The Perfumer's Secret (32 page)

I sniffed back tears. ‘It will take as long as it must,’ I said, recovering myself, and feeling surprised at how calm I sounded despite the tremor in my voice. ‘Time must pass for people to accept.’

‘Indeed. And, of course, I will be going back.’

‘Oh, Sébastien, no!’ It hadn’t occurred to me that I might yet lose him to the bombs and bullets of war.

He took my hand and raised it to his lips, gently laying a kiss. ‘I must. It’s my duty. I can’t escape what others are facing.’ He waved his cane. ‘I’m hardly much use with this but my language skills alone are needed. I’m a chemist; perhaps I can help in the medical tents. I can make up drugs, do paperwork, send messages, any number of tasks that can contribute. I certainly can’t languish here, in all good conscience.’

‘When?’

He lifted a shoulder with a rueful expression. ‘As soon as the mayor and police clear me to return . . . as soon as I can.’

I swallowed. All of them gone.

‘Fleurette,’ Graciela said, arriving to squeeze my wrist with affection, ‘anyone who survives a bombing and then a gunshot aimed directly at him twice is like a cat with nine lives. He’s going to come back, this lucky black cat of yours.’

I had to believe her. I had to trust the angels to continue to watch over him and bring him back to me.

__________

I stood alone in the mortuary, my dead twin laid out on unforgiving marble. Around the base of the plinth he slept upon was hung a black wool curtain, richly embroidered with gold fleur-de-lys symbols and trimmed with a glinting gold metallic fringe. Not so long ago our father had been laid out identically and on this same table with this same valance, for a similar visit when my brothers and I had come to pay our final respects.

I felt the emotion rise and clog at the top of my chest over the notion that he wouldn’t have anticipated that both his sons would be dead within two years of his passing. I corrected myself – that his
three
sons would be dead in this timeframe.

I touched Felix’s hand. It felt chilled and stiffly unfamiliar but I held it all the same, as if I might pass some of my living warmth into his lifeless cold.

Graciela had accompanied me to the mortuary. But I wanted to be alone with Felix.

‘Remember, his spirit has flown,’ she reminded me as I hugged her before turning away; she remained outside. I suppose her remark was a way of preparing me to confront the dead. She had also handed me a small tin of lanolin scented heavily with lavender. I had no idea of her use for it, nor did I care. Graciela pointed to her nose. ‘It helps with the smell of a morgue.’

I took it but didn’t use it. Smells were my life. And revolting though this one might be, it was part of the fabric of the life I was blessed with. I couldn’t linger with only the beautiful scents of nature; she offered up unpleasant ones also. They were all part of her landscape . . . mine too.

Felix didn’t smell. Instead I inhaled the disinfectant, the tang of formaldehyde, the vague and horrible old sweetness of decay from other corpses that were stored somewhere here. Aimery was nearby but I didn’t look for him, didn’t ask for him either, and no one would blame me, given that word would have got around at how Felix died. I switched off from all of that and focused on my brother and mercifully it was only he who was laid out for viewing.

His complexion appeared waxy pale against the black flop of his hair, like a perfect gardenia bloom sitting amongst thick, dark leaves but the image I conjured disintegrated swiftly. Felix
was
beautiful but there was no beauty here, only sorrow and damage. Someone had diligently combed his lustrous hair into a neat style but not in the right way. I dug furiously and absently in my bag for a comb, feeling offended that he looked wrong, and lost myself for a minute or two, gently adjusting my brother’s hair so that Felix emerged again. And after my ministrations he really did appear as if he were simply sleeping. The act of combing his hair calmed me. He was an extraordinarily attractive man despite the abrasions of life in the trenches. I touched a slight cut above his brow and a small bruise high on his cheekbone. ‘How did you get these, Felix?’ I pondered aloud softly. Had they occurred from the same event or separate injuries? I knew I would not learn the truth but it kept my mind dislocated from reality for a fraction longer while I considered how the cut would never heal, the bruise never darken and develop through its odd palette of colours. Dark lashes curved above the bruise and I remembered how as a young child Felix would entertain our father and me with what he called ‘butterfly kisses’. He’d lean in close and flutter those lashes to tickle our cheeks and make my father chuckle or me squeal with delight.

