The Scent of You

by Maggie Alderson

  ‘That’s an excellent idea,’ said Guy. ‘See, Polly, your daughter gets it, even if you’re stuck in some kind of Celebrity Big Brother mentality.’

  ‘All right, mystery man,’ said Polly. ‘I’ll do a blog just about the shop and the smells. Let’s have a whiff of this new one, then.’

  Guy swished off through his curtain again.

  ‘He’s brilliant,’ said Clemmie. ‘I love him. Is he gay?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Polly. ‘I thought he was when I first met him, but he’s never mentioned a boyfriend or a husband – or a wife or girlfriend – so I’ve got no idea. As he says, he’s very private about his personal stuff. We mostly talk about perfume and I just like him because he’s such a laugh. We’ve been to a few events together and it’s always a riot.’

  ‘Next time you’re doing that, can I come?’ asked Clemmie.

  ‘Of course,’ said Polly, ‘I’d love that. Would you come back from Cambridge just for a party?’

  ‘If I didn’t have any big tests coming up,’ said Clemmie. ‘Definitely.’

  ‘What about Bruno?’ said Polly, thinking that a huge rugby player with a flattened nose would have fitted in at the Great Outdoors launch, but not at any others she could think of. ‘Would you bring him too?’

  Clemmie quickly looked away. Polly saw she was biting the inside of her lip. She put her hand on her daughter’s arm.

  ‘Is everything all right with Bruno?’ she asked quietly.

  Clemmie closed her eyes and shook her head.

  ‘We broke up,’ she said, in barely a whisper.

  ‘You broke up?’ said Polly, shocked. ‘When?’

  ‘It hasn’t been great for a while. I thought bringing him home for Christmas would make things better, but it didn’t, and when we got back to Cambridge we had one more big row and it’s over. He’s moved out.’

  ‘Oh sweetheart,’ said Polly, ‘and you’ve never said anything to me. Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘I thought you had enough on,’ said Clemmie, and Polly pulled her close and kissed the top of her head.

  ‘My poor love, I’m always there for you. Whatever’s going on for me, you still come first, and you must always tell me if something bad happens. Always. OK?’

  Clemmie nodded.

  ‘And I’ll find some really amazing parties for us to go to soon, OK?’

  Guy came back with a plain spray bottle, a pile of blotters and some kind of metal gadget. It had several hinged arms coming off a central spindle, with clips on the ends. He splayed them out and put blotters in three of them.

  ‘Ooh,’ said Clemmie. ‘Very Edward Scissorhands.’

  ‘It’s my blotter holder,’ said Guy, spraying the blotters lavishly then proffering the gadget so they could each take one.

  Polly already loved the smell in the air, and as she lifted the card to her nose for the first time she sighed involuntarily.

  ‘You sighed!’ said Guy, jumping off his stool and doing a happy dance.

  ‘Mmmmm,’ said Clemmie, ‘I think I sighed too. This is lovely. It’s not the sort of thing I wear, but I do love it. It’s posh, but there is a kind of freshness to it . . . not lemony, but . . .’

  ‘Pennyroyal,’ said Polly, looking at Guy, who pointed his left forefinger at her as he swung back onto his stool. ‘Mint. I normally hate mint in anything, but it works here.’

  ‘Bang on it. Just a tinge of toothpaste among all the earthy stuff to freshen it up, that was my thought.’

  ‘And a very soft rose,’ said Polly. ‘I think there’s a lot more to come, this is a very quiet beginning for you. What are you calling this one?’

  ‘First Light,’ said Guy. ‘I went for rose because they are one of the flowers that smell best in the morning – but not too much, because it’s really all about what comes next. Do you like the name? I was going to call it Dawn’s Crack, but thought better of it. But what is going to come through next is lots of lovely orris root, which has that musky morning bed smell to me – and it all just said “waking up in the morning after serious hanky panky”, so I went with that. And then there’s the idea that you can experience first light after a long night without sleep, which I also like.’

  ‘Well, I love it,’ said Clemmie. ‘It’s not cloying like that other one I said “Yuck” about and it’s not old-lady like the things my mum loves.’

  ‘Old lady?’ said Polly. ‘Excuse me!’

  ‘All your favourite perfumes smell the same,’ said Clemmie.

