24

‘Ça manque de cul.’

Cul is an exquisitely expressive French word – after the palate-slapping ‘c’, uttering the ‘u’ is like puckering up for a kiss, while the ‘l’ remains silent – that can mean either ‘ass’ or ‘sex’. Monsieur pronounces it greedily. I doubt anyone knows the way I smell better than him: over the course of our long affair, he rooted round my body like a truffle pig. He is the first man I’ve ever tested Duende on, and he feels just as I do: ‘not enough sex’.

It took me over two years to reach out to Monsieur again after I cancelled our last date. When I did, I sprayed the inside of an envelope with Carnal Flower, the last scent he’d given to me, and sent it to him. Within twenty-four hours, he’d answered the call of the tuberose. I joined him for dinner at Lapérouse on the Quai des Grands Augustins, the last Parisian holdover from the era when gentlemen entertained courtesans in private rooms. The scratched mirrors have never been replaced: this is how tarts checked to see if the diamonds they’d been offered were the real thing.

I’d sent him an olfactory message in that envelope. He greeted me with another. ‘You’re not wearing Mouchoir de Monsieur!’ was the first thing I told him after he’d pulled me onto his lap on the banquette and we’d laughed at the joy of touching each other again, even before the first glass of champagne. I wondered whether another woman had chosen it for him. Ironically, it was from the same Italian house as the fragrance that had suddenly appeared on the bathroom shelf during the uneasy period when my husband and I shared our flat while getting a divorce. Though at the time I had been having an affair with Monsieur for over a year, the invasion of my bathroom by another woman’s gift had roused my territorial instincts: I’d symbolically pissed in the bottle with a squirt of clove-laden Coup de Fouet, which the Tomcat had always loathed. If he’d noticed, he’d never said.

And now, a year and a half after having resumed our acquaintance, Monsieur and I are sitting at the terrace of a restaurant near the Bastille in the early September sun. He’s saying he’s already smelled Duende on me. He couldn’t have, but perhaps he’s detecting something of Bertrand’s signature: I’ve worn Nuit de Tubéreuse on occasion to meet Monsieur. Though it is purely olfactory, there is a faint, exquisite whiff of symbolic betrayal in carrying the scent of one man on my skin to entice another. This is a jungle thing, a marking of territory I only became aware of as I held out my wrist to Monsieur. And Monsieur is a subtle enough reader of my thoughts to have guessed at this subconscious double-timing even before I did. I’ve been … sprayed by someone else. Nevertheless, the man who knows me best thinks Duende doesn’t smell enough of me. Or of cul. But serendipitously, the mailman has just brought me a parcel containing a bit of the beast, which I intend to take to my next session with Bertrand.

*   *   *

The minute I ripped open the envelope last week, my Siamese cat materialized in the living room, howling. As I unravelled the bubble wrap around what looked like a tiny brown crumbly stone, she jumped onto the desk and tried to prise it away from me, purring, nipping and batting like a mad thing.

This was a gift from Dominique Dubrana, also known as Abdes Salam Attar, who practises the ancient art of blending natural essences in a small town above Rimini, in Italy. He is a convert to Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam; his compositions are profoundly meditative, moving back centuries into the sacred origins of perfumery. I’ve never met Abdes Salam, but we’ve exchanged emails. And now this gift: a non-identified, mystery material in a parcel. I had to lock up the cat before having a proper sniff, which yielded fascinating observations: facets of blood, acetic acid (present in vinegar), apple, flint, patchouli, vetiver, pepper, cow and horse dung, herbaceous notes, blackberry, blackcurrant bud, ink, leather … I shot off an email to Abdes Salam to ask him what the stuff was. He replied he’d deliberately not identified it so that I would ask him the question. But by the time he answered I’d sussed it out on my own: the little rock now resting in a feline-proof box was African Stone, the fossilized urine of a rabbit-sized South African beast called the hyrax, or dassie. Hyrax colonies urinate at the same place, often for centuries, and their urine is jelly-like rather than liquid. Over time, it fossilizes and can be collected in chunks. It has been used in vernacular medicine for centuries and the perfume industry is starting to use it as a replacement for materials of animal origin, since it is cruelty-free. After all, it’s basically recycled piss.

Ick? Hardly. I couldn’t get enough of the warm, funky, somehow feminine smell of African Stone. I wrote back to Abdes Salam, whom I could imagine chuckling in his beard as he typed back that I must be a member of the olfactory perverts club …

*   *   *

‘Or maybe you’re a pervert, period?’

I’ve just handed Bertrand the African Stone over our table at the upscale soup and sandwich shop next door to his lab. Are the pheromones in this stuff acting on his brain as they did on the cat’s? I sometimes forget that he’s, well, a guy, and that there are some words, like ‘pervert’, you can’t utter in front of a straight guy without his cracking some kind of joke. He’s got an odd glint in his eye. Thrust a new aromatic material under a perfumer’s nose and he’ll go into overdrive.

It’s the first time Bertrand and I have managed to get together since the summer holidays and that fateful question he asked me: ‘Do you know what you want?’ Although I did write to him during the summer that I’d thought about it, had a clearer idea, and asked him to wait before working on new mods, he’s gone ahead on his own.

