White lilies arrive
Opinions bloom before tea—
Good heavens . . . she’s here.
The interview with Fleur de Lalita produced perhaps the strongest opening line the Living Library has yet recorded:
GAH!!!! WHEW! OLD LADY FLORAL OUT OF CONTROL!
White flowers.
Everywhere.
Huge white lilies.
Jasmine.
Paperwhites. (You know, the cute little white flowers on the long stems that appear every spring. You put them in the bathroom . . . and an hour later you open the door and nearly faint from fragrance overload.)
Not politely entering the room.
Occupying it.
This perfume had absolutely no inside voice.
I admired its confidence.
I just wished I could have done so from a considerably greater distance.
During the drydown, my notes became increasingly less analytical.
They mostly consisted of things like:
“Still floral.”
“HOW is it MORE floral?”
“Dear heavens . . .”
Ordinarily, that would have been the end of the story.
This scent is not for me.
Relationship complete.
Except . . .
. . . something unusual happened.
Instead of introducing itself . . .
. . . the fragrance introduced someone else.
She lives, I’m convinced, at Bottom Lodge, Norfolk.
A gracious old manor house with slightly uneven stone steps and an immaculate herbaceous border.
She is always dressed for luncheon.
Always.
Pearls.
Fresh lipstick.
Patent leather handbag.
Ready for a martini with exactly five olives.
Never four.
Certainly never six.
She has opinions.
Not unpleasant ones.
Merely . . .
. . . well-developed.
One imagines accidentally asking what she thinks about the Vicar’s restoration of the village church and emerging forty-five minutes later with a brain full of medieval pigments.
She looks . . .
. . . rather a lot.
Which means many people quietly avoid eye contact.
This, I suspect, is their loss.
Because here’s the extraordinary thing.
The Duchess isn’t actually interested in talking about herself.
She’s interested in talking about . . .
. . . whatever you’ve brought with you.
Conversationally . . . or carefully cupped in two tiny damp hands.
A child appears carrying a salamander.
The Duchess stops mid-sentence.
The pince-nez rise immediately.
“Good gracious . . . “
A beat.
“. . . what a lovely beastie. Tell me about it.”
Not because she knows anything about salamanders.
But because she would very much like to hear about this one.
Adults tend to imitate her for a cheap laugh.
They imitate the lilies.
The pearls.
The martinis.
The opinions.
The quick, decisive way she moves her torpedo-shaped body over her tiny, black patent-shod feet (with surprising speed for someone her age—unless, of course, you know her history. Which no one ever does).
The way she says,
“Jaaaaaames . . . “
The children though.
They never imitate her in that slightly cruel way that adults use to make themselves “Better than.”
Children understand her immediately.
They instinctively recognize something adults often mistake for eccentricity.
She isn’t performing curiosity.
She’s practicing it. She listens. She looks you in the eye.
If you respectfully place something genuinely interesting before her . . .
. . . you have her complete attention.
Not indulgently.
Not theatrically.
Seriously.
Children know the difference.
It also explains why nobody seems to know very much about the Duchess herself.
Everyone assumes she’s an open book.
She isn’t.
Not because she’s secretive.
Because she has no interest in the topic. (If asked, she’d wave her pince-nez and say with a smile: “Oh, I’m just a boring old woman. Tell me about that Roman boundary stone on the back of your property.”)
No one knows where that remarkable posture came from.
No one knows about the ballroom dancing blue ribbons.
No one knows about the county tennis championships.
Not because she’s hiding those things.
Because, given the choice, she’d much rather hear about that stone.
One afternoon, someone who has heard she’s a Duchess—and therefore assumes she’ll be impressed by achievement—begins listing accomplishments while standing over her as she sits comfortably in an overstuffed chair with her martini and her Yorkie.
Committees.
Awards.
Titles.
Professional distinctions.
The Duchess listens politely.
Suppresses what may be the world’s most gracious yawn behind one white glove.
Then, while lamenting the difficulty of finding good staff, he casually mentions that the gardener uncovered traces of runes while repairing the old garden wall.
The pince-nez fly upward.
“What?”
Not:
“Good heavens . . .”
Not:
“Really?”
Just:
“What?”
It suddenly becomes obvious.
Don’t mistake autobiography for conversation.
Somewhere around this point I realized I was no longer writing fragrance notes.
In fact, I hadn’t been for quite a while.
The perfume itself had quietly disappeared.
(Well . . . not literally. It was still making its presence abundantly known. But the conversation had moved elsewhere.)
The Duchess remained.
And with her, in the background, came The Vicar.
Gardeners.
Children.
Roman boundary stones.
Salamanders.
And, quietly, Mr. Nigel Pembroke, Senior Valet.
Nigel, it turned out, was married.
Margaret (“Maggie,” but only to Nigel) had apparently been there all along.1
One sentence later, they had a history.
Another sentence, a marriage.
Another, sixty years together.
The fragrance hadn’t become a character.
It had become a portal.
When I first began this fragrance project, I thought I was cataloguing bottles.
Instead, I seem to have stumbled into an Edwardian village.
One person introduced another.
Then another.
People who had never previously met suddenly knew one another.
The Duchess knew Nigel.
Nigel knew Margaret.
Margaret knew the Vicar.
The Vicar, I suspect, knew everyone.
The relationships formed independently of the fragrances that first revealed them.
That’s when I realized the fragrances weren’t creating these people.
They were simply introducing me to them.
The Duchess wasn’t the perfume.
The perfume merely opened the gate.
The fragrance itself eventually received a <.
It had finished its work with me.
Not because it wasn’t extraordinary.
Quite the opposite.
It had accomplished something remarkable.
It introduced me to someone I suspect I’ll visit for years.
The Duchess, however . . .
. . . never received a classification at all.
She simply took up residence.
And immediately began introducing me to everyone else.
She reminded me of something I hadn’t thought deeply about before.
The opposite of self-importance isn’t modesty.
It’s curiosity.
The kind that raises the pince-nez not to inspect you . . .
. . . . but to better see whatever fascinating thing you’ve just brought into her orbit, whether conversationally . . .
. . . or in your slightly damp little palm.
And if she were standing beside me while I write this, I suspect she’d read the entire essay with polite patience before lowering the pages, saying,
“Very nice.”
A beat.
The pince-nez would rise.
“Now then . . .”
“. . . tell me about that salamander.”
Field Notes
Fleur de Lalita (Dusita, Pissara Umavijani, 2018)
Official Notes: White Lily, Jasmine, Galbanum, Magnolia, Ylang-Ylang, May Rose; Ambrette; Ambergris, Sandalwood, Madagascar Vanilla, Tonka Bean.
Living Library Notes: An unapologetically magnificent white floral with extraordinary performance and absolutely no inside voice. Less a journey than a portrait. It never seemed remotely interested in becoming something else.
Disposition: <
Not because it wasn’t exceptional.
Because it had finished its work with me.
It introduced me to the Floral Duchess Dowager of Bottom Lodge, Norfolk.
She, however, appears to have settled in permanently.
- NOTE: If you look at the image that Chad generated way back in the Characters post, Nigel had a wedding ring, and his caption stated “married to Margaret.” So – Chad knew all along. ↩︎