The Scent of Night, a short story

The sun cut sharp as a blade across the floor tiles. Penny felt the warmth on her face as she padded to the window and pushed open wooden shutters to embrace the morning. Beyond the courtyard and the garden below, the wide blue ripples of the Luberon hills hung like a great curtain across the landscape. The only sounds came from the first sleepy cicadas.

Perfection: the beauty and peace of a month in Provence; the summer heat and light. This rambling farmhouse they had rented hadn’t disappointed, far from it. Inside and out, there was space to breathe and long, calming views from the hillside.

Trees whispered in cooling breezes. Sunk into the garden was a swimming pool with water the colour of glacier melt.

“Are you going down to get the bread or am I?” John’s voice carried a plea, a hungover-sounding appeal to her good nature.

He was still a sheeted walrus on the bed.

“It’s your turn,” said Penny. “And they’re your guests.”

And I wish they’d go, she thought. Not even in the sense of “leave”, just go to the boulangerie one morning for once instead of expecting to be waited on as if they were staying in a hotel. Because this holiday was supposed to be their anniversary treat (twenty-five years married!) but it hadn’t quite been the paradise she’d hoped for.

It had been fun while Sam and Lottie were staying, but they were adults now with jobs and commitments of their own, and plans that didn’t include spending too much time with Mum and Dad. After the children, their partners and assorted friends had gone, Penny and John had a huge empty house in the South of France to themselves. That was fine with Penny.

She had visions of sitting in the shady courtyard under a fragrant fig tree and reading, or wandering round gorgeous villages looking at brocante markets, and drinking glasses of light, fruity rosé at lunchtime, all the things she never seemed to have time to do at home.

But it hadn’t worked out like that.

 

Instead of drifting dreamily around lavender fields and spending long lazy afternoons doing whatever we want, Penny thought as she scooped up the car keys and her straw basket for the bread and croissants, I have been running a small hotel and restaurant for all the friends and family John invited to drop by as it seemed a shame not to make the most of it. It was amazing how many of them had taken up the offer.

And now, after three weeks of hot-flush-fuelled cooking and cleaning and bed-making, John’s old workmate Simon was the final straw. He had turned up, newly divorced, with a younger woman in tow – and she was awful. Her name was Sassie (Saskia), she was a pin-slim, groomed corporate lawyer in her early thirties, and she lay by the pool all day checking her Blackberry. And it went without saying she never lifted a finger to help and looked with pity at Penny and the cellulite that no sarong could mask – though not enough pity actually to get dressed and volunteer to do the supermarket run for a change, of course.

She was waiting for Penny downstairs, a vision of blonde good health in a wisp of beachwear.

“Are you going into town?” she asked. “Because if you are, could you get me some more sun cream?” Saskia studied one slim bronzed arm. “Factor 15 ought to do it.”

Penny opened her mouth to suggest that perhaps Sassie might like to go herself, as the chemist was only a few doors away from the bread shop, but closed it again as she realised that left to Sassie there would be probably be no breakfast. She seemed to exist on hot water and slices of lemon.

“Who owns this place, again?” asked Sassie. Penny had the impression their guest had had a good nose around while she was alone downstairs.

“A composer and his wife.”

“It’s all a bit of a mish-mash, isn’t it?”

“I rather like it,” Penny said, beginning to walk off. She supposed some of the old French furniture had seen better days. The large splashy paintings on the walls were flaking. And the brown wood statue of a monk in the hall was a little unsettling, as was the wall sconce of an arm reaching out of the iron frame with a candle. But it was shabby chic, wasn’t it? It was perfect for this house of white walls speckled with the patina of time and gleaming terracotta tiles on the floors, as were the rusty garden chairs and odd stone artefacts outside.

 

Anyway, Penny thought but didn’t say, if this doesn’t suit you, go somewhere else. But after three days Sassie and Simon showed no sign of moving on.

Later that morning Penny had returned with the supplies (and the sun cream which Sassie had just picked up from the kitchen island and hadn’t even offered to pay for), and was making a cheesecake for dinner. She absent-mindedly licked the mixing spoon then started to scrape the bowl. She felt fat and dragged down. It is a truth universally acknowledged (though not nearly often enough), thought Penny, that a woman approaching 50 is in need of a husband who likes a good armful because, by God, that was what he’d be getting.

