Elegance and Innocence (20 page)

‘Absolutely not.’

‘So, Kiddo.’ I hear her lighting a cigarette. ‘What’s the occasion?’

I look out the window. The world outside is still and black.

‘No occasion, Mom. I just called to hear your voice.’

P
Pounds

Every springtime the fashion magazines and women’s pages invent new diets which, if they are followed to the letter, guarantee a slender figure and, consequently, elegance. Although it isn’t necessarily indispensable to be as skinny as a mannequin in order to be elegant, it is probably true that the list of the Ten Best Dressed Women is also a list of the Ten Hungriest Women
.

Slimming is practically a new religion. It used to be practised very discreetly, almost clandestinely, and the early followers contented themselves with a moderate slenderness which still allowed for a few soft curves. But the sect has gained new converts every day until it now confidently decrees that salvation is impossible for the few remaining infidels who do not believe in the string bean silhouette and the skinny look
.

Should you or should you not convert to this new
religion? Perhaps, but at what cost? Dieters can become drearily obsessive about their new found vocation. I recommend that you weigh not just yourself but your priorities as well. After all, God made you the way you are and there is no point fighting nature to the extent that you alienate all your friends and family with endless rules and regulations concerning what you can and cannot eat
.

Being slender is undoubtedly elegant but neurotic self-obsession is NOT
.

I’m standing in the queue at Starbucks, trying to figure out the fat grams, calorie content, and carbohydrate index of a fat-reduced blueberry muffin. All I really want, though, is a slice of double fudge chocolate cake. I’m irritable and confused, looking at the cake like a hypnotized lemming. Ria’s asking me what I want so that we can order and the queue behind me’s getting restless and the girl behind the counter is rolling her eyes. What I want to do is to punch through the glass case and grab the whole cake and run howling into the street with it like a creature from a Hammer Horror film.

But I don’t.

No, I do the right thing. Because the world is divided into right and wrong, good and bad, fat and thin. So I order a double espresso instead with no sugar.

And when Ria asks, ‘Are you sure?’ because she saw me eyeing the cake, I snap at her, ‘Yes, yes that’s it!’ like I hate her, because I do. I hate her and anyone else who can order anything they want without going through a thousand mental gymnastics – who can walk up to the spotty Spanish girl behind the counter and say, ‘I’ll have an iced latte and a slice of double fudge chocolate cake’, without taking a rollercoaster ride to hell and back from waves of guilt and panic.

So. I order the double espresso instead, get completely psychotic on caffeine, and walk around in a sweaty, twitching cloud of resentment all day long because yet again, I’ve denied myself. And there are three meals in a day, a day’s twenty-four hours long and they follow each other, day after day after day, until you die. And that’s an awfully long time not to have what you want.

I went on my first diet when I was nine. Being a dancer, we were encouraged to starve ourselves. I remember our teacher sitting us down, talking to us about how it was time to start watching our weight. She taught us how to carry little jars of honey and teaspoons in our ballet bags so that when we’d been dancing all day with nothing to eat and felt like fainting, we could pop a teaspoon of honey into our mouths to keep us going. So we all carried leaky little jars of honey that came undone and coated our leotards in thick, sugary goo.

We used to sit in the changing room, listening avidly to
the diet tips of the older girls. You must eat only low fat yoghurt, Diet Coke, coffee, and baked potatoes with nothing on them. Or only protein and vegetables, as much as you want but less is better. However, all too often we ended up eating hamburgers at McDonald’s after class, and if you were going to have a hamburger, you might as well have fries and a shake. But that was OK, because we’d all learnt from Melissa Formby the wonderful invention of throwing up everything after you ate. She’d only just discovered this magical solution herself and was now giving master classes on how to best achieve the results you wanted with the least amount of effort.

‘Always drink a glass of water very quickly beforehand,’ she instructed us. ‘And then use your longest finger. A little nail doesn’t hurt. And think of something gross. If you can think of something
really
gross, then you don’t have to waste too much time and that keeps your mother from getting suspicious.’

We nodded. How wise she was.

‘Oh, and use a private toilet. Especially until you learn how to do it quietly.’

Good one. We were, after all, as dancers always learning how to do things quietly – how to jump across a room and land without a sound, how to bourrée on bloody point shoes without so much as a whisper, how to stretch your leg up around your ear without screaming. Piece of cake.

