‘Well, what else could she say?’
‘Yes,’ Grace agreed numbly.
Madame Zed passed her the final vial. Choses Perdus, she said. ‘It means “Lost things”. This is the accord Eva was obsessed with – the heart of the fragrance Hiver can’t reproduce.’
Grace took it, held it up.
Suddenly the gap in her senses closed. The air became tighter, more compressed. Her eyes filled with tears.
‘I have never been able to smell it.’ Madame sat forward. ‘Please, will you describe it to me?’
Grace nodded. ‘It’s the smell of wool, paperwhites, wood . . . and hair . . . my hair.’
Paris, September 1942, during the Nazi occupation
The letter was delivered by Jacques Hiver’s driver, in the early afternoon.
It had been a quiet day. Eva had been dusting the shelves for the second time that week, taking the bottles down, carefully wiping each one with a damp cloth, when she saw the black Daimler crawling slowly up the street. It was surrounded by a crowd of neighbourhood children, running after it, shouting and banging against the windows. With strict petrol rationing, non-military vehicles were increasingly rare. Only the very rich or important could afford such a luxury. Eva watched as the driver shooed them away, before he came into the shop.
The note was a typically brief communication, just a location and a time scribbled in Jacques’s spidery, perpendicular handwriting. The only thing that set it apart from the other notes he regularly sent was that this time the location was a private address rather than a hotel.
Eva folded it back up, put it into the pocket of her skirt.
‘Who was that?’ Andre called from the back room. ‘A customer?’
‘No.’ Customers had been far and few between. ‘Nothing important.’
‘Oh. One of your admirers,’ he said.
They both knew the term ‘admirer’ wasn’t quite accurate. And they both refrained from saying so.
Ever since Eva had returned to Paris seven years ago, she and Andre had reached a kind of unspoken agreement. After her abrupt departure, he had struggled on without her, at first angry and hurt, then torn between regret and self-loathing. When, months later, he arrived one morning to find her standing, waiting on the front doorstep of the shop, he was overwhelmed with gratitude and relief.
But as he unlocked the door, he said only, ‘Are you back?’
‘Yes,’ she answered.
She walked in and, without another word, set about re-arranging the counter display.
He never asked her to explain and she never did.
Things were different now, expectations gone. Neither of them had the reserves for strong emotional gales. A respectful distance protected both of them. Kindnesses were rendered, trespasses ignored, narrow spaces negotiated in a state of amicable reserve.
Pushing back the thick velvet curtain that separated the shop from the storeroom, Eva leaned against the door frame. Andre was balanced on top of ladder, reaching for a sealed jar of ambergris tucked away on one of the high shelves. He was thin, very thin. Everyone in Paris had lost weight with the strict rations but often Andre was too distracted to eat even his modest share. He subsisted on a diet mostly of cigarettes, white bean stew and weak ‘coffee’ made from chicory and barley. With the decline in commissions, he channelled his considerable energies into the reorganization of his entire collection. Already he’d managed to categorize and cross-categorize his existing perfumes to a remarkable, almost pathological degree, creating occasionally bizarre, whimsical classifications, which he labelled underneath each vial. Eva knew he was simply trying to steady himself, to keep his mind from the looming shadow of the future.
‘Why don’t we take a break?’ she said. ‘Let’s lock up the shop for half an hour and step out for a breath of fresh air?’
Climbing down, he put the jar on the counter. ‘There’s nothing fresh about the air in Paris anymore. Besides,’ he scratched at an angry red patch of eczema that had developed, spreading across the back of his right hand, ‘I’m in the middle of something.’
Eva didn’t press the point. She knew he hated to be seen in public, wearing the barbaric yellow star stitched onto his lapel. He only really felt comfortable now in the shop. The beautifully tailored suits he once wore hung untouched and undefiled in his wardrobe. He’d capitulated only once, stitching the badge on to his least favourite suit jacket, which he wore every day. He no longer frequented cafés or bothered to meet with friends.
In fact, he was becoming a recluse, hardly leaving the workroom, working away in the basement, after curfew, well into the night. And the fruits of his obsessive labours could be found on the now-crowded shop shelves, vials upon vials of new formulations, sometimes two or three in a single night. It was beyond prolific; it was like a kind of brilliant possession. Andre was at the height of his powers, creating subtle, daring, elegant compositions. Frequently he spent hours showing her his notebooks, taking her through each detail of the process, as if he both doubted himself and wanted a witness to carry on his legacy. Some afternoons, he would make her test twenty different variations of the same formula, only to discount them all. Other times, he was emphatic, dictatorial, chain-smoking heavily, proclaiming amidst a fog of thick smoke that he was the only real nose left in Paris.