Through the kitchen window she noticed that Sassie had taken her bikini top off. John – straining to hold his stomach in – was eagerly adjusting the parasol above her and taking his time about it, while Simon handed her a drink. Unless he leaves me for a younger model, of course, Penny hastily revised her homely assumption. He was still a good-looking man, big and broad with a lovely, generous nature. A younger woman would be lucky to have him.

The drinking went on throughout the lunch Penny laid out on the terrace: a vibrant tomato salad on a deep cobalt plate, goat’s cheese and sweet onion tartlets, pâté and fresh bread. The sun seared down from the bluest of skies. When everyone else slunk off for a siesta, a sober Penny cleared the dishes away, made herself a cup of coffee and went down to the pool with her book.

She tipped her face up to the heat, luxuriating in the time alone.

 

That evening, sunset burned a rosy tangerine streaked with gold. Everyone assembled expectantly by the table on the terrace. Penny produced more chilled wine and a sumptuous dinner, and repeated the catering process. Sassie only picked at the sea bream and ribbons of courgette. She was comfortably installed on a cushioned chair telling the men about the high-profile cases she had worked on, making them laugh and admire her even more with tales of defeated opposition and great men brought down, as Penny got up and cleared away.

In the kitchen she cut herself a hefty misery slice of cheesecake as she surveyed the stacks of plates. A light tinkling of laughter from Sassie wafted through to the kitchen. Penny drowned her out by crashing pans loudly, but no one seemed to notice.

After midnight, Penny lay in bed unable to drop off to sleep. Next to her, John had started to snore gently. The trouble was, Penny thought, I’m on my own with this. I am just myself, and Sassie is a sex goddess and invincible career woman. She tried not to think about what was going on in the bedroom down the corridor. But all that success shouldn’t stop her from behaving with basic courtesy, even if friendliness was too much to hope for.

Perhaps a fellow grumpy old woman might have noticed Sassie’s selfishness, but the men wouldn’t have a clue. And in comparison, there was no doubt about it: Penny had let herself go. She was wondering rather reluctantly whether she might have to start going to some kind of gym, when she gradually became aware of a scent carried on the air. It was a lovely perfume, of vanilla and sweet lavender, which then became a kind of chocolate smoke. Minute by minute it was becoming stronger, until it seemed to pervade the room.

It was either coming through the open window from outside, from some night-fragrant plant down in the courtyard – or was it a scented candle that Sassie had lit? Penny got out of bed and went out on to the terrace outside the bedroom and breathed in deeply. The scent was carried off by a faint breath of wind in the dark. Above was a luminous arc of silver stars, bright and burning in the black sky. All was still and quiet.

 

 

It was strange; the scent didn’t seem to be coming from the garden. Penny waited a while, enjoying the profound silence, then went back to bed. In the darkness, she lay on her back enveloped by the lovely scent from a source that was still mysterious and closed her eyes.

But when she mentioned it the next day, Sassie didn’t know what Penny was talking about.

“I can assure you it was nothing to do with me,” she insisted.

“It was quite pungent – lavender and rose and vanilla and chocolate and burnt almonds. Really strong and smoky. I was wondering if it was a candle or something…” persisted Penny.

But Sassie shook her head, and denied everything. “I only ever wear a very light delicate perfume. I absolutely loathe anything strong and smoky. The very thought gives me a headache and makes me want to run.”

That evening, at Simon’s suggestion, they went out to a restaurant on the edge of a beautiful hill-top village. Penny had put on a new maxi-dress and pulled herself together. She took a little more time and trouble with her make-up and decided that whatever happened she would make an effort. It was so lovely to be taken out to eat this evening instead of taken for granted.

 

From their table outside under a vine canopy, they could see for miles. All down the valley, the distinctive vertical crevices in the ridge of the mountain darkened as the air softened, until they seemed to be great dusky rivers cascading down to the valley floor.

