The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life

by William Nicholson

  Laura’s eyes rake the racks, eliminating whole rooms of possibility in less than a minute. Plaited fabrics, floral prints, denim, leather, all fly past, never to be seen again. She lingers briefly over a pretty summer dress by Etro, light and sexy and elegant at £505. But the forecast for Saturday is not good, she would have to wear a warm outer layer, and the charm of the garment would be lost.

  ‘Are you looking for anything in particular?’

  ‘I’m fine, thanks.’

  She wants no help, no interference. The assistant does not take offence. Laura is a serious shopper, the kind they are here for. Her short unsmiling response commands respect.

  Up stairs to higher floors and more racks. Astonishing how much information the eye can glean from an item seen only edge-on between dozens of others. Colour and fabric, of course, the basis for ninety per cent of her rejection. But she can also intuit how it will hang, whether it’s her kind of dress, from the far side of the room, simply from the glimpse of it on the hanger.

  She catches a flash of orange, a muslin top, entirely transparent. The colour draws her first, a deep burnt orange. She lifts it off the hanger. A long veil-like broad-sleeved jacket, offered here to be worn over a shot-silk dress in aubergine. The muslin top is designed to be worn open, and hangs almost to the knee. It’s utterly impractical, and very beautiful.

  Her roving eye then falls on a cluster of silver and grey garments. After the noon heat of the orange, the silver-grey speaks of twilight. She is interested in grey, the right grey makes her look younger. She feels her heart beat faster, sensing treasure. She crosses to the rack. Jacket, tee shirt, trousers, all made to be worn together, all in the same tones, but all different. She’s puzzled by the fabrics. She feels the jacket sleeve between thumb and forefinger. What is it made of? Some shot material, a shiny silver woven with a dove grey. She searches out the label. ‘Linen 80%, polyamide 20%.’ The jacket is wide, loose, collarless, buttonless. Zoran, a designer she doesn’t know. The trousers too are wide and loose, and they have a look she has never met before. She takes them out, and at once sees why. They are cut in two fabrics, one on top of the other: a silk chiffon lying on a silk satin. Because the two materials cling together, the effect is of a single but subtle fabric, which shimmers with the slightest movement. Laura is captivated.

  An assistant approaches, sensing her interest.

  ‘Do you have this in a twelve?’

  ‘One size only, madam. Zoran doesn’t do sizes.’

  Doesn’t do sizes! How can that be possible?

  ‘Of course, if you’re very big you can’t wear them. But you’ll have no problem. Try it on.’

  Laura knows she’s no fashion model. But nor is she unusually big. Evidently these miraculous garments are made to flatter a variety of shapes.

  She goes into the changing cubicle and strips with rapid efficiency. The cloudy garments slide onto her with seductive ease. She looks at herself in the cubicle mirror, and then, coming out into the wider room, watches herself walk towards a mirror on the far side. Never before have clothes hung so well on her. Astonishingly, the iridescent folds make her body beneath seem slender, almost coltish. She slips off the jacket and tries the effect of the tee shirt and trousers alone. The tee shirt is silver silk, seamed on the outside, which gives it the look of gleaming armour: a breastplate worn above the fluid lines of the straight wide trousers. She feels like an heiress from the 1920s.

  She draws the jacket back on. Warm enough for a spring evening. Could this be it?

  ‘How much for the three?’

  ‘Around eleven hundred.’

  Too much. Also she has come upon them too early in the day. Even more glorious clothes may be waiting elsewhere. She has not yet earned the right, in hours spent and energy exhausted, to take her reward.

  She returns to the cubicle and gets back into her own clothes.

  ‘It’s the last one we have. I could put it aside for you.’

  ‘No thank you.’

  Laura is mildly offended by the crude sales gambit. Does the assistant think she’s so new to the game?

  She moves on. But now there is a subtle shift in her attitude. She has located a possible outfit. Whatever she considers next will be measured against it. This gives her a new confidence, which in turn decides her to head down Bond Street and try the Donna Karan store. Donna Karan is not usually her style, though she did once buy a very expensive, very impractical and very beautiful pair of Donna Karan shoes. It’s the store itself that attracts her.

