When I wake up, he’s already gone to the theatre. There’s a note on the kitchen table. ‘Were snoring, so didn’t bother to wake you.’ My husband is nothing, if not concise.

This is bad.

The truth is, I sleep far too much – wake up late, take naps in the afternoon, go to bed early. I live with one foot dangling in a dark, warm, pool of unconsciousness, ready at any moment to slide into oblivion. But it’s just a little bit anti-social, all this sleeping, so I try to hide it.

I make toast. (I believe that’s what’s known as cooking for one.) Then climb back on board the bed. Turning to the first letter in the alphabet, I try not to get butter on the pages.

A Accessories (#ulink_802ec850-1b8e-553b-b0b7-8199d6d78791)

You can always tell the character of a woman by the care and attention she lavishes upon the details of her dress. The accessories worn with an outfit – gloves, hat, shoes, and handbag – are among the most important elements of an elegant appearance. A modest dress or suit can triple its face value when worn with an elegant hat, bag, gloves, and shoes, while a designer’s original can lose much of its prestige if its accessories have been carelessly selected. It is indispensable to own a complete set of accessories in black and, if possible, another in brown, plus a pair of beige shoes and a beige straw handbag for the summer. With this basic minimum, almost any combination is attractive.

Of course, it would be ideal to have each set of accessories in two different versions: one for sport and the other dressy. And in this regard I cannot restrain myself from expressing the dismay I feel when I see a woman carry an alligator handbag with a dressyensemble merely because she has paid an enormous sum of money for it. Alligator is strictly for sports or travel, shoes as well as bags, and this respected reptile should be permitted to retire every evening at 5 pm.

And here, as in no other department, quality is essential. Be strict with yourself. Save. Economize on food if you must (believe me, it will do you good!) but not on your handbags or shoes. Refuse to be seduced by anything that isn’t first rate. The saying, ‘I cannot afford to buy cheaply,’ was never so true. Although I am far from rich, I have bought my handbags for years from Hermès, 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?’