“To Penny,” said Simon, raising his glass, “Who has looked after us so beautifully. Very much appreciated.”

It was so unexpected, Penny forgot any lingering annoyance. Candles were lit, and dishes of mouth-watering Provençal food arrived. Under the table, John squeezed her hand. Penny felt herself relax in the warmth of the evening and the effect of the wine, and let Sassie be the centre of attention.

They all drank too much. Simon constantly leaned back in his seat and ordered fresh bottles of palest rosé. Penny, sitting next to him, noticed the criss-cross patterns of red veins in his cheeks, and the way he looked at Sassie as if he couldn’t believe his luck that she was with him.

Everyone except Sassie finished with a trio each of crème brûlées, infused with lavender, thyme and peach. Penny sat back, replete and glowing from a glorious afternoon in the sun. But when the bill came and Simon tried to pay, his credit card was refused and it was John who settled up.

Back at the house, another bottle was freed from John’s stock.

“Push on through, eh?” roared Simon, pulling the cork.

“I’m going to bed,” said Penny. She didn’t want so much as another sip. She heard Sassie coming up about half an hour later, but the men stayed up into the early hours, drinking in the garden.

The next morning, though the sky was cloudless again and the heat rising, there was a distinct chill in the atmosphere.

Sassie was fuming.

“We are leaving, as soon as we can,” she hissed as they came downstairs.

Simon blanched. It was clear from her tone she expected to get her way.

“And as for you,” she said to Penny, though barely acknowledging her with a glance, “Drenching our room with that suffocating scent in our room after I’d specifically said I can only tolerate the lightest of fragrances… It gave me the most appalling night, made me physically sick. I can’t think why you did that.”

“But I didn’t –”

Sassie waved her words away imperiously. “You obviously don’t want us here, so we’re leaving, and that’s that.”

Penny decided to offer no resistance.

 

An hour later they were saying goodbye: Simon reluctantly and apologetically, struggling with the bags. Sassie strode ahead towards Penny, but the four-inch heels she’d put on for travelling caught on an uneven paving stone as she approached, throwing her towards Penny and forcing them to embrace far more closely than either intended. She was bony as a starved child, thought Penny, as they pulled apart awkwardly and exchanged thin smiles. She smelled of lemon pith, sharp and bitter.

“Bye, then,” said Penny.

“Was it you?” asked John. He didn’t seem concerned in the slightest.

“No, it wasn’t! I didn’t go near their room, not since I delivered the fresh towels Sassie asked for, but that was yesterday morning.”

She wondered whether to mention the mysterious perfume, but then John said: “Poor old Simon.”

“What?” Poor old Simon, the successful entrepreneur with the stunning younger woman? Had her hearing gone now?

John was positively jaunty as he measured out coffee and filled the pot with water. “He poured it all out last night. He’s pining for his ex-wife and he’s taken a massive loss on his last deal. There’s not much left, and no doubt when Sassie finds out, she’ll be off permanently. I know her sort.”

“I thought you thought she was marvellous,’ said Penny.

“I was being nice, for Simon’s sake. He hasn’t had much luck lately.”

Penny sat down with relief. “She was so irritating,” she said.

“Not a woman of substance,” smiled John, reaching out for her.

“Like me,” she said sadly.

John bent his head and kissed her gently. “In all the best ways.”

“Three whole days left to ourselves,” said Penny happily.

She pottered into the sitting room and noticed a book had fallen off a shelf. It was an illustrated history of lavender growing and she opened it instead of putting it straight back. The first picture was a photograph of a house, this very house. A piece of paper covered in handwritten notes fluttered out. “Marthe Lincel, creator of perfumes,” Penny read, “was inspired by her childhood home, Les Genévriers. Lavande de Nuit, her most famous fragrance, was said to capture the spirit of Provence…”

Penny took the book outside and spent the whole day reading in the garden. The tranquillity and the books she dipped into were balm for her soul.

That night, she woke and smelled the perfume again. It was a soft warm caress all around her, and it was heavenly.

