The Little Perfume Shop Off the Champs-Élysées

by Rebecca Raisin

  ‘Don’t get your hopes up,’ Lila said, waggling her eyebrows. ‘I plan on taking the prize.’

  We laughed. I’d got my wish of forging a true friendship with Lila, and knew no matter where we ended up we’d continue to support each other.

  And then there was Lex. Leaving him would be like leaving a favorite uncle. We’d keep in touch, but I’d miss his quiet contemplation, and compassionate nature. The last few days he’d been happier, smiling more, gazing off into the distance like he was remembering something beautiful. Maybe it was the sleep blend, but I didn’t think so. Whatever it was had given him reason to be happy again, that weight he carried had lifted.

  It took me a few moments to realize, I hadn’t smelt alcohol on his breath for a while now. He wasn’t as rumpled as he’d been. His clothes were pressed, his once ruddy skin clear. Had he quit the booze!? How could I have missed that?

  ‘We have to get through the semifinal first. I don’t want any of us three to go,’ Lila said, her gaze downcast.

  Lex arrived, his hair combed back, eyes bright ‘Let’s go do this, hey? May the best perfumer win. And truly, I hope it’s one of you,’ he said kindly. And I knew he meant it.

  ‘From your mouth to God’s ears.’

  ‘Let’s go, America,’ he said, proffering his arm. We wandered down the stairs, that same delicious aroma wafting through walls as it had on the first day, and headed outside to our meeting point.

  We took our places in front of Sebastien and his mom, Aurelie.

  Sebastien wore the smile of a man who was inspired. ‘Welcome to our final challenge before the Grand Finale next week.’

  We whooped and cheered.

  ‘You will need to show the judges just how much you want it.’

  Nerves flared.

  ‘Today you will have to make one final perfume. You’ll have the week to complete it. There are no rules, no restrictions, no themes, just make a perfume that will live through the ages, appeal to the masses. What that means to you, well, only time will tell.’

  Appeal to the masses. What would appeal to the majority of the world…?

  ‘That’s it,’ he said, cutting his usual talk short. ‘Head to the lab when you’re ready!’

  We raced away, knowing we’d need every single second to outdo each other. As I ran, and then slowed to a jog, and then a brisk walk, and then more of a hobble, I debated various themes. Outdoors: sun, sand, sky. Nope, been done a million times. What did everyone yearn for? Want? Need? Crave?

  Aha! Love! But I stopped short. I’d tried to bottle love, hadn’t I? And it scared me that I’d waste the week, and get stuck still missing that crucial element. What if I did that again and then had nothing to submit? I couldn’t fail this time. There could be no room for error. Did I trust in my ability and all I had learned here to make it work?

  There was no question that love would appeal to the masses. But bottling love that was another thing. Still, I had to try.

  I heard Nan over my shoulder, love is the answer!

  Well, OK then! I began to interpret my own feelings of love, and poured them out of my soul, feeling bold and brave, ready to lay my heart out for all to see.

  ***

  A few days later, I was at breaking point. It hadn’t worked! I’d painted myself into a corner and for the life of me I couldn’t see where I’d gone wrong. Just when I’d been doing so well! I’d managed to make a bottle of puppy love. The type of perfume you’d buy for the twelve-year-old girl next door.

  Next to me Lila put down her own work and edged over. ‘What is it, Del?’

  ‘It’s not working! I really thought I’d managed to bottle a feeling, evoke emotion, but it hasn’t translated. Not in the way I wanted. I’ve managed to bottle puppy love!’ It was hard to keep the angst from my voice. I only had two days to fix it or start over and from the contented sighs and sporadic happy dances going on around me things were going well for Lex and Lila up to this point.

  She took my perfume and sniffed it and then went to speak but hesitated.

  ‘You can say it,’ I said. ‘I won’t be offended.’

  ‘When I think about falling in love, especially the first time, it’s explosive, like fireworks. It’s passionate, and romantic, but thorny too. You’re missing the intensity, that overwhelming feeling you have at the beginning, those emotions that are so strong you think you’re the only person on the planet to have ever felt such a way.’

  My nan had been right, how could I make a fragrance about all consuming love without having experienced it myself? But I had felt it, unrequited or not, hadn’t I?

