Shem-el-Nessim: An inspiration in perfume
PART FOUR
By now, I was anxious to know what had made Stan Tooprig leave London, but it was some weeks before he felt sufficiently at ease with me to disclose exactly what happened to him after he discovered Shem-el-Nessim. It had become the essence of his being; a poison undoubtedly, but one without which he could apparently no longer function.
The seasons changed, Tooprig and I would meet once a week for coffee at the Khan el-Khalili coffeehouse and each week he would appear weaker, thinner and to have lost a little more of his feeble grip on life. Mostly he would stare sluggishly at his coffee grounds while I read the newspapers. Occasionally, he might appear to have been roused from a reverie to ask me the time or the date; annoyingly, often several times in the same morning.
Then once, quite out of nowhere, and as though there had merely been a brief pause in a long stream of conversation, from his last pack Tooprig lit his final cheap Egyptian cigarette and wheezed, “I say, do you know what happened to me at The Savoy in London? It was quite the damndest thing. Buy me a coffee and I shall tell you all about it.” By this time, I was no longer sure that Tooprig even recognised me, let alone remembered my name. Nevertheless, I bid him to continue.
About a week after his first encounter with the woman, it seemed, on a quite separate errand off Bond Street, Tooprig fancied he saw her again. She had emerged like an apparition between behatted heads and traffic, bobbing on long limbs and with her head moving fractionally from side to side, as if to gyroscopically navigate herself through the crosshatching of obstacles.
As he drew closer to her, the woman’s scent became unmistakable. He followed her to Trafalgar Square, around which she walked twice before stopping in her tracks and turning to face Tooprig confrontationally. She didn’t speak a word, it seems, just looked at him and smiled. “There was something terrifyingly lascivious about her lips,” Tooprig claimed, and he shook as he recalled them. She held up a key to Room 941 at The Savoy Hotel, proffered it to him, then turned and continued on her way.
The woman then led the way along the Strand towards The Savoy. This was at a time when it was without doubt the finest hotel in London. The Orpheans Orchestra had a residency at the Grill, which had become a rendezvous for stars of the London theatre and opera, impresarios and critics, and there were hundreds of fresh carnations festooned about the lobby, where the opulence was draped in thick folds. When the elevator door opened, the woman entered it and turned to look out at Tooprig with a sphinx-like smile. He followed her only after leaving a tactful interval and discovered her waiting outside the door to Room 941.
When he unlocked the door with the key she had given him, it was dark and all the air had gone from the room. The heavy drapes were drawn, excluding all that was left of the winter daylight. In the twilight, she took off her coat and threw it onto the bed, where it crumpled like snow falling from a roof. Her clinging black dress was the next to go, and soon she was naked, skin shimmering and pearlescent, with the sheen of shot silk.
They lay together far into the failing light of a late afternoon — not that any of it was visible to them — all the while the indescribable oriental fragrance of her skin buffering the stale airlessness of the room. Hardly a word was spoken in this time by either of them, but there was a prevailing tenderness, a lightness of touch, and from what Tooprig told me, it was not spoiled by the directness of their passions; at least not at first.
“Her body was warm, and yet she seemed to be draining me of heat,” he said. “I felt the life being sapped out of me. Her ministrations were tender enough, and yet there gradually came to be a tinge of the deadly about them, as though she were embalming and not making love to me. Her kisses tasted salty and bitter.”
Tooprig said he felt some nascent obstruction in his airways; as though something viscous and too large for the passages was being pulled out of him. Meanwhile, the woman’s hands touched his skin gently and she did nothing to restrain him.
“I had my eyes closed and yet, when I attempted to open them to see what was happening, it was as though I was asleep — I simply didn’t have the energy to lift my eyelids. A vinegary odour filled the room, as though of some unctuous preservative.”
All at once, there were not merely two but a manyness of hands upon him, he said; not soft and womanly, but large, coarse and oiled. “They sought and prodded, poked and peeled to such an extent that I could no longer keep track of their location on my body. I felt a sharp stroke below my left ribs and a sensation of something being quickly removed. I felt even weaker. My heart was suddenly extremely heavy, as though it were about to fall through both me and the bed and onto the floor. And yet, her hands were soft and clean, like fresh linen. I felt as though I was being wrapped in her arms. Her fingers stroked the length of my body, seeming to envelop me in layers of softness. But I could not defend myself against the other violations — whatever they were — and I began to feel afraid. All the while, my eyelids were as though sewn shut. I tried to call out, but I couldn’t; it was as if all my senses were paralysed. And although my heart was beating hard, my blood felt thick and sluggish in my veins.”