 

 

This is a story I wrote some years ago  for Woman and Home magazine in the UK, and it appears in the anthology The Coffee Shop Book Club. I posted it in short episodes over the course of last week on Instagram, as part of the Bookstagram Gala, and I thought I ought to post the whole story here in case anyone missed a bit. I hope any readers who know The Lantern and The Sea Garden enjoyed the nod to the setting and the characters who appear in them. 

 

My latest novel 300 Days of Sun is available in the UK for only £2.99 on Kindle and at all good retailers in the USA, including here on Amazon.com.

An old postcard from Céreste

To celebrate the paperback publication today of The Sea Garden, I'm taking you to Céreste, a quiet village at the eastern end of the Luberon, on an intriguing trail.

This charming backwater plays a crucial part in the middle section of my novel, where we renew acquaintance with Marthe Lincel, the perfumier who first appeared in The Lantern. Just up the road, the Vaucluse ends and the signs announce the department of Alpes-de-Haute-Provence. In real life, as The Sea Garden, Céreste was a Resistance stronghold during the Second World War, secret headquarters of "Captain Alexandre", the poet René Char, as I wrote here in a previous blog post.

A couple of years ago, while I was writing the novel, I found a stall selling old postcards at a market in Simiane-la-Rotonde. Naturally, I stopped to sift through the boxes marked with the names of places I knew, and pulled out this one of Céreste:

 

Now this may sound a bit crazy, but when I'm writing a book, I always look for signs that I'm on the right track. I'm sure there are plenty of people who will say that we see what we want to see, and it's all a lot of nonsense. They are probably right, but that doesn't stop me enjoying a nice moment of coincidence, synchronicity, call it what you will. But look at the name on the right: Monsieur Gabriel Brachet, Marseille. If you haven't read the book, I'm not giving anything away, but be sure to make a note of the first name. If you have read the book, I hope it gives you a pleasant frisson!

The words were written on July 23, 1931, and they're not terribly interesting - it seems to me they could well have been written to a child, as the sender urges "Gaby" to take care to fill in a form and to write with news of what he's been doing. The intriguing part is that the sender gives his own name, "Mr Et. Paul" - Etienne? - and address as the Château des Guis at St-Martin-de-Castillon.

St Martin de Castillon is another lovely, quiet village that sits opposite the ripples of the Great Luberon, a few kilometres along the road and higher in the hills than Céreste. I know it well, but I'd never heard of the Château des Guis. Of course, I bought the postcard and scoured a large scale map when I got home. I couldn't find the château. An internet search found nothing, either.

But I never like to give up...and when I was looking at the my files of photos and background info the other week, wondering what I could use for my blog, I remembered this postcard - and this time, with a bit more online detective work, I managed to find the property in St-Martin. It is a grand old residence, though it's not called a château but a "bastide", which is denotes an imposing old house, possibly once fortified.

And here it is, The Bastide Les Guis:

 

 

The Bastide Les Guis is even available to rent, and there are details and more pictures on the Janssens Immobilier site and on Made in Provence. 

Marthe Lincel at Manosque

 

"The war had not yet begun when Marthe Lincel went to the
perfume factory for the first time. It was a visit organised by
the school for the blind in Manosque. If anyone were ever to
ask her, she would tell him without hesitation that it was the
day that changed her life.

She was eighteen years old, almost ready to leave the school,
when she took her first careful steps towards the long table
in the blending room at the Distillerie Musset, her hands in
the hands of other girls, one in front and one behind. The
girls walked in concert down from the school, through gusts
of dung from the stables, past the ramparts of the ancient
teardrop-shaped town, on past incense from the church and
into the tree-lined boulevard des Tilleuls. At the door to the
shop, a bell tinkled, and moments later they seemed to enter
the very flowering of lavender."

                                                        from The Sea Garden

 

The tree-lined boulevards of Manosque in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence still encircle the old town, linking its fortified gateways - one on the north side, one on the south - that date from the fourteenth century. The planes and limes cast welcome shade over the pavements, for even in this early in the year, the light is searing and on a cloudless day the heat can be intense. The gnarled branches and green leaves make a quintessentially French picture.

