The French Perfumer

by Amanda Hampson

  Initially I was more curious than distressed about the note. Mother had, after all, been away for most of the war years. Her visits home on leave had been fleeting and distracted, often interrupted by mysterious disappearances, apparently visiting friends. Over that period, she had become a different person; younger, livelier and less responsible – more like a sister. She even went so far as to ask me to call her Clare rather than Mother at one point. In retrospect that was more significant than I gave it credit for at the time.

  Clare was nineteen years old when she met my father, Henry, sometime during 1920 at Murray’s Night Club in Beak Street. Light on his feet, he was busy making up for those years lost to the war by working his way through the clubs that were springing up all over London at that time.

  Clare had been academic at school, topping her class in mathematics. She had wanted to go on to university but her parents thought it a waste. Unlike me, who toddled off to Secretarial School without a murmur of protest, she was more spirited and rebelled by running away to London. To a young woman newly arrived from the north, Henry must have seemed brave and worldly. His scarred jowl added an heroic element to his even, handsome features. Two months later they were married. I came into the world the same year and Alan arrived a year later.

  Clare was barely forty when war broke out and she leapt at the chance to tear off her apron and join the army. She trained as a radar operator. Older than many of the other female recruits, she showed a rare talent for the work, perhaps because of her aptitude for mathematics. After training, she was sent to Suffolk to the radar station at Bawdsey Manor. She loved having valuable work and the respect of colleagues, something she had never had the chance to experience. It was as though she had been waiting her whole life for this opportunity to shine. A year later she was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant and came home on leave proudly sporting one pip on her shoulder. And so the die was cast.

  By the time she left us for good, I was twenty-five years old. Father, perhaps not trusting himself to deal with the situation rationally, instructed me to find out her whereabouts and talk some sense into her. I telephoned my grandparents, who lived in Ormskirk, and extracted from my nan that they had seen Clare briefly and that she had gone back to Suffolk. So on the Saturday I took the train to Suffolk and the tiny hamlet of Bawdsey. Initially Clare had lived in the women’s quarters within the manor but once commissioned she was moved into a more comfortable billet with a local family, Mr and Mrs Curtis and their two sons. They lived close enough to the manor that she could ride her bicycle to work.

  I found the address easily enough; I had often written to her there. Mrs Curtis was at home. Her face puffy and mottled, she nodded glumly as I explained the situation and then kindly invited me in. The house smelled damp with sorrow and regret. We sat in the kitchen watching her two boys play football in the garden. Beyond lay peaceful green fields and woodlands that stretched into the distance. Mrs Curtis wept, trembling uncontrollably as she made tea and in the end I helped her to a chair and made the tea myself. Mr Curtis, she explained, had left yesterday and was now living in sin with my mother in nearby Felixstowe. I knew already that Mr Curtis had lost an arm fighting in France in 1942 and had been seconded as a school teacher in the local school for the remainder of the war. The trouble didn’t start right away, she explained, but she could see it brewing. ‘George is a gentle man; quiet. He never wanted to go to the war and, when he came back, he just couldn’t accept his injury.’

  ‘She – your mother – was on duty all hours so we hardly saw her. She just slept here. Sometimes we didn’t see her for days but then she’d have a twenty-four-hour leave and sleep half the day or sit in the garden drying her hair in the sun or whatever.’ Mrs Curtis dissolved into tears. ‘He’d be his normal grumpy self then she’d walk in the room and he’d light up and suddenly turn into what you might call a sparkling conversationalist. Showing off, he was. Flirting. I came home one afternoon and they were sat on the settee, pretending to have a conversation but I just knew that two minutes earlier they’d been all over each other.’

  ‘Did you talk to him about it?’ I asked.

  ‘I was too afraid. I didn’t want to bring it out in the open. First off, I wanted to get her reallocated but then I realised I wouldn’t be able to keep an eye on him, and, worse, the whole village would find out about it. So I waited for it to wear itself out.’ She dabbed her eyes with her handkerchief. ‘That was my first thought when the war ended. It took six weeks before she was demobbed and I was finally rid of her.’ She burst into a fresh bout of crying. ‘He was like a ghost when she’d gone. I thought he’d get over it. Now, only a week later, this! He didn’t give us a second thought, me and the boys.’