  ‘Explosive…yes. I’m missing the wow.’ She was spot on. I’d played it safe and made a bottle of puppy love, the first flush you have when you’re a teenager, when what I really needed was something more adult.

  ‘I don’t have time to start over,’ I said, my shoulders slumping at my mistake.

  ‘You have this,’ she said, holding my puppy love perfume. ‘If all else fails.’

  I considered it. ‘OK, so fireworks, thorny red roses…’

  And then it hit me.

  ‘Thank you, Lila!’

  ‘I owed you,’ she said, and smiled.

  Just because I hadn’t admitted my love to the man, that didn’t mean I hadn’t felt it. Or dreamed of it too many times to count. I took a pen and notebook and scrawled my ideas down. Love was…

  Moonlight, the sweet release of sleep after rapture. Heartbeats. Breath.

  What else did love consist of? Not just the elements but the mood – the feeling…

  We all wanted to love and be loved, but you couldn’t just snap your fingers and choose. You couldn’t order up a Mr Right. Until then you needed faith. The almost ineffable knowing that true love would find you, and until then you just had to believe. And what was true love? For some it was love of a person, for others a place, or a spiritual quest. Love was more than words, it was waking up in the moonlight. The desire to have just one more day with someone. French kissing and breakfast at dinner time. But how to bottle that? Could it be done? The language of love wasn’t a specific language, it was a feeling! And it buzzed in my fingertips as I worked.

  ***

  We handed in our perfumes, emotions getting the better of us, knowing our time in Paris was coming to an end. Sebastien didn’t make eye contact with me when I handed mine in so I left feeling heavy with regret. What had I expected anyway? For him to throw his arms around me?

  Lila noted my long face. ‘Want to go to eat your body weight in chocolate?’

  ‘I have never wanted anything more,’ I said.

  Outside we wandered slowly along the Champs-Élysées, past the Place de la Concorde until we got to Le Chcolates Yves Thuriés on Rue Tronchet. The heavenly scent of rich dark chocolate wafted from the small shop and my mouth watered accordingly. Surely there was no problem too great that couldn’t be solved with grand courverture chocolate. Well, no problem of mine, at any rate.

  ‘Shall we pretend we’re going to skip dinner?’ I asked Lila.

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘And we can pretend we’re going to walk it off too.’

  ‘Great,’ I said and turned to the man behind the counter. ‘Bonjour! I’ll have the…’ I tried to read the French names. ‘Bouchons Pralines noir.’ Dark chocolate pralines, get in my belly! ‘And a box of truffelines.’ He nodded and got my order together. ‘And one tub of fondue au chocolate.’ I wasn’t sure what that was but it looked like a tub of chocolate mousse or ganache. Either way, I intended on spooning out every delicious morsel. ‘And…’ Lila shot me a sideways glance. ‘That should be enough for now. I can always come back,’ I said hesitantly.

  Lila laughed at my suddenly desperate expression. ‘We can come back every day until we go home,’ she promised.

  ‘And you?’ the man said to her.

  ‘I’ll have the same.’

  We took our goodies and wandered to the Tuileries and found a spot on the grass. People were reading, chas
ing small children, eating ice creams, or resting their weary legs a while.

  ‘So,’ Lila said, choosing a truffle from the box. ‘How did it go in the end with your perfume?’

  I took a truffle dusted in cocoa. ‘Good, really good, thanks to you. If you hadn’t stepped in, Lila, I’d be gone, I know I would.’

  ‘I’m only here because you stepped in for me with the whole filtering debacle I had back in the first week.’

  I smiled and bit down on the truffle. ‘Can we take a moment to appreciate this man is probably married to some lucky lady who gets to eat chocolate like this every day?’

  Lila laughed. ‘She probably hates chocolate. Too much of a good thing can do that.’

  I sighed. ‘I don’t think that applies to chocolate somehow. It would be cruel.’

  ‘Yeah, maybe. It’s not like we ever tire of perfume or wearing it, is it?’

  ‘No.’

  We ate until we could stomach no more. ‘I think I over-ordered.’

  ‘You definitely did.’

  I laughed.

  She laid back on the grass shading her face. ‘It’s been a helluva ride, huh?’

