The Memory of Scent (6 page)

‘Are you here to help someone?’ There was a short pause.

‘I have an elderly lady at this side, who wants to apologize for being cruel.’ The group looked to each other to see who this could be meant for. Only Henri seemed to have taken it to heart. Madame Xavier’s grip on my hand felt stronger and I was afraid to look at her.

‘Confusion and prayerful distress has reached me. I have a baby here, but all I can say is that she is being soothed.’

My heart began to pound loudly, colour pumping to my cheeks. I squeezed my eyes tightly closed. No one around that table could have known of my baby, the baby who didn’t live for more than a couple of hours. The baby I had as a fifteen-year-old girl in my early days in Paris before I understood that the kindness of men is sometimes contractual and not freely given. My study into how to tell the difference has been an undertaking of many years, and still often, I fail miserably.

‘Captain Olivier? Captain Olivier, are you still among us?’ Madame Xavier’s matronly tones had returned but nothing else came by way of reply. With a trembling breath, Madame Xavier slumped back in her chair, the séance concluded.

My shift here is nearly done. Walrus steadies himself as he rises from his booth and I hand him his hat. His girth speaks of unbridled gluttony but that would be a wrong assumption. His is a nuanced love affair with food. He doesn’t gorge on it to satisfy his hunger and then be done, he tries to honour it. And, as if food were something capable of feelings, he hates to reject it, even the blandest lumpiest and most tasteless of specimens placed before him. He must have been a very attentive lover in his youth.

* * *

Distraction from my thoughts of the patchouli girl came with the suggestion by Agnes that we all go to the weekend’s masked ball. Maria and I took to the task of transforming ourselves with unseemly gusto as we hunted through several shops, managing to assemble an array of feathers and fake jewels.
Maman
helped us sew them on to elaborate dresses beneath which we wore purple pantaloons. We looked as if we had been tumbled from the Maharaja’s trunk, although the image we were aiming for was that of Arabian princesses with peacock feathers pinned to our hair and our kohl-blackened eyes.

Little can match the anticipation of a night of revelry and tonight we are feeling especially flighty. I must have needed this night of diversion more than I had realised. There is a glorious randomness to people who are prepared for nothing but a night of entertainment and possibilities and so we fall in with the indiscriminate swell of eccentricity spilling from one
brasserie
to the next. We weave through jugglers, fire-eaters and tumblers. A man dressed as a woman with a monkey on a leash nods warmly in acknowledgement towards us, the two smiling Arabian princesses, who are, at
best, culturally confused in our attire. The street singers fight for their corners with soaring voices their weapon of choice in a duel of supremacy.

Our arrangement is to meet Agnes at the Chat Noir. The tables are small and tightly packed together. There are three musicians playing and singing in the corner between the huge fireplace and the ceiling-high stained-glass window. We nudge our way excitedly through the curtain into the cabaret section of the café and can see Agnes at a busy table chatting and drinking alongside several costumed companions. They are all ignoring the poet who is doing his best to wring out a dismal poem with as much pathos as he can muster while standing on his little platform.

‘Ah, my girls. Vermouth all around.’

By the time we have twisted ourselves into the cramped space where two seats have been left for our arrival, the drinks are ready to be raised in a rousing toast.

‘To idleness’, declared an already tipsy Agnes.

‘To idleness’, we all enthusiastically concur, my arm bracelets rattling in percussion.

This is the type of setting where I most love to watch Agnes, maybe because I have cast her in the role of a pioneer, exploring the outer boundaries of that mysterious world of aging. I am unfairly expecting her to lay the groundwork, to create the template that I have decided I will use because I have burdened her with my admiration. For example, the impact that she still has on the young men in her company. They fuss over her and hang on to her every word. She is coquettish and flirtatious and the men are jostling each other out of the way to pour her drinks.

