The Scent of Mimosa

Les histoires

One rare, color snapshot amongst the others caught Vince's attention. It showed a tiny, red-headed girl in front of a swimming pool, her eyes focused adoringly on the woman beside her.

''Hey! Look at you!'' Vince chuckled. Cassandra hadn't changed a wink since she was a toddler and he recognized her immediately. With her mop of wavy red hair tucked neatly back under a large floppy bow, she had been a cute little thing alright. ''Is that your mother you're with here?''  

He knew as soon as the question was out of his mouth that he had said the wrong thing. A look of such anguish had passed across Cassandra's face that he wished he could go back and swallow up the words.

''No,'' she said quietly. After a moment's pause she went on, ''You won't find my mother in many of those pictures. She never really joined the parties. She hardly went outside at all.'' 

Vince nodded silently. He didn't want to push the issue. Whatever the problem had been with Cassandra's mother, the memories were obviously still incredibly painful to her, and he didn't need her getting all gushy on him now. He was here to work, not to handle someone else's baggage, but it seemed that now she had started talking, the floodgates were opened, and Cassandra wasn't going to let it go.

''My mother wasn't a well woman, Vincent,'' she told him, her face drawn. ''She had a serious heart condition since childhood, and it left her weak and wasting. I think there must have been times when she had more to give, but as long as I can remember, she spent most of her time in bed. There were times when I would watch her from the door of her boudoir, and it was as though she had disappeared completely into the sheets. She was so thin – so very thin and so very pale. I adored her, but she was more like a ghost than a real mother to me: a pale, beautiful ghost.''

So, this was why Geneviève Guipard-Ducasse had never been a player in the perfume industry, why he had known nothing of her till now, Vince thought.

''It's amazing that she managed to have you if she was so ill,'' he commented. It was remarkable that someone so feeble could have produced offspring as full of life as Cassandra.

''Well, I think I was probably a mistake.'' she continued, looking down, ''A mistake for both my parents, unless my father felt that by producing an heir to the house, he would find even more favor with my grandparents. He was hardly the type to dote on children. 

''No-one had even expected my mother to marry you see. But as I said, she was beautiful with her pale white skin and her silvery blonde hair, beautiful but weak.  And she was an heiress - just what my father was looking for. He could talk a good game, charm the snakes right out of their skins when he wanted to. 

''He claimed he could 'update' Atelier Guipard, give it the edge it needed to compete in the modern market. My grandparents were only too happy to hand over control of the company to him, believing that here at last was someone who would look after their daughter's inheritance for her when it was clear that she could not do it herself.

''By the time they realised that he was a philanderer, a gambler, and a fraud it was all too late. I am glad they didn't live long enough to see the worst of it. He broke what was left of my mother's heart and ran the company into bankruptcy while he was at it. I am certain that she died because she couldn't handle the pain any longer. I will always hold my father accountable.''

Vince was silent as the understanding of what had happened to Guipard hit him.  An ill-conceived marriage and a single reckless manager had driven this once-great company into the ground. Robert Ducasse had wasted his wife and daughter's legacy and left the company bearing their name with a crushed reputation. He gulped at the enormity of what Cassandra's father had done.

His own parents had hardly been models of nurturing. He remembered his mother mostly as a beautiful but aloof woman in a black evening dress, kissing him coldly on the cheek as she swept out to yet another gala event. His memory of his father was of a man rigid and unyielding in his sense of propriety. They may never have taken young Vince to the park to play, or helped him with his homework, but at least he could not accuse them of such gross fiscal negligence.

Cassandra, he saw, had been left to pick up the pieces. She must still be carrying her father's debt, judging by the state of their family home, and without a serious cash injection, he knew it would be impossible to pull the family business out of its troubles.  

She suddenly seemed so young to him, so very young and so burdened by her lot. It would be hard for just about anyone to cope with what Cassandra had to handle. Perhaps for her, with her otherworld eyes, it was even more so.   

It dawned on him that, whereas before he had judged her as an obvious failure, she had really shown extraordinary strength of character under very trying circumstances.

"I am so sorry Cassandra," was all he could say. He found that his heart was genuinely aching for this girl, for all that she had lost. Hers had been a life rich with beauty and comfort, with love and fun and experience, and suddenly it had all been taken from her. No wonder she crept away from the world and clothed herself in the past. She was probably hanging on to every shred of her own history, unwilling to let go of an existence that she knew she would never recapture.

"But still,'' he said, hoping to offer her some small comfort, ''your father must have loved your mother very much.'' It was a statement, not a question, and Cassandra looked surprised.

''Why would you say that?'' she asked him.

''Because of the perfume of course. Geneviève. He named it after her, and it is exquisite. His only hit fragrance. His greatest work.''

The corners of Cassandra's mouth pursed downwards, and she gave a bitter little laugh.

''Hmmmph,'' she said quietly, shrugging off his comment. Then, clearly reluctant to discuss the matter any further, she pointed back to the photograph of herself as a child.

"The woman in the picture," she said, ''that's actually my grandmother.'' Vince looked back at the photograph and raised an eyebrow.

''I know,'' said Cassandra, understanding what he meant without him having to say a word. ''She looks way too young to be a grandmother. Everybody always said so. She was always very glamorous and even more outrageous. She ran away from her family in Ireland as a teenager to become an artist's model. That's how she ended up in the south of France. Over there, behind that plant is a better portrait of her. You can see her more clearly.''

Vince looked over in the direction that Cassandra was pointing. A large oil painting of a woman hung in the corner of the room, obscured by the shadow of a hanging fern. The subject was glancing over her shoulder, the silk-chiffon wrap that she wore sliding away to reveal a wide swathe of luminous décolletage. Her thick auburn hair tumbled almost halfway down her back and her vivid green eyes laughed teasingly.

''Wow. She was an amazingly beautiful woman, your grandmother,'' Vince said wide-eyed.

Cassandra looked pleased with his assessment and turned back to her desk, resuming the process that she had been immersed in before their conversation. In the room down below, Vince stared up at her back for several minutes, his eyes darting now to the painting and now to the girl before him.

''Incredibly beautiful,'' he muttered under his breath as his eyes took in the sweep of another shoulder, the gleam of another cascade of red hair. Then, silently, to himself, he finished off his train of thought: ''She looks just like you.''