The scent was all around them; it curled and diffused in the air with a sweet warmth and subtlety, then burst with a peppery, musky intensity. The blind girls moved into another room. There they arranged themselves expectantly around a long wooden table, Mme Musset welcomed them, and a cork was pulled with a squeaky pop.
“This is pure essence of lavender, grown on the Valensole plateau,” said Madame. “It is in a glass bottle I am sending around to the right for you all to smell. Be patient, and you will get your turn.”
Other scents followed: rose and mimosa and oil of almond. Now that they felt more relaxed, some of the other girls started being silly, pretending to sniff too hard and claiming the liquid leapt up at them. Marthe remained silent and composed, concentrating hard. Then came the various blends: the lavender and rosemary antiseptic, the orange and clove scent for the house in winter, the liqueur with the tang of juniper that made Marthe unexpectedly homesick for her family’s farming hamlet over the hills to the west, where as a child she had been able to see brightness and colours and precise shapes of faces and hills and fruits and flowers.
Afterwards, as the pupils filed past Mme Musset, each nodding her thanks, Marthe found she was speaking before she had even decided to. “Could I come again, please?”
“You enjoyed this, my petal?”
“Very much, madame. I can’t tell you how much.”
The line of girls was pressing into her back now, warm and softly solid.
“I will talk to your teacher.”
The movement of other bodies carried her along past the lilting voice that Marthe could have listened to all day, telling her so much she wanted to know and making sense of the world in a way that she understood instinctively.
“Till the next time, I hope,” said Marthe.
She could not speak on the way back. It was as though her senses had fully opened and the smells of the town were not only distinct but living, complex but delicious puzzles to solve. Waves of vanilla cream from the patisserie danced with iron from the blacksmith’s forge. As they waited to cross a road, she picked up powdered sugar and spring woodland.
Voices of young children sang out: “Gathered today! Wild violets—only a centime a bunch!”
Marthe dropped the hand she was holding and plucked a centime from her pocket.
Mme Delphine Musset, wife of Victor Musset, owner of the small perfume distillery, also held the title of potions manager, which denoted a higher calling than the production of homespun fragrances. She was a mixer of country tonics and medicines. In a more southern, less industrialised country she might have been known as a wise woman, the kind who dispensed natural cures and used her powers with compassion.
She kept her word to Marthe. Over the following months, she arranged for her to come back a couple of hours one afternoon a week. Marthe washed bottles and stirred soap mixtures with the workers in the sheds of the courtyard factory behind the shop. She was there when deliveries of other essences were made from the farm: the grass-green herbs of spring and winter infusions of cardamom and ginger. But in the course of the many tasks there was always time to talk about which aromas combined successfully and why the addition of one could deepen the impact of another; and the more Marthe asked, the more she was allowed to do. When the time came for her to leave school, she had impressed the Mussets enough with her nose for fragrance to be offered an apprenticeship as a scent maker.
The war came, but life in the unoccupied south went on. For the first few years of learning her craft, Marthe lodged in a room of a house belonging to a friend of Mme Musset. It was close to the shop-factory, and her landlady would take Marthe’s arm for the five-minute walk along the pavement under the plane trees to her workplace.
When Mme Musset spoke, it was in the true accent of the southern mountains. Every vowel proclaimed her ancestry in these rocky slopes. To Marthe, whose only physical contact with her was the guiding touch of her hands, Mme Musset was a stout person, with a wide, red-cheeked face. It was several years before Marthe was given a description of the strong bony features that gave her a touch of the witch, one of those elderly women in fairy tales who might be good, or might be evil.
“The kind who sets a trap,” said Bénédicte.
By the time Bénédicte told her this, Marthe was engrossed in the alchemy of perfume and the infinite possibilities it offered. Bénédicte, her sister, was fifteen years old, with little experience outside the farming hamlet where they had been brought up. She had loved to read from an early age; Marthe remembered her bent over an illustrated book of folk tales, the grotesque coloured plates showing wild creatures and wilder humans with distorted features, and she understood where this disconcerting image might have sprung from.
“That’s not like you, to be unkind,” said Marthe.
“You told me that’s what you wanted me to come for, so that I could describe to you what you couldn’t see for yourself.”
“That’s true. But—”
“I’m not being unkind. I’m doing my best.”
But Marthe felt her certainties fracture. Here was her sister, usually so good-hearted and loyal, speaking out of turn about the Mussets, her saviours. Mme Musset had seen something special in her. She had kept her word, and they had chosen her. More than that, Madame had given her a purpose in life, and a future she could scarcely have imagined but for the lucky chance of a school visit to the distillery.
“And Monsieur Musset, what do you think of him?”
Bénédicte gave a nervous laugh. “He’s the boss, and he acts like one.”
“He can be a bit distant when he’s at work. And short-tempered, sometimes, when people make silly mistakes. ‘He doesn’t suffer fools,’ that’s what Madame says. It took me a while to gain his acceptance. But—oh, Bénédicte!—when he is with his family, he is the kindest man. You should hear the terrible jokes and how affectionate he is to his wife.”
