‘Close your eyes and tell me what you can smell in this Flower Cabin of yours.’
Emma holds her face up to the sun, and for a moment she thinks of Clem and the scent of her shop– do all flower shops smell the same?
‘There are the lilies. They are the first to greet you when you open the door– they are big, pushy flowers, and their scent is heady and rich, full of importance.’ She smiles, eyes still closed. ‘Then when you step in, there is the sweet, powdery scent from the stock.’ She pictures the dark-green enamel buckets filled with their plump, frilly heads– magenta, white, and peach. ‘As you get closer, that’s when you catch the scent from the more modest flowers. The roses are there: some cream, some pale lemon and a vase of tall roses the pink of cherry blossom. Their fragrance is subtle and understated, but if you lean your face close to theirs, you can catch the scent of an English garden in the summer.’
In her mind, she is now standing in front of the banks of flowers, searching for other fragrances– there is the smell of the wooden floor, and what else? She turns towards the counter.
‘If we are lucky, we have some sweet peas in. We put them by the till, and usually the first people to see them buy them. No one can resist their scent.’ She opens her eyes and looks at Philippe. ‘And behind the smell of the flowers, there is a greenness, I don’t really know how to describe it, but it’s an important part of it all. Maybe it … balances it?’ She half laughs. ‘I’m not really sure what I’m talking about.’
‘You’re doing splendidly,’ Philippe assures her, turning to his box and busily searching through the phials. Eventually, he selects four and opens them. With his gardener’s hands, he wafts the scent towards her.
‘Oh yes,’ Emma says. ‘That’s the beginning of it, for sure. That’s how it smells when you first open the door.’ With the fragrance comes the thought of Les, Betty and Tamas waiting for her behind the half-open door. She smiles, wondering if her perfect fragrance should have the smell of fresh coffee mixed in with it, too.
Philippe frowns slightly. ‘I can tell this is a complex fragrance. It will be the middle notes that will speak to the heart of you. I wish we had more time…’ He glances back to the house, and Emma can’t help feeling he would like to be in his laboratory, experimenting.
‘Jasmine,’ Emma hears herself say suddenly.
‘And what does Jasmine make you think of?’
‘My father.’ Emma can feel something shift within her. ‘He died ten years ago. Four months after we got married.’
Philippe returns to the wooden box, then hands her a phial.
‘Oh, that’s my dad,’ she says, opening it. ‘Definitely. In his shed, which was really an old-fashioned greenhouse– part potting shed. On the wall at the back, he grew jasmine. I think it reminded him of Spain.’
She pictures the green wooden door with its peeling paint, sticking slightly as she pushes it open. She hears the door scraping on stone and then, then, the warm air is filled with the scent of jasmine. Sunlight falls through ancient glass, and in that mottled brightness, her father looks up and smiles at her.
She breathes in the scent from the phial once more. ‘He loved his garden like you do– your hands are a bit like his.’ Emma looks down at her own hands. It is so hard to describe her father; he is more of a feeling than a place or occasion. ‘He didn’t always say much, but it was the certainty of him… It was like having a hand in the small of your back that you can barely feel, but you know the hand will not let you fall.’
She inhales the jasmine and closes her eyes, fighting the tears. ‘I never got to say goodbye.’
‘Did he die suddenly?’ Philippe asks, taking the phial gently out of her hand.
‘Yes and no– he’d just started cancer treatment. We knew it wasn’t good news. I’d been there at the weekend and was due back the following week, but he suddenly went downhill.’
Philippe stands up. Taking a pristine linen handkerchief from his pocket, he hands it to Emma, holding her hand for a moment as he does so. He glances towards the house and then nods as if reaching a decision.
‘I am going to make you a perfume, English Emma. It is going to have deep within it a foundation of sandalwood blended with jasmine. But that will not be at the very heart of it. The heart will be the modest flowers that sit waiting for you in the flower shop, the flowers that tell a tale of an English garden. The top notes…’ Philippe looks towards the house once more. ‘I do not yet know what the top notes will be, but they will add a balance, a greenness to your perfume.’ He smiles. ‘I can tell you this though, Emma– it will be a perfume for your future.’
Chapter 61
Violet
Lily of the Valley
Everywhere she looks, there are boxes: boxes filled with liquor, chocolate boxes tied with sky-blue ribbons, cases stamped with the crest of great Champagne houses, squat boxes containing she knows not what– and in there, somewhere, are the boxes she must rescue.
This is the resting place of the latecomers, the last packages to be taken on board theTitanic. They must be scooped up and ushered to their rightful places, like tardy children loitering outside school. They have just set sail, and this square space must be returned to normal as soon as possible. People will come and go, dresses sweeping the tiled floor like desultory maids. Then the voices will lift and fall in undulating conversation. But for now, the voices are loud and urgent, words tossed across the boxes.
‘Bring the one to your right. No! the box of brandy by your foot.’
‘How many did you say were for Stateroom Six?’
‘How in damnation can I see who it’s for if they won’t address it properly!’
‘More chocolates for the family in Stateroom Three, sure they’ll be as sick as pigs if they eat all this lot.’
She stands back to avoid being crushed by a man with enormous arms carrying what looks like a tea chest. She hears him mutter as he staggers by, ‘What in God’s name can they want with this?’