  ‘I think she might mean they’re variations of chypre,’ said Guy, grinning.

  ‘It’s bloody rude, whatever she means,’ said Polly

  ‘Do you think you would wear this, Clemmie?’ said Guy.

  ‘Can I try some on my skin?’ she asked, holding her wrist out to him.

  ‘You’ve trained her well,’ he said to Polly, spraying Clemmie’s arm.

  She waited a moment and then lifted it to her nose.

  ‘I think I might wear it,’ she said. ‘Like I said, it’s very different from my usual perfumes, but I think I might be ready for something a bit more grown-up now.’

  Polly picked up the bottle and sprayed some on her own arm, took a sniff and then left it alone, so the scent could develop on her skin.

  ‘You look serious, Polly,’ said Guy. ‘What are you thinking?’

  ‘That I need to see how it progresses, like I said.’

  ‘You’re right,’ said Guy. ‘And of course, this is only a first mix. I need to leave it to sit for at least month to macerate, to see how it all settles in.’

  ‘Is that what you have to do?’ asked Clemmie.

  ‘It’s like a stew,’ said Guy. ‘The longer you leave it for the flavours to mingle, the better.’

  They drank their tea and chatted until Polly decided to go in for another smell. Guy was watching her intensely. She brought her arm up to her nose again and breathed deeply.

  ‘Well?’ said Guy, leaning towards her.

  ‘Hmmmm,’ said Polly. ‘This is an interesting one. The rose is lovely and subtle and now I’m getting the orris root and classic patchouli and I think some suede, but then . . . I can’t put my finger on it quite, but it’s as though something is missing. It starts off so quietly and beautifully, moves on enticingly, but then it drops away, just when I would expect – going on your other perfumes – something else surprising to unfold. I hope that’s not rude.’

  Guy was looking at her steadily.

  ‘How interesting,’ he said. ‘Because I did take something out. Maybe I need to put it back in again.’

  He jumped off his bar stool and strode over to the door, turning the sign over to ‘Closed’. Then he pulled a set of keys out of his pocket and double-locked it.

  ‘Shall we go and have a play?’ he said.

  Polly and Clemmie followed Guy behind the counter and through the bead curtain to a small hallway with stairs going up, and next to it a closed door, with three locks on it.

  ‘Blimey, is it Fort Knox?’ asked Polly.

  ‘Something like that,’ said Guy.

  He opened the door, which Polly could see was reinforced with metal, and flicked on a light that revealed another staircase, going down.

  ‘Are you sure you’re not going to lock us up in here?’ said Clemmie, as he stood at the top of the steps and ushered them down.

  Guy laughed.

  ‘Don’t give me ideas. I just have to close the door up here before we open the one at the bottom. Wait for my signal, OK?’

  When he gave the go-ahead Polly pushed open the door to reveal what looked like a laboratory. Guy ran down the stairs, rushed past them then took a fresh white coat out of a drawer and put it on.

  ‘Hey, Dr Strangelove,’ said Polly, starting to giggle.

  ‘You may laugh,’ said Guy, ‘but if you knew how much these ingredients cost, it might wipe the smile off your face. I can’t risk contamination from anything – not even air or light.’

  He handed them each a l
ab coat.

  ‘Put these on, please, and don’t touch anything unless I hand it to you, OK?’

  He started opening a wall of locked cupboards behind them, then turned and handed Clemmie a plastic spray bottle and a cloth.

  ‘You must be used to lab rules,’ he said to her. ‘Can you wipe down the bench, please?’

  Clemmie set to and Polly watched as Guy took an array of things out of the cupboards and lined them up very precisely on the work top. There were scales and liquid measures, pipets, a bottle of liquid labelled with a number, and five empty test tubes, which he set up in their own brackets.

  ‘OK,’ he said, rubbing his hands together, ‘let’s make magic happen.’

  He put on a pair of latex gloves, opened the bottle and used a pipet to put a few drops of the liquid into each of the empty test tubes.

  ‘That’s my master mix for First Light,’ he said. ‘What you smelled upstairs.’

  He turned round and took a notebook out of the cupboard, flicking over the pages and then putting it down, open, on the work bench.

  ‘I do this old-school, because I’m sentimental,’ he explained. ‘I write it all up on my laptop afterwards in spread sheets, but I like to pretend I’m Jacques Guerlain with a notebook when I’m concocting.’