By the time I was thirteen, I’d developed my own little
variation on this theme. I’d have one meal a day, usually something completely disgusting and devoid of any nutritional value, like chocolate cake, covered in M&M’s, with ice-cream and chocolate sauce for breakfast, and I’d take speed, coffee, and Diet Coke the rest of the day. If I had any food after my one meal, I’d chuck it up in the guest room toilet.

This went on for quite a while, until one night, high on speed and having just watched a particularly depressing Bergman film about necrophilia, I scoffed down a whole box of nasty, white sugar biscuits and then threw them up again. I sat, shaking on the bathroom floor, certain that I didn’t want to live any more. Or, at least, that I didn’t want to live like this. I could no longer bear the twenty-four hour obsession about what I was going to eat, when I was going to eat it, and worst of all, what I wasn’t allowed to eat. (I’d already tried laxatives, with disastrous results.) So, I resolved that whatever I ate would stay down, for better or worse. And a new chapter in my dieting history began.

When I got married, I kept my eating habits a secret. But with my husband away every evening on stage, it was easy to get into a routine of bingeing in his absence.

We’re in Stratford; he’s with the RSC. We have a new place to live, he has a new job, and I’m on a new diet. It’s like the Hay Diet, only it’s with organic food. Every day I eat about twenty-six pounds of grimy, misshapen, hairy
fruits and vegetables. I have wind constantly and smell like a cabbage.

The rules are easy. (Diets have rules, like games. There’s no difference really, this one’s Twister with food.) You can have carbohydrates with vegetables and dairy but not with protein. And you can have protein only with vegetables. And fruit, well, fruit’s so dangerous that you can only have it on its own, several hours before or after eating anything. So, that’s steak and salad, chicken and salad, fish and salad. But not cheese. Cheese is evil. The devil’s work. I’m allowed some strange form of organic goat’s cheese curd but there’s only one shop in Notting Hill that sells it and it tastes like glue. And for lunch, salad. Salad with rice, salad with nuts, salad with bread. When I say bread, what I really mean is a gluten-free yeast-free loaf of millet and linseed. It looks like a brick but if you toast it, it’s really quite crunchy. (In the absence of any taste, texture will have to do.) And no sugar of any kind, no caffeine, and no fat.

The book makes it seem quite simple. Actually, more than just simple; like you’d be an idiot to eat any other way. There’s a couple in their seventies laughing hysterically on the front cover and running a marathon. Completely caffeine free. I feel inadequate just looking at it. There’s a strong emphasis on beans. Bean and cabbage soup, flavoured with garlic. They could’ve warned me that I was going to explode. I have to lock myself in my room with the window open. My husband sleeps on the couch.

You’re meant to eat as many things raw as you can. I’m munching on a fortune’s worth of crudities all day long and all I manage is to feel bloated and hungry at the same time. I’m dreaming of hamburgers, chips, shepherd’s pie. I wake up gnawing at my pillow. Watching other people eat becomes an erotic experience for me. Staring in the window of McDonald’s like a Peeping Tom, I’m glued to the spot, ready to kill for a Happy Meal.

It’s meant to get better. I’m meant to be full of life and energy. My skin’s meant to glow. But all that happens is I get a vicious case of irritable bowel syndrome. I’m doubled over with pain and my husband takes me to the doctor.

‘What are you eating?’ the doctor asks after he’s examined me.

‘Well, today I had gluten-free muesli and rice milk, broccoli and chicken stir fry with ginger, some raw carrots, a little rye toast with soya spread and sugarless raspberry jam …’

He raises a hand to stop me; he’s already late for his golf.

‘Good God!’ He looks at me in disgust. ‘Eat a potato, woman! Have a sausage roll! No wonder you can’t stand up straight.’

‘But … but …’ I can’t believe it. Doesn’t he want to be running a marathon when he’s seventy?

Apparently not.

By the time I came to live with Colin and Ria, I was so confused from a lifetime of dieting that I felt beyond repair
or redemption. The only difference was that now there was no place to hide it. We shared a kitchen, often ate together, and while Colin was happy to tease me about my strange meals and occasionally force-feed me chicken curry and steamed jam pudding, Ria observed my eating habits in silence, quietly noting all the things I would rather she’d forgotten.

