A Perfect Heritage (20 page)

‘Well . . .’

‘I was like you,’ Patrick said, after a pause. ‘Always top of the class or near it, picked for all the teams, captain of cricket, never did anything wrong. The worst was smoking a quick fag behind the art block.’

‘Daddy!’

‘Oh, I know. Then a new boy arrived, rather glamorous – his dad was a maharajah or something like that, and everyone thought he was wonderful. Bit like your Carey I suspect. Anyway, he had access to some whacky baccy. I think you’d call it weed. Hash. Marijuana, anyway. He used to sell it, and if you didn’t buy it and smoke it with him, God help you. He was a vicious little so and so.’

‘He sounds awful. Carey’s not like that,’ she added quickly.

‘Well, not exactly. I tried it of course, the hash, but it had an awful effect on me, made me sick and gave me awful headaches. And I said I wouldn’t do it any more; he wasn’t very pleased, and his little gang were pretty nasty to me. And then he got caught. Someone – not me – sneaked, and he was expelled. And it all settled down again. But I felt really bad about it. Crazy, isn’t it? As if I’d missed some kind of opportunity. For not joining in, being part of the bad gang.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. So you see, I do understand how these things happen. But it doesn’t make it right, Milly. More importantly, it isn’t sensible. You’re such a lucky girl, and you have such a head start in life. If you go further down that route, get a bad reputation, it could all go horribly wrong. Mrs Blackman’s pretty tough about these things. And you don’t want that, do you?’

‘No.’ Milly’s eyes met her father’s. ‘No. But – but I really like Carey. She’s fun. More than my other friends. It’s not just going to Paris, just the things she says and knows about – her dad is just so cool, and the people they know—’

‘And you don’t?’

‘Well, you and Mum, no offence, but you,
our
lives, are not exactly exciting.’

‘Well, I’m sorry we’re so boring—’

‘Daddy, you’re not boring,’ said Milly, her large dark eyes anxious. ‘I just meant your jobs were.’

‘I know. But anyway, the important thing about all this, Milly, is that I wanted you to know that we, Mummy and I, are always there for you. Whatever happens you can come to us to help sort things out. But that doesn’t mean we’re going to think everything you do is OK. And if this sort of thing happens again, which I hope it won’t, you might find us all a bit less tolerant. Do you understand?’

‘Yes.’ The voice was subdued again. ‘Yes, I do. What about Mummy, what does she think?’

‘I – I haven’t had time to talk to her about it properly yet, she’s away till tomorrow night.’

That sounded lame, he thought, putting Milly’s behaviour into a different perspective, something that didn’t qualify for immediate attention. But it was true. ‘And then she’ll want to discuss it with you too.’

‘But is she – is she very cross?’

‘More disappointed, I’d say.’

This was an overstatement; Bianca’s reaction to the news, in a quick break between sessions at a conference, had been distracted.

‘Milly? Bunking off from school? Heavens! But it doesn’t sound too serious. We’ll have to watch it, though. It’s that Carey, of course, she’s trouble. Patrick, I’ve got to go now, sorry, I’ll call you later tonight, discuss it properly.’

Only later that night there’d been a dinner and she’d been exhausted and said could it wait till she’d got home.

After Milly had left him, with a kiss and a ‘Thank you, Daddy, I promise I won’t do it again’ he went for a walk and thought about his own life: his own indisputable dullness, as he saw it, his dutiful career path – and the chance he had with this new job to seize some excitement, success. Saul Finlayson was his own Carey Mapleton, offering him some brilliance, some danger even; and he wanted to do it more than he could remember wanting anything. Except Bianca, of course, and she had seemed pretty exciting.

Well, not much longer. Fortunate that this little hiccup with Milly had happened while he was still with BCB.

Terry had survived the surgery.

‘His heart stood up to it,’ Mr Stevenson said, ‘and his vital signs are good. Early days, of course, and we won’t be able to relax for forty-eight hours, but I’m very hopeful.’

‘So he’s still alive?’ she said, stupid with relief. ‘He’s all right?’ And burst into tears.

Mr Stevenson put his arm round Marjorie’s shoulders and proffered her a handkerchief with his other hand.

She took it and wiped her eyes and then smiled at him.

‘Thank you very much. You’ve been so kind and I’m grateful to you. Thank you.’

‘That’s what we’re here for,’ he said.

Florence felt quite anguished for Marjorie. She was very fond of her, and indeed of Terry, who she had got to know over the years; he reminded her of her own long-dead husband, with his cheerful courage and sexy flirtiness. Of course, Duncan had been a rather different social class, but . . .

