The Green Flash (7 page)

I went round to the road side and cut the wire connecting the offside headlamp. I got a piece about three feet long which was enough to connect the battery to the coil, then shut the bonnet and climbed in. The police will sometimes stop you if the headlamp on the driver's side is not working, seldom or never if it's the inside light.

Then I couldn't find the solenoid button, which operates the starter. Or maybe the car was too new a model.

A couple of lolloping teenagers were passing. I got out and offered them a pound note.

‘My starter seems to have jammed. Think you could give me a push?'

‘Right, mate. Come on, Ern.'

With their help, I nosed gently forward and engaged the gear. The motor fired and I waved my thanks and eased out into the traffic.

I drove the car back to London, finding standards of comparison with Armitage's BMW. They were both 2000s; and there were minuses and plusses on both sides. Patriotism will not allow me to say which I found the better.

I left the car about a quarter of a mile from my new pad in Fulham and walked home. It was not until I got in and switched on the light and made myself a coffee that I began to ask myself why I had behaved like this. It wasn't even logical. If you're going to bend the law you surely have to calculate the percentages. Any sensible man does. So I hadn't behaved like a sensible man today. Was I batty, I asked myself? Probably a bit. But sometimes the temptation really is too great. Maybe my father had had a bit of the same complaint, same need to get the blood going. But he had taken to drink. Drink was never my problem, not even my solace.

I

John Carreros was a square-faced chap with leathery cheeks and a sensitive mouth. Eyebrows and ears-sprouted grey hair, and horn-rimmed spectacles hung loosely over a hawk nose. He was old, and not as tall as he looked sitting down. He grabbed my outstretched hand.

‘Mr Abden. I have been hearing things about you. Welcome to our little firm. I hope we shall be happy with you.'

Apart from one or two racing drivers, he had the hardest hands of any man I'd met. Not that he tried to emphasize his masculinity by gripping too hard. But you couldn't miss the inversion of the last sentence.

‘Thank you,' I said, ‘I'll do my best to fit in.'

‘I understand you have a nose.'

‘They tell me I can smell better than most people.'

‘I would like to test it. Perhaps you will come down to Isleworth.'

‘Surely. But of course I'm not a chemist, you know.'

‘Who needs a chemist? Do you play bridge?'

‘What? The card game? Not in office hours!'

He laughed. ‘But out of them?'

‘Yes, a little.' I had once thought of trying to make my living by it.

‘Good. Good. My wife – she will not play. She calls it systematized frittering.'

‘Most of life is, one way or another, isn't it?'

‘Ah, the philosopher.' He shoved his heavy spectacles up his nose. ‘A philosopher and a pessimist in one so young. I like that. I was a pessimist at your age.'

‘And now, Mr Carreros?'

‘Ah, now I am a fatalist. What will be will be. It saves a lot of worry, eh?'

‘It's a rich man's indulgence,' I said.

He gave me a sharp look. ‘Perhaps more truly an old man's. When one looks back on one's life and observes the fine threads of chance and mischance which have shaped one's destiny … It is impossible to suppose one is in personal control. Do you play Acol?'

It was the new thing just then, superseding many of the old systems. ‘ Yes.'

‘We must have a game sometime.'

I wondered what stakes he played for, and thought of. introducing him to one or two of my friends; but that might queer my pitch before I began. That would have been even stupider than joyriding in other people's cars just for the hell of it

II

Jerry told me of this mishap that had befallen his friend Armitage. They were all drinking in the bar after their second round at Cooden when the police rang him. They accused him of having parked illegally in Bexhill, and said they had driven his car away. They had found his address and telephoned his wife, who gave them the Cooden number. They seemed reluctant at first to believe his story that he had parked at the Cooden Golf Club, their view being that no one would steal the car for so short a trip.

Jerry said: ‘Did you find your girl in Bexhill, David?'

‘Yes. She was there.'

He grunted and fingered his tie. ‘Did you – er – take a taxi?'

‘Of course. It was too far to walk.'

‘I just wondered.'

