When they left Porquerolles it was night. The street lamps ablaze. They cut like broken glass.
“What’s the matter?” he said.
“Nothing,” she replied, and tucking her head down walked on beside him. Paris was a revelation. And what it revealed was Méret Voytek.
Two young women, only a few years older than she was, passed them, walking side by side. One wore her mother’s scent, Soir de Paris, the other Chanel No. 5. Two trails of perfume entwining in the night air in an invisible, delectable double helix. Wisteria and honeysuckle, wrapped the one about the other. She stopped and turned and looked. Breathed in.
“Startling, isn’t it?” she heard him say.
She said nothing, watched the two women caught like flickering frames on a cinema screen by streams and pools of light as they passed the illuminated window of each café and restaurant.
“Before the war,” he went on, out of sight behind her, a baritone susurrus at her shoulder, “I would have said Paris smelled of drains, castor oil and patchouli. Now every woman that passes is an olfactory delight. As though they had been saving it these last five years. Their faces are different, all but stripped of their maquillage. A bare simplicity. Even the way they walk is different. Watch them. There is none of the hautecouture, arse-wobbling strut of the pre-war Parisienne. They plant their feet firmly on the ground, as though stepping out into this strange new world. And it is a strange new world, is it not?”
He was by her side now, looking down as she looked up.
“Yes,” she said. “Strange in that it is original. Nothing like it has ever existed. And there is none shall find it stranger than I.”
Back in her room atop the studio, atop the bordel, in Rue de la Huchette, she took out her possession. Her sole possession. The last relic of her childhood—the small conical bottle of Soir de Paris, three-quarters full. She had had it for the best part of a fortnight now, had opened it and sniffed at it but not used it.
She dabbed a little on her neck, a little more on her hand, and as the alcohol cleared she smelt her mother one fleeting final moment as Paris 1929 submerged into Paris 1945, the scent became her scent, and she entwined with the honeysuckle and wisteria, spiralling out into un soir Parisien.