Shem-el-Nessim: An inspiration in perfume
PART TWO
“No, this was a woman. I can still smell her.”
The barber eyed his customer suspiciously. But although Tooprig had no idea what scent it was that the young woman had been wearing, it was on his nose sure enough. Towelling off his face and tipping the barber for his trouble, Tooprig resolved to follow her; her scent was so oriental and distinctive. Looking left, then right and back again, his eyes soon settled on the only woman within a plausible distance of the barber shop door. She was waiting to cross the road at the next junction: a tall, even willowy woman, with her raven hair very straight and quite short for the fashions.
He followed her at a safe distance as far as the eastern reaches of the city: south of Little Britain and north of Paternoster Row. At this point, Tooprig was even more fascinated by her scent than he was by the woman wearing it, and although she was some way ahead of him, from time to time wafts of it were borne on the breeze to tantalise his nostrils.
He pursued her towards St Paul’s Cathedral, across the junction of Newgate Street, just beyond the Alpine Club. She did not look back. Her gaze was fixed on her feet, but she was untroubled by the traffic and moved along swiftly. Her hair was inexplicably dark; it had a sable quality like a broad brush. She had limbs like the legs of a racehorse, though they were barely visible beneath her long coat; her walk was a study in poise.
At a side road, she half turned to make sure that she would not collide with any turning traffic and, in profile, her skin seemed so pale that it was almost luminous. She had slightly plump cheeks but appeared to have most attractive, widely set eyes. Her face was a harmony of curves and palenesses. There was no mistaking that she was a woman of means: fine-tailored clothes and the unmistakably clear complexion of one who has never toiled or hungered. There was a kind of middle-eastern turn to her features, as though her forebears might have hailed from the Orient, but then she also had something of the film star Louise Brooks as Lulu about her, Tooprig claimed. Her nose and lips were bud-like, although entirely without the upturned porcine quality he found so repellent in many supposedly well-bred English women.
It was on Newgate Street, at the corner of Ivy Lane, that the woman disappeared into the doorway of a large building that ran towards Paternoster Square. By the time Tooprig had reached it, the door had closed behind her. From without, the etched glass and dark wooden portico gave the place the look of a public house, but it was quiet within and, in any case, it was quite unthinkable that a woman of her obvious refinement would have entered an alehouse alone.
Tooprig had to step off the pavement and into the street in order to read the sign, “J. GROSSMITH & SON”, above the shop windows, but there was no mention of the business being conducted within.
The etched glass door opened with a gentle chime when he pushed against it and the rattle of the buses, cabs and coal trucks subsided as it closed behind him and he removed his hat. Inside, a display behind glass advertised what were apparently J. Grossmith & Son’s products: Phul-Nana Bouquet of Indian Flowers; Old Lavender Cottage; and White Fire fragrances, along with a range of sixpenny sachet, soap, face powders and dentifrice.
Behind the counter, a man with a balding head and a neatly waxed moustache closely eyed Tooprig, who found himself uncharacteristically overwhelmed; intimidated by the shelves, display cases, glass-stoppered bottles and brightly coloured advertising materials. “What can I do for you, sir?” asked the man, with the faintest hint of a foreign accent, as Tooprig reached the counter.
Tooprig hesitated, at a loss for words and feeling discomfited that he had entered the store with no plan in mind. “That woman who entered here, just before I did… I, er, she…”
“You must be mistaken, sir. You are our first customer this morning. We have just this minute opened, at nine o’clock.” The man nodded politely towards a clock set above the window, which indeed showed the time to be just after the hour. Tooprig was confused; perhaps he had chosen the wrong doorway, but it seemed unlikely. He looked around, trying to buy time as he considered what his next move might be. His gaze settled on another of the displays for perfume. It seemed an odd but perfect coincidence.
“If I were looking for a particular scent, for a lady, do you think it possible that you might carry it?” Tooprig asked, after regaining his composure.
The man smiled. “Do you know its name, sir? It’s highly likely that we would be able obtain it. Or, if you can describe it to me, I would be happy to assist you in blending a scent that matches your requirements.”
“I see.”
“We distil our own perfumes on the premises, sir, but we also retail a wide range of proprietary scents from other manufacturers. It’s unlikely that there is a single essential oil or blend of fragrances that has not crossed this counter at some point.”
“Well, I wouldn’t really know how to describe it to you,” Tooprig confessed. “It’s not a scent I have ever encountered before.”