‘Wondered what? Oh …' My eyes opened. ‘ Do you think I would be that much of a screwball? What would be the point?'

‘No, no. I see that. It was just the odd coincidence.'

‘What coincidence?'

He looked uncomfortable. ‘Well. You know.'

‘No, I don't know. I'll bet there were plenty of golfers at the club who live in Bexhill.'

‘Ah, yes, I'm sure.'

‘But we don't know who did it, do we? Some passing hitch-hiker maybe. Anyway Armitage left his keys in the car, didn't you say? Must have been an ass to do that.'

‘Yes,' said Jerry. ‘ Yes.'

III

When I actually joined the firm in the first week in January, Alice Huntington was delegated to show me round. She was this crone of about forty-five who had the skin of a girl of twenty. Yet somehow she looked no younger for it. She dressed in frocks of heavy silk and was always gracious and smiling, as if someone had cut her out to be the Queen Mother. Clearly she didn't like me and suspected me of being groomed to take over her job. I went out of my way to be genuinely nice to her: butter wouldn't melt, etc.; ingenuous questions; holding open the door; handsome young man escorting handsome young woman. Perhaps the thing that annoyed me most about her was the way things dangled and jangled, bracelets, earrings, brooches.

The firm was amazingly compact after Yardley's. Exclusiveness on a shoestring. The laboratory wasn't bad, but any other machinery or gadgetry in the factory was well worn and out of date. Two nice new delivery vans tastefully advertising Shona. Really not much else.

Although I saw the Isleworth factory right away it was not until March that John Carreros had me over for a day and ‘tried me out', as he called it.

As I suppose most people know, no ‘House' makes its own perfume entirely. Not only the ingredients but usually the almost finished product comes from the great chemical firms. You don't exactly scream for a ton of
Dolly Dream
or whatever the perfume is called; but you order a ton of the already blended essences that make it up. What you do in your own laboratory is really quite little; but it puts the finishing touches on what is supplied to you.

In our laboratory there were two bathrooms, two lavatories, two washing machines and a variety of other gadgets that helped our chemists to test out their new ideas. Beyond these quarters were a couple of small smelling rooms, empty except for a table and a couple of chairs and a few Shona photos. John Carreros installed me in one of these, and a girl brought in a collection of smelling papers, each one prepared with a 1 percent solution of different aromatics, and I was invited to identify them or describe them. I said one smelled of chocolate, another of spice, a third of lemonade, a fourth of margarine, a fifth of machine oil, a sixth of lavender, etc. It was all nonsense, really. If I was going to be of any genuine use to this successful but one-horse firm it was in the realm of expansion and advertising and total sales, not because my nose was above average sensitive.

However, it seemed to please old Carreros. He grunted his way through his notes, like a heavy dog scratching for a bone, and then he asked me if I could identify what the perfumes were. I got three: Vanillin for the chocolate, Citral for the lemonade, oil of lavender for the lavender.

‘Good,' he said. ‘Good. Number two you said was spicy. What sort of spicy? Meat – soup – cake?'

‘More like cinnamon.'

‘That is what it is. Now tell me, does any one of the others remind you of fresh green leaves that you have just rubbed in the fingers?'

‘Number five maybe.'

‘Right. Hydroxycitronellal. Interesting that you should think of machine oil. The margarine smell, as you called it, was methyl heptine carbonate. Now let us try some more difficult ones.'

We went on to balsam of Peru, oil of vertivert, geraniol, oil of bergamot. I had a shot at comparing the two lots of smelling papers, arranging them into groups.

Then he said: ‘Now we must stop for a while. I will have some water brought for you to drink. The sense of smell gets tired far more quickly than any other sense. Do you smoke?'

‘Thanks.'

‘No, no, I am not offering you one now. I mean you would do well to give up smoking; it destroys the finer senses.'

He began to talk. I sat back and sipped water and thought how difficult it must be for him to shave, with all those nooks and crannies about his mouth and chin.

