LITMIR.BIZ

      New Year’s Eve, and the end of a decade. A portentous moment, for those who pay attention to portents. Guests were invited for nine. Some are already on their way, travelling towards Harley Street from outlying districts, from Oxford and Tonbridge and Wantage, worried already about the drive home. Others are dining, on the cautious assumption that a nine o’clock party might not provide adequate food. Some are uncertainly eating a sandwich or a slice of toast. In front of mirrors women try on dresses, men select ties. As it is a night of many parties, the more social, the more gregarious, the more invited of the guests are wondering whether to go to Harley Street first, or whether to arrive there later, after sampling other offerings. A few are wondering whether to go at all, whether the festive season has not after all been too tiring, whether a night in slippers in front of the television with a bowl of soup might not be a wiser choice than the doubtful prospect of a crowded room. Most of them will go: the communal celebration draws them, they need to gather together to bid farewell to the 1970s, they need to reinforce their own expectations by witnessing those of others, by observing who is in, who is out, who is up, who is down. They need one another. Liz and Charles Headleand have invited them, and obediently, expectantly, they will go, dragging along their tired flat feet, their aching heads, their over-fed bellies and complaining livers, their exhausted opinions, their weary small talk, their professional and personal deformities, their doubts and enmities, their blurring vision and thickening ankles, in the hope of a miracle, in the hope of a midnight transformation, in the hope of a new self, a new life, a new, redeemed decade.

      Alix Bowen has always known that she will have to go to the party, because she is one of Liz Headleand’s two closest friends, and she has pledged her support, for what it is worth. She has promised, even, to go early, but cannot persuade her husband Brian to go early with her. A couple of hours of any party is enough for me, Brian has said, and we’ll have to stay until midnight, so I’m certainly not turning up before ten. All right, I’ll go alone, said Alix. She thought Brian was quite reasonable not to want to go early. She herself is not a reasonable person, she suspects, a suspicion confirmed that evening in the bathroom as she tries, out of respect to Liz’s party, to apply a little of a substance called Fluid Foundation to the winter-dry skin of her face. This is what people do before parties: she has seen them doing it on television: indeed, she used to do it herself when she was young, when she had no need of such substances, before she reverted so inexorably to her ancestral type.

      The Fluid Foundation comes in a little opaque beige plastic container, and is labelled, in gold lettering, Teint Naturel. She bought it a year ago and recalls that it cost a great deal of money. She uses it infrequently. Now she cautiously squeezes the container. Nothing happens. Is it dry? Is it empty? How can one tell? She squeezes again, and this time a great glob of Teint Naturel extrudes itself from the narrow aperture on to her middle finger. She gazes at it in mild dislike. It glistens, pinky-brown, faintly obscene, on her finger. Common sense, reason, tell her to wash this away down the wash bowl, but thrift forbids. Thrift is one of Alix’s familiars. Thrift does not often leave her side. Thrift has nearly killed her on several occasions, through the agency of old sausages, slow-punctured tyres, rusty blades. Thrift now recommends that she apply the rest of this blob to her complexion rather than wastefully flush it away. Thrift disguised as Reason speciously suggests than an excess of Fluid Foundation on one’s face, unlike a poisoned sausage, will cause no harm. Thrift apologizes, whingeing, for the poisoned sausage, reminding Alix that she ate it twenty years ago, when she had no money and needed the sausage.

      Alix hesitates, then splats the rest of the glob on to her face and begins to work it in, angrily. She blames the manufacturers for the poor design of the container: probably deliberate, she reflects, probably calculated to make people splurge out far more than they need of the stuff. She is slightly cheered by the thought of how little reward they would reap from their dishonesty if all consumers were as moderate as she. (She wonders, in parenthesis, how much of the nation’s income is spent on cosmetics, and whether the statistics will be provided in the New Year issue of Social Trends.) She is more cheered, although at first puzzled, by the fact that as she works the excess of Teint Naturel on her skin, her appearance begins to improve. Instead of turning brick-red or prawn-cocktail-pink, as she had feared, she is turning a pleasant beige, a natural beige, she is beginning to look the same colour that people look in television advertisements. A pleasant, mat, smooth beige. It is remarkable. So this, perhaps, is what the manufacturers had always intended? She apologizes to Thrift for having been angry, then remembers that it was Thrift that had dictated her previous parsimonious, sparing applications, and is confused.

      She gazes at herself in wonder. Vanished are her healthy pink cheeks, her slightly red winter nose, her mole, her little freckles and blemishes:

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