The Grossmith assistant regarded Tooprig calmly and then introduced himself as Monsieur Duat. “Each scent has its own particular characteristics, its own olfactory notes and overtones. The combination of these makes each scent unique,” Duat explained. “Would you, for example, describe the scent you’re looking for as fresh and of a citrus nature, or perhaps something deeper and more musky?”
“I can only say that I felt it had a kind of oriental quality.”
“Well sir, that narrows it down a little. I shall be back in a moment.” The man disappeared into a back room of the shop. As he opened the door there was an industrious bubbling and hissing from beyond and Tooprig was left to browse for ten minutes among the display bottles.
Duat returned, carrying a lidded wooden box with drilled inserts, into which were set around twenty vials capped by rubber bulbs. From inside the lid of the box Duat retrieved some thin strips of what appeared to be blotting paper, onto which he siphoned a drop of perfume from three of the vials. Thereupon, Tooprig gradually succeeded in narrowing down the woman’s scent to something from the ‘amber’ fragrances: a blend of warmth and sensuality. The scent Tooprig was looking for drew its richness — or so Duat surmised — from the pungency of musk and vanilla. It was an exotic and spicy rather than a floral scent, but there was some other substance (perhaps a precious wood) that remained elusive even to the expert.
Duat suggested to Tooprig that he return the following day, and that in the meantime he would experiment with subtle variations by adding lighter, woody notes to his existing blends. As odd as it might seem, since entering the shop, Tooprig had almost forgotten about the woman and was now eager to have the mystery of her perfume solved as swiftly as possible. Nevertheless, he acquiesced to Duat’s request and agreed to return the following day, shortly after lunch.
The next day, Duat produced an elaborate cylindrical carton from beneath the counter and offered it to Tooprig. It was made in two interlocking parts of uneven lengths. The lid, which formed the upper two-thirds of the cylinder, was slotted over the lower part to conceal a gilt lining. Floral designs in pink intertwined with curlicues; abstract urn shapes repeated around the base; and large, blue stylised lettering with drop shadows spelled out the transverse words Shem-el-Nessim.
“I don’t know why I didn’t think of this yesterday. I feel certain that this is the scent you have been looking for, Mister Tooprig.” Duat dabbed a tiny quantity of the Shem-el-Nessim onto one of his blotting paper strips. Tooprig only needed to move his nose to around twelve inches from the strip of paper to ascertain that it was exactly the perfume that the woman had been wearing. It was quite remarkable: it was her very essence. Duat was obviously a master parfumier, a veritable alchemist in fragrances, to be able to identify a perfume from the clues provided by a modest neophyte.
Tooprig tried to persuade Duat to let him know Shem-el-Nessim’s formula, for he found it impossible to pinpoint its characteristics in any useful way (they seemed to shift according to his mood), but Duat would say only that Shem-el-Nessim’s recipe was protected and “registered in all the leading countries of the world”. Tooprig purchased as much of the perfume as seemed judicious in a single transaction, as he was wary that Duat might consider him unhinged; which, it transpired, he may already have been at this point.
In the following weeks, Tooprig haunted the British Museum’s reading rooms and public libraries around the capital, looking for information on Shem-el-Nessim. After a painstaking search, he found but one solitary reference to it: in the works of an occultist. In The Confessions of Aleister Crowley, Tooprig read that Oscar Eckenstein, an acquaintance of the famous eccentric, had suffered from an aversion to artificial scent. “One day my wife and a friend came home from shopping. They had called at the chemist’s who had sprayed them with Shem-el-Nessim. We saw them coming and went to the door to receive them. Eckenstein made one rush — like a bull — for the window of the sitting-room, flung it open and spent the next quarter of an hour leaning out and gasping for breath.”
In his search for the constituents of the perfume, however, Tooprig was utterly frustrated. But now that he had identified her perfume, the desire to be with the mystery woman grew in him like a strange addiction; he craved her closeness although he could not satisfactorily explain why. The days came and went, and often it was only his valet who roused him from a soporific trance in his study as he came in with Tooprig’s five o’clock cocktail, whereupon it became apparent to him that he hadn’t moved from his wing-chair since retiring there after breakfast, nine hours before. All the while, the scent of Shem-el-Nessim filled his senses and his mind. What did these reveries expect of him, he wondered.