One of the worst things, of course, had been not knowing for a long time how Duncan had died; only that it had happened right at the end of the war, in Operation Varsity, meant to secure three bridges over the River Issel. It still haunted her, the thought that he might have lain in agony for hours, with no one to comfort him, let alone relieve his pain, for something that perhaps hadn’t made any difference at all. She would wake in the night crying out, not just from grief but from what were truly terrible dreams. And she had been hugely comforted when a fellow officer came to see her and told her what had actually happened.

‘He was so brave, Miss Hamilton, so brave, gathering his men after the drop, making sure they knew what to do, where to go. There were dead men everywhere and the Germans kept on firing. Duncan was – was lucky for a long time, and then a shell hit him. I know it’s army policy to tell you that people died instantly, but he really did. Just like that. I saw it. He couldn’t have known a thing.’

‘Oh,’ said Florence, and it was almost as if he had told her Duncan hadn’t actually died at all, so sweet and refreshing was the relief. ‘Oh, thank you so much. That is so good to know.’

‘Yes, well I wanted to tell you. And I think he managed to see what we were doing as an adventure. Well, you know what he was like.’

‘Yes,’ said Florence, ‘I do.’

Three months later she had a letter from the war office, commending Duncan’s courage and saying he had been posthumously awarded the military cross . . .

Now she wrote Marjorie a note, saying how sorry she was about Terry, and how she would love to visit them both when he was a little better . . . ‘and I was so sorry too to hear that you had been made redundant. These are very difficult times for all of us but to have it coinciding with your husband’s illness must seem so hard. I shall miss you and if ever you feel like a free facial at The Shop, then you have only to ask.’

She didn’t make any optimistic remarks about Marjorie’s future; she felt Athina was doing quite enough of that – and possibly hindering, rather than helping, Marjorie’s cause.

Chapter 20

Susie looked as surreptitiously as she could at the text that had just arrived:
Where r u?

Not surreptitiously enough; Bianca had noticed. Her forehead contracted very slightly and Susie was still on probation, she knew, had been ever since being late for the advertising presentation. She switched her phone right off and turned her attention one hundred and one per cent back to the discussion.

They were in a meeting with Bianca, she, Lara, the perfumier who had yet to arrive, and rather surprisingly, Florence. Susie might have been less surprised had she known that while Lady Farrell had been extremely opposed to the idea of the perfume launch, Florence was extremely in favour. She had voiced this view to Bianca on one of her visits to The Shop, and did so again now.

‘As I told you, Mrs Bailey, many of our customers, for as long as I can remember, have asked if we do a perfume. And more recently, scented candles, that sort of thing. I think it’s a wonderful idea – but very expensive of course. Perfume launches cannot be done on the cheap.’

‘Of course not. But I’m glad you like the idea, Florence. Now, I have a perfumier coming in to see me next week; just to talk concepts. I wonder if you would have the time to join us? I really would like you there and to have your input. Oh, and Florence, do please call me Bianca.’ She smiled at her quickly and walked out of the door and into the arcade; thereby making the suggestion an order rather than a suggestion. Florence felt flattered, if a little unnerved. It had been many years before she had been able – or rather permitted, by way of a gracious conversation with Lady Farrell – to address her employers as Cornelius and Athina. Out of the office, of course, things were sometimes rather different . . .

She arrived a little early; she had walked, unlike the other attendees.

‘What an example you set us, Florence,’ said Bianca, smiling. ‘Nobody else coming to this meeting would walk that far, I’m quite sure.’

‘I love walking in London,’ said Florence briskly. ‘You get an absolutely different view of everything, the shops, the people, the clothes, even things like the posters – of course one has to change one’s shoes on arrival, but that is not such a hardship.’

Bianca glanced down at Florence’s feet, clad in low-heeled but extremely elegant pumps. So unlike the trainers people forty years her junior seemed to consider essential to walk even half a mile. She was looking extremely elegant altogether, in a navy calf-length crêpe dress which bore Jean Muir’s unmistakable signature, under a softly swathed cream jacket which Bianca would have loved to own herself, a small straw hat with the brim turned down on one side, and she carried a small cloth bag which presumably contained her other shoes.

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Jemima, do show Florence into my bathroom – she can change her shoes there. And do leave your jacket and hat there, too, Florence. I love the jacket! Well, I love everything you’re wearing, of course.’

‘Thank you. The jacket is from Zara,’ said Florence, ‘several seasons ago now, I’m afraid. One does have to look rather hard in there – well, I do – but I’m very fond of it as a store.’

Bianca had a rather challenging vision of Florence advancing through the teeming halls of Zara, and rifling through the rails, picking out a jacket that would have looked as well on someone a quarter of her age.