The darkness throbbed and, out of it, he seemed to hear male voices chanting. Tooprig claimed he felt something peppery with the texture of grit being inserted into his nostrils, but he found it impossible to provide any real resistance to the sensations assailing him, and soon he fell into unconsciousness.
“Afterwards, I was numb. In a dream of red velvet drapes, gilded cherubs and tasselled silken ropes, I smelt her perfume again: sweeter than any bloom; warmer and more satisfying than any musk; fresher than any exotic fruit. And, like a dream, it dissipated as I woke, until I was left with next to nothing; for when I awoke she had gone.”
It was only when Tooprig left The Savoy that he fully became aware of Shem-el-Nessim again, because traces of it had been left on his clothing and his skin. It was the perfume from his dream, and it had been with him permanently ever since — night and day, no matter where he went.
“She had very white thighs,” Tooprig mumbled, as though speaking of something holy, something utterly sacred to him. In those days, encounters with strangers were even more unusual than they are today, of course, and Tooprig’s had been entirely anonymous: Neither did she know his identity nor he hers. It was a rum business altogether, but already he wished to see her again. He told me that some time later he had returned to The Savoy and approached the concierge’s desk, where he engaged him in conversation. He lied to him, albeit discreetly, about his liaison with the woman. “She was staying in Room 941, I believe,” he said. “We met here for tea. It was a Tuesday — I distinctly remember that, and the date must have been late in January, perhaps the last day of the month.”
“Sir, no such rendezvous can have taken place in this hotel,” said the concierge.
Tooprig was infuriated by such impertinence. “Dash it all, man, are you calling me a liar?”
“Not at all, sir, but you are nevertheless mistaken. No such liaison can have taken place in that room as there is no Room 941 in The Savoy Hotel.”
“Then some other room! I’ve simply got the wrong number.” Tooprig turned from the counter, quite sure that he had not in fact misremembered the room number. Was the concierge determined to be obstinate or was something stranger afoot?
He decided to try a different approach, and bribed a Savoy bell boy who at least claimed to remember such a woman from Tooprig’s description. Although the boy didn’t recall the woman’s name, Tooprig asked him where she had gone after she had checked out of the hotel. The boy slowly spelled out a word he had memorised from the label of her cabin trunks:
“K-A-I-R-O”.
*
Stan Tooprig had spoken to me often of returning to London, but he never did. He spent his final days in the coffeehouse in Khan el-Khalili, and a man more out-of-sorts with himself you couldn’t hope to meet. It was soon after recounting his tale to me that he died. His personal affairs were in severe disorder, as was the rest of his life. Following payment of his considerable debts and having set aside enough for his valet’s outstanding retainer, there was just enough left over to cover the cost of an undertaker and a modest funeral. It seemed he had squandered what was left of his fortune on the search for the Shem-el-Nessim woman, and so he was buried here in Cairo: at the Beb el-Wezir cemetery with a view of the Citadel and the Mohammed Ali Mosque, beyond.
Was Tooprig’s mystery woman a descendant of a Pharaoh’s queen, or does Shem-el-Nessim provide evidence of reincarnation? Was there, perhaps, some other, even less plausible link between that oriental perfume, a mysterious woman and the death of two men from quite different cultures on opposite sides of the world? I’ve found no suggestion of any such thing in my researches, but it does seem possible that Stan Tooprig and Rezk, the Egyptian grave-robber, expired while suffering from the same ailment.
In all of everything there is an element of the mysterious, and yet we know the world can only be this way. For, as the biologist J.B.S. Haldane once observed, “The Universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose.” It is with a heavy heart that I acknowledge the mystery of Shem-el-Nessim might never be solved. It is simply not for solving: whether that mysterious woman existed only as a vivid hallucination in the mind of Stan Tooprig is not entirely relevant to me since, once imagined, she existed for him as well as everything else in his world. And if she did exist and had tricked him into partaking of her charms, it was only because he had seen fit to enter her world and take what he believed to be rightly his.
I am old now and my senses have been dulled by Time. I have memories, and that is all I have; but they are like the loose leaves of a book that has lost its binding. There are gaps in the story; it makes even less sense than it did at the time I learned of it; the pages are in the wrong order, are torn and fragmented.
Journalism no longer provides me with any income (the publishers of the Cairo Gazette say they prefer younger writers, by which they mean cheaper), so perhaps my storytelling has become a little rusty.
