Rosie Thomas - If My Father Loved Me

‘Sit down here, miss,’ Mr Phebus said and I slid into a seat. As well as having alarming eyebrows, I thought he talked in a funny way, as though ‘s’s and ‘th’s were ‘z’s. When I was older I learned that the old man had been an analytic chemist in Warsaw, but he had come to London with his wife before the war. He started work with a cosmetics house and he turned himself from a chemist into a perfumer by sheer hard work.

‘Your father, Mr Ted here, he has what we call a nose,’ Mr Phebus grandly announced.

I remember looking at my father’s face and realising it was a handsome one compared with Mr Phebus’s, and feeling proud of my father’s youth and good looks. But his nose seemed relatively unremarkable. ‘So have I,’ I retorted, pressing the end of mine and squashing it.

‘We shall see,’ the old man said. I thought he was not very observant if he couldn’t see it already.

The three of us sat down at the plain wood table and Ted gave me my own jar of the flat white pencils. Now I could see that they were in fact strips of thick blotting paper, the same size as the spills my mother used for lighting the gas. Mr Phebus was humming and setting a line of the little glass bottles between us. He unscrewed the top of one with a flourish and told me to take my blotter. I glanced at Ted and he pointed to the white paper strip. Mr Phebus already had one and as I watched he slid the tip of it gently into the liquid in the bottle.

‘Now you,’ he said. I copied him exactly as he lifted the blotter to his nose and breathed in. His eyebrows twitched and I looked again at Ted, wanting to laugh. My father pressed his forefinger against one nostril and winked again. I sniffed hard at my dipper, as Mr Phebus had done. A dense, sweet cloud instantly filled my nose and rushed up through the secret insides of my face until it seemed to squeeze its fingers round my brain. I coughed and closed my eyes, and as I let my hand fall the scent’s power receded, although I could still feel the pressure of it above my cheeks and the stinging shock in the tender membranes of my nose.

‘What is that?’ I whispered.

Mr Phebus said, ‘That is lavender. It will be one of the top notes of the scent we are working on today.’

‘Lavender’s blue, dilly dilly.’ I had heard the song on Listen with Mother and I was pleased to make this unexpected connection. But Mr Phebus held up his hand and frowned. We were working. The lab was no place for rhymes or any kind of inattention. He unscrewed another bottle and we went through the same process, dipping and smelling. This one was nasty as well as strong. The stink was sharp, like cats or the brown-tiled lavatories at my school, and I screwed up my face in disgust.

‘Cassia,’ Mr Phebus said. ‘Very important. You must remember that not all perfume essences smell sweet and pretty. We often use these sensual animal stinks like musk and civet for our base notes, to anchor the structure. Men and women are animals too, you know, and we all respond in the same way.’

I frowned at him, battling my incomprehension.

The door opened and a woman with her hair swept up on the top of her head looked in at us. ‘Phone call for Mr Thompson,’ she said.

I shivered on my wooden seat with pleasure at the importance of this. We didn’t have a telephone at home. Ted sprang up and went out, not remembering to look round at me. Mr Phebus went on unscrewing bottles and motioning to me to dip and sniff. Some of the smells were like flowers pressed and squeezed to make them powerful instead of sweet and gentle, others were surprising, reminding me of orange peel, or Christmas, or the sea at Whitstable where we had spent a summer holiday. By the time my father came back there were ten used white dippers on the table in front of me. I was beginning to feel bored and slightly queasy.

‘Now, miss,’ Mr Phebus said, pulling at the thistly tuft of one eyebrow. ‘Pay no attention to your father. Can you remember which one was lavender?’

Ten dippers with their tips discoloured or turned translucent by the oils now lay on the table in front of me. I stared at what was left of the evidence and then reluctantly I picked up several in turn and sniffed at them again. My head felt muzzy and too full of potent fumes. The dippers smelled less strongly now; their separate characters and the names Mr Phebus had given them had become hopelessly confused. I took a wild guess. ‘That one?’

‘No, that one is jasmine.’

Ted laughed and sat down again on the wooden chair beside mine. He tilted it back on two legs with his arms folded, in the exact way my mother told me not to do at home. My eyes were stinging. I felt that I had let him down.

‘Don’t worry, you can learn the difference if you try hard enough,’ Mr Phebus said. ‘I managed it. I spent many years of hard work, memorising thousands of notes, which is what we call the different basic scents and that is only the very beginning of what a perfumer must know. He must have other skills too, and most of all he must have imagination that lifts him from being a mere technician into an artist of fragrance.

‘I am an artist, in my small way, but only of the fourth or maybe third degree. But your father here’ – he paused for effect, with his eyebrows pointing at me – ‘he is, at once, a natural. He smells a note only once and he remembers it. And he knows, because the artistry is in his heart and in his mind, he knows what he will add and what he will withhold to coax from these bottles, these not romantic little jars, the dreams of women.’

Women and their dreams, again. I was torn between pride in my father and a new discomfort that rubbed at the margins of my understanding. I didn’t like the feeling of insecurity that came with it.

‘Of course, he still has very much to learn. Many years of practice.’

Ted laughed out loud delightedly. ‘Better get on with it, then.’ He was always enthusiastic in those days. He rubbed his hands and smacked his lips, full of raw appetite for life. I didn’t recognise his hunger then for what it was, but I already knew that my mother entirely lacked what Ted possessed. I loved her, of course, and I took for granted her devotion to me, but she wasn’t thrilling in the way my father was. She was always there and I never noticed her constancy until she wasn’t any longer. One morning she was at home and that same afternoon she was never coming back. That’s how sudden her death was from the brain haemorrhage. Afterwards, when I thought about her, I would remember her quietness and restraint. She used to brush my hair and tie ribbons in it, looking down or away instead of into our joint reflections in the mirror of her kidney-shaped dressing table. She wore plain jerseys and calf-length colourless skirts that hid her pretty legs. It was as if even before she left us altogether she occupied only the corners of her own life. Whereas Ted joyfully overflowed out of his, and ran in a hot current through hers and mine as well.

Mr Phebus said, ‘Let’s have Black Opal three and four, then.’

Ted brought some bottles from the shelves and they drew their notepads and jars of blotters towards them. The two of them began nosing and muttering together, and I half listened while unfamiliar words washed over my head. They talked about heart and base notes and aldehydes and sparkle and synthesis, and the names of natural essences and the chemical polysyllables of synthetics rolled off their tongues. I didn’t remember tongue-twisting phenylethylene or galaxolide, but the mysterious-sounding beauty of naturals – vetiver and musk and mimosa – did stay with me.

They were still with me now as I sat by my father’s bed and held his dry hand. Only the names, not the scents. I failed Mr Phebus’s first test and I knew I was not an artist like Ted.