Tooprig later confided in me that he had sought solace in the whores of Mayfair’s Shepherd Market, onto whose bodies he would apply Shem-el-Nessim. But the ruse did not work: on them, it smelt cheap, cloying and overly sweet. At other times, the perfume made the women gag and transmuted itself on the nose to the acrid stench of rotten eggs and cabbage. Could he have developed an allergic reaction to the scent he had found so addictive when he first saw the mysterious woman — or were they both figments of his imagination; she and Shem-el-Nessim alike?
*
Every now and then in winter, London briefly anticipates spring with an unseasonably long spell of sunlight; a patch of clear blue between the clouds; a brightening of the otherwise pale skies; and a fragrance of mown grass from the parks. On such mornings, Stan Tooprig would walk from York Street to Jermyn Street because three times a week, at eight o’clock, he had an appointment at Klinge & Schneider, the barbershop renowned for the closest shave in London.
He knew of nothing better than to start the day with the feel of newly shaved skin. Klinge & Schneider was a haven of sandalwood and Turkish soap; a darkly timbered respite from the rumble and clatter of the city. A hint of worn leather rose from the seats, and hair tonic and pomade wafted from rows of lotion, talcum powder, brilliantine and styptic pencils on its shelves. Tooprig particularly enjoyed being clean-shaven on cold mornings when there was a touch of frost in the air; stepping out across the threshold, lightly powdered, with the frisson of cologne vibrant on cheeks met by the first chilled fingers of fresh air.
On this morning, he had been lounging as usual in the adjustable chair, head thrown back, with his face encircled by hot towels. His barber had left him to strop the razor when a delicate but deliciously oriental waft of spice drifted between the hot towel and Tooprig’s nose. He didn’t recognise the scent, but by the time his barber had turned back to the chair with a keenly glinting cut-throat, Tooprig had cast off his hot towels and was at the door, which was still closing against its jamb as though someone had left the shop a moment before.
“Who was that just now?” Tooprig asked his barber.
The barber, clutching Tooprig’s discarded cape, professed to have seen no one. “Perhaps, sir, a customer too impatient to wait,” he said. “It happens.”
He knew of nothing better than to start the day with the feel of newly shaved skin. Klinge & Schneider was a haven of sandalwood and Turkish soap; a darkly timbered respite from the rumble and clatter of the city. A hint of worn leather rose from the seats, and hair tonic and pomade wafted from rows of lotion, talcum powder, brilliantine and styptic pencils on its shelves. Tooprig particularly enjoyed being clean-shaven on cold mornings when there was a touch of frost in the air; stepping out across the threshold, lightly powdered, with the frisson of cologne vibrant on cheeks met by the first chilled fingers of fresh air.
On this morning, he had been lounging as usual in the adjustable chair, head thrown back, with his face encircled by hot towels. His barber had left him to strop the razor when a delicate but deliciously oriental waft of spice drifted between the hot towel and Tooprig’s nose. He didn’t recognise the scent, but by the time his barber had turned back to the chair with a keenly glinting cut-throat, Tooprig had cast off his hot towels and was at the door, which was still closing against its jamb as though someone had left the shop a moment before.
“Who was that just now?” Tooprig asked his barber.
The barber, clutching Tooprig’s discarded cape, professed to have seen no one. “Perhaps, sir, a customer too impatient to wait,” he said. “It happens.”
“No, this was a woman. I can still smell her.”
The barber eyed his customer suspiciously. But although Tooprig had no idea what scent it was that the young woman had been wearing, it was on his nose sure enough. Towelling off his face and tipping the barber for his trouble, Tooprig resolved to follow her; her scent was so oriental and distinctive. Looking left, then right and back again, his eyes soon settled on the only woman within a plausible distance of the barber shop door. She was waiting to cross the road at the next junction: a tall, even willowy woman, with her raven hair very straight and quite short for the fashions.
He followed her at a safe distance as far as the eastern reaches of the city: south of Little Britain and north of Paternoster Row. At this point, Tooprig was even more fascinated by her scent than he was by the woman wearing it, and although she was some way ahead of him, from time to time wafts of it were borne on the breeze to tantalise his nostrils.
He pursued her towards St Paul’s Cathedral, across the junction of Newgate Street, just beyond the Alpine Club. She did not look back. Her gaze was fixed on her feet, but she was untroubled by the traffic and moved along swiftly. Her hair was inexplicably dark; it had a sable quality like a broad brush. She had limbs like the legs of a racehorse, though they were barely visible beneath her long coat; her walk was a study in poise.
