My Story

by Jo Malone

  From now, my weekends were either spent with Dad as he sold his wares or performed magic, or with Mum at the skincare salon. I never stopped enjoying being Dad’s able assistant, but shadowing Mum in her glamorous new world, and the prospect of meeting a countess, pulled on me the strongest.

  I was transfixed the first time I met Madame Lubatti: initially, by her scent – an amazing mix of sandalwood and rose oil; then, by her appearance – a six-foot-tall, white-haired lady who appeared so grand and polished, even as she mixed lotions and potions, darting between her lab and two treatment rooms. She wore the same ‘uniform’ almost every day: a long, white lab coat over white fishnet tights with the dramatic accent of black, high-heeled, peep-toe shoes. Then there was the striking use of make-up: the blood-red lipstick, the stark, black eyeliner, and the generously powdered complexion, beneath her fringe and short, elfin hairstyle. She looked so regal to me. And yet, behind the formidable exterior was a soul with the kindest eyes and the silkiest hands that defied their aged and brittle appearance.

  Her skincare salon was housed at No.14 Montagu Mansions, within a Victorian, four-storey, red-brick mansion block, a stone’s throw from Baker Street. At one end of the road was York Street, with its regiment of Georgian terraced houses; at the other was Crawford Street, with its expensive apartments and a small parade of shops. To my young eyes, the neighbourhood was the poshest place I had ever been. Residents had flower boxes on the sills of canted bay windows, and the cars in the street looked like the kind that Dad drove in his dreams. No wonder Mum had me dress up all nice in my green Billie Kilt skirt with straps, white jumper and navy blue Clarks sandals with white socks pulled to the knee. I doubt that other kids at my school dressed as well for church.

  We walked up a set of marble steps into a lobby where a uniformed porter was on hand, and then we turned left into a ground-floor apartment that opened into a reception hall. Mum told me that BBC Radio disc jockey Pete Murray lived in the same building, but that meant nothing to me. The only ‘star’ who excited me was Madame Lubatti, and she always took my hand and led me inside her lab, leaving Mum to carry out treatments on clients.

  Beyond two treatment rooms and the lab, the apartment comprised a large kitchen, a bathroom and a drawing room, which were the private quarters where Madame Lubatti and her ‘companion’ Mr West lived. But it was the lab, ‘where all the magic happened’, that left me endlessly fascinated. It was as heavenly white as a John Lennon Imagine video: white paint, white shelves, white cupboards, white cups, white plates, white racks. Underfoot, the black-and-white tiles ran throughout; on the walls were bevelled mirrors; on the ceilings, twinkling chandeliers. The whiteness of everything made the place feel so serene and safe.

  At the far end of the lab, beneath the window that let in the daylight, there was a countertop covered with glass sweetie jars containing ingredients such as slippery elm, sandalwood, rosehip, camphor crystal, dried marigold flowers, and amber crystals; you name it, she stocked it. On other shelves, there were different-sized tubs of cream and corked, antique poison bottles containing oils and tonics, each one clearly labelled with a handwritten tag tied around its neck. Imagine a pharmacist’s room at the back of a chemist’s – with clear, green and brown glass bottles neatly stacked on different shelves – and you get the picture.

  If there was one overriding smell that kicks open that memory, it would be the combination of rosemary, lavender and camphor, and I can see Madame Lubatti mixing a lotion in a glass cylinder as she walked around, forever on the go, exuding an undiluted passion for her craft, almost bouncing around the room with her creative spirit.

  The laboratory was where she took me under her wing, and I had my own exclusive spectator’s spot, sitting in the gap between a bookcase and desk on a set of portable wooden steps that were used whenever Mum or Madame Lubatti needed to grab an ingredient from out-of-reach shelving. I observed everything from this vantage point, taking in every detail and imbibing every scent. I also watched Mum come alive in between appointments, grabbing this or that ingredient before crushing it all together with a pestle and mortar, adding a touch of goat’s milk to everything she did – that was one of Mum’s touches. Dad was a genius with his hands but I now saw that she was equally talented, able to make the perfect face mask.