  She walks briskly, preparing herself for the coming experience. I am beautiful, she tells herself. I am rich. I am entitled to the best. I am beautiful. I am rich. I am entitled to the best. All only a game, of course. But for the short time that you play, you get more out of it if you’re serious.

  You are beautiful. You are rich. You are entitled to the best.

  For the opening night of the Glyndebourne season on Saturday. Not for Nick, who comes tomorrow evening, Friday. Nick whose only image of her is now twenty years old. How can she compete with her own youth? She blushes in the middle of South Molton Street to learn how much she wants Nick to find her attractive still. Not because she wants him back. That time is past, she’s living a different life now. No: she just wants him to regret what he threw away. She wants him to be sorry not for her, but for himself.

  She pauses outside the Donna Karan store, preparing herself for the transition from street to temple. The huge windows are backed in black drapes, and hold a very few headless mannequins, all clothed in slender black. In the best shops the dummies have no heads. This delivers a number of messages, the most powerful of which is, only the clothes matter. Not beauty of face, not mental ability, not personality. With dress alone you can be whatever you want.

  The glass doors are high. Within, a cavernous space floored in Portland stone, with walls of black French-polished plaster, broken by white shelves bearing a few, a very few, very elegant objects. A wide basin made of crazed clear glass. A bulbous black two-handled water jug fashioned from car tyres and canvas webbing. A single mottled-blue candle the size of a barrel. Further away, beside the wide sweep of stone stairs, rise floor-to-ceiling mirrors, and high panels of gold leaf, and low black leather couches. Higher still, lost in the black ceiling, pinpricks of light beam secret and selective illumination into the expensive air.

  Where are the clothes?

  Two headless mannequins stand at the foot of the stairs, wearing severe black jackets barely big enough to fit Carrie. Over on the left side, where three sales assistants stand murmuring to each other, pointedly not intruding on Laura’s privacy, a single rail of all-black garments hangs suspended by some unseen power in space. Nowhere is there anything so vulgar as a price tag to be seen. As they say, if you need to ask the price, you can’t afford it.

  Laura sweeps slowly up the staircase, watching her posture in the mirror wall. All this is for me. I am the priestess of this temple. I am beautiful. I am rich. I am entitled to the best.

  Of course it’s all a nonsense, this reverential hush, this ostentatious display of discreet good taste, these assistants who never look up, yet who register her every move. Intimidating, yes. But also thrilling. Laura feels it intensely, and revels in the feeling: this is a stage, and I am the centre of attention. It’s this more than anything that the extravagant use of space delivers. The few who enter these doors become special. Think by contrast of shopping in Marks & Spencers, or even Harvey Nichols. Among the crowds and the bustle, in the literal vulgarity of it all, the sense of a unique self drains away. Here, entering retail space that costs over £4,000 a square metre, in much of which nothing at all is on display, a lovely woman can feel she has value.

  Upstairs, where the store reluctantly admits that there are actual clothes for sale, she scans the all-black rails. A smart very simple very long black wool skirt at £710. A leather jacket of kidskin so fine you’d think twice about wearing it out of doors, at £1,995. After a while the figur
es cease to carry weight. Is £2,000 too much for a short-waisted leather jacket? Is £10,000 a year too much for a prep school? Is a million pounds too much for a house? None of these purchases, the jacket, the schooling, the home, has become any more glorious over the last twenty years; but the zeros have kept growing on the numbers’ ends, like empty carriages being added to a slow-moving goods train. When she is old, no doubt a leather jacket will cost £10,000 and the school fees will be a million. What difference does any of it make? At what point should one be shocked, and say, no, too much? The Clemmows have a wide-screen plasma display television, one of the flat ones, and Stephanie Clemmow told Laura it had cost £7,000. For a television! Then she said, to put the price in context, ‘It’s no more than a First Class airfare to Hong Kong, and Richard does that every other week.’ And there were those City boys in the paper recently who spent, what was it, £40,000 on a restaurant dinner? Two bottles of Petrus at £15,000 a bottle, or some such laughable figure. Did any of it matter? What did they get for their money but a few glasses of wine?