At a side road, she half turned to make sure that she would not collide with any turning traffic and, in profile, her skin seemed so pale that it was almost luminous. She had slightly plump cheeks but appeared to have most attractive, widely set eyes. Her face was a harmony of curves and palenesses. There was no mistaking that she was a woman of means: fine-tailored clothes and the unmistakably clear complexion of one who has never toiled or hungered. There was a kind of middle-eastern turn to her features, as though her forebears might have hailed from the Orient, but then she also had something of the film star Louise Brooks as Lulu about her, Tooprig claimed. Her nose and lips were bud-like, although entirely without the upturned porcine quality he found so repellent in many supposedly well-bred English women.
It was on Newgate Street, at the corner of Ivy Lane, that the woman disappeared into the doorway of a large building that ran towards Paternoster Square. By the time Tooprig had reached it, the door had closed behind her. From without, the etched glass and dark wooden portico gave the place the look of a public house, but it was quiet within and, in any case, it was quite unthinkable that a woman of her obvious refinement would have entered an alehouse alone.
Tooprig had to step off the pavement and into the street in order to read the sign, “J. GROSSMITH & SON”, above the shop windows, but there was no mention of the business being conducted within.
The etched glass door opened with a gentle chime when he pushed against it and the rattle of the buses, cabs and coal trucks subsided as it closed behind him and he removed his hat. Inside, a display behind glass advertised what were apparently J. Grossmith & Son’s products: Phul-Nana Bouquet of Indian Flowers; Old Lavender Cottage; and White Fire fragrances, along with a range of sixpenny sachet, soap, face powders and dentifrice.
Behind the counter, a man with a balding head and a neatly waxed moustache closely eyed Tooprig, who found himself uncharacteristically overwhelmed; intimidated by the shelves, display cases, glass-stoppered bottles and brightly coloured advertising materials. “What can I do for you, sir?” asked the man, with the faintest hint of a foreign accent, as Tooprig reached the counter.
Tooprig hesitated, at a loss for words and feeling discomfited that he had entered the store with no plan in mind. “That woman who entered here, just before I did… I, er, she…”
“You must be mistaken, sir. You are our first customer this morning. We have just this minute opened, at nine o’clock.” The man nodded politely towards a clock set above the window, which indeed showed the time to be just after the hour. Tooprig was confused; perhaps he had chosen the wrong doorway, but it seemed unlikely. He looked around, trying to buy time as he considered what his next move might be. His gaze settled on another of the displays for perfume. It seemed an odd but perfect coincidence.
“If I were looking for a particular scent, for a lady, do you think it possible that you might carry it?” Tooprig asked, after regaining his composure.
The man smiled. “Do you know its name, sir? It’s highly likely that we would be able obtain it. Or, if you can describe it to me, I would be happy to assist you in blending a scent that matches your requirements.”
“I see.”
“We distil our own perfumes on the premises, sir, but we also retail a wide range of proprietary scents from other manufacturers. It’s unlikely that there is a single essential oil or blend of fragrances that has not crossed this counter at some point.”
“Well, I wouldn’t really know how to describe it to you,” Tooprig confessed. “It’s not a scent I have ever encountered before.”
The Grossmith assistant regarded Tooprig calmly and then introduced himself as Monsieur Duat. “Each scent has its own particular characteristics, its own olfactory notes and overtones. The combination of these makes each scent unique,” Duat explained. “Would you, for example, describe the scent you’re looking for as fresh and of a citrus nature, or perhaps something deeper and more musky?”
“I can only say that I felt it had a kind of oriental quality.”
“Well sir, that narrows it down a little. I shall be back in a moment.” The man disappeared into a back room of the shop. As he opened the door there was an industrious bubbling and hissing from beyond and Tooprig was left to browse for ten minutes among the display bottles.
Duat returned, carrying a lidded wooden box with drilled inserts, into which were set around twenty vials capped by rubber bulbs. From inside the lid of the box Duat retrieved some thin strips of what appeared to be blotting paper, onto which he siphoned a drop of perfume from three of the vials. Thereupon, Tooprig gradually succeeded in narrowing down the woman’s scent to something from the ‘amber’ fragrances: a blend of warmth and sensuality. The scent Tooprig was looking for drew its richness — or so Duat surmised — from the pungency of musk and vanilla. It was an exotic and spicy rather than a floral scent, but there was some other substance (perhaps a precious wood) that remained elusive even to the expert.
