Kathleen Tessaro - Elegance

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.

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.

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 to be 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 select what 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.