 

The fictional Distillerie Musset, in The Sea Garden, is situated on just such a street. It's not a grand shop front, but it has an enticing display of perfumes and soaps in the window and a presence on one of the main shopping boulevards. At the rear, accessed from the narrow lanes of the ancient town, is the courtyard and manufacturing shed. The entrance to this part of the business is discreet, also dappled by a venerable tree, rather like this:

 

 

                                   "In the blending room at the Distillerie Musset in town,

Marthe held a glass vial to her nose: a distillation of violet. She

breathed in slowly until it seemed for those few moments the

air was reduced to a powdery sweet- sharpness. Over the months

since then she had experimented with other ingredients to

intensify the fragrance, but now the addition of spicy acacia

wood had deepened its distinctive sweetness (the scent that

would always recall that first propitious visit to the Mussets)

to capture its shaded woodland origins and the shy purple petals

in the first shafts of spring sunshine." 

As many of you know, Marthe Lincel first appeared as a character in The Lantern, but seen only through the perspective of others. Writing about her in the third-person-intimate (in which the story unfolds only through the viewpoint of one character) was a particular challenge, because she is blind. Her story had to be told through other senses but the visual, and from her memories of sight as a child. In the event, I found it easier that I thought, given that I am normally a markedly visual writer.

Others will judge whether I have succeeded, but I found it hugely interesting and a spur to my own perception of certain circumstances. Of course, there is a certain irony in setting the scene in this way by posting these photographs, but the reading of a book has a great deal to do with the creation of pictures in the mind, and as a reader myself I always fascinated to see - and hear and smell and touch - the places that inspire books.

The sight of lavender

 

Marthe’s head was brimming with new pictures: the fields of lavender at Valensole, all the subtle grades of blue and purple; the way twilight melted them all into one; the precise hues of the liquid distilled from each plant, the shape and colour of the bottles, and a new understanding of the surroundings where she was learning her craft. Just as plant variations were bred together to create new hybrids - like the lavandin from the delicate wild lavender - this was what she did with the descriptions her sister had supplied; she grafted them on to the sights she remembered from childhood and reinvigorated them.
                                                                   from The Lavender Field

I was sent a video link at the weekend by Frederic Vercammen, a beautifully photographed short film (very short: only a minute long) of lavender in Provence, with a meditative soundtrack. But before I could put it up here, by strange chance I ended up in A&E on Sunday night with a nastily scratched cornea. I must have scraped my eye with a contact lens. It was extremely painful and I could see very little.

Almost two days later, the eye is on the mend, but I'll have to wear my glasses for the next two weeks, which I never find very easy as the vision just isn't as sharp. So I'm blundering around, half the time without glasses as that is, perversely, more relaxing. It seems rather appropriate to give the link to Frederic's video here, with an extract from Marthe's section of The Sea Garden - and now that I've put my glasses on again I can see the lavender photo I uploaded is the one that shows tiny white snails clinging to the flowers.

Click here for a lavender interlude by Frederic Vercammen.

Knowing when to let go

    "The shepherd’s body was found up on the steep slopes where the lavender made its last wild clutches at the mountain peak.

    Each year the sheep were moved across the high meadows above the lavender fields. Here men still adhered to the old ways: hardy men with gnarled and twisted limbs as if they had been carved by the same winds as the rock sculptures.

   One of them was the shepherd Pineau. Alone under the blue citadel of the sky, he guided his flock from one ancient stone borie to the next. All the farmers knew him: Old Pineau in his ragged clothes was part of the landscape when the great surge in lavender growing for the perfume industry had begun, when the Mussets and others began staining the slopes purple. The shepherd was a man who knew every stone and tree of the ridges, a man who had seemed part of nature: part mountain, part stream, part animal, living his life by the turn of the seasons, solitary with his sheep, walking from rocky ledge to pasture, valley to plateau as they fed. He sang as he went, songs that had been sung for centuries.

   That summer day in 1943, when small puffs of his flock broke away and drifted in lazy clouds down the hill, the lavender farmers knew something was wrong. In the uplands men and women had always relied on one another. They went up looking for him."
                                                                                    from The Sea Garden

No sooner had I started to immerse myself in research for a new novel last week, than the copy edits on the book to be published next summer arrived on my desk and I had to put the notebook away to re-focus on the previous story.