That’s how our flowers feel when the butterflies dance amongst their petals
, he’d explain. It was only in this moment as my whole body ached with loss that I grasped what a romantic my twin had been, even from childhood. He’d hidden it through his sardonic approach to life but he had not been waiting for the right woman to fall in love with him. No, only now I realised that Felix had been waiting for the elusive woman that
he
would fall desperately in love with. And whether she was considered right for him or wrong by the family, I don’t think now it would have mattered. His well-disguised romantic soul wanted that sort of helpless surrender; it’s why, I now understood, that he forgave me for loving Sébastien and then threw his life away to protect that love – the same sort of love he aspired to. I’d never really pondered his romances; up to this moment he’d been my laughing, handsome twin but I’d not paid much attention to how women viewed him. I wondered at how many hearts might break to learn of his death . . . how many hearts he’d broken while alive. Many, I suspected. His conquests were his, though, and never spoken about, certainly not to me, and I had known not to pry. I doubted Felix shared his triumphs with other men, bragging about this woman or that as others might. He was far more private and soulful than most realised. Perhaps all that others saw was the jovial, entertaining side of Felix but I knew there were depths to him. In thinking back over our final conversation, I could touch his grief over losing his gift. I began to imagine how life would be if I didn’t have my ability to smell the scents of life. It felt momentarily impossible to imagine and then the notion that each day would feel pointless and insurmountable struck me. Yes, I understood. Felix, like me, was a creature who needed to ‘taste’ life and needed his olfactory senses to call upon. I too would feel incomplete . . . no, I would feel damaged, half the woman I was.

This is what he was trying to explain to me that morning: why he wished he’d died in the trenches, rather than being injured in this cruel way. And it was why he gave his life so willingly to Sébastien, still mostly whole, and in a position to give me a happy life of love.

Strange that I wasn’t weeping; I hoped this was how it was going to be for me now. Had I reached some high precipice from which I had new perspective – that of someone who could be entirely in control of her emotions, who might lead by example? I’d cried enough tears this last year. And people were weeping all over Grasse for their dead, all over France for our men; I wasn’t particularly special in this regard.

Henri was buried in a mud field somewhere in the north. One day I would visit him, sprinkle some centifolia rose petals of Grasse at his grave unless they could bring his body home for me – we would see. But Felix was here. He would join our mother and father in the family vault and he would wait for me there. I couldn’t plant roses above him as he’d romantically asked me to but I would plant new roses for him and in his name.

I spoke to him now. It felt important to say what I needed to aloud. ‘My heart hurts, Felix, but perhaps you would tell me yours hurt more at the realisation that making perfume together was not to be our future. I understand that now. You were brave to the last. I know you hid your courage on the battlefield and let people like Henri and Aimery take the praise. Both of my brothers gave their lives for others when the question was asked of you . . . and for that I don’t think our debt to you will ever be paid. All I can say is that you are loved and admired; your memory will not die. I will hold it close in the vivid recollections I have of every moment of our growing up . . . to this very moment now when I am forced to bid you a final farewell.’ I wiped a single stray tear. I would not crumple now. I sniffed the weakness back. ‘I’ll live for both of us, for all three of us, in fact. I’ll make a perfume that the Delacroix and De Lasset families can consider the sum of their combined knowledge. I’ll channel it into an elegant but individual scent to excite women the world over. It will speak of independence and courage, of triumph and hope, of facing adversity and staying true to oneself. It will, above all, darling Felix, speak of love, of course, and its secrets. I forgive our father for I have sinned in the same way and I know it is a sort of madness that overtakes. Love when it comes is not rational or fair. I am convinced it chooses us rather than the other way around. That is love’s greatest secret of all – it is a free spirit and cannot be controlled. Thank you for saving the life of the man I love. Thank you for forgiving me for loving him. I don’t know how to go on without you other than to try to get through each new day a little easier than the last until I no longer have to try. Tally-ho, my darling,’ I said, surprising myself at bringing our mother back to mind in this moment, but she did love us and it was appropriate she share this dreaded moment of farewell. I could almost feel the presence of my father and Henri watching us.