  No, it’s not that easy. Their money buys them more than wine. It buys the worshipful attention of the staff. It buys the conviction of privilege. It buys the envy, even the awe, of others, when the tale is told. Money buys confidence. Admit it. Without Daddy’s money sweeping her along like a warm wind, Laura could never have sailed into the Donna Karan store, where she knows she will buy nothing. This is a place for the thin and young and rich, but if the only one of the three you can manage is rich, well, that will do nicely.

  Will Carrie come here one day? Laura has only to think the thought to feel her heart clench with a fierce protective love. Nervous gawky Carrie, who has inherited her father’s sandy hair and poorly coordinated body, would be miserable here. No amount of money could buy her ease in such a place. Better for it to be out of reach. Better to be poor.

  The thought has occurred to her before. Not a serious thought. Only a little Marie-Antoinetterie, a nostalgia for a remembered simpler life. Money removes anxieties. Money oils wheels. Money eases pain. And yet. And yet.

  Oh. Money.

  Laura leaves the Donna Karan store as slowly and as regally as she entered it. The interlude has, on the whole, proved calming. Now she crosses the street and enters the white-wood mock-colonial villa that is the Nicole Farhi store. Here serious shopping resumes. The blonde parquet floors hold rack upon rack of casual clothes, of the kind you can fling over chairs. The boy behind the till calls out a cheery hello as she passes, in a manner that would get him sacked across the street. There is music playing, some soft indie rock that is unfamiliar to Laura, but that she knows is designed to make her feel she is now among the style-setters, the urban elite, the affluent young.

  She checks her watch. Time is passing. A quick cruise down one wall and she pulls out only a silk sleeveless top with beaded bands, not the sort of thing she’s here to buy at all. A slight chic garment priced at £170. After the £2,000 jacket this seems modesty itself. She tries it on, standing between the two giant pivoting mirrors that show you the back of your head, and more disturbingly, your bottom. The garment is sweet but not quite right. The momentary glimpse of her own rear view comes as an unpleasant shock. What has happened? Why does everything seem to droop? She has the disagreeable sensation that her flesh is slowly dripping down her body, and will one day form a blubbery puddle round her ankles.

  How much was the silver-grey outfit that comes in only one size? Eleven hundred? You’d barely get an arm and a tit from Donna Karan for that. The woman in Browns said it was the last one. Not a wink, not a blush, as she trotted out the tired old lie. I suppose it works on some people. Oh, the last one, they think. What if someone else were to walk in ten minutes after I leave and buy it?

  Frowning, beginning to feel pressured by time, Laura completes the circuit of the racks, and finds nothing. Nicole Farhi’s not quite smart enough, if I’m honest. Better bite the bullet and do Fenwicks on the way back.

  On the way back to where?

  There it has been, nestled at the back of her mind, knowing its time will come, feeding on the darkness, putting down roots, growing in size and assurance: back to Browns. Back to Zoran.

  How much time left? Lewes by three means the 1.46 at Victoria, which means looking for a cab soon after one, and it’s quarter to twelve now. An Evening Standard placard reads: ‘Anna Ford to marry Moon Man.’ How very odd. How old would Anna Ford be now? Somewhere in her fifties, surely. And still very lovely. What is a Moon Man?

  She’s about to enter Fenwicks, has in fact just hit the wall of scent samples that in her poorer days represented the portals of glamour, when with a clang like the closing of an iron door she thinks, What if it wasn’t a lie? What if the assistant at Browns was telling the simple truth? Laura re-runs her excellent visual memory of the rail of clothes, looking for reassurance that there are many more of the ones she picked out. But the others are different. Small differences, certainly, but different. She can’t be sure that the exact three garments she tried on, which hung so flatteringly on her, which moved with such seductive grace, are replicated elsewhere on the rail. Why on earth didn’t she take the trouble to look at the time? The answer isn’t hard to find. At the time the silver-grey outfit was no more than an early lucky hit, a promissory glow on the horizon. In the two hours that have since gone by it has been silently transformed into the one and only answer to her prayers. And maybe, just maybe, it’s the last one. After all, it must be left over from the spring season, and everywhere now the summer stock has taken over. What if someone walked in ten minutes after I left and bought it? What if they’re walking in now, right now, climbing the stairs to the upper back, glancing along the rack, homing in on that intriguing glint of silver?