Quite a good thing, I think, to have started to move on from the completed work. I'm sure it sharpens the critical facilities. Sometimes, when I've spent too much time continuously a manuscript, it feels as if I can't see the wood for the trees, or the sense for the words on the page. The terror at the copy-editing stage is in wanting to change everything, and I'm sure there are authors who give in to temptation.

The art is doing enough, but knowing when to let go. Now is not the time for wholesale rewrites but for trust in yourself and your primary editor, and the work that has already been done.

A tiny glimpse inside The Sea Garden, then. I chose this extract because I know many of you enjoyed the lavender sequences in The Lantern and this gives a flavour of the link between the two novels. I hope it's not too misleading, though: the new book as a whole is not a prequel, but one section does relate the story of Marthe Lincel as a young woman and how exactly she became a perfume maker. And it gives me a chance to post one of the lavender photos I took in the summer! 

The Next Big Thing

Twelfth Night and the festivities are officially at an end. Another retreat behind closed shutters, then, (here's the first) for some renewed hard work on the new book. But there’s just time to answer the questions posed by The Next Big Thing, which gives writers a chance to open up their current manuscript.

I was tagged by Vanessa Couchman, a freelance writer living in France. She also writes short stories which have been published in anthologies and is currently writing a novel set in Corsica. A member of Writers Abroad, she blogs with brio as Vanessa France at Life on La Lune. If you love south-west France, its history, architecture and daily life, you’ll be entranced.

Here goes with my answers:

What is the working title of your next book?

The Night Flight.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

I happened across a poignant newspaper story about the excavation of a crashed plane in a field, and the archaeology involved to discover more about it. It was almost certainly a World War II plane – but who were the crew on this fatal flight? Some seventy years afterwards, time is running out to solve many such mysteries across Europe as the war generation passes away; the witnesses too, most of whom were children at the time.

Although I began the novel with this scene in mind, it probably won’t make it into the book. The story that evolved from this first idea took on a life of its own and placed the characters in different settings so that this scene became an awkward complication. But I reserve the right to change my mind.

What genre does your book fall under?

Romantic suspense with a strong sense of place and well-researched history.

Which actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

Let's pencil in Olivier Martinez as the Resistance hero and Rosamund Pike (cool, intelligent English toughness) as the young garden designer, unnerved by the unexpected darkness of the world she has entered. And we can always find something for Dan Stevens.

What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?

On the Mediterranean island of Porquerolles, the restoration of a garden is key to the secret lives that cast a long shadows over the present.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

I am extremely lucky to be represented by Stephanie Cabot at The Gernert Company in New York and by Araminta Whitley at Lucas Alexander Whitley in London. The novel will be published by HarperCollins in the USA and Orion in the UK.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

I’m not there yet but as a general rule of thumb it takes me about a year - excluding breaks for consultation with agents and editors - before the first draft is ready for submission.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

William Boyd’s Restless, Sebastian Faulks’ A Possible Life, Rachel Hore’s A Gathering Storm.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

I have long been fascinated by stories of clandestine daring in World War II. Our part of Provence was a big Resistance stronghold where complicated networks operated across isolated farming communities, many in liaison with British agents and pilots, a courageous partnership that is far from forgotten today. The poet René Char wrote some of his most beautiful and heartbreaking prose-poems about the fine line between life and death in those dangerous times, and a memoire La Nuit d’Alexandre (his code name was Capitaine Alexandre).

But my novel – structured in three distinct parts – is set in wartime London and Sussex too, showing another side of the operations and other lives intersecting with these events. Secrecy was all, along with the immense difficulties involved in communications and maintaining contact.

What else about the book might pique the reader’s interest?

One of the three sections centres on a character from The Lantern, Marthe Lincel the blind sister with the gift for perfumery. What really happened to her at the perfume factory in the lavender fields of wartime Manosque, omitted from Bénédicte's narrative?