Furthermore, I must admit that over the years I have increasingly come to doubt the veracity of Tooprig’s story. Surely he had woven it all together as one might a ghost story, conveniently omitting anything that did not assist in his narrative progression. But one day I had reason to reproach myself for questioning Tooprig’s honesty and his motives. In particular, the part of his tale in which he visited Monsieur Duat at J. Grossmith & Son and succeeded in employing his services seemed an overly convenient aside.
In recording the chronology of the foregoing events, however, I was forced to refer to some back issues of the Cairo Gazette. And so I found myself in the reading rooms of the Al-Azhar University library in the shadow of the Fatima Az-Zahraa mosque. In an issue from the spring of 1926, I turned the page from an account of the Palestinian labour camps and the deportation of thousands of fellahin to France, Syria and Mesopotamia, when my eyes were greeted by a full-page display advertisement that I don’t recall ever seeing before. It was for the London company J. Grossmith & Son. And along with the prices of some of Grossmith’s other products, the advertisement featured a black and white line drawing of a turbaned woman on a night-time camel ride in front of the Great Pyramids. Two oversized bottles of Shem-el-Nessim hung like water vessels from either side of her camel as, bearing a short riding crop and an enigmatic smile, she looked gaily at me from the newsprint. The advertising copy read:
Shem-el-Nessim
Scent of Araby
AN INSPIRATION IN PERFUME
“Shem-el-Nessim”
Possesses an indescribable
charm and distinction; is
exquisitely delightful, and
truly Oriental.
It appeals at once to every
lady of taste.
“Shem-el-Nessim” preparations form a complete and
ideal toilet outfit. Each item is most daintily put up,
and all possess the delicate fragrance of the Perfume.
J. GROSSMITH & SON NEWGATE ST LONDON
—THE END—
By now, I was anxious to know what had made Stan Tooprig leave London, but it was some weeks before he felt sufficiently at ease with me to disclose exactly what happened to him after he discovered Shem-el-Nessim. It had become the essence of his being; a poison undoubtedly, but one without which he could apparently no longer function.
The seasons changed, Tooprig and I would meet once a week for coffee at the Khan el-Khalili coffeehouse and each week he would appear weaker, thinner and to have lost a little more of his feeble grip on life. Mostly he would stare sluggishly at his coffee grounds while I read the newspapers. Occasionally, he might appear to have been roused from a reverie to ask me the time or the date; annoyingly, often several times in the same morning.
Then once, quite out of nowhere, and as though there had merely been a brief pause in a long stream of conversation, from his last pack Tooprig lit his final cheap Egyptian cigarette and wheezed, “I say, do you know what happened to me at The Savoy in London? It was quite the damndest thing. Buy me a coffee and I shall tell you all about it.” By this time, I was no longer sure that Tooprig even recognised me, let alone remembered my name. Nevertheless, I bid him to continue.
About a week after his first encounter with the woman, it seemed, on a quite separate errand off Bond Street, Tooprig fancied he saw her again. She had emerged like an apparition between behatted heads and traffic, bobbing on long limbs and with her head moving fractionally from side to side, as if to gyroscopically navigate herself through the crosshatching of obstacles.
As he drew closer to her, the woman’s scent became unmistakable. He followed her to Trafalgar Square, around which she walked twice before stopping in her tracks and turning to face Tooprig confrontationally. She didn’t speak a word, it seems, just looked at him and smiled. “There was something terrifyingly lascivious about her lips,” Tooprig claimed, and he shook as he recalled them. She held up a key to Room 941 at The Savoy Hotel, proffered it to him, then turned and continued on her way.
The woman then led the way along the Strand towards The Savoy. This was at a time when it was without doubt the finest hotel in London. The Orpheans Orchestra had a residency at the Grill, which had become a rendezvous for stars of the London theatre and opera, impresarios and critics, and there were hundreds of fresh carnations festooned about the lobby, where the opulence was draped in thick folds. When the elevator door opened, the woman entered it and turned to look out at Tooprig with a sphinx-like smile. He followed her only after leaving a tactful interval and discovered her waiting outside the door to Room 941.
When he unlocked the door with the key she had given him, it was dark and all the air had gone from the room. The heavy drapes were drawn, excluding all that was left of the winter daylight. In the twilight, she took off her coat and threw it onto the bed, where it crumpled like snow falling from a roof. Her clinging black dress was the next to go, and soon she was naked, skin shimmering and pearlescent, with the sheen of shot silk.
They lay together far into the failing light of a late afternoon — not that any of it was visible to them — all the while the indescribable oriental fragrance of her skin buffering the stale airlessness of the room. Hardly a word was spoken in this time by either of them, but there was a prevailing tenderness, a lightness of touch, and from what Tooprig told me, it was not spoiled by the directness of their passions; at least not at first.