  My mother had gone and stolen the father of two small boys and wrecked this poor woman’s life but all I could think about was what on earth to tell my father.

  Evidently the diminished, ghostly George Curtis had been waiting for a message. When his marching orders arrived from Clare, he came to life, took the stairs two at a time, packed his bag and told Mrs Curtis the brutal truth – he was head over heels in love.

  ‘As I said, he’s a kind man – or was,’ said Mrs Curtis sadly. ‘But it was like a fever in him. I suppose, he never thought, you know, with him damaged goods and all . . .’

  She saw me to the door and gave me the name of the guesthouse where Clare and George were staying in Felixstowe. As I stepped outside into the freezing wind blowing off the North Sea, she asked, ‘Are you going to see them? Would you mind taking his warm jacket?’ She gazed up into the leaden sky. ‘I think this weather’s going to take a turn for the worse.’

  Clare and George, now masquerading as Mr and Mrs George Curtis, were holed up in a greasy, rundown guesthouse two streets back from the seaside. At my knock, there was a palp­able silence, then Clare called out, ‘Who is it?’ On identifying myself there was another long silence, underpinned by hushed murmurings. She opened the door a crack, enough to reveal that she was wearing the clichéd night attire of a 1940s screen siren. A fruity animal heat seeped out of the room. Behind her I could see an unmade bed, grey tangled sheets.

  ‘Hello, love,’ she said with a quick nervous smile, as though she hoped to avoid this conversation. I handed her George’s warm jacket and suggested we meet in the pub across the road. She nodded and quickly closed the door.

  In the pub I nursed a lemonade and fumed with angry resentment for a good twenty minutes before she came hurrying through the door hugging her coat to her. She ordered a shandy and brought it to the table. Fresh from her bath, her hair was in a topknot, tiny curls clinging damply to her neck, giving the treacherous home-wrecker a sweet childlike vulnerability. She sat down and covered my hand with hers. The spiteful child in me was tempted to snatch my hand away but something stopped me. There was sorrowful apology in her eyes but no disguising the radiance that illuminated her every cell. I realised with a thump of my heart that I had never seen my mother truly happy.

  The heaviness that had weighed on me from the moment I read her note lifted. In that moment I detached from her and we became separate beings. The final protective skin of childhood was sloughed away. I saw my mother through adult eyes as an individual who, despite her obligations, could do what she damn well pleased with her life. I realised that despite the pain she had caused, what she had done was terrifyingly courageous. She had grasped the chance of happiness with both hands, and George had done the same – though only with the one hand, obviously.

  I delivered the message from my father – which was about as romantic as a bill of sale – and although she was remorseful, Clare was resolute. She asked if I would like to meet George, and despite the hesitancy of my agreement, she darted out the door with an energy I hadn’t seen before. A moment later she returned with a large shambling man, the empty left sleeve of his jacket tucked neatly in his pocket. He wasn’t a handsome hero, just an ordinary chap with a slow smile and kind eyes. In spite of everything, I liked h
im. As it happened, it was the last time I would ever meet him.

  I caught the train home that evening and conveyed the basic information to my father and Alan – neither of whom asked me a single question about her situation. Father made his own interpretation. Like Mrs Curtis, he preferred to sit with the idea that this infatuation would wear itself out and Mother would event­ually come home, whereupon life could resume as before. Waiting gave him no peace but we never spoke of it again.

  As for Clare and George, they left Suffolk soon after and set up house near Dundee, where George had found a teaching post. Only a year later, on a sightseeing holiday on the west coast, George, perhaps hampered by his disability, failed to take a corner. Their car left the road and plunged down a bank into Loch nan Druimnean, where they both drowned.