Duat suggested to Tooprig that he return the following day, and that in the meantime he would experiment with subtle variations by adding lighter, woody notes to his existing blends. As odd as it might seem, since entering the shop, Tooprig had almost forgotten about the woman and was now eager to have the mystery of her perfume solved as swiftly as possible. Nevertheless, he acquiesced to Duat’s request and agreed to return the following day, shortly after lunch.
The next day, Duat produced an elaborate cylindrical carton from beneath the counter and offered it to Tooprig. It was made in two interlocking parts of uneven lengths. The lid, which formed the upper two-thirds of the cylinder, was slotted over the lower part to conceal a gilt lining. Floral designs in pink intertwined with curlicues; abstract urn shapes repeated around the base; and large, blue stylised lettering with drop shadows spelled out the transverse words Shem-el-Nessim.
“I don’t know why I didn’t think of this yesterday. I feel certain that this is the scent you have been looking for, Mister Tooprig.” Duat dabbed a tiny quantity of the Shem-el-Nessim onto one of his blotting paper strips. Tooprig only needed to move his nose to around twelve inches from the strip of paper to ascertain that it was exactly the perfume that the woman had been wearing. It was quite remarkable: it was her very essence. Duat was obviously a master parfumier, a veritable alchemist in fragrances, to be able to identify a perfume from the clues provided by a modest neophyte.
Tooprig tried to persuade Duat to let him know Shem-el-Nessim’s formula, for he found it impossible to pinpoint its characteristics in any useful way (they seemed to shift according to his mood), but Duat would say only that Shem-el-Nessim’s recipe was protected and “registered in all the leading countries of the world”. Tooprig purchased as much of the perfume as seemed judicious in a single transaction, as he was wary that Duat might consider him unhinged; which, it transpired, he may already have been at this point.
In the following weeks, Tooprig haunted the British Museum’s reading rooms and public libraries around the capital, looking for information on Shem-el-Nessim. After a painstaking search, he found but one solitary reference to it: in the works of an occultist. In The Confessions of Aleister Crowley, Tooprig read that Oscar Eckenstein, an acquaintance of the famous eccentric, had suffered from an aversion to artificial scent. “One day my wife and a friend came home from shopping. They had called at the chemist’s who had sprayed them with Shem-el-Nessim. We saw them coming and went to the door to receive them. Eckenstein made one rush — like a bull — for the window of the sitting-room, flung it open and spent the next quarter of an hour leaning out and gasping for breath.”
In his search for the constituents of the perfume, however, Tooprig was utterly frustrated. But now that he had identified her perfume, the desire to be with the mystery woman grew in him like a strange addiction; he craved her closeness although he could not satisfactorily explain why. The days came and went, and often it was only his valet who roused him from a soporific trance in his study as he came in with Tooprig’s five o’clock cocktail, whereupon it became apparent to him that he hadn’t moved from his wing-chair since retiring there after breakfast, nine hours before. All the while, the scent of Shem-el-Nessim filled his senses and his mind. What did these reveries expect of him, he wondered.
Tooprig later confided in me that he had sought solace in the whores of Mayfair’s Shepherd Market, onto whose bodies he would apply Shem-el-Nessim. But the ruse did not work: on them, it smelt cheap, cloying and overly sweet. At other times, the perfume made the women gag and transmuted itself on the nose to the acrid stench of rotten eggs and cabbage. Could he have developed an allergic reaction to the scent he had found so addictive when he first saw the mysterious woman — or were they both figments of his imagination; she and Shem-el-Nessim alike?
*
“So, what happened?” I asked Stan Tooprig in the Khan el-Khalili bazaar. “Did you ever see the woman again?”
In the dim and diffuse light of the Khan, sheltering from the midday heat, I waited for him to continue his tale as men in long djellabahs appeared to float by the coffeehouse like ghosts. What little there had been of Tooprig’s personality disappeared before my eyes. His eyes went dead, his face became a blank. I felt as though I was looking at a mere shell and not a once-wealthy Englishman. He was silent for what seemed like an age.
“Tooprig, Tooprig!” I cried, but there was no reply.
—END OF PART TWO—
Come back to NZBC on Monday 16 January to read Part Three of Shem-el-Nessim.
To request a PDF of the complete short story, send an email with the subject header Shem-el-Nessim to this address. Order more of Chris Bell’s fiction here. And if you’d like to read some more of his short stories, you’ll find a selection of them here.
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