We settle down into what has by now become a well-rehearsed routine. This time, there are four phials, numbered 11 to 14. The scent wafting up from the strips has become familiar as well, though each time I encounter a new version something has shifted. Today, a new layer of expression has been added: grapefruit to make the zesty top notes bitterer and a dry, crackling fizziness produced by a material called magnolan to magnify the floral note and intensify the incense. Each mod contains double the amount of magnolan put into the preceding one: three per cent in 11, six per cent in 12, and so forth.

‘Just small tweaks. That’s what you’ll be seeing more and more of from now on, unless we want to change our course drastically at some point.’

I frown over my blotters. If this were something I was discovering in a shop, would my credit card levitate from my purse?

Bertrand dips a strip into a phial of magnolan. It smells both of wet stone, flowers and grapefruit, with a crackling quality, as though it could punch little holes into a blend to fizz it up. Interesting, but I still think Duende isn’t sexual enough, I tell Bertrand, quoting my recent conversation with Monsieur. He shoots a curious glance at me.

‘Who’s Monsieur?’

I’ve never told Bertrand about him. We don’t tend to discuss the details of our personal lives and, besides, I wouldn’t quite know how to describe my relationship with Monsieur. So I squirm a bit, grope around for a pithy answer and end up twirling a raised hand in the air with a little shrug and what I hope is an enigmatic smile. For a second Bertrand looks at me expectantly and I brace myself for the wisecrack I swear is bound to come out, but he just shakes his head with a little smile in an ‘Oh … women’ kind of way and gets back to the business at hand.

‘For the moment, this must be as floral as possible – besides the fact that it can be very cuisse de bergère [‘shepherdess’s thigh’] or anything you please!’

‘You mean cuisse de nymphe émue!’

The term means ‘thigh of excited nymph’: it designates both a variety of rose and a colour (which translates rather more prosaically in English as hot pink). Clearly, Bertrand has never heard it: he repeats it quizzically and bursts out laughing.

‘Then we’ll be doing cuisse de nymphe émue, no problem but, for now, I want to make the floral accord impeccable. Magnificent. It’s got to be unique, unlike anything I’ve done before. I want you to feel as though you were walking down an alley of orange trees in blossom, with jasmine dripping all over the place!’

Quite. But what I’m getting is mostly banana. The effect comes from the jasmine and ylang-ylang. Bertrand has used a new quality of the latter, sourced through a fair-trade organization he’s been working with in Madagascar. Though I think they’re a little off-course in the story, I love those over-ripe fruit notes: they have an almost animalic effect.

‘Yes, they can even be a bit petite fille qui se néglige [little girl who neglects herself],’ Bertrand agrees. ‘We’ll play on that. But, for the moment, we’re not there yet. Now that I’ve perfected the fruity note that covers everything up, we might add more incense – I started out with ten per cent and I’m down to one!’

As I wave the blotters under my nose, I catch a whiff of the African Stone that’s rubbed off on my fingertips. It blends in quite nicely. I like the idea that it landed on my cuisse de nymphe émue just at the time when I was concerned about the perfume not being erotic enough, as though the perfume itself had called for it …

‘Correct me if I’m wrong, but couldn’t African Stone go into this?’

He thinks it over for a couple of seconds.

‘Yes! Of course! But we’d have to know if we can use it. I always get slapped on the fingers because my products are too expensive.’

Price isn’t the only factor. Natural raw materials have to be available in sufficient quantities and in a consistent enough quality to ensure the same formula can be produced over the years. More importantly, they need to have passed a battery of scientific analyses to demonstrate they aren’t harmful. Actually, no animal substance in perfumery is – but you’ve still got to be able to prove it. Not to mention that, though African Stone is cruelty-free, some consumers might balk at the idea of putting an animal substance on their skin. Especially fossilized pee. Still, we agree I’ll ask Abdes Salam about it and we go back to comparing the variations.

Bertrand dabs on numbers 11, 13 and 14, waves his arms around to accelerate the evaporation of the alcohol and holds them out to me after smelling each dab. Professionals don’t take the dainty sniffs fellow perfume lovers indulge in during joint expeditions. They go for full-contact, snout-to-skin molecule-snorting. So I do it like I’ve seen it done: I grab Bertrand’s left wrist, tug it towards me and run my nose along his inner arm. Though the contact is meant to be purely impersonal, it is disconcertingly intimate – a prolonged, inquisitive animal snuffling of the type you only indulge in with your lover or your child in the real world – and it hasn’t become routine enough for me to feel like business as usual. This is the first time I get a whiff of Bertrand’s skin: when we peck each other on the cheeks French-style, the gesture is warm and affectionate but subtly timed and choreographed to remain within the appropriate social codes. No time for sniffing out the beast.

As I flit from mod to mod, I tug one of Bertrand’s arms towards me then the other in a strange little dance. When the analytical part of my brain finally kicks in, I find that N°14, the one with the highest dose of magnolan, seems to collapse under its own weight, sending all the facets flying in separate directions. And we’re both thinking the banana note is a little over the top. This isn’t Carmen: it’s Carmen Miranda. Bertrand concludes he’ll reinforce the animal, narcotic notes as I asked him to, tune down the banana and raise the percentage of incense.

‘Take these,’ he says, handing me the four phials, ‘wear them, follow them. I’ll keep on working. Now I know where I’m going.’

I do too, as a matter of fact. Tomorrow morning, I’m flying off to Nice, from there to Grasse and all the way up to the hills above the village of Cabris. I’m going to see where our brainchild will be born if it ever comes to term.