On Beauty and Family Feuds

The best entry from our competition to win a screen print signed by Zadie Smith

Back in February, we ran a competition to celebrate the glittering success of Zadie Smith's On Beauty, a novel that concerns a pair of feuding families – the Belseys and the Kipps – and a clutch of doomed affairs, putting low morals among high ideals and asking some searching questions about what life does to love. The prize was a signed screen print of the cover artwork, signed by Zadie herself. The winner is right here:

The Precious

The ring was precious to them. Aunt Julia wanted it; Grandma Teresa wouldn't part from it; and Aunt Alberta coveted that small emerald trophy relentlessly. The ring was precious to all, a remnant of colonial pride, a whisper of riches from the western shores of India.

So, with the resolve of a Latin spirit with a sense of overdue privileges, within the richest and finest, inbred and newly aristocratic, nouveau riche family in Lisbon, the cataclysmic battle of the secular century was prepared. Backstage access to contributors only, sharpeners of tongs, providers of acid malice, spite in all its useful, disastrous forms.

The year of 1974 came; a sea of red carnations removed from power a dictator with an oedipal sense of rule. This unexpected turn on things suggested exceptional measures if the outtake was to be glory – arranged marriages were tailored for the occasion, the advantage being Grandma Teresa's objectified opinion on what a lifelong affiliation ought to be: safe, innocuous, with no financial reservations; winters in the south, springs in Paris, and summers with the new lover, regardless of nationality.

Mutually settled on a race for succession, Aunt Julia and Aunt Alberta married into old money, preferences aside, for between Doctor Julius and Engineer Alberto, the single aim was to avoid suggestions of vulgarity; so Julia became Mrs. Alberto, and Alberta Mrs. Julius. Some matches might be made in heaven, others are simply shovelled into being, manifested by ambition in quantum form.

And so they lived, both sisters, cheating on faithful, gullible husbands, striving on the muddy paths of their privileged lives, always foreseeing the day one of them would reach the bright green light at the end of that sizzling Portuguese existence. Monthly attacks on mutual reputation became ordinary; the conquering of nations was replaced by the overpowering of opinions, the barometer of status nourished in cafes.

The years passed, and the old bat Teresa wouldn't die – Julia and Alberta preferred to overlook their mother's slim, quite unnaturally healthy condition.

Sons and daughters gave way to a new generation; grandchildren with their own agenda, vile dreams of small children, ambition distilled into toddlers.

Teresa's longevity, once seen as a sign of ruthless determination, was now a case of gargantuan stubbornness. At the comfortable age of 72, with both her spinster daughters anciently married, Teresa found it was time for a long due affair with her 37 year-old butler, Thaddeus. The whole thing lasted for no more than a fortnight. By that time, Teresa had managed to get pregnant.

By setting herself this new boundary of resolution, an unprecedented method of immortality (at this age, anyway), the dearest of all ruthless grandmas became the talk of high society Lisbon. There wasn't a cafe not reeking of gossip. 'Poor Julia,' was whispered by some, 'Poor Alberta,' by others; 'One can't imagine the indignity!' was the common tune.

Seven months after the surprising announcement, baby Luisa was born. With a fresh millennium at her feet, this sum of generations of women determined to have their own way gazed the world with her sapphire eyes.

Clearly, an emerald ring wouldn't do. It wouldn't do at all.

And this is how Luisa became known as the infant with the emerald pacifier 7ndash; an heirloom to be considered.

So, whenever the gods hear their riotous children inquiring on the puzzling ways of the universe – over thinking the clockwork precision operated on ambrosia and gin filed Olympian nights – they simply point their heavenly, insubstantial fingers towards the small favours human-beings pay them: transformation, transmutation, transfiguration of hatred and love, chips and vegetable zucchini, into the same essence crammed in different packages. The universe isn't ever-changing – it is simply a recycling factory of moral, sexual and egotistical strife of epic proportions.

A pacifier is harmless, but human intent is as forgiving as a starving shark on ecstasy.

Pedro Nuno Galvao Ferreira, Portugal

On Beauty, by Zadie Smith, is out now in Hamish Hamilton hardback.
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