  Laura panics. She turns round in Fenwicks doorway, colliding with two women entering behind her, and walks fast back up Bond Street. Please God let it still be there. Too proud to run, she pounds the pavements with the big cat prowl of the professional walker. The silver-grey outfit dances before her mind’s eye, now shining like the moon, dazzling and taunting her with its desirability.

  Anna Ford to marry Moon Man, she says in her head, in time to her hurrying footsteps. Anna Ford to marry Moon Man.

  South Molton Street is entirely filled by elegant women carrying Browns bags. Any one of them could contain her outfit, leaving the rack bare, the morning a failure, and the coming Saturday an evening of self-punishment and regret. She wants to snatch the bags from their hands as they pass, demand the right of search, seize back what is rightfully hers, saying like a child in the playground, I saw it first.

  Sweating slightly for all the chill of the day she reaches the door to Browns and storms the stairs. The same assistant is there. From the look on her face Laura knows the assistant understands the entire psycho-neurotic scenario playing in her head.

  ‘Not gone yet,’ she says.

  A wave of blissful relief bathes Laura’s trembling frame.

  ‘Though one woman said she might be back for it.’

  Not necessary. No sales pressure needed now. The deed is done. The moment of commitment took place in the doorway of Fenwicks. These processes are mysterious.

  ‘I’ll have it.’

  The assistant takes the outfit off the rail. Laura examines it carefully, lovingly. Yes, it will do. It will be perfect. It will be hers. Thank you God.

  As the assistant swaddles the delicate garments in layer upon layer of tissue paper, Laura sits on the padded window bench and experiences the final stages of this emotion-packed morning. She feels a sense of relief, of course, but this is now fading. Beneath the relief, a warm layer of satisfaction. Beneath the satisfaction, some eddies of unease. The price is £1,035, less than the eleven hundred quoted, almost half the cost of the little leather Donna Karan jacket. Not therefore too much of an extravagance. And the classic styling will never be out of fashion. Suppose she’s still wearing it in thirty years time, that comes to, oh, not much more than thirty p
ounds a year. Really rich women have designer dresses costing tens of thousands. You couldn’t call this really rich shopping. Well-off, maybe. Not rich.

  Oh. Money.

  At Victoria Station, where Laura is in good time for her train, she gets herself a cup of carrot-and-coriander soup and an Evening Standard. Anna Ford is to marry Colonel David Scott, who commanded the Apollo 15 mission in 1971, and walked on the moon. Colonel Scott is sixty-seven. He is, says Anna Ford, lovely, extraordinary, and very learned. Ms Ford is fifty-six. Her two teenage daughters have given their blessing. We are very happy and hope to spend our future together.

  On the train, Laura holds her Browns bag close, feeling the soft fat bundle inside, and reads about the lives of strangers. As the train enters Sussex, so her special day comes to an end. The jealously guarded space she has created and within which she has moved is opened to the waiting throng of her everyday concerns. Has Carrie had a good day at school? Did Henry speak to that teacher? What will she give the children for supper? Has Annie remembered to remake the beds in the spare bedrooms? Does the Volvo need filling with petrol? When does half term start? There are haircuts to book for the children, and friends to play, and oh God there’s dinner to make for Nick, just a simple supper but let it be delicious, let it haunt the rest of his life. Cold roast fillet of beef, new potatoes, pick up the beef at Middle Farm on the way to school. It’s all getting very tight.

  Her shopping trip slips into the past, and becomes a memory of a simpler age. Only the crisp cream carrier bag remains as proof that it really happened. In it, her hard-won treasure.

  We are very happy and hope to spend our future together.

  26

  Jack watches till the cars have passed and then makes a run for it, across the open track to the cover of the derelict barn. Here he waits, his heart beating violently, for the Dogman to pay his daily visit to the sheep.