Elegance

‘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 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.

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.