I adore my own mother, but her infirmity and feebleness frighten me. To make it more comfortable for me, I try to
exaggerate her ‘otherness’ so that I do not easily find similarities between us. I take a twisted pride in the unflattering physical traits that I have inherited from my father, even though my mother’s grace would cloak more easily my missteps, lack of guile, and plainness. And then I forget my efforts and find myself mirroring her in a regrettably instinctive way. The way we tilt our heads when we are enquiring after someone, the way we tug at the fringes of our hair because we are too aware of our high foreheads despite being told such a forehead speaks of intelligence, the way I feel reassured and refined when I splash on my mother’s cologne, despite its association with her genteel passivity.

Agnes has braced herself for a pronouncement. She is choosing to introduce the table to us, the recently arrived. ‘Ladies, this young man is a fine upcoming artist who is sure to go far. That young man is a sublime poet who would make petticoats quiver with the exquisite tenderness of his words. Beside him, a talented young blade, who, I’m afraid, would not be interested in looking in your direction, my pretties.’

Her strident twinning of ‘youth’ and ‘talent’ is frustratingly belittling, almost a slur on everything I hold dear about her. ‘Tell me, Agnes, does “youth” always equate to “talent”?’

The young poet, who is masked and cloaked, smiles across the table, evidently deciding to address the question I have posed.

‘Yes there is an adoration of youth, or, more correctly, the state of being youthful. We may not be rich in talent, but we are wealthy in vanity and that tends to obscure the reality. And when you have someone as discerning as Madame Agnes by your side, then truly you are blessed. With one indulgent glance from her, my self absorption can almost be justified.’

He takes Agnes’s gloved hand and kisses the back of it. I roll my eyes; a childish response I know, but I tend only to come up with quick and clever retorts after much deliberation.

‘Aren’t you the dandy?’

‘I would love to be a bohemian, but I couldn’t stand the disorder.’ He is better at this than I.

‘What about the pursuit of individual freedom? Is that the preserve of the young, or only the preserve of the young male?’ I feel on firmer ground here. This time the artist responds.

‘Surely there is an obligation to pursue individual freedom as a young person, whether male or female.’

‘… and your gender shouldn’t prohibit you in any way?’

Maria raises her hand. A curious response because usually she in not backward about coming forward. She has been drawing on the table cloth in a distracted manner.

‘Who then gets to live with the consequences? You fine gentlemen might end up with no more than an odd or irritating itch, we on the other hand … well, imagine if after even one particularly wild night of pursuing individual freedom, you found yourself growing a whole new person inside you?’

One of the men spurts his drink out. He dabs at his mouth apologetically with a napkin.

‘I do beg your pardon. Yes, I can see how that would rather cramp my style. Damned inconvenience I’d have to say.’

The writer laughs and raises his glass. ‘To being a man!’

The rest of us, Maria most enthusiastically of all, raise ours in hearty response. ‘To being a man!’

Agnes stands up, and everyone else follows suit. ‘Now, my lovelies. To the dance! Let’s defy nature. Let’s go and be deviant.’

We shaped a staggered line and ease towards the gaudy hall, immediately being curled into the throng of dancers. Maria and I take our place on the scuffed wooden floor and
stand as each other’s
vis-à-vis
for the
quadrille
. One dance blends into the next, waltzes into polkas, one partner into the next, with the sweat on the brow of the conductor glistening under the glow of the lamps. Most people in the feverish crowd are masked. Part of the pleasure of these dance halls is the perfumed anarchy they inspire. These places are looked down on by many in the higher-society ranks because they are the perfect cauldron for lewd and totally uninhibited behaviour. It’s well known that while they are condemned in parlour rooms across the city, respectable husbands will just as quickly and fervently sneak off to don a mask and melt into the heady excitement of anonymous love making which is a key promise of the night.

I could be dancing this very instant with an escaped husband. He is short and portly and hidden behind an elaborate eye-piece. Because we are costumed, I think we become kinder and less critical. I am trying to wriggle into a longer hold without outright insulting this person. He is not short enough to be a dwarf, so is simply, therefore, one of life’s runts. There is a strange warmth, a breath, on the back of my neck and quickly turning I see it is the writer of our company. He is grinning; his large-brimmed hat cocked low, his mask taking up three-quarters of his face. He executes a quick bow to my portly runt and I am peeled away with a flourish.