  ‘I had no idea you did all this yourself,’ said Polly. ‘I thought you would tinker about, but send the serious stuff to a professional lab.’

  ‘I learned how to do it in a lab,’ said Guy. ‘I’ve got a BSc in Chemistry and when I graduated I went to work for Givaudan.’

  ‘That’s a huge international flavour and fragrance company, Clemmie,’ said Polly. ‘They create everything from perfumes for elite and celebrity brands, to smells for chewing gum and washing powder.’

  ‘I worked on tastes for cheap sweeties,’ said Guy. ‘Which are just smells, really. Possibly mixed some of the deadlier ingredients you would have consumed as a child.’

  ‘Where did you do your degree?’ asked Clemmie.

  Guy smiled, looking her straight in the eye.

  ‘Cambridge,’ he said.

  ‘Get out!’ said Clemmie. ‘What college?’

  ‘Oh, let’s not talk about all that now,’ said Guy, spinning round and regarding the contents of the cupboard, which contained row upon row of small vials, all neatly labelled. ‘We’ve got a perfume to perfect.’

  ‘Did you know that?’ Clemmie whispered to Polly, while Guy was preoccupied, humming to himself and picking out some vials, which he threw from one hand to the other like a cocktail barman. ‘That he went Cambridge?’

  ‘No idea,’ said Polly. ‘As I told you earlier, I know nothing about Guy, apart from the fact he has this shop and makes beautiful perfumes – but almost nothing would surprise me.’

  Guy turned back to them and consulted his notebook.

  ‘So, we have the quiet opening of the rose, which I tempered with patchouli, as you picked up – because remember this is the morning after the night before, so she would have been wearing her pulling perfume . . .’

  ‘Do you always make up stories to go with your perfumes?’ asked Clemmie.

  ‘Of course,’ said Guy. ‘I have to create a scenario, a whole world. Sometimes I give the people in the stories names.’

  ‘Has this girl got a name?’ asked Clemmie.

  ‘Not yet,’ said Guy. ‘Now, so remember I’m putting this on top of a base I buy from the lab I work with in Grasse, which is a secret recipe, although I’m sure it has lavender in it, because there’s a smooth freshness at the bottom of it that is redolent to me of beautiful white sheets. So we just have to imagine those sheets in a lovely tangle.’

  ‘So she’s had quite a night, this girl of yours,’ said Polly.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Guy, grinning. ‘Very much so. That’s why I put the civet in, to evoke the man. A nice bit of armpit. Then I flung in the pennyroyal – mostly to show off, because no one uses it, but there’s also the thought of a bit of emergency chewing gum, to freshen the morning breath, or wiping toothpaste on your teeth with your finger, because you haven’t got your toothbrush with you.’

  Polly and Clemmie laughed.

  ‘You sound quite experienced in this area, Guy,’ said Clemmie.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he said, with a faux innocent expression on his face. ‘Now, let’s smell it again.’

  He dipped the blotters in the test tube and handed them each one.

  ‘That’s where it dies down,’ said Polly. ‘After the pennyroyal, before the civet. You need something to amp up the animalic there, to keep it really smooth and sexy.’

  Clemmie frowned.

  ‘I’ll have to take your word for all that, Mum,’ she said, ‘but I do know what you mean about dying off. It starts so amazingly and then it sort of stops.’

  Guy had his eyes closed, lost in the zone.

  ‘You’re right, Polly,’ he said, opening them again and gazing at her with his head on one side. ‘But what to use?’

  He picked up a couple of the bottles and looked down at them in his hand.

  ‘I wondered about more patchouli, because it’s such a good carrier, but it’s too obvious.’

  ‘Another spice note?’ suggested Polly.

  ‘Yeah, maybe they had a curry on their way back to his place,’ said Clemmie, sniffing the blotter again. ‘Or some chicken tikka crisps . . .’

  ‘I could try putting the anise back in,’ said Guy. ‘That’s what I took out. Not many people like it, but I thought it might be interesting.’

  ‘Had they been drinking ouzo?’ asked Polly.

  ‘All right,’ said Guy, ‘I was showing off to myself. Orris and anise was a classic renaissance accord, but it didn’t work for this. Perhaps something gourmand. Chocolate might be good.’

