Home life
Furs and furbelows
Alice Thomas Ellis
It occurred to me the other day that the inside of my wardrobe very much resem- bles the inside of my head; that is, it is crammed with outmoded articles, forgot- ten trivia and all sorts of things which I have absolutely no recollection of putting in there and cannot imagine ever using. I can't believe I ever did use some of them. Golden shoes with platform soles? My friend the analyst chanced to be here the other day and I thought that with his trained mind he might be able to prevail upon me to impose some sort of order on all that chaos. If he had been a plumber I would have led him to the washing- machine which has taken to vomiting dirty water out of the soap-powder drawer, if he had been a builder I would have shown him the course of bricks which has mysteriously fallen off the back wall, squashing the mint, and if he had been a professional baritone I would doubtless have asked him to sing. As it was I flung open the doors (standing well back) and said, 'Behold.' He wasn't very interested. I think his mind was elsewhere. I leapt in at random, drew out my musquash from the wardrobe floor and it utterly came to pieces in my hands: lots and lots of horrid little pieces — tufts and gobbets and morsels, ineffably carnal, mortal and irretrievably deceased. I re- member one of the cats got shut in with it some years ago and slept on it until discovered, but I had subsequently sponged it and given it a good airing and put it back to wait to be mended (it was a full-length musquash and the weight of the bottom half had caused it to drop off the top), but something, cat fleas or not, had wrought total destruction upon it. There was no question of hesitation, of 'Well, why don't we hang on to it. You never know it might come in handy. We could make a muff out of what's left.' We had to employ dust-pan and brush to get the remains into the bin bag. I then felt I had done enough for one day and delved no deeper.
I've got two more fur coats in various stages of dissolution and a mock snow leopard of such brazen artifice that it goes right the way round and is almost tasteful. All the genuine animal furs I got second- hand, which for some irrational reason makes me feel less guilty about the fate of the original owners. The threatening 'The first one to wear that coat died in it' has less force if other wearers have come between you and it, although I never quite like to look straight in the eye of my fox fur especially since Beryl Bainbridge- in- advertently burned the tip of its tail off while lighting a cigarette — because I would recognise a fox if I saw one. I don't know what musquashes are. Somebody told me they were a sort of rat, but musquash was not what they were called when they were still alive and kicking, so I am no wiser. One of my other coats is reddish blonde with vague stripes; of roughish, harsh texture it is reminiscent of hyena. It isn't lion or tiger but looks as though it came off a largish animal since the stripes go on quite far, and we are all mystified. I once had a neighbour with a coat made of cow skin, and while I feel only a fanatic would complain about that, since cows are always having their skins turned into shoes or club armchairs, I felt she was nonetheless taking a chance. Step- ping unwarily in front of a passing car she would have handed the irate motorist the appropriate epithet and choice of phrase on a plate. The coat was cream-coloured with big brown splashes and could have been absolutely nothing but a cow.
My third fur coat used to belong to my aunt and is also unrecognisable — dark brown and faintly lustrous. It is obviously genuine fur, but of what we cannot tell. I lent it to my friend Zelide last winter to keep her warm when she went off research- ing marine matters in Holland and as she left for home her colleagues told her she was lucky no animal rights protesters had thrown eggs at her (do eggs have no rights?). I sympathise to some extent with their outrage, but I would go even further if could discover precisely which animal's rights I had infringed.
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