  This was a completely different world to the rough and ready environment of the markets, and I definitely felt more at home in the lab – it felt like the most natural place for me to be. Indeed, all I wanted to do was spend my Saturdays with Mum and Madame Lubatti.

  One afternoon, while Mum was locked away in one of the treatment rooms, the countess waltzed in holding a bottle of Shloer grape juice, but I didn’t know it was grape juice because I’d never had it before.

  ‘Jo, let’s celebrate!’ she said as she carried two crystal, engraved champagne coupes over to the table near her desk. ‘Would you like some champagne?’

  ‘I-I-I would, but I don’t think Mummy would let me!’

  ‘Ohhhhh, you can have this champagne!’ she said, pouring it into my glass.

  She patted the other seat, inviting me to join her, and we clinked our glasses as she made a toast I now forget. The toast isn’t what mattered; what mattered was that I was being a real lady, sipping pretend champagne with my new favourite person, drinking from a glass that felt like a fish bowl in my hands. Then Mum walked in. I can see her face now as she saw me with a champagne coupe to my lips, which I slowly lowered as a frown formed on her brow.

  ‘M-Mad-Madame! What is she drinking?!’

  I looked at Mum, looked at my drinking partner, and wondered how much trouble I was in. ‘It’s grape juice, Mum! Look, taste it!’

  Madame Lubatti laughed as Mum approached the table and spotted the bottle; suddenly her frown dissolved into a smile. She put one hand on my shoulder, picked up my glass with the other, and clinked Madame Lubatti’s glass. ‘Cheers!’ she said.

  She, like me, started to see the countess as my surrogate grandma.

  Sometimes, Mr West – or Vernon, as the countess referred to him – invited me to go outside and grab some fresh air, but I never did warm to him; he smelled of beer all the time and seemed distant and aloof. Besides, he wasn’t as inspiring or as entertaining as the countess. She used to do yoga, even though she was in her eighties, and we once found her doing a handstand against the wall.

  ‘Madame, how long have you been in this position?’ Mum asked.

  ‘Oh, about an hour!’ she said. ‘Almost done.’

  She used to say that if you stood on your head for an hour a day, the blood rush to the brain would make you more intelligent. She was a student of yoga long before it became fashionable, which was evident in how nimble she remained; indeed, it was her flexibility that likely saved her from serious injury one Saturday morning.

  In the bathroom, she had one of those extendable washing lines that stretched from wall to wall – that was how she dried her fishnet stockings. Mum and I showed up at 9 a.m. and Madame Lubatti must have heard the door go.

  ‘EILEEEEEEN! EILEEEEEEN!’ she screamed, sounding in distress.

  We hurried through – me trailing behind Mum – and there she was, hanging upside down, head and shoulders on the floor, with one leg awkwardly slung over the drooping washing line. She had apparently been doing another headstand when one of her fishnets got caught. Once Mum had freed her, she sat on a chair to catch her breath, looking a little confused and disoriented. Mum had a treatment to carry out so she asked me to keep an eye on Madame Lubatti.

  In the kitchen, I could see her shaking slightly as I made her some lapsang souchong tea, served with a drop of honey in china teacups. A drop of honey was her medicine for everything, to soothe a stye in the eye, to treat a sore on the face, and, in this instance, to calm her nerves. The tea was awful – it smelled like burning rubber – but it seemed to do for Madame Lubatti. As I watched her hold the cup in both hands, I knew what would take her mind off the embarrassment: a story. She alway
s liked going back to her glorious past to retrieve a fantastical episode, and I couldn’t think of a better distraction, for her and for me. ‘Madame, tell me about the time when . . .’

  Like Dad, Madame Lubatti was flamboyant with her storytelling. When the words fell from her lips, with drama conveyed by widening eyes and do-you-know-what-happened-next cliffhangers, I hung on every theatrical anecdote. Two worldly tales lodged in my mind. The first involved her mother, who owned an evening dress that had the most divine bejewelled lilies, and in the centre of each lily was ‘a diamond the size of a quail egg!’ I had no idea what a quail was and so, in my mind’s eye, this egg was the size of the boiled egg I’d eaten that morning. Her mother’s show-stopping outfit was worn to one high-society party where everyone dressed in their finest and quaffed champagne. ‘Do you know what happened next, Jo?’