She didn’t need her sister to tell her that Victor Musset was a wide tree of a man—Marthe could sense his bulk and hear where the rumble of his voice started deep in his chest. When Marthe offered the Mussets her ideas for new perfumes, he might suggest a touch more refinement, but there was always expansive praise for her efforts. Madame’s small sigh after an inhalation told her all was well. But Monsieur’s heavy arm came around her narrow shoulders, and she would shine in his encouragement like a star in the firmament. She had had to work hard to earn his approval.
“He works harder than anyone, always on the move all day between the fields and the production line, the shop and the customers. At least three days a week he’s out on the road in the old trap delivering the basic lines in soap and cleaning products. He says he likes to do it himself. He loves to eat, and talk and read, too. In the evenings he reads the essays of Montaigne, makes notes and reads aloud from them—so you see he is a man of culture. The pages of his book turn slowly, and his pencil scribbles. You can tell he is thinking deeply.”
Gradually she had relaxed in his company. The Mussets had no children, but there were always people around at their farmhouse up in the hills above Manosque—in many ways spending time there, as she soon did, was like coming home to the farmstead where she grew up. She missed her family, naturally, but what she was learning at the perfume factory was so absorbing that any misgivings or homesickness passed.
“I’ll never forget the day Monsieur called me over to the chair where he was reading by the fire. ‘Here are some words for you, little one, from the wisest man I know,’ he said. He meant Montaigne, of course. ‘A straight oar looks bent in the water. What matters is not merely that we see things but how we see them.’ And ever since then . . . well, I’ve known he is thoughtful of others. He is a good man.”
Bénédicte took her hand and squeezed the fingers affectionately. “It’s obvious you’re happy here. Maman and Papa . . . it’ll make them happy too when I tell them.”
“I am, yes.”
It was true: despite everything, she was happy. Som
etimes it was hard to put such an elemental feeling into words. How was it possible to capture in words what the essence spoke for itself?
After her sister’s visit, Marthe’s head was brimming with new pictures: the fields of lavender at Valensole, all the subtle grades of blue and purple; the way twilight melted them all into one; the precise hues of the liquid distilled from each plant, the shape and colour of the bottles, and a new understanding of the surroundings where she was learning her craft. Just as plant variations were bred together to create new hybrids—like the lavandin from the delicate wild lavender—this was what she did with the descriptions her sister had supplied; she grafted them on to the sights she remembered from childhood and reinvigorated them.
Somehow, though, in Marthe’s mind the kindly pumpkin face she had given her mentor Mme Musset was always more dominant than the face that could be seen by others. Without sight, you had to understand what was beneath the surface.
Madame was a true and generous person who cared for her. The endearment had come so naturally—“my petal”—a name not used for anyone else. The deft way she set out the essential oils for Marthe, always in the same order and same place on the table, spoke silently of encouragement. The thoughtful cleverness in the way Madame had labelled Marthe’s first experimental blends by using sealing wax stamped with letters from an old printing set, so that Marthe could identify each one by touch. Later, when the quality of Marthe’s nose and invention were becoming more and more apparent, she was permitted to open the tiny vials of more exotic ingredients bought in Marseille before the war—orris root, amber, patchouli—and used drop by precious drop to add distinction to the homely fragrances of the landscape.
When Marthe’s widowed landlady decided to close up the house and move to Banon to live with her daughter and grandchildren while her son-in-law was held as a prisoner of war in Germany, Marthe went to live with the Mussets at the farmhouse surrounded by lavender fields, halfway between the plateau and the town.
3
Almond Blossom
1943
The shepherd’s body was found up on the steep slopes where the lavender made its last wild clutches at the mountain peak.
Each year the sheep were moved across the high meadows above the lavender fields. Here men still adhered to the old ways: hardy men with gnarled and twisted limbs, as if they had been carved by the same winds as the rock sculptures.
One of them was the shepherd Pineau. Alone under the blue citadel of the sky, he guided his flock from one ancient stone borie to the next. All the farmers knew him: old Pineau in his ragged clothes had been part of the landscape when the great surge in lavender growing for the perfume industry had begun, when the Mussets and others began staining the slopes purple. The shepherd was a man who knew every stone and tree of the ridges, a man who seemed part of nature: part mountain, part stream, part animal, living his life by the turn of the seasons, solitary with his sheep, walking from rocky ledge to pasture, valley to plateau, as they fed. He sang as he went, songs that had been sung for centuries.
That summer day in 1943, when small puffs of his flock broke away and drifted in lazy clouds down the hill, the lavender farmers knew something was wrong. In the uplands men and women had always relied on one another. They went up looking for him.
Urgent footsteps on the path, spitting stones, brought the news to the Musset farmhouse that evening. A hammering at the door, and Auguste burst into the kitchen, panting. “Old Pineau’s had it—they got him!”
Auguste Baumel was the Mussets’ best supplier, son of the farmer who had planted vast swathes of the new hybrid lavandin on the plateau.
M. Musset scraped his chair back. For a moment there was silence. Then Madame flapped into action, fetching glasses, telling him to pull up a chair, pouring from the bottle.