  ‘I wish we could stay.’

  ‘Paris has got to you,’ she said.

  I laid down beside her and closed my eyes against the sunshine. ‘I don’t know if it’s Paris or the perfumery, but I never expected to feel so alive, so independent. Sad, right? I’m almost thirty and this is the first time I’ve been away from my home town. But somehow I feel like I finally belong. But why? I don’t have anything here.’

  ‘You can fall in love with a place, you know. So what happens next for you, once this is all over?’

  ‘I was all set to move to New York,’ I said but the words didn’t ring true even to me. ‘But now I’m not so sure. What about you?’

  ‘Slovakia. Back to parents who want to control my life.’

  While my parents were the epitome of unreliability at least they encouraged me in anything I chose to do. I felt for Lila, following her passions without any support. It wasn’t like she was wasting her life away, she was striving for a future in perfumery, a lucrative career if you made it.

  ‘Why don’t you say no to them, Lila?’

  ‘They’re strict, controlling. I find it hard to speak up around them.’

  I turned to face her. ‘Do you have to go home? Why don’t you stay here?’

  ‘Ah,’ she said rolling on her side. ‘In a perfect world, I’d never leave, I’d stay in Paris and open up my own perfumery and eat chocolate for breakfast and adopt a rescue dog and walk when I’m anxious and sit on the grass at the Champ de Mars with a bottle of wine and some cheeses from the market and wait for my friends, the ones I haven’t made yet, to join me.’

  I grinned. ‘That sounds like a damn good life to me, Lila. So what’s stopping you?’

  ‘Money, what else?’

  For the first time ever, I realized I wasn’t the only one whose perfumery dreams hinged on the prize money. In a way I wanted Lila to win it so she could do everything she wanted to do. Live a life of her choosing. But her winning would put paid to my dreams.

  ‘If you won the prize money would you stay here?’

  A tear rolled slowly down her face, and the scent of hope, bright and breezy filled the air. ‘Yes. Please god, yes.’

  What could I say? It meant freedom for her.

  That evening I found Sebastien alone at in the Leclére dining room. He was staring into the distance with a lost look on his face. I debated about whether to retreat but he heard me and turned around.

  ‘Del,’ he said. ‘Come and join me.’

  ‘Where is everyone?’

  ‘Enjoying Paris, I suspect. Everyone is on edge about the semifinal results on Monday.’

  ‘Yes, it’s daunting.’

  ‘And then we’ll have only one week left.’

  ‘It feels like I’ve been here for years, I can’t imagine leaving. I bet you’ll be happy to have your quiet life back. You can leave and never look back.’

  He gave me a sad smile. ‘I’m not so sure, anymore. Maybe Paris isn’t as bad as I thought.’

  ‘Maybe you can have the best of both worlds.’

  ‘Oui.’

  ‘Who would your papa have liked? Not just for their perfumery, but for their personality.’ I wasn’t fishing, I genuinely wanted to know more about Vincent and the type of people he had been drawn to.

  ‘Ah, that’s a good question. Truthfully, I think he’d like Lila, her reserve, the way she can focus and make a perfume spring to life. But you, he would have loved you, Del. He’d have squirreled you away and questioned you, eking every last piece of information from you. And Lex. In a way, Lex reminds me of him at times. That need to distance themselves. Their ability to let love go, even when they shouldn’t.’

  ‘You know about Lex?’

  ‘Oui, it’s not hard to see. My papa wore that same look for decades.’

  ‘Today, it was gone though. I bumped into him this afternoon and he was almost a different person.’

  ‘And why do you think that is?’ Sebastien grinned and it lit up his face, his eyes sparkled with a secret.

  My breath caught. ‘Oh!’ I remembered the day the last challenge was announced, and the way his expression changed, but I couldn’t pinpoint what it was. A waft of rose, but more, of faith, and hope, and…love! ‘Your maman!’ I cried out. It changed when Lex caught sight of Aurelie. ‘Does she know?’

  Sebastien shook his head. ‘I don’t think so.’

