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.
I was talking too much, I realised. It would be tiring for him. ‘Do you remember?’
‘How old were you?’ he asked, restlessly moving his legs and frowning with the effort of recollection.
‘Six, or seven.’
‘Back in ’56, then.’
I was pleased that he knew the year of my birth. I wouldn’t have placed a bet on it. ‘Yes.’
‘We were working on contract for Coty.’ His hand moved a little in my grasp, as if he were trying to reach for something, and then fell back again. ‘I don’t remember the day. It must have been boring for you.’
We’re so polite to each other, I thought. We are like a rough sea swirling under a thin skin of ice.
While the old man and my father continued with their sniffing and scribbling I began to fidget and rock on my chair. I made a wigwam of dippers and then, with a hasty movement to stop it collapsing, I knocked over a bottle. The bottle rolled across the table and stopped in front of Ted.
He raised his head, his forehead corrugated with irritation and his eyes cold. It was a look I had seen often enough. ‘Why don’t you go out and sit by Miss Mathers?’
Miss Mathers was the woman with piled-up hair. I had seen them laughing together and heard Ted call her Babs, but I understood that she was Miss Mathers to me. I stood up obediently.
Miss Mathers gave me some pencils and some sheets of paper to draw on, then went back to her typing. She rolled letterheads and pale-pink and green flimsies sandwiched with carbon paper into her black-and-gold typewriter and busily stabbed the keys. Once or twice she answered the telephone in a sing-song voice: ‘Phebus Fraygrances.’
At twelve thirty Ted and I went out. After the dimness inside the warehouse the sunshine was so bright it made me blink. We strolled down Kingsland Road to a pub and I sat on a bench in the sun whileTed went inside. My excitement flooded back with the novelty of all this and I swung my legs so my white socks flashed. Ted brought out lemonade and a cheese sandwich for me, and a pint of beer and a ham-and-pickle sandwich for him. He took a long swallow of the beer and rubbed the froth from his clipped moustache. Then he slid a packet of Players from his pocket and lit one. He blew out the smoke in a long plume and sighed with pleasure. ‘Not a word to a soul,’ he said to me, pressing his lips with the side of his index finger. ‘No good for the old nose, booze and fags, are they?’
I was awed to be part of this conspiracy. The old man and Miss Mathers would have had to torture me before I would have breathed a word about my father’s lunchtime habits.
The afternoon of that day was the same, except that the hours seemed longer than the morning’s. My father and the old man were shut up in the lab together and Miss Mathers largely ignored me. I drew some desultory pictures on my sheets of paper and looked at shiny brochures with pictures of women and tins of talcum powder in them. Yet as Ted and I finally rode home in the bus, along Holloway Road and up to the Archway, I felt utterly triumphant. The new words I had learned still rang in my head: mimosa, musk, amber. Mr Phebus had given me a folded ten-shilling note when Ted took me into his office to say goodbye. But the best of it was the new footing I felt that I was on with Ted himself.
Before now, he had gone out in the mornings and come back again at night with the newspaper, a kiss for my mother and a joke for me. He brought different sounds and smells and a new atmosphere into the house with him, but I had no picture in my mind of where he had been. Quite often he was away at night too, or for days at a stretch, on business for Mr Phebus.
But after today, I felt that I was a part of his other world. There had been beer on his breath as we walked back to the warehouse after the pub, and he had put pennies into a chewing gum machine on a wall. We were both chewing one of the little white pillows as we walked diagonally across the bomb-site to the warehouse door. I had heard him joking with Miss Mathers, although I didn’t like the soft teasing sound that crept into his voice when he spoke to her. At Miss Mathers’s suggestion, I had carried their pot of tea into the lab at four o’clock. Ted and Mr Phebus were both in their shirtsleeves with scratched notes and discarded dippers spread everywhere, and I understood that they were too preoccupied to glance at me. I accepted my lack of importance with proper humility.
The impression of that day stayed with me for years. It defined my notion of work, as the utterly exotic somehow hemmed in by the tedious progress of hours. At the end of it, as Ted and I marched up the garden path to the house where my mother was waiting for
