WEEKEND COLUMNISTS It had been a bad day. Only ordinary-bad, as my daughter says, but bad none the less. The morning brought a disappointment about a gift gone awry; the afternoon, a sense I’d been deliberately misled; and in the evening this hardened into a feeling of being wronged. The air crackled with dilemmas. I had to take a view, but knew not how. I tried to exhale with dignity.
I rarely believe in being right at the expense of being happy – I’ve read the self-help books – but every seven years or so, a person has to stick up for herself. I paced the room practising an expression that was grimly bright, fighting my corner, holding my own.
Of course, I know it was not the greatest idea to draft an e-mail asking for advice about my tricky situation and send it to 10 friends at 11 o’clock at night. A babe in arms can see that. Ten peoples’ views are always going to be unwieldy, paralysing even. What did Mr Fred Astaire croon? “Too many irons in the fire is worse than not having any”? Yet what’s the alternative? Putting all your eggs in one basket? With my weaving skills?
But then, who’d have thought 10 friends would be at their computers close to midnight and have such wildly differing views? “I don’t see how she could possibly mind. This is reasonable, kind and fair,” wrote one. “Avoid this kind of confrontation at all costs; it will be too harrowing for both of you,” another decreed. “Let her win, walk away graciously and get down on your knees and pray you never have to go through what she is going through,” counselled another. “Too wordy!” “Too blunt!” The messages kept trickling in.
I couldn’t make any sense of it, even less a decision. Sleep was out of the question, as was any hope of peace. The tea cup and the cake tin didn’t help. The drops of Rescue Remedy backfired spectacularly, the distinctive taste instantly bringing to mind all sorts of previous traumatic occasions. The art of consolation, of self-consolation, is meant to be a speciality of mine, but it was evidently my night off.
I sat in a chair in the kitchen and read an entire book a friend had given me called A Chance Acquaintance, by Charles Chadwick. It was a wonderful book, so brimming with humanity, intelligence and humour there was no incentive whatsoever to stop reading. It achieved what only very good novels do: it created a completely realised world of its own that wasn’t at all dependent on the real one. In the world of this book it was an enormous pleasure to linger. I lingered long.
The heroine of the book, Elsie, is a hospital cleaner from a middle class family who was born with some kind of facial disfigurement that means her extended family and everyone she meets consider her very ugly. This has greatly limited her choices. Her disfigurement has cauterised her against life to a certain extent, so she lives out at the fringes of things. Yet she is a cheerful woman, kind, good natured and reasonable. She has her hospital work, which she knows she is good at, and she visits gardens whenever she can. She has her spotless flat and her puzzling family who do not love her as much as they might. It is shocking to see how the world struggles and fails to find love for one it considers very ugly in this novel, yet this lack of love, astonishingly, has situated a corresponding surge of love for the world in Elsie. On a bus one day she sits next to a fellow who has recently come out of prison following a sentence for murder. He is gruff and defensive at first, but a chaste friendship between them develops very delicately and through the other’s loyalty and support each of them blossom.
I’m not quite sure why this book had such a profound effect on me. My mood lifted with every page and I composed a few glowing sentences to post on Amazon. Proximity to something of the highest calibre can make life’s disputes or disappointments seem all the more trying, petty, defeating, embarrassing and shameful. Yet this book had made the real world appear finer and more mysterious. Its immaculate ugly heroine, its seedy criminal underworld, even its episodes of neighbourliness, bristled with maximum life. There was something very daring about its moral stance that was exhilarating.
It made me feel daring, too. The perceived slight I was reeling from gradually diminished in my mind. All day I had felt I could not possibly let it go, and now, with the help of this small masterpiece, it was gone.
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