“Her body was warm, and yet she seemed to be draining me of heat,” he said. “I felt the life being sapped out of me. Her ministrations were tender enough, and yet there gradually came to be a tinge of the deadly about them, as though she were embalming and not making love to me. Her kisses tasted salty and bitter.”
Tooprig said he felt some nascent obstruction in his airways; as though something viscous and too large for the passages was being pulled out of him. Meanwhile, the woman’s hands touched his skin gently and she did nothing to restrain him.
“I had my eyes closed and yet, when I attempted to open them to see what was happening, it was as though I was asleep — I simply didn’t have the energy to lift my eyelids. A vinegary odour filled the room, as though of some unctuous preservative.”
All at once, there were not merely two but a manyness of hands upon him, he said; not soft and womanly, but large, coarse and oiled. “They sought and prodded, poked and peeled to such an extent that I could no longer keep track of their location on my body. I felt a sharp stroke below my left ribs and a sensation of something being quickly removed. I felt even weaker. My heart was suddenly extremely heavy, as though it were about to fall through both me and the bed and onto the floor. And yet, her hands were soft and clean, like fresh linen. I felt as though I was being wrapped in her arms. Her fingers stroked the length of my body, seeming to envelop me in layers of softness. But I could not defend myself against the other violations — whatever they were — and I began to feel afraid. All the while, my eyelids were as though sewn shut. I tried to call out, but I couldn’t; it was as if all my senses were paralysed. And although my heart was beating hard, my blood felt thick and sluggish in my veins.”
The darkness throbbed and, out of it, he seemed to hear male voices chanting. Tooprig claimed he felt something peppery with the texture of grit being inserted into his nostrils, but he found it impossible to provide any real resistance to the sensations assailing him, and soon he fell into unconsciousness.
“Afterwards, I was numb. In a dream of red velvet drapes, gilded cherubs and tasselled silken ropes, I smelt her perfume again: sweeter than any bloom; warmer and more satisfying than any musk; fresher than any exotic fruit. And, like a dream, it dissipated as I woke, until I was left with next to nothing; for when I awoke she had gone.”
It was only when Tooprig left The Savoy that he fully became aware of Shem-el-Nessim again, because traces of it had been left on his clothing and his skin. It was the perfume from his dream, and it had been with him permanently ever since — night and day, no matter where he went.
“She had very white thighs,” Tooprig mumbled, as though speaking of something holy, something utterly sacred to him. In those days, encounters with strangers were even more unusual than they are today, of course, and Tooprig’s had been entirely anonymous: Neither did she know his identity nor he hers. It was a rum business altogether, but already he wished to see her again. He told me that some time later he had returned to The Savoy and approached the concierge’s desk, where he engaged him in conversation. He lied to him, albeit discreetly, about his liaison with the woman. “She was staying in Room 941, I believe,” he said. “We met here for tea. It was a Tuesday — I distinctly remember that, and the date must have been late in January, perhaps the last day of the month.”
“Sir, no such rendezvous can have taken place in this hotel,” said the concierge.
Tooprig was infuriated by such impertinence. “Dash it all, man, are you calling me a liar?”
“Not at all, sir, but you are nevertheless mistaken. No such liaison can have taken place in that room as there is no Room 941 in The Savoy Hotel.”
“Then some other room! I’ve simply got the wrong number.” Tooprig turned from the counter, quite sure that he had not in fact misremembered the room number. Was the concierge determined to be obstinate or was something stranger afoot?
He decided to try a different approach, and bribed a Savoy bell boy who at least claimed to remember such a woman from Tooprig’s description. Although the boy didn’t recall the woman’s name, Tooprig asked him where she had gone after she had checked out of the hotel. The boy slowly spelled out a word he had memorised from the label of her cabin trunks:
“K-A-I-R-O”.
*
Stan Tooprig had spoken to me often of returning to London, but he never did. He spent his final days in the coffeehouse in Khan el-Khalili, and a man more out-of-sorts with himself you couldn’t hope to meet. It was soon after recounting his tale to me that he died. His personal affairs were in severe disorder, as was the rest of his life. Following payment of his considerable debts and having set aside enough for his valet’s outstanding retainer, there was just enough left over to cover the cost of an undertaker and a modest funeral. It seemed he had squandered what was left of his fortune on the search for the Shem-el-Nessim woman, and so he was buried here in Cairo: at the Beb el-Wezir cemetery with a view of the Citadel and the Mohammed Ali Mosque, beyond.
