She is glad The Purser Priest is not around to hear it. She saw him earlier today as dawn was breaking and they were scurrying up onto the upper decks– ants heading for work. He nodded at her as she passed and said, ‘Be so kind as to come and see me in my office when you’ve finished arranging your cabins.’ He is a polite man, even at his busiest. Then he turned and was off, issuing more instructions, to the left and to the right. She could not see his face but imagined his eyes shifting, flicking, checking.
From where she is stood, her back to the wooden panelling, she catches the scent of something– not sweat this time, or Faithful Lover, or new paint, but something sweeter, more delicate. A fragrance is sneaking towards her through the piles of boxes.
She has only once seen lily of the valley growing wild. It was underneath a tree in the grounds of the orphanage where the boys lived for a time. The nuns were not women who lovingly tended flowers– if they had been, she thinks they would have known better how to care for the boys they grew. She remembers kneeling on the grass by the flowers and burying her face in their petals and leaves. If the nuns came, she planned to look them straight in the eye and say she was praying; she would say the water on her cheeks was dew from the leaves. She remembers the delicate white flowers tickling her face and the scent, so green and clean and sweet.
And now it is calling to her again across a field of boxes.
Chapter 62
Emma
Flowers of the Coral Tree
Both Emma and Betty are tired when they meet back at the hotel, so they decide to eat just around the corner in a bistro Emma spotted earlier. Betty has been to see many of Paris’s famous landmarks and is clearly delighted with herself. She even managed a few French phrases when she stopped for lunch.
Over supper, Emma tells Betty about Philippe and the perfume he is planning to create for her.
‘What a wonderful thing to do, love– he sounds like a very special man.’
A special man who had an affair, Emma thinks. She wonders if Betty is thinking the same.
When Emma tells her about using fragrance as a way to explore memories, Betty is particularly taken with this. ‘So that explains why Les can’t abide the smell of sweet peas,’ she comments. ‘I remember they filled the church with them when Big Les died.’
They are walking back to the hotel when Emma’s text alert sounds.
‘It’s Alistair!’ Emma glances briefly at the message. ‘He wants to know if I’m free for a Zoom call.’
‘Now this should be interesting,’ Betty responds, picking up her pace.
Emma asks Alistair to give her ten minutes and hurries after the accelerating Betty.
They find a spot in the hotel library, a small room that serves as a coffee shop during the day but is currently deserted. Through the frosted glass doors at one end of the room, they can see glowing lights and hear laughter from the bar.
Emma has her tablet up on the table in front of them when Alistair calls. First, she introduces Betty and then she leaps in. ‘So what have you found?’ She meant to ask Alistair how he is– his face is inscrutable, and yet…
‘Wait and see,’ he says, raising a glass of wine in salute to her and Betty.
Alistair is sitting on a grey sofa, in what appears to be a plainly furnished sitting room. He has a black and white cat curled on his lap.
He leans forward and adjusts his screen before starting. ‘Violet did write about her life– looks like it was in the 1930s when she decided to attempt her memoirs. She didn’t have much success getting any interest in them, but aTitanichistorian took them up, oh, years later, and you can read her extracts along with his analysis.’ He pats the pile of books beside him on the sofa. ‘I get the impression from reading his notes that he thinks some things are well recalled and some … less so. Maybe things shifted in her mind over the years. Also, there are some big gaps.’ He takes a sip of his wine. ‘For instance, she doesn’t go into what actual work she did in a huge amount of detail. So I have to admit, at first I thought we’d drawn a blank.’
He leaves a long pause, and Emma and Betty glance worriedly at each other.
‘But then I read the memoirs again, and the thing that began to strike me is that flowers featured throughout her life. I don’t mean as window dressing, but as something with real significance for her. So, take her childhood– she grew up in Argentina, although her parents were Irish. She had four brothers and then a much younger sister, who I get the impression she was very close to. Violet was the eldest. Anyway, when Violet was writing about her childhood– and remember, she would have been really small– she was noticing the wildflowers on the Pampas, the flowers in the cities and also the flowers of the coral tree. I looked that one up,’ Alistair adds proudly. ‘It’s Argentina’s national flower.’ He continues. ‘She also has strong memories surrounding a death in the family. She wrote about a grave planted with … plumbago, I think it was?’ He pauses. ‘Have I said that right?’
‘Yes, it’s a trailing plant,’ Emma says. ‘It has small, baby-blue flowers.’
Alistair nods and pauses as his cat stretches out beside him, the tip of its tail waving across the bottom of the screen as if in lazy salute. ‘Anyway, Violet also wrote about decorating her mother’s hat with roses and– this is an amazing bit– when she was little and really ill in hospital, they moved her bed out into the garden so she could be among the flowers. At that point, they all thought she was going to die. She wrote that the doctor did it because they knew how much she loved flowers. Anyway, she’s there in the garden supposedly dying and someone, I think her mum, brings her a huge bunch of honeysuckle which she knew Violet loved, and the smell of it revived her.’
‘That’s lovely. What was wrong with her?’ Betty asks.
‘I can’t remember exactly– something to do with her lungs.’
‘But she recovered?’
‘Yes, thanks to the honeysuckle.’ He grins, but then his face becomes serious. ‘Sometime after that, her dad died and the family had to move to England.’
‘So Violet would have spoken Spanish and English.’ Emma finds this thought comforting.