  Part of me believes that had she stuck to the original well-trodden path of her life, my mother would still be alive. But the fatalist in me wonders if this was the trajectory that life always had in store for her . . . in which case, at least she had that time of supreme happiness, something many people never have the chance to experience.

  As for myself, I regret not having more time with her. I took it for granted she would always be there. As the years pass, I miss her more deeply and in different ways. I miss the possibilities for our adult relationship. I’m sure if he allowed himself to think about it, Alan would feel the same. On the odd occasion when we have a moment alone, there may be a wistful mention of her but we have learned the hard way to never let the conversation stray in that direction within earshot of Ruth. We have an unspoken understanding that Ruth’s condemnation of our mother and her ‘immoral’ behaviour (cloaked in the guise of loyalty to Alan, but actually because Ruth is the self-appointed standard-bearer of suburban morality) leaves us both feeling emotionally flayed. We loved our mother.

  Although I obviously told Mr Brooke a highly edited version of this story, I could see he was moved. Reaching across the table toward me, he asked for my hand. Slightly confused, I offered my hand as if to shake his. He took it and held my palm gently against his cheek. He held it for so long that my self-consciousness disappeared. I began to feel that I was in the hands of a practitioner and allowed him to absorb whatever it was he needed. I would be patient. I could feel the texture of his skin on my fingertips, the hardness of his cheekbone and it was as though we had made a connection that, even a few minutes ago, seemed impossible. We seemed to have so many misfires and misunderstandings but there was a sense of peace between us then. The incendiary smell that usually fills the air around him had dissipated and something more gentle and poignant emerged: loneliness, regret.

  So, that was the highlight of my day but now I need to bathe and dress for dinner – such a tiresome business to have to endure every single night! I truly long for a simple supper and a warm little cat curled up in my lap.

  Dinner was a splendid roast of beef with Yorkshire pudding and all the trimmings but my mind was elsewhere, and guests had to ask me several times to pass the gravy boat or the salt and pepper. Vivian looked at me curiously and I made a concerted effort to snap out of my dream state. It was not so much the incident with Mr Brooke as the hour this evening spent writing my mother’s tragic story that has stayed with me.

  Oddly, Mr Farley was at dinner without his dear little other, so Mrs Somerville assumed he was available for some light sparring. She blazed away at the wrong-headedness of British colonialists and then moved onto the French, who had lost control in Algeria – two arrogant, deluded colonial powers whose glory days were over. Despite Vivian’s best efforts to divert her, she pushed on until Mr Farley, who had barely looked up from his supper, launched back at her. ‘Madam, French imperialists cannot hold a candle to the British Empire when it comes to the management of their colonies. One cannot speak of them in the same breath.’

  Mrs Somerville puffed up excitedly like a songbird about to warble but Mr Farley wasn’t bridging any interruption. ‘In the words of the great Cecil Rhodes, the British are the finest race in the world and the more of it we inhabit the better. No one ever said that about the French.’

  ‘That we know of,’ added Jonathan under his breath.

  But Mr Farley wasn’t finished. ‘The French seem to overlook the fact that their colonies do not share their own high opinion of themselves – unlike British subjects who, far and wide, recognise us as a superior race. We give savages something to aspire to.’

  While this absurd (and embarrassing!) debate raged, I found myself watching Mr Geraldson. Throughout the discussion he had maintained his usual detachment. However, when Mr Farley, determined to overrun Mrs Somerville, turned to his compatriot and asked, ‘Don’t you agree, Geraldson?’ it was as though Geraldson were an actor as he stepped smoothly into the part, adding his concurrence. It dawned on me then that despite his upper-class pretensions and refined enunciation, Mr Geraldson is not British. There’s something foreign about him. Not just that he eats bread with ham for breakfast; more a sense that he’s playing the part of an English gentleman.

  Once Mr Farley had established that he and Mr Geraldson were in accord, he gave a thin smile and excused himself. Lady Jessica was apparently feeling poorly and he needed to attend to her, which left Mrs Somerville looking rather deflated. I have to admire her: she’s plucky taking him on and quite the progressive thinker.