Was Tooprig’s mystery woman a descendant of a Pharaoh’s queen, or does Shem-el-Nessim provide evidence of reincarnation? Was there, perhaps, some other, even less plausible link between that oriental perfume, a mysterious woman and the death of two men from quite different cultures on opposite sides of the world? I’ve found no suggestion of any such thing in my researches, but it does seem possible that Stan Tooprig and Rezk, the Egyptian grave-robber, expired while suffering from the same ailment.
In all of everything there is an element of the mysterious, and yet we know the world can only be this way. For, as the biologist J.B.S. Haldane once observed, “The Universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose.” It is with a heavy heart that I acknowledge the mystery of Shem-el-Nessim might never be solved. It is simply not for solving: whether that mysterious woman existed only as a vivid hallucination in the mind of Stan Tooprig is not entirely relevant to me since, once imagined, she existed for him as well as everything else in his world. And if she did exist and had tricked him into partaking of her charms, it was only because he had seen fit to enter her world and take what he believed to be rightly his.
I am old now and my senses have been dulled by Time. I have memories, and that is all I have; but they are like the loose leaves of a book that has lost its binding. There are gaps in the story; it makes even less sense than it did at the time I learned of it; the pages are in the wrong order, are torn and fragmented.
Journalism no longer provides me with any income (the publishers of the Cairo Gazette say they prefer younger writers, by which they mean cheaper), so perhaps my storytelling has become a little rusty.
Furthermore, I must admit that over the years I have increasingly come to doubt the veracity of Tooprig’s story. Surely he had woven it all together as one might a ghost story, conveniently omitting anything that did not assist in his narrative progression. But one day I had reason to reproach myself for questioning Tooprig’s honesty and his motives. In particular, the part of his tale in which he visited Monsieur Duat at J. Grossmith & Son and succeeded in employing his services seemed an overly convenient aside.
In recording the chronology of the foregoing events, however, I was forced to refer to some back issues of the Cairo Gazette. And so I found myself in the reading rooms of the Al-Azhar University library in the shadow of the Fatima Az-Zahraa mosque. In an issue from the spring of 1926, I turned the page from an account of the Palestinian labour camps and the deportation of thousands of fellahin to France, Syria and Mesopotamia, when my eyes were greeted by a full-page display advertisement that I don’t recall ever seeing before. It was for the London company J. Grossmith & Son. And along with the prices of some of Grossmith’s other products, the advertisement featured a black and white line drawing of a turbaned woman on a night-time camel ride in front of the Great Pyramids. Two oversized bottles of Shem-el-Nessim hung like water vessels from either side of her camel as, bearing a short riding crop and an enigmatic smile, she looked gaily at me from the newsprint. The advertising copy read:
Shem-el-Nessim
Scent of Araby
AN INSPIRATION IN PERFUME
“Shem-el-Nessim”
Possesses an indescribable
charm and distinction; is
exquisitely delightful, and
truly Oriental.
It appeals at once to every
lady of taste.
“Shem-el-Nessim” preparations form a complete and
ideal toilet outfit. Each item is most daintily put up,
and all possess the delicate fragrance of the Perfume.
J. GROSSMITH & SON NEWGATE ST LONDON
I was wondering whether the woman on the camel might be the same one who possessed and put paid to Stan Tooprig. She certainly had something of Louise Brooks about her; albeit in stylised simplicity. While gazing at the woman’s face I was struck by an intense fragrance — something oriental laced with Arabic spice and perhaps a touch of sandalwood — that filled my nostrils, my lungs and then my imagination. It has been many years since women played any significant role in my life, I am not that way inclined, and yet I was strangely attracted to the idea of her, even if she were imaginary. I turned to try to ascertain the source of the perfume, but the reading room was quite still, save for a fleeting shadow crossing the open door and a curtain billowing over a window left ajar.
The Shem-el-Nessim woman may have been an inspiration to Monsieur Duat and the parfumiers of Grossmith & Son; but for some the scent of Araby was tainted with the miasma of early death. I myself have been ill since the time of my visit to the library, and I doubt I shall live to see my seventieth birthday. She, though, will never grow old; and I fear the fragrance that seduced me like a ghostly memory of a London long ago will be on the air a long time after we are all gone.
The Shem-el-Nessim woman may have been an inspiration to Monsieur Duat and the parfumiers of Grossmith & Son; but for some the scent of Araby was tainted with the miasma of early death. I myself have been ill since the time of my visit to the library, and I doubt I shall live to see my seventieth birthday. She, though, will never grow old; and I fear the fragrance that seduced me like a ghostly memory of a London long ago will be on the air a long time after we are all gone.
—THE END—
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