  ‘No, Madame . . . Tell me!’

  ‘My mother went to grab her cape from a chair and just as she was about to pick it up, a waiter screamed, “Stop, Madam! Stop!” And she looked down to find a python coiled on top of the cape!’

  ‘A real snake? A big one?’ I asked.

  ‘Eee-normous,’ she said. ‘About this big . . .’ and her hands measured thin air, about five feet apart.

  One of my favourite stories was about her time in Hong Kong when she was working as a homeopath, learning about fruit, plant and flower extracts. ‘Everyone thought that was all I did,’ she said, ‘but do you know what I really did, Jo?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Can you keep a secret?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Well, I worked . . .’ and she approached me, bent down and whispered, ‘as a spy!’

  I gasped. ‘Madame Lubatti!’

  ‘And do you know how we passed secret messages back and forth?’ She took one of the face creams and removed the lid. ‘In here, in one of these tubs, under the wadding. No one was going to look inside a woman’s face cream for a tiny piece of folded paper!’

  There were so many other exotic stories from Hong Kong, China, London and Italy, and each one almost made me forget that Mum was in another room, doing a facial. Half the time, it felt as though it was only the countess and me in the salon. But it was more than simply her stories that impacted me; she was the one who opened the door into fragrance.

  Over the next two years, I would unwittingly soak up the knowledge she imparted, along with my own observations that I unconsciously collected. She showed me the beauty of creativity, the fantasy world of product, the magic of mixing lotions, and what it was to be an artist. She turned on a light in the deepest parts of me, and that light would only glow brighter with time. It was almost as if she saw my future as much as she did Mum’s, which was probably why she decided to train my senses by regularly testing my nose.

  She would bring over three unlabelled bottles of different rose oils, remove the stoppers, place each one under my nose and ask: ‘What do you think that smells of?’

  I’d close my eyes and sniff. ‘Tea rose?’

  It impressed her that I could tell the difference between the woody muskiness of a garden rose, the clean, apple-green notes of a tea rose, and the rich, regal scent of a Bulgarian rose. ‘Very well done,’ she said, producing another bottle. ‘And what about this one?’

  ‘French lavender!’

  The next day brought a new test. ‘What’s this?’

  ‘Camphor. It’s camphor, isn’t it?!’

  ‘Now try this. Not as easy . . .’

  I screwed up my eyes, inhaling deeply and thinking hard about this sticky, waxy, gloopy smell. And then it came to me. ‘Jojoba oil!’ It is the ingredient that brings thickness and texture to a face cream. It is one of those characters that is a slight chameleon because it turns as hard as wax in cold temperatures yet as loose as yoghurt on a hot day. The fact I nailed it in one earned me extra brownie points. In fact, I didn’t get many wrong, as Madame Lubatti coaxed out my love of fragrance and essentially trained my instincts. She said that I had a nose for the business – a comment that never ceases to make me chuckle today.

  She also divulged a little-known tip that made me understand the reasoning behind whiteness in a room: one interior colour, plus very little sound, allows the eyes and ears to relax so that the scents in the air are the only stimulant for the senses. But that wasn’t the only inside tip I learned, because, on her desk, she kept the biggest secret to her unrivalled success – a precious, well-thumbed, black leather ledger, filled with more than four decades’ worth of recipes for her skincare products: the pink moisturiser that smelled of marshmallow; the orange skin food that reminded me of geraniums; the white nourishing cream derived from Bulgarian rose oil; the rosemary and lavender body oil; the sandalwood exfoliating mask . . . the lot. She allowed me to flick through its pages one day and that’s when I noticed her intricate, spidery handwriting, in black or blue ink, that recorded her precise formulations. I stood there scanning, if not reading, an invaluable archive that most of London’s beauty industry would have died to get their hands on, even if I didn’t realise it at the time. That precious artefact contained the secrets to eternal youth. What I could not have known was that it would one day end up in my mum’s possession, and help change the course of my life.