The perfumier, Ralph Goodwin, had been suggested to Bianca by Maurice Foulds, the chief chemist at the lab. She didn’t like Maurice, but though Lara had come up with a couple of people, one of whom she liked very much, he didn’t have the capacity and Maurice Foulds assured her that Ralph Goodwin would be ideal: he worked at a big set-up out in the wilds of Sussex, and did work not just for the cosmetic trade, but for everything which needs perfuming – washing powder, cleaners, and of course, toiletries.

He didn’t look much like a perfumier: early fifties, smooth to the point of smarmy, Susie thought, dressed in a pinstripe suit, with neatly cut hair, highly polished loafers and a BBC accent. But then, she was probably over-romanticising the whole thing. Perfumiers, especially these days, were probably just technicians.

He shook hands with them all and sat down beside Susie.

‘This is a great pleasure,’ he said. ‘Thank you so much for inviting me – us – to help. As you know, we are quite a large firm and I am only one of three perfumiers. Where shall we begin?’

‘I think we begin by deciding if we can work together,’ said Bianca, ‘so we would very much like to hear what you would require from us, for instance, how long you think development might take. Suppose we decided you would go ahead – what would you need to take away with you today?’

‘Ah,’ said Goodwin, ‘well, above all, a story.’

‘A story?’

‘Yes. I need a vision, a story from you of what this perfume is about, what it will say and do. We can start with a picture of your ideal consumer. The sort of clothes she’ll wear, the sort of food she eats, the job she does, the furniture she buys, the flowers she likes. And then, narrowing it down, colour swatches, fabrics, tear sheets from magazines – anything visual that interprets your idea of her and what she aspires to.’

‘Music?’ put in Susie. ‘I always think music and perfume are a bit the same.’

Goodwin smiled at her. ‘Music, yes, very good. What music does your perfume sound like?’

‘Oh – goodness,’ said Lara, ‘that could be quite a fun game. Let’s see –
Eternity
has to be Mahler.’

‘
N˚5
, Gershwin. I think anyway,’ said Susie.

‘No, too heavy,’ said Bianca. ‘Mozart, I think.
Diorling
– Rachmaninov . . .’

‘Jean Paul Gaultier’s
Classique
– Cole Porter,’ said Florence rather unexpectedly.

‘Wonderful,’ said Goodwin, who had been scribbling in a notebook. ‘I can see we could all work together very well. I don’t often find so imaginative a client. Then I want mood: is she eccentric, your consumer, is she hugely intelligent, happy, unhappy?’

‘We certainly don’t want perfume for an unhappy person,’ said Florence firmly. ‘I think perhaps Mrs – that is, Bianca – how would you feel about a slightly rebellious woman? A little wild? Below the surface at least.’

‘I’d feel good about that,’ said Bianca.

‘And – tell me, Mr Goodwin,’ said Florence, ‘do you still sit at an organ? In my day that is what perfumiers used to do, sit at this high sort of desk, with dozens of tiny bottles ranged on its shelves, florals, musks, woods, and literally mixed them together.’

‘Sadly not. That was when perfume was a romantic art. Now we do a formulation from a computer – although I would bring to our first meeting several phials of scent, which we could literally play with, using spills and sticks, mixing the fruity, the vanilla, the patchouli, which is woody, the rose perhaps, which is powdery and sweet – so that I can begin to understand what I call your odour language.’

‘It doesn’t sound very attractive,’ said Bianca, laughing.

‘I know. But it is. And the more complex the better. And then I would bring three or four fragrances, based on that original briefing.’

‘Goodness,’ said Lara, ‘it does all sound very exciting.’

‘Mrs Clements – Lara, if I may – perfume is the most exciting thing in the world. It can be anarchic, it can be submissive – you simply need to choose, and I am confident I can discover it for you.’

‘And you do really feel you can develop it in time? We shall need finished samples by next January when we have our first big conference.’

‘Definitely. Of course we’re not talking huge business here, your numbers are rather . . . small.’

‘Well, I don’t know,’ said Susie. ‘Look at Jo Malone, just a few perfumes made in her tiny factory, but thanks to a clever story and her brilliant sampling campaign – I’m sure you know about that, a tiny phial of a new one enclosed with whatever the customer was buying? – she went global, as they say. We can do something like that. The same but different.’

‘If you say so, Miss Harding, I’m sure you can. I like the project very much, I must say, and I would like to work with you.’

‘Yes, well, I’ll get back to you, Mr Goodwin,’ said Bianca. ‘And do I take it I can come and visit your headquarters, see all these wonderful things for myself? I hear you have mock-ups of bathrooms, kitchens, wonderful things like smelling booths.’

‘Indeed. And we have a very strong reputation for landing appeal.’

‘Landing appeal?’

‘Yes. The smell wafting out from the bathroom, urging people into the bath.’

‘Good heavens! What a lot we’ve all learned today.’