‘Until we meet again,’ I whispered, my voice quavering with choked emotion. I bent down to kiss his chilled, immobile lips, pausing to give his cheek a final affectionate stroke. I hoped it would be a long time before we were reunited.

1 JANUARY 1918

Incredibly and with sinking hearts we moved into our fourth bitter year of war. It had ground everyone down to husks of our former selves as we all awaited the next telegram of grim tidings or the next distressing report in the newspapers or cinema. We’d begun gathering at the town hall for updates. I no longer considered it unseemly to be huddled alongside the womenfolk of Grasse, hanging on to every word. There was a sense of comfort in numbers and Graciela had urged me to be seen amongst the town’s people, sharing their fears, walking with them, passing conversation no matter how bleak. These days the affection that came my way was not simply connected with my surname but with the person I was becoming.

I could feel it. I was growing into a woman with her own path to walk, her own take on life. I had suffered as much as any and they knew it; they saw my composure as strength, as something to adhere to, to look up to. Girls in their early teens would seek me out in the square, walk with me while holding my hand and speak of their concerns for brothers and fathers. They were looking for my assurance. I couldn’t tell them that my heart ached for one man, so we talked about loss, about facing adversity, about finding inner strength. I felt if Felix could only see me now he’d probably say I was standing taller than he could recall me being. Although if I looked in the mirror, which I rarely did these days, I barely recognised the woman staring back. I appeared shrunken with a definite hollow where rounded cheeks used to be. I could count my ribs and the knuckles of my pelvis were visible, pressing through pale skin stretched across my skeleton.

Food was scarce. We had been growing as much as we could for all of France; I had turned over swathes of both our families’ lands into growing food rather than flowers because we were simply not making perfume. Our combined De Lasset and Delacroix warehouses bulged with stocks of essential oil. When the war ended – if it ever ended – I liked to daydream that I would be ready to manufacture perfume from the day peace was declared. But for now I had opened up the family facilities into manufacturing much-needed soap and medicinal creams for our army. It felt to me as the least we could do, especially as in Grasse we had the know-how and access to product. For us it was relatively simple to transfer our skills.

At Sébastien’s urgings I also opened up our chemical plants for the production of drugs for the medical corps and, walking around our once again busy laboratories, I wondered constantly whether Sébastien would handle the very vials we were producing here. I took to labelling them myself in case he did, as though each ampoule of painkiller was a private love note to the man I yearned I would never mourn.

I was supervising so many new duties now, down to signing out each cartload of our precious fruit and vegetables, especially during the busiest summer harvest season. I’d wave them off and watch the carriages rumble away down the hill into Nice to be railed from there to wherever our fresh goods were needed to feed our army, together with the medicines that would heal it.

At the De Lasset villa we were down to a sparse diet made worse by these winter months and now when I looked at our basic stews and painfully simple celebratory food on feast days, I could barely recall the decadence of that fateful Christmas of 1914 with its sugar and spice. But none of us complained. The new diet made us appear ghostly in our clothes that hung loosely but we needed to know our men’s bellies were fed as best as we could manage while they fought for our freedom, and if that meant some hungry, lean times, so be it.

Thinking back now to the end of 1914, I saw that all of its trauma had shaped me into a woman. Before then I believed I was still simply a child in a grown-up’s body. The New Year of 1915 was the beginning of a fresh era of my life when I left behind innocence in every sense of the word and I realised that life was not, and could never be, coloured with the black-and-white certainty of youth for me again. I now lived in a world where sometimes the dark to grey shadings of thought were my friend, often a comfort.