  He took another small vial out of his cupboard and put a tiny drop from it into one of the test tubes containing the original blend, which he then stoppered and slowly tilted back and forth to mix. Once he was satisfied, he prepared three blotters and they all sniffed.

  Polly burst out laughing.

  ‘So not,’ she said. ‘That’s just awful. It’s like you’ve put a Snickers bar in there, it’s so caramel and nutty.’

  ‘That is basically what I did put in there,’ said Guy. ‘I thought a cheap chocolate accord, with a toffee element, would work better than the eighty per cent cocoa solids style.’

  They tried black tea, absinthe and blackcurrant – on a whim of Polly’s – but none of them worked.

  ‘Let’s recap,’ said Clemmie. ‘So they met at a party. She was wearing her heavy oriental pulling perfume – what was he wearing?’

  ‘David Beckham Instinct,’ said Guy, chuckling. ‘I’m serious. I put in some bergamot for that.’

  ‘That’s their scents covered, then,’ continued Clemmie. ‘So they go back to her place – or is it his place?’

  ‘Hers,’ said Guy. ‘The nice white sheets, remember? He would have polycotton.’

  ‘Is he a bit of rough?’ asked Polly.

  ‘Sporty,’ said Guy, winking at them.

  ‘So they have a big old night of how’s-yer-wotsit,’ said Clemmie. ‘And you’ve got that sweaty animal thing covered by the civet musk?’

  Guy nodded.

  ‘Well, it’s obvious what’s missing, then,’ said Clemmie. ‘Cigarette smoke.’

  Guy looked at her for a moment, then clapped his hands.

  ‘You are so right, Miss Clemmie,’ he said, spinning round and peering into the bottom shelf of the cupboard. ‘Cigarette smoke in her hair the next morning. That’s exactly what it needs. Here we are, this should do it.’

  He added the essence to a fresh test tube of the original blend, mixed it and then prepared the blotters.

  ‘On three,’ he said, handing them across the bench. ‘One, two, three.’

  Polly raise the sliver of card to her nose and inhaled.

  ‘Aaaaaaah,’ she said.

  She turned to Clemmie, who was beaming.


  ‘Works for me,’ she said. ‘What a difference. I had no idea one ingredient could transform a perfume like that.’

  ‘That’s precisely where the magic is,’ said Polly, smelling her blotter again. ‘This is seriously sexy now. Do you like it, Guy?’

  His eyes were closed again, nose down to the smell, and he made a noise in the back of his throat, almost a growl.

  ‘I love it,’ he said, opening his eyes and grinning at them. ‘Obviously I’ll need to fine-tune the exact proportions, but that was definitely the missing link. Let’s all skin it.’

  Polly and Clemmie held out the arms they hadn’t tried the first version on and Guy dropped a tiny bit of the mix on them, then on his own.

  ‘Works for me,’ said Polly, waving her arm in front of her nose and taking deep sniffs of it.

  ‘And me,’ said Clemmie. ‘I would definitely wear this. In fact, I think it’s going to be my pulling perfume.’

  Clemmie went straight to Liverpool Street Station from Guy’s and Polly went home and tried to distract herself from missing her, and feeling horribly alone by writing the blog post about Guy’s shop. She’d have to go back another day to do the photos, there’d been too much going on, but she wanted to get the words down while it was all fresh.

  She was chewing her lip, trying to work around the fact she couldn’t give any information about the nose who created these new perfumes she was raving on about when her phone pinged.

  It was Chum asking for her email address. She sent it straight back to him, wondering what it was that he couldn’t just put in a text. Then she turned her attention back to Google, where she’d been researching what Guy had said about the orris root and anise combination he’d experimented with being a classic Renaissance combination. Then something occurred to her: she still hadn’t googled Chum.

  He’d given her permission himself, but every time she’d thought of it, she’d been distracted by something else and didn’t remember to go back – or was it more Freudian than just forgetting? Perhaps she didn’t really want to know what all the sad ‘poor Chum’ stuff was about?

  Apart from that moment on the top of the hill, when he’d suddenly clammed up, she always found him such good company on their walks. She didn’t want to go poking around into something that might start her seeing him in some kind of a downer context. She had enough negative complications in her own life without going to look for them in someone else’s.