  It all made sense. He’d given up the booze, which he’d probably only started as a way to alleviate the pain of a broken heart. ‘That scent, it’s the one I bottled with Nan all that time ago!’ Instinctively I’d captured that nebulous essence. It didn’t have a description, it was a tangible mood, a feeling; if I had to name the ingredients, I could. Bergamot, pink peppercorn, rose, musk and more, but it wasn’t about that, it was more tangible than that. It was creating something when you understood it, when you felt it in your very bones, when you radiated it and that shone out of you and straight into your work. Oh, god help me. I was in love too and I only recognized the bouquet of love now.

  I was woozy, giddy, and dizzy all at once. Sebastian’s scent morphed as he moved closer to me. And I recognized it at once. Love was in the air. Literally.

  My nan had been right all along. Hadn’t she said I wouldn’t know until I’d said I love you…

  ‘Je t’aime, ti amo, te amo.’

  ‘Did you just say “I love you” in three different languages?’

  I whipped my head around, sure it was my nan who’d just spoken and blushing to the roots of my hair to find it had come from my own mouth.

  ‘Umm.’ I couldn’t think straight. His proximity had that effect on me, it turned my brain to mush, my mouth to speak of its own accord. But how to get out of this?

  Just as I was about to speak he pressed his lips against mine and I was lost to him. At that moment all I could do was respond, my heart thumping against my ribs, and kiss him back with all the love I had in my heart.

  When we parted we stared at one another, and I realized I’d been searching for Sebastien my whole life. I just hadn’t known it. The big question though, was he searching for me?

  The spell was broken when Lila walked in, headphones in, staring at her phone. We pulled away from each other, and I blushed and fumbled with my earrings, while Sebastien busied himself at the table.

  ‘Oh, hi,’ she said, taking her ear buds out. ‘So we can have dinner after all?’ Even after all that chocolate!

  ‘Yes,’ I said, giving her a toothy smile that felt wooden. ‘I guess so!’

  The real world came crashing back. What the hell had I been thinking? I kissed him again! And love, what did I know of love? How ridiculous. So it might have been the first flutterings of romance, but that was all. And yet, surreptitiously I touched my bottom lip; that was one hell of a feeling, and I yearned for more.

&n
bsp; Would I be the girl who risked her future on a whim? I didn’t think so.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Nerves were frayed as we sat in the salon and awaited our fate. One of us would be eliminated ahead of the grand finale.

  Lex grinned like a lovesick puppy and I had to hide my smile. He wasn’t aware that I knew he had his sights on the glamorous Aurelie. Once this was over I hoped he would give love another chance – if anyone deserved it, it was Lex. Would she be interested in him, was the big question, and I hoped in time I’d find out. Lila sat biting her poor nails to the quick.

  ‘Welcome,’ Aurelie said her usual greeting. ‘A sad day for us at Leclére, saying goodbye to a contestant ahead of the grand finale next week. I know you’re nervous so I’ll get straight into it.’

  ‘The winner this week is Del with her perfume called Love Potion, a transcendent fragrance, and one we won’t forget.’ I bit my lip as my emotions threatened to overcome me. It wouldn’t do to jump for joy when one of my friends was being sent home. But I’d finally solved the riddle that had stumped me and Nan all those years ago and I felt her there, cheering me on for finally believing and taking those risks she’d urged me to do for so long.

  ‘Next was Lila, with Sweet, an inspired gourmand perfume.’

  I took Lex’s hand in mine, giving it a supportive squeeze. Tears stung my eyes and Lila let out a sob of anguish. Lex was out of the competition.

  ‘Girls.’ He took us in his arms. ‘It was never about winning for me. It was about finding my way. To come this far has been the greatest joy. And now I get to watch one of you win.’

  ‘I know you’re on the up and up, Lex.’ I rallied a little, knowing he had found what he needed here in Paris.

  ‘We’re in the final!’ Lila cried out.

  ‘It’s crazy,’ I said. It proved all that scheming, all that sabotage hadn’t helped the others in the end.

  ‘What will the final entail, do you think?’ I asked. Would it be a week-long extravaganza or something deceptively simple?

  ‘Who knows?’ she gulped.

  Sebastien spoke up. ‘The grand finale begins and ends tomorrow. You are required to meet in the lab at nine a.m. sharp. By the end of the business day, we will crown our winner.’