I understood now, as I quietly celebrated my twenty-seventh year over a sip of sherry and some simple orange-scented biscuits, that compromise was everything, especially in how we regarded one another. Over these desperately sad and challenging years I’d won myself some perspective on those last few days of 1914, and while I had not and never would forgive Aimery for murdering my brother, nor for his determination to kill Sébastien, I had not spat on his coffin in his family crypt. I had visited it many times, in fact, and placed fresh flowers in the vase, even dusted it so that the stone that enclosed him never appeared untended. I had come to realise that Aimery was as much a victim as any of us in the doomed affair of our parents. I wished I could have had more sympathy for him years ago; we might have avoided the outcome of that day. In my quietest moments, usually wandering a row of our roses or just before I turned out the lights for the night, I wished I could have shown some greater restraint that terrible day. I’d allowed pride, ego and my inflated confidence at finally discovering love with Sébastien to colour my approach to a man in pain. And he was like a wounded dog that day. In that blinded hour of his arrival I’d thought myself mature but a mature person would have known a wounded dog was always going to strike back at an attacker. However, the wisdom of years had also taught me that we can only act in the moment we stand, and that what I knew now or how I thought now could not be compared to a previous time. We evolve, we develop, we take fresh perspective, we feel less emotional about some matters, we become more intense about others.

I had needed to reach some plateau of clarity from which I could strip away all the emotion of that day and think objectively. And so, at some point, I don’t know when, I’d taken on the full burden of both deaths and accepted my part that, while I didn’t pull a trigger, I helped to enrage Aimery to the point of becoming a murderer. Even so, I’d made my peace with this. I had to, or risk going mad with guilt, plus I knew all the blame was not mine. Aimery was a brute, had always been capable of irrational behaviour and violence, would likely have pulled out his firearm and killed any one of us, even without my involvement. He was a tinderbox of anger at any given time but it was true I made it easier that day to light the spark into the volatile vapours that surrounded him. I couldn’t change the past but I could shape my future, and so I’d reached the understanding – with no little help from my friend Graciela – that if I was to lead a productive life I must teach myself how to put that day away, lock it into an imaginary box and forget the key.

I spoke to Felix most days in the family crypt, although now, in spring 1918, my number of visits per week had slackened. It used to be daily, now maybe three times per week, sometimes two if I was busy in the lab or fields. Nevertheless, I always managed to find a single flower to pluck on my way to lay on his vault. Sometimes it was a simple daisy, other occasions I might lay an ethereal iris, a peppery geranium, whatever caught my attention. During these regular visits I told him what was happening in the war, I read him letters, I’d update him on our fields including those turned over to growing food now and I’d always spend a few minutes discussing the perfume I was mentally working on. Before I said goodbye, I’d tell him how Sébastien was, even if he’d already heard about him from a recent letter. It helped to keep Sébastien vivid in my mind – by speaking aloud of him like this and yet so intimately, he felt close and safe.

I had come to accept that Graciela had called it correctly. Sébastien possessed uncanny luck and remained gratifyingly alive, writing to us regularly. I’d read his letters aloud in the parlour, often to an audience of women as they knitted or crocheted, who would smile knowingly at his softly amusing remarks and sharp observations about men at war. While the business of a double death in our small town had stunned everyone initially, I had to admit that the sheer amount of death – and constant threat of it – that everyone was coping with did help to dilute the impact of two of Grasse’s most prominent people dying suddenly and inexplicably at the Delacroix villa.

In peacetime the speculation and gossip might have raged for years. In the environment of war, it found its correct place as a tragic outcome for two brave men. Graciela had never been implicated and people who perhaps knew her as Aimery’s mistress who saw us both together might have been perplexed at the beginning, but any idle chatter surrounding us had long ago lost its titillation.

The verdict of Sébastien having to bring down an intoxicated Aimery through self-defence was duly delivered and he was permitted to return to northern France within ten days of our sealing the coffins and placing our dead into their final resting spots. It’s fair to say that word had moved like a grassfire up a hillside that my husband had arrived home drunk and angry over reasons we didn’t understand, had forcefully cast me aside when I’d tried to comfort him and had been brandishing his firearm, killing Felix by accident when my brother had come to my aid. And then self-defence had prompted a third bullet. There was immense shock – of course there was – but people began to admit they’d seen Aimery De Lasset arrive intoxicated at the station. Madame Mouflard had confirmed he became belligerent and angry to discover that his wife was not at the house to greet him. Her statement – unsolicited by me, I might add – to police that she ‘feared for Madame’s life in his dark mood’ was extremely helpful to our cause. Jeanne too had chimed in, saying she’d overheard him muttering as he’d left the De Lasset villa that he would ‘choke’ me for ‘humiliating him’.