Then one night, she finds me in the kitchen.

It’s half past two and I’m sitting in my pyjamas, stuffing cookies into my mouth. They’re her cookies; she’d been given them at Christmas, several months ago, and, not having much of a sweet tooth, she’d let them sit there, going stale on a shelf above the sink. Normally I wouldn’t touch her food without asking her, but I’d woken up, suddenly scared and starving and didn’t have any of my own food left. I was afraid to buy it in case I ended up eating it all in one go. I hate myself for stealing stale biscuits. They’re the kind I normally would’ve gone out of my way to avoid. But here I am, crouched in the dark, cramming them into my mouth when she comes in and turns on the light.

I blink stupidly, like a wild animal caught stealing from a garbage pail. I can’t bear to be seen eating, even at the best of times, but it’s absolutely essential that these midnight raids remain secret.

‘What are you doing?’

I scramble up from the floor and try to smile. ‘I’m sorry. Really.’

‘But what are you doing?’ she asks. Again.

I want to die, to disappear, to be sucked away into the ether. I’m still holding the bag, so I put it on the counter, my hand moving in slow motion, as if not holding it will make it all go away.

‘Those are old,’ she says. ‘Why are you eating them? And why are you eating them in the dark?’

‘I was hungry. I’m sorry. I’ll replace them. Buy some more.’

‘Louise, I don’t like those biscuits; that’s why I never ate them. The biscuits don’t matter. But what you’re doing is strange.’

‘I know. I’m sorry. I won’t do it again.’

She looks at me carefully. ‘Yes. Yes you will.’

It’s half past two and there’s nothing, no noise of passing traffic, no distant drilling to whisk the words away. They hang there, solid between us, and for some reason I can’t explain, I don’t lie or wheedle, laugh or protest.

‘You’re right,’ I hear myself say.

How odd that you’re saying that, I think in my head. No one’s meant to know and now here you are, saying it out loud. But it doesn’t stop there.

‘I can’t eat,’ the voice goes on, speaking through me, like a ventriloquist’s dummy. ‘I don’t, don’t really know how.’

We stand there. A breeze blows in through the open kitchen window, out of the solid blackness that presses
against the house. Cold and fluid, like mercury, it races between us, running its fingers through Ria’s hair and making it dance around her face. Her white cotton nightgown billows up around her like a sail and for a moment she isn’t earthbound at all but weightless and floating, like an apparition pasted against the poorly fitted kitchen cabinets. Then it darts away, brushing past us impatiently on its way to more exotic locations and we’re alone again. Ria’s nightgown drifts silently back around her ankles and her hair lands gently in place on her head.

‘Are you still hungry?’ she asks.

‘No.’

‘Well, why don’t we go to bed then.’ She holds out her hand and I take it. ‘You think too much, Louise. You’re not really meant to think so much.’ And she leads me back through the darkness to my room.

The world is full of advice about how to eat, but here’s a novel idea.

Have three normal meals a day. Eat what you really want. Stop when you’re full.

I’ll admit, sometimes that’s easy and sometimes it’s very, very hard.

But, in Madame Dariaux’s immortal words, ‘God made you the way you are.’

And in Ria’s, ‘Get over it.’

Q
Quality/Quantity

One of the most striking differences between a well-dressed Englishwoman and a well-dressed Parisian is in the size of their respective wardrobes. The Englishwoman would probably be astonished by the very limited number of garments hanging in the French-woman’s wardrobe, but she would also be bound to observe that each one is of excellent quality, expensive perhaps by British standards, and perfectly adapted to the life a Frenchwoman leads. She wears them over and over again, discarding them only when they are worn or outmoded, and she considers it a compliment (as it is meant to be) when her best friend says, ‘I’m so glad you decided to wear your red dress – I’ve always loved it!’

Foreign visitors are often shocked by the high prices in the Paris shops, and they wonder how a young career girl, for example, who earns no more than her British counterpart, can afford to carry an
alligator handbag and to wear a suit from the Balmain boutique. The answer is that she buys very few garments: her goal is to possess a single perfect ensemble for each of the different occasions in her life, rather than a wide choice of clothes to suit every passing mood
.