‘I am sure, David, you will have learned to take no notice of trade journals, textbooks, published formulas; because no good firm will ever divulge the whole of its knowledge to an inquirer. The most essential ingredient of all is secrecy.'

‘And at the end of it all,' I said, ‘more than half of a success is not content but psychology.'

Carreros shoved up his heavy glasses. ‘ Madame, I think, tends to underrate the chemists' work at times. It is an inescapable fact that it is from the small laboratories such as ours that there have issued some of the finest perfumes on sale in Europe today.'

It was time for lunch, but he didn't seem to notice. I was hungry. I began to perceive that, whatever Mme Shona thought about her business, John Carreros was the dedicated technician.

He was going boringly on about Dryad, the research, the experimentation, the fine ingredients, etc. I interrupted him by saying: ‘Yes, I'm sure. But you have to face facts. I've been working them out. A half-ounce bottle of Dryad perfume costs £14. How much of that is ingredients? You know as well as I do: probably about seventy pence. It's not a large part for your chemists to play, is it.'

He stiffened. ‘You think it overpriced? But, David, you know well that that sort of percentage is the norm. For every pound the public pays for Dryad, how does it go?'

‘You tell me.'

‘Do I need to? Of every one hundred pence the retailer takes forty-five. That I agree with you is excessive, but we cannot change that without a total upheaval of the retail world. So we are left with fifty-five pence. Is that it?'

‘That is it.'

‘Of that, thirty or thirty-one pence goes in advertising, promotion, overheads, administration, particularly the great cost of maintaining and paying the girls in the big public stores. Fourteen pence is roughly the cost of the making of the perfume, of which about ninepence is spent on the packaging and, as you truly remark, only fivepence on the ingredients. Shocking! On every pound the woman buyer lays down she only receives five-pennyworth of perfume. But what is our profit? Tenpence. That is correct, is it not?'

‘About that, I'd reckon.'

‘And is a ten per cent profit before tax so much? And without the skill of the chemists, without their strict quality control, their extraordinary care, it can quickly turn into a heavy loss. Let me tell you, five years ago a mistake was made in our laboratory in the blending. When that is done there is nothing to save the consignment, nothing to do with it but pour it away. We made a sixty thousand pounds loss on that one consignment – half our profits for the year were gone.'

John Carreros, I decided, was a man without, humour, and a man with a mission – the mission being to please women, to enhance their beauty, to preserve their skin; to be a public benefactor – at a price – to half the human race.

Even now, for heaven's sake, he was not done. He rang the bell and the girl came in again with a new set of smelling papers.

‘Just tell me what you think of these, David.' He stretched his legs indulgently and sat back in his chair. ‘Take your time.'

I held the first paper up and sniffed it. ‘Jasmine. But something else.'

‘It's benzyl alcohol. Very good. It is a delicate scent, is it not?'

I tried the second. ‘Dog dirt,' I said.

There was silence. He adjusted his spectacles again.

‘That is musk,' he said. ‘ Or a composition of musk … Go on.' I took the next paper and smelled gently. ‘Cat's piss,' I said. Another silence. John Carreros was looking at me. ‘And Number

Four?'
I tried again. ‘ Lavatory paper after use.'
After a few moments he climbed to his feet. ‘I think you have

done enough for today. It is time for lunch. I cannot unfortunately

lunch with you as I have another appointment.'

IV

It was two or three days after this that Shona called me into her office on some unimportant routine question. After a couple of minutes she said: I hear you have been to the factory with John.'

‘Yes.'

‘He is pleased with your nose. But not so pleased with your general attitude.'

‘Oh?'

‘Why did you try to – what is the vulgar phrase? – to take the mickey out of him?'

‘Is that how he sees it?'

‘Oh, come. Don't fence with me, David.'

‘At the time I happened to be getting hungry.'

‘Rubbish.'

After a minute I said: ‘He takes it all too seriously. The sermon began to drag.'

‘So you just felt like being offensive.'

‘Not at all. If you ask silly questions you get silly answers.'

‘It is not your business here to be silly.'