The mayor had visited two days after the funerals to explain, haltingly and with great embarrassment, that Aimery’s and my marriage was not officially sanctioned because of the lack of a civil marriage ceremony and licence. I blinked sadly as he spoke, inwardly cheering, of course, as he gradually and tentatively built up to the words that I was not legally a De Lasset and thus I had no legal rights as his widow. He had struggled to get these final words out. I made it easier for him. I remember now how I’d sighed and stood, moving to the window.

‘Perhaps it is for the best.’

I recall how he’d looked at me, aghast that I could be so accepting. ‘Madame, I know this must be a terrible shock. I —’

‘Nothing could shock me more than losing both of my brothers within a week of each other, sir. Actually your news makes it easier for me to come to terms with what Aimery De Lasset did. I do not wish to be his wife given his actions and so your news, though bleak, is not unwelcome.’

‘I am humbled by your wise perspective, Madame.’

‘Mademoiselle,’ I corrected him with a rueful smile.

He had tittered nervously. ‘It means no financial benefit. It all goes to his brother, Sébastien De Lasset.’

‘I do not need the De Lasset fortune,’ I had reminded him, ensuring I had not sounded haughty.

Everyone from Paris to Nice knew I was now the wealthiest woman in the region in my own right, perhaps in all of southern France. ‘Still, it is a shame that our two families lose that special connection that the town so welcomed and celebrated,’ I had said, airily.

He nodded. ‘This is my deepest regret. It made our region more powerful. His brother . . .’ His thought trailed off.

‘Is a very fine man,’ I picked up and continued for him. ‘I’ve come to admire him immensely. We all have.’

‘I hear that Sébastien De Lasset writes often to you?’

So the tongues were wagging. But this was good gossip – exactly what I had hoped to encourage. ‘Yes, indeed,’ I replied, without hesitation. ‘The whole household waits on his next missive. I share them aloud to the staff and friends.’ He nodded that he’d heard this too.

The mayor’s subsequent shrug spoke droves. ‘Maybe . . . who knows . . . after the war . . .’ He tiptoed around what was in both our minds. He shook his head. ‘Life must go on.’

I had beamed him a smile. ‘We shall all do our best and the two families of Grasse will always keep her strong,’ I said.

He’d held my gaze a moment longer than might be considered comfortable and a silent message had passed that I may well be open to being courted by another De Lasset . . . for the good of Grasse, of course.

I had never since his death spoken a bad word about Aimery, donning black – as a widow should – to mourn all those dead in our families and celebrating his heroic acts on the battlefield. However, I did nothing to dissuade people’s admiration for Sébastien . . . a true son of Grasse whom they were still to get to know, but his actions to seemingly protect me and Graciela did his reputation no harm.

And so I had continued to share his letters and Sébastien knew this, making sure he kept them general, interesting and as amusing as he could under the circumstances. Over the last three years they’d all come to know and admire him, and talked of him as though his returning to live here was the most natural progression for his life. Sébastien usually included a single-sheeted private letter just for me. These I did not read aloud, nor did anyone but Graciela know about them; in this she had become my ally.

These precious sheets I handled as a private treasure, forcing myself to wait all day to read them, busying myself with work in the fields or in the lab, allowing the tension and desire of hearing his voice in my head to build. And then after a meagre meal that I often shared with Graciela, now a regular visitor, I would light a spill and touch it to the candlewick so I could read by a naked flame in my bedroom; I knew it sounded childish, but it felt more romantic, for I know he would have likely written his letters to me aided only by a guttering candle or lamp.

I’d remained at the De Lasset villa, although there was no obligation or binding reason for me to do so. As much as I would have loved to return home, it was merely an empty shell and it held only bleak memories for the time being. Even three years on it felt raw in the drawing room and I swear I could still smell the fear and loathing of that tumultuous day.