‘I’m glad. And we can arrange a date for your visit before I leave today.’

‘Excellent,’ said Bianca.

Francine was working on a client when Florence got back to The Shop but she was not alone. Athina was there, looking mutinous.

‘As well I was here to deal with things,’ she said, as if a queue was snaking down to Piccadilly. ‘Where were you?’

‘In a meeting,’ said Florence, taking off her hat and releasing her hair into its wild curls. Once dark, those curls were now kept, at some expense, a kind of variegated gold and brown colour – tortoiseshell, was how she described it to a new colourist.

Athina, who had kept her sleek bob snow-white for over a decade, was always very disparaging about Florence’s hair, saying without ever relating it directly to her, that she considered hair colouring rather pathetic after a certain age. ‘Everyone knows, after all, that it can’t be genuine. Such a waste of time!’

But the white hair suited her and her porcelain skin, as Florence always said in reply, while it did not Florence’s darker, olive colouring.

‘What sort of meeting? And with whom?’

‘With Bianca Bailey. And Lara Clements and Susie Harding,’ said Florence, her voice as honey-sweet as her smile.

‘What about?’

‘Perfume.’

‘Perfume? You don’t mean she’s going ahead with it? How extraordinary. I told her not to. Why?’

‘I imagine because she disagrees with you,’ said Florence. ‘Would you like some tea, Athina?’

‘No, thank you. I don’t have that sort of time. I’m going to Farrell House. I have a great deal to do there.’

Half an hour later, as she sat in her office raging with boredom, she began to think about perfume. Another perfume, dreamed of four decades earlier . . . How excited she had been by it, and how disappointed when it proved impossible to further its development . . .

Back in her office, Susie switched her phone on: it announced she had three text messages and two answerphone messages. They were all monosyllabically hostile. Shit! Bloody Henk. He must not do this to her when she was trying to work – and she mustn’t let him rattle her so badly either.

Stay cool, Susie, she thought, you actually hold all the cards. You do, you do.

He did look really angry. Angry and – what? Contemptuous, she supposed. It was so unlike him; he usually understood such problems.

‘Look,’ she said, quite shaken, ‘look, I can’t help it. I just can’t be there.’

‘Of course you can help it. It’s a meeting, cancel it.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake!’ He never swore either. ‘I don’t know what your meeting’s about—’

‘Product concepts. I told you.’

‘Yes, and this one is about our daughter’s future. I find it hard to believe you can’t see that’s more important.’

‘Patrick, you’re exaggerating. It’s a parents’ evening. You’ve done it before, gone for both of us, I just don’t see why—’

‘Mrs Blackman has specifically asked us to see her afterwards.’

‘I didn’t know that!’

‘Bianca, I sent you an email about it, the minute she emailed me. Forwarding hers. Don’t tell me you didn’t get it.’

‘I . . .’ she hesitated. She remembered now. She had seen the email, headed Parents’ Evening, St Catherine’s, and because she’d been already late for a meeting, she’d not even opened it, promising herself she’d look at it later. Only then there had been two dozen more and . . .

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I – well I had to go to a meeting and then it got buried. I never opened it. Sorry, Patrick.’

‘That’s OK,’ he said, easily mollified by her apologies as always, ‘but now you know . . .’

‘No, Patrick, I’m sorry, I really can’t.’

‘
What?
’

‘It is so, so important this meeting, it’s with Lara, and the lab.’

‘Bianca,’ he said, and his expression was anxious now, ‘I do think you have to come.’

‘But Patrick, she’s only going to talk about this bunking off nonsense, but we’ve spoken to Milly about it—’

‘
I’ve
spoken to Milly. I don’t think you ever quite got round to it.’

‘That’s not right. I had quite a long chat with her—’

‘Over the phone! What kind of message do you think that gives her? That really, it can’t matter too much because your job outweighs its importance. This is a potentially dangerous situation and she needs our full attention.’

She knew he was right. As always when cornered, where she might have been expected to go into the attack, she became more conciliatory.

‘Well, I am truly sorry. But she seemed very clear about what she’d done and why it was wrong. And she said you’d talked about it for a long time. We don’t want to labour the point, Patrick. She’s approaching it in a very adult way. And I’m sure you can make Mrs Blackman see we’re treating it seriously.’

‘So, you’re not prepared to come and see her?’

‘Patrick, please.’ She could feel her temper slipping. ‘Mrs Blackman is playing games to an extent, making a point. And you can handle that. Anyway, she much prefers you to me,’ she added with a brief smile. ‘And you know the deal, it’s always been understood that except for
really
important things, it has to be you.’

‘Bianca, this
is
really important. All right, if that’s your final decision. But I have to say I’m quite – shocked. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a lot to do.’