My picks for The Next Big Thing:

Essie Fox is the acclaimed author of The Somnambulist and Elijah’s Mermaid, both dark Victorian novels. Before her success as a writer she worked as an illustrator, which clearly shows in her wondrous blog, The Virtual Victorian, Essie Fox’s Facts, Fancies and Fabrications.

Helen Smith is a novelist and playwright who lives in London. She is the author of cult bestsellers Alison Wonderland, The Miracle Inspector and Being Light. She’s a shrewd observer who makes being very funny look easy. Here’s Helen's writing blog.

Ann Sharples is a writer and artist in Spain and is the author of the Violet Jelly books for readers aged 8-10. Her Wordstitcher blog is a delight, full of gorgeous photos and well-chosen words.

Karen Wojcik Berner has been a writer, editor and magazine editor for twenty-five years, and puts up fantastic posts about grammar on her Bibliophilic Blather blog. As a defiantly indie author near Chicago, she is the author of the sassy Bibliophiles series about a fictional suburban Classics Book Club.

Forever Ambre

Perfume news: Ambre is back! A few years ago the Provence beauty product company L’Occitane discontinued their Ambre scent, to universal dismay. Well, maybe not universal, but dismay was certainly widespread. I made a point of asking about it in every L’Occitane shop I entered – in France and England, just to add my voice – and the response was always the same: I wasn’t the only customer asking for its return.

We missed this rich, beguiling amber fragrance with its wonderful sweet warmth and lingering caramel comfort. What had once been an everyday spritz, especially in winter, was now being guarded and used like a rare essence on special days.

It’s a scent that begins with top notes of bergamot and white flowers then quickly brings in the sweet tobacco of tonka bean and labdanum. The labdanum is the key – no, not laudanum, the opiate of past poets – labdanum is the sticky brown resin derived from the cistus shrub Cistus ladanifer, a type of rock rose. Even growing in the garden, this plant releases a wonderful scent, sweet yet citrus, and instantly reminiscent of warm Mediterranean evenings.

After about an hour on the skin, the base notes of amber, vanilla and cedarwood come into play. From there on in, it’s all musky wood and honeyed earthiness with more than a hint of maple syrup.  This is a scent that lasts but manages never to cloy. It develops into slightly oriental spice and caramel.

Centuries ago, amber perfume was produced from ambergris, the origins of which were very much less appealing. Ambergris was a waxy substance produced in the digestive system of sperm whales and excreted. As it aged it developed a distinctive heavy sweet scent. It was also, for obvious reasons, extremely rare and expensive.

But in Provence, where the cistus grows wild, are ideal conditions to produce a labdanum substitute for ambergris. It could be made by boiling the leaves and twigs, or as an essential oil extracted by steam distillation.

My novel The Lantern and the novella The Lavender Field have their roots in the use of local plants in the perfume industry in Provence and I have L’Occitane to thank not only for returning Ambre to its shelves but for a small but vital detail that provided inspiration.

The idea of a blind perfumer, Marthe Lincel, came from the realization that there were strips of Braille on the packaging used by beauty product brand L’Occitane en Provence, based at Manosque. In 1997 the company created the foundation Provence dans tous les Sens (All the Senses of Provence) to introduce visually-impaired children to the world of perfume creation. In the novel, Marthe finds her true talent as a perfume “nose” after a visit to the Distillerie Musset from the school for the blind she attends in Manosque, although this episode takes place in the 1930s.

For most of the 20^th century in this region, there was a gradual erosion of traditional farming as young people moved to the towns to seek work in the new industries and factories. The Luberon valley is celebrated for its fruit production – from cherries, apricots, peaches and melons, to apples and pears – and the local specialty is candied fruits, produced on an industrial scale.

The fight to survive was intense for those left behind on the hill farms in a region that was poor until the advent of mass tourism. In The Lantern, Pierre - the only brother - takes off for better-paid work, Bénédicte struggles on at the farmstead Les Genévriers while Marthe finds increasing success in Paris.

But how did Marthe really make the leap from a small distillery making scent and soap in the back hills of Provence to Paris? What did her signature perfume Lavande de Nuit mean to her? This is the story told in The Lavender Field…and which will provide a surprising link to the next full-length novel in progress.