Elegance

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.