  Madame Lubatti decided out of the blue that I needed to apply my new-found knowledge. ‘Jo, come here. I want you to make a slippery elm mask. Do you think you can do it?’

  ‘I do. You use—’

  ‘No, don’t tell me. Show me.’

  My heart pounded because I was worried whether any attempt I made could be good enough. What if I disappoint her? What if I disappoint Mum?

  My head was barely above counter height, so she dragged over a stool for me to stand on, and then I opened one of her big glass sweetie jars and scooped out some of the oatmeal-coloured slippery elm powder, added a tablespoon of plain yoghurt, a few drops of avocado oil, jojoba oil and some vitamin E, with a dash of freshly squeezed lemon juice and a spoonful of honey. I mixed everything in a bowl with a spatula and, once I’d finished my feverish stirring, I poured this mousse-thick mixture into a white plastic jar with a black lid and handed it to her. Madame Lubatti placed her nose to the rim and then dabbed a finger into the cream, like a chef testing the texture of a sauce.

  ‘Wonderful . . . wonderful!’ she said, and gave me a big, tight hug.

  At that moment, Mum walked into the room. ‘Eileen,’ said Madame Lubatti, ‘look what Jo has made!’

  Mum was impressed, too. ‘Oh darling, well done – that’s wonderful.’ I don’t think she realised until that moment how much attention I had been paying to the whole operation.

  I learned so much under Madame Lubatti’s tutelage, including two skincare tips that have remained with me to this day: mashing up avocado to treat dry, dehydrated skin, and using cotton-wool pads soaked in ice-cold milk to bathe tired, swollen eyes. I knew this because it was my job to slice the avocado and mash it in a bowl, and I would also cut the lint into little squares to fit snugly on clients’ eyes.

  My education at the school of Madame Lubatti wasn’t only limited to the lab; she also took me along to Goulds homeopathic chemist in Crowndale Road, where she bought her pills, powders and oils by the kilo and half-kilo, as well as Baldwin’s in Walworth Road, one of the great herbalists, where she sourced different herbs, waxes and dried flowers.

  The days I looked forward to the most were those when she took me to Marylebone High Street to a Viennese coffee shop that became our regular haunt. She’d have a chicken vol-au-vent and I’d devour a chocolate marzipan in the shape of a seal. Sometimes, we’d go there for brunch, sitting at a small round table near the window, and she’d tell me more outlandish stories or talk about different teas, herbs, and face creams. I soon saw for myself why her incredibly high standards had played a huge part in her success: if a pastry or cup of tea wasn’t perfect, she’d send it back, in the same way she would reject a face cream if it wasn’t absolutely perfect. ‘If you ca
n’t do something perfectly,’ she told me once, ‘then don’t do it all. You must do everything brilliantly!’

  She hardly drew breath when talking and I could have listened to her all day long. Maybe it was because she spoke to me like one adult does to another. ‘Do you know,’ she said to me one day as we sat there, ‘I think you are my best friend . . .’

  Apart from Mr West, I don’t think she had anyone else in her life except for me, Mum and her clients. And I doubt she had anyone who was quite as enraptured as I was.

  She seemed so sprightly and alert that it was easy to forget her age. But one day, a glaring moment of forgetfulness caught me unawares. Bless her heart, we were about to walk into the cafe when she stopped dead in her tracks and gripped my hand. ‘We have to go back, Jo!’ she said, sounding alarmed.

  ‘Why, Madame. Why?’

  She put a hand to her mouth. ‘I’ve forgotten to put my underwear on!’

  When we returned to the salon, she seemed quieter than usual, as if she was too busy thinking. I didn’t realise at the time that she was probably mortified. I also failed to see the significance in why she was spending more time with me, leaving Mum to do more and more treatments.

  Another incident happened two or three weeks later: we were walking along streets that had been her backyard for years when she stopped and stood rooted to the spot, looking utterly lost. ‘Do you know where we are, Jo?’

  ‘Yes, I do. Marylebone High Street, Madame.’