“I went up with a couple of the others to . . . check on him. I took my cousin Thierry with me,” said Auguste. Thierry ran a garage in town. Marthe couldn’t think what expertise he might have provided up in the fields.
Auguste gulped down a drink, and it made him splutter.
“Take it easy, lad.”
The story spilled out. Looking back, it seemed to Marthe that they had forgotten she was in the corner of the room. She listened intently.
Inside the shepherds’ hut, hardly more than a pile of stones with its lone chair and table, Auguste and Thierry found Pineau’s tin drinking cup on the floor, abandoned. Outside, under the lone olive tree, the shepherd’s last meal was still being devoured by flies and beetles. They called his name, thinking he might be injured, unable to move. They found him a hundred metres away, face-down in a stream he had used for drinking and bathing. Blowflies hummed over sweet and sickly flesh.
“We turned him over to be sure,” said Auguste.
“And was it—”
“A shot to the head,” said Auguste. “They must have found him as he washed his hands before eating.”
Silence.
Marthe didn’t dare move, let alone speak. She felt the chill of the spring water as it filled the shepherd’s nostrils, the stones pushed into his mouth by the flow. Twice dead, by bullet and by water. She remembered her sister describing the hills and mountains as waves on the sea, and the pictures in her head merged. Marthe told no one, but she had a dread fear of drowning.
M. Musset paced the floor, his words coming as fast as Auguste’s. “Every barter is a risk. We put aside our differences for a common cause, but never forget that others have their own agenda. It is no longer possible to assume that any two people understand a situation in the same way or have the same loyalties. The natural order has gone, that is what we know.”
She could make no sense of it.
Perhaps one of them noticed her then, as she sat scarcely breathing in the chair by the window. Whatever prompted them, the two men headed for the door and went out.
Marthe’s skin prickled. She wondered whether Madame would say anything, either to them or her, but she only clattered some pans and ran the tap.
The shock of Pineau’s murder fused with the aroma of burning onions and garlic as Madame turned away from the stove. Insults in the street and the herbal astringency of rosemary soap. Memory and scent, so closely entwined. It can’t have been long after that Arlette came to live with the Mussets, bringing a tin of real ground coffee beans. For years they had drunk only a bitter brew of acorns. The rich coffee fragrance was so intoxicating, so redolent of lost freedom, that it brought a tear to the eye. Rosemary, burnt onion, and coffee; the lavender harvest; all combined and gave coherence to Marthe’s memory of those precise few weeks in July 1943.
Arlette was Mme Musset’s niece, daughter of Madame’s sister who lived in Lyon. Her parents ran a drapery shop, but since the Germans had crossed the demarcation line and eradicated the zone libre, Lyon was considered as dangerous as Paris. Arlette, nineteen when she moved south, had a smile so wide it could be heard in her speech and made others smile in return. She was resilient and optimistic, and she was going to be an actress one day, though quite how she was going to achieve her dream in Manosque rather than the great city of Lyon wasn’t altogether clear.
The first time Marthe heard Arlette’s voice, it was singing. The song ended, but even when her chatter took over, it had a musical quality that seemed to brim with confidence and joie de vivre, the words barely able to contain the giggle that might erupt at any moment. Marthe had pulled herself back into the corner of the room, as if she might make herself invisible, fearing disdain from the laughing voice, steeling herself for resentment at her position as a cuckoo in the nest.
But Arlette bounded over to her. “You must be Marthe—I’ve been longing to meet you! Aunt Delphine sent me some of your lemon balm scent for my birthday, and do you know, I’ve had women stop me in the street to ask what it is!”
Marthe could only stutter her thanks for the compliment.
“Your ears must be terribly singed.”
“I beg your pardon?”
<
br /> “My aunt and uncle talk about you all the time—heaping the praise! Your ears must burn on a regular basis.”
“Well, I—that’s very good to know, thank you.”
She might not be sincere, Marthe reminded herself.
But over the following months Arlette proved herself not only enthusiastic but practical and a hard worker too. She rolled up her sleeves to make soap alongside the other employees, as well as helping with the deliveries and going out with Monsieur to drum up more business. At the farm too she took on any job that had to be done.
Along the way she and Marthe became firm friends. The war was horrible, but they both agreed it was never a good idea to worry about anything you couldn’t change.
“You can’t go around asking ‘What if?’ What is, that’s the only thing that matters,” said Arlette.
“I had to learn that lesson too, but it was hard,” admitted Marthe. She had surprised herself by confiding the story of how she became blind to Arlette. How, as her eyesight worsened, she had focused—closely, unbearably closely—on what she could still see and feel: the heliotrope flowers on the slope outside the barn; the meadows; the smooth iron of the banister rail under her hand, the half-moons of stone stairs worn away by centuries of use; the tiles on the floor, which still bore the imprints of dogs’ paws like fossils. The passages and steps and rooms of her childhood home were safe in her memory, the bedrock and template of all that came after. And then her parents had sent her away, to a new place she had never seen.
“Tell me. Tell me all of it,” Arlette said. Often that first summer they lay in a grassy dell by a group of wild plum trees, gorging on crisp fruit.
The Sea Garden Page 10