‘I’m not sure that’s entirely allowed.’ My tone is of exaggerated primness.

‘Should I have begged that sweating man’s permission when you know that in truth, this is a rescue mission? I feared you would suffocate, or drown.’

I am pulled assuredly towards him until I am close enough to feel the strands of beads I am wearing indent my skin. This is how you know. A close encounter can be as awkwardly mismatched
as wrongly placed jigsaw pieces. Like the first time I sat on a blanket with a boy. It was afternoon, and he had put his arm around me and pulled me close to his side. He then went on to point out the different types of boats and skiffs on the river. I spent the greater part of the afternoon wedged awkwardly against him, staring at a great silver button near his lapel, because I felt too embarrassed to shift my position. To this day, I cannot tell one type of boat from another, but I can recall, even in my sleep, that one great silver button.

This is different. He smells of cedar wood and musk. His hold is strong, like a frame. No – I have an image of a bookcase, and my back the spine of one of its books, and through my flimsy layers his fingers are tracing one vertebra at a time, inch by inch, as if unsighted and unsure. The width of his palm print is now on the small of my back and I arch towards him. I want him to cover me, in the bestial way that animals in the fields conduct their mating. It is the anonymity of the masks and costumes … it seems to allow for a primitive rendering of lust, an urgency of the immediate, the moment, the now. The costumes are like camouflage, extending permission to indulge in covert behaviour. If I were in my ordinary attire, I know my mind-set would be restrained and disciplined, but here and now, all I am aware of is an overwhelming smell of musk.

And then the conductor swoops his baton with a dramatic flourish and the orchestra takes a break. The masked writer steers me to where Agnes is sitting and pulls out a chair for me. I am composed once more. My fear is that he has always been. That would make me foolish.

‘What’s your name?’ I try to conduct trite civilities. Again the grin and nothing further. He excuses himself and goes off to heartily clap the back of a friend he has just caught
sight of and is swallowed up into a small knot of men. I feign diffidence. Agnes fixes her gaze on me.

‘I was your age once, Fleur. Time rushes by very quickly. Be steely in your determination to secure yourself a footing in this world. You and Maria must soon find yourself decent positions. Don’t fall into the trap of many young women who believe that the only chance for those from low circumstances is to become a grand courtesan. Every young woman born into poverty thinks that they will one day captivate a wealthy man who will drag them out of their position.’ Agnes is being kind, but I wasn’t born into poverty. I had a good home and a governess. Maria on the other hand is the daughter of a gin-soaked seamstress, and I do not think any less of her for that. Agnes has clearly watched waves of young girls crash against the tide and the waning of the moon. And so she continues, ‘Nobody wants to be a brothel dweller for life, or to have to work their fingers to the bone sewing and washing until they’re practically blind. But it’s a mirage. The beautiful and fêted girl will one day reach thirty, and unless she has amassed enough jewels and possessions by then, well it’s back to the brothels and the hovels because she will never be allowed again to mix in respectable company.’

There are ten lives lived in those blue eyes.

‘Men are magpies when it comes to stealing beauty. There it is, nice and shiny, and they make off with it until the next glittery thing catches their eye. I’m afraid I’m no longer shiny enough to prove a distraction for too long. Look at you, Fleur. Half a dozen men could pass by this table right now and each would glance. You miss those surreptitious glances when you get to my age. Look, the artists return.’

Both Maria and what I can now assume is a new friend, look slightly flushed, and judging by the peacock feather that
drops from Maria’s hair to the floor as she takes her seat, it is clear that something more than boisterous dancing has been keeping them occupied.

‘I see that my guest list has proved to be a success.’ Agnes claps triumphantly.

The writer, on his return to the table, picks up the feather and places it in his inside pocket. The night has reached that point beyond which lay only the dregs. This is something that experience teaches you, so Agnes rises and immediately everyone else prepares to leave without any real decision being voiced. The third young male companion, the blade as she referred to him, who has said very little throughout the entire evening, seems content to allow Agnes to hook his arm. It is almost as if this was his only purpose.