Home life
Colour problem
Alice Thomas Ellis
It was most invigorating to enjoy an evening out. And I met P. J. Kavanagh whom I hadn't seen since he was a little boy at his school in Wales. I used to pass him in the mornings on the way to my own school. He never saw me — probably, we agreed, because I was always engulfed in a horrible school hat, chewing the chin elas- tic. I did have a nice time — at the party, that is, not on the way to school. (It was probably school that set me on the road to being a recluse, since you can't get away from your fellows in a classroom any more than you can at a dinner party.) Teeny little coincidences kept coming up during the evening. For instance, when I was at school my house colour was mauve, which is probably why I have never much cared for this shade. Tom Wolfe said he had planned to write a book with a long title containing the word mauve, only no one ever knew how to pronounce it — mory or molly. It's in the same category as scon, scohn, or scoon and varz, vaze or vawz: you pays your money and you takes your choice.
I recently bought a mauve blouse be- cause spring is coming. I have a new black coat and skirt, and when I was a girl in Liverpool I always greeted the onset of spring in a black coat and skirt with a bunch of violets pinned to it. The mauve blouse, I thought, would go nicely with the bunch of violets, except that now, as I soon realised, you can't get bunches of violets any more and, if you can, they don't smell of anything, let alone violets, and they drop dead as soon as you look at them. So there I am with an expensive new blouse in a colour I don't like with a name I can't pronounce. I try thinking of it as lilac, or lavender, or even pale purple, but it stays mauve.
I had a frock once which I tried to think of as dark red, but it was puce; it stubborn- ly remained puce, and in the end I had to throw it away. Puce is the colour of people having apoplexy, and mauve (pronounce it how you like) is the colour of people who have died. Of all the colours in the spectrum, red and blue make the unhap- piest mix. Even porphyria is an illness, and I don't know why we persevere in regard- ing purple as becoming to the complexion. I was about to speak of this to my neighbour when I remembered a story told by my friend Laura. Her father was a minister in Scotland, and one day a parishioner's baby died. He went to visit the family and was disconcerted to find the coffin open. On enquiring why they hadn't nailed it down he was told it was because the wee bairn was such a pretty shade of blue. I think this 'blue' is what I would describe as mauve, and it doesn't encour- age me to regard my blouse with any greater favour.
Happily at this point the conversation turned to writing methods and I vowed to mend my ways in this respect before I turn blue — or whatever — myself. If I metho- dically take S. Maugham's advice and apply the seat of the pants to the seat of chair I might feel justified in going about more in the evenings, thereby acquiring food for thought. I shall never like that purple muck they squash out of grapes, but if the company's amusing who needs it?
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