The Perfume Collector

‘Not really.’

Sis turned on her. ‘Oh, they’re just the worst! For example, they believe in common property. Do you know what that means? What I have would belong to you too and vice versa. Isn’t that barbaric?’

Eva thought about Sis’s bolt of Irish lace. ‘I guess so.’

‘Otto says he believes in blacks marrying whites, white people not marrying at all, everyone living in communes and the entire overthrow of democracy.’

Eva tried to imagine a black man marrying a white woman. What colour would their children be?

‘And real communists, the ones in Russia, have no religion at all. It’s outlawed. There’s not a church for thousands of miles!’

‘What do they do on Sunday mornings?’

‘Nothing. No God, no heaven, no hell. I mean, that’s just asking for trouble.’ She sighed deeply. ‘He’s a Fallen Man, my friend. Forsaken. He only stays here because they won’t let him back into the Continental on account of the oyster incident.’

Eva’s eyes widened. ‘What’s the oyster incident?’

‘Believe me,’ Sis waggled a finger in Eva’s face, ‘you don’t want to know! But I’ll tell you this, the young lady involved was very offended.’

They’d reached the end of the corridor, where the service trolleys were kept.

‘You may have to clean his room,’ Sis continued, ‘but don’t talk to him. And don’t let him tell you about any of his ideas.’

‘OK.’ Eva pulled out her cart and adjusted her cap again, which kept falling down about her ears.

A jumper in room 1129 and an Enemy of the State in 313.

She was definitely going to need extra towels.

For the first week, Eva hardly saw Mr Lambert. Then one day she noticed him locking his room, heading down the hallway.

He was distracted; head down, in a hurry. He looked like any other middle-aged man; of average height, not fat or too slim, brown hair. His gait was awkward, as if one leg faltered, but it appeared not to bother him.

She stared hard.

He didn’t look fallen. Or did he?

‘Good morning, Mr Lambert.’

She didn’t know quite why she did it. And she said it softly, under her breath.

He hadn’t heard her.

So she said it again, a little louder.

‘Good morning, Mr Lambert.’

(Sis was going to kill her.)

Stopping, he turned and looked straight at her. He didn’t have the eager enthusiasm of an American but seemed to weigh up whether he would speak or not.

‘Good morning.’ His voice was low and cultured and he tipped his hat, ever so slightly, before heading down the hallway again.

Eva watched, terrified and thrilled, as he turned the corner.

He had eyes so blue they were almost navy and a thin dark moustache just like John Gilbert. Sis had neglected to mention he was handsome.

Eva let herself into his room.

There was that particular stillness which pervades after a flurry of activity; a palpable sense of energy settling. She walked into the bathroom; the air was still damp and humid, smelling of soap, warm flesh and aftershave.

Picking up the wet towels from the floor, she washed the dark hairs from the drain, wiped everything down, arranged his shaving kit and toothbrush at right angles on either side of the sink. Eva collected his laundry, retrieved stray socks from under the armchairs, and smoothed the rumpled sheets of his bed where he’d lain only twenty minutes before, propped up on one arm, reading the morning newspaper and drinking coffee. Was it her imagination or were they still almost warm?

She felt a closeness to him she didn’t feel for any of the other guests. A proximity that mimicked intimacy.

There were extra glasses in his room, one smeared in lipstick marks, a cheap waxy shade of bright pink. What kind of man wanted to look at that on a girl’s face?

Eva put the glasses in her cart and took out fresh ones. But as she dusted and hoovered, she spotted nothing more damning – no strange leaflets with slogans calling for the overthrow of Western civilisation, no foreign newspapers or telegrams in other languages; not even the odd book in Russian.

Eva opened the window to let air in and turned round. The room was clean.

Still, she lingered just a bit longer than she needed to.

According to Sis, men were both stupid and dangerous, in much the same way that poison ivy is one of God’s worst ideas and all too easy to catch. But there was clearly a world of difference between Pots and Pans’s high-heeled shoes and the refined corruptions of Mr Lambert.

Fallen women were common; all you had to do was have sex before you were married to qualify. But for a man to fall required much more – a deliberate turning away from God, a conscious decision. Such decisions were rare. Religious sloppiness was easy. Rejection required moral and intellectual convictions.

For this reason, along with the way he tipped his hat and the unnatural blueness of his eyes, Eva decided that Mr Lambert was worthy of respect.

Paris, Spring, 1955 (#ulink_622a4b5d-96ea-5079-aa84-d996499156ab)

There was a chill in the air as they got out of Monsieur Tissot’s tiny red Citroën and walked across the park in the centre of the Place des Vosges, the oldest residential square in Paris. It was a vast, elegant enterprise, a triumph of early civic planning with an aesthetic unity rarely seen in a public structure. Imposing brick buildings bordered the central park on all sides, built over galleries which housed shops and restaurants.

Grace surveyed the symmetrically arranged park with its formal fountains, rows of thick, boxy yew trees and neat gravel paths. ‘This is very posh.’

‘Very posh indeed. It was first built in the early 1600s.’

‘I had no idea it would be so grand. It must be expensive.’

‘I believe the apartment was a gift.’

‘From whom?’

‘I understand that it’s been in the Hiver family for years.’

‘Is that usual?’ It struck Grace as particularly brazen to have the two worlds so closely intertwined. ‘I mean, to give a mistress a family property?’

‘The rich make their own rules.’