  The most extraordinary thing just happened. It was late when I finished the last entry this evening and, feeling peckish, decided to tiptoe down to the kitchen for something to placate my hunger pangs. The house was in darkness but a full moon threw slabs of cold light through the windows and I found my way easily down the winding service stair.

  As I approached the kitchen via the scullery off the service hallway, I noted something unusual in the air – there was a dense, rich, earthy smell but with a tingling charge to it, like the aftermath of a thunderstorm. The door to the kitchen was closed and the room in darkness but through the glass inset I saw the most astonishing sight: the silhouette of a naked woman standing beside the kitchen table. Her breasts flashed white in the moonlight. She bent down, perhaps to slip off her panties as she then tossed an item across the room. I recognised her immediately by the fall of her hair. It was too dark to make out her expression. I wondered had she lost her mind? Should I fetch a blanket or just slip away? Crouching down, I changed the angle of my view and spotted a cigarette tip glowing red in the darkness, then flicked toward the sink. The silhouette of a man moved toward the woman and she momentarily disappeared in his shadow. Then a flare of moonlight illuminated her cheek as he lifted her onto the table and she pulled him into an embrace, her legs wrapping around his waist. Compelling as the scene was, I had now crossed the fine line between curiosity and voyeurism, so slipped back up the stairs to my room. What a to-do!

  On reflection, I’m thoroughly annoyed about the kitchen incident last night. Vivian has a perfectly good bedroom in which to conduct her torrid affairs. It is outrageous that an innocent party seeking a late-night snack is subjected to the spectacle of her employer stark naked – let alone in congress with a strange man. I have no idea if this is normal behaviour for Vivian or something inspired by the full moon – perhaps a rite of spring? How on earth will I face her today having seen her in the altogether? I do hope she retrieved her knickers off the kitchen floor. She’s normally so fastidious. And who is the lover? Really none of my business, but it’s difficult not to be insanely curious.

  I feel a little strange about venturing down to the cottage this morning. When Mr Brooke took my hand yesterday I felt as though there was some sort of breakthrough of understanding between us. But now I’m not so certain. Perhaps I was caught up in the strange intimacy of the moment and misunderstood the situation? I’m worried the whole business about him pushing to hear my mother’s story was to somehow manipulate me, to make me more vulnerable to him. I just don’t know him well enough to decide.

  Things have been calm and pleasant in the house this week, mai
nly due to a festive atmosphere created by the royal wedding. Mr Brooke has taken no interest apart from expressing his reservations as to how an American actress could fit into the situation, which according to him, was already complicated. He did reveal in passing that he had met Prince Rainier on several occasions as well as Princess Charlotte, whose personal fragrances were created by his grandfather, Monsieur Rousseau.

  Mrs Somerville hired a driver to take herself and Lady Jessica to Monte Carlo (despite Mr Farley’s disapproval) to join the throngs waiting to see Princess Grace leave the cathedral. From their account it was something of a crush with only distant glimpses of the royal couple. They probably saw less than the rest of us who watched a blow-by-blow account on the television set Vivian has recently installed in a small, rather inhospitable sitting room. Even in slightly fuzzy black-and-white, Princess Grace radiated beauty and goodness. I do so hope she will be happy.

  On the subject of beauty and goodness, I received a splendidly long letter from Colleen detailing all the latest gossip in the department with a sweet postscript noting how proud she is of her friend in France. I suspect my letters to her may have overstated the good aspects and understated the difficulties of my situation.

  My relationship with Mr Brooke has definitely improved and he is far more cordial. We finished Moonraker which was quite a satisfactory experience for both of us and have been able to discuss things more amicably. While nothing specific has been discussed about exactly what Vivian wants me to achieve, it’s fairly clear that she has plans for me to document something relating to the perfume business which, from what I can gather, has long since closed down. Despite Jonathan’s allusion to ‘hocus-pocus’, it seems unlikely it would have anything to do with formulas or compositions since surely these would be recorded at the time of creation? So that makes no sense.