CHRIS BELL

Shem-el-Nessim: An Inspiration in Perfume

CHRIS BELL WAS BORN in Holyhead, Wales. He moved to Hamburg, via London, before arriving in New Zealand, where he worked as a magazine editor and writer. His short stories have appeared in The Third Alternative, Grotesque, The Heidelberg Review and Not One of Us, while his story “The Cruel Countess” was anthologized in The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror: 10th Annual Edition.

The author’s short stories have been collected in The Bumper Book of Lies, while his first novel, Liquidambar, won the UKAuthors/PADB “Search For a Great Read” competition. In 2005 he was a contributing editor to a commemorative booklet marking Russell Hoban’s eightieth birthday, published by Bloomsbury Books.

“‘Shem-el-Nessim’ (subtitled ‘An Inspiration in Perfume’) was inspired by a real perfume of that name,” reveals Bell, “or at least by a framed advertisement for it that once hung in my girlfriend’s parents’ house. Now that we live together, it hangs above our bed.

“The story took a year to write. I began making notes in England in 2005. When I discovered more advertisements and packaging by J. Grossmith & Son, Distillers of Perfumes (the firm fictionalized in the story) on the Internet, Stan Tooprig, the mystery woman and the Cairo Gazette journalist narrator came alive.

“In a piece of synchronicity in the real world, Grossmith Ltd was recently resurrected and its managing director contacted me to ask how I came to write ‘Shem-el-Nessim’. ‘It was partly because of your description of Stan Tooprig in the story that I thought you had some special insight into the Grossmith family,’ said Simon Brooke, a Grossmith descendant himself.”

THE MU’EZZIN OF THE Sultan al-Zahir Barquq mosque in the City of the Dead was calling for morning prayers when in one last rattling exhalation the Englishman opposite me expired. As his head fell forward, jangling our coffee cups and startling the clientele, his skin appeared translucent in the dust-dappled light. “Shem-el-Nessim!” were his final words. While the proprietor sent for a doctor from the Coptic Hospital on Ramses Street, I slipped the gold ring from the third finger of Stan Tooprig’s left hand on to my own.

The Cairo of 1926 was the city of Moslem legend, seat of Saracen art, home of the Arabian Nights. The coffeehouse in the Khan el-Khalili bazaar on Gawhar el-Kaid Street was so far below the domes and minarets that it didn’t even merit a name. Five times a day the Mu’ezzin would summon the faithful, halting the hammerings from the silver smithy next door. But at all other times it was too noisy for us to sit outside with the pipe smokers if we wished to converse, so we were confined to the shadows within.

Most of the coffee drinkers were fantasists. In their daydreams, they would be smuggling whisky, writing novels and returning home wealthy and triumphant. I had met plenty who had never left Cairo and would not – at least not alive. These star-crossed fools drifted here on inauspicious currents and were marooned by ancient history. Stan Tooprig was something else altogether, and I am still not sure what. He had come here from London in search of something, or merely to escape himself. As I had done with all the rest, I struck up a conversation with him over coffee.

The unlikely surname resulted from an unusual ancestry: a Dutch trader who had made his fortune in London around the time of the Great Fire and whose descendants had been there ever since. Tooprig claimed he had always wanted to visit Egypt because his father had once produced a ring of yellow gold engraved with strange foreign symbols, and which he claimed had once belonged to a Pharaoh. He had won it in payment of a debt while on a trip to Venice, he assured the young Stan. After his father died, Stan inherited the ring, along with a considerable fortune. It was many years before he learned that what was engraved on the ring was a cartouche of Egyptian hieroglyphs.

The Stan Tooprig I met in Cairo was no longer the well-to-do English gentleman he had once been. Behind everyday reality, there is a deeper reality so cruel that it condemns to death those whose crime is no greater than the pursuit of their own curiosity. I know this to be true because it happened to Stan Tooprig. And, as strange as it may sound, it was piqued by a woman’s perfume.

Tooprig required something of women that was not physical but sensory. Although he claimed to be as partial to blondes as he was to brunettes, he had always favoured the civet cat-like scent of redheads; there was a certain astringency about them he said he found entirely libidinous. Unless she could tantalize his nose, her other charms would be of no consequence, and a fragrant woman invigorated all of his senses, not merely the olfactory.

He lived just off Baker Street, on two floors, with modest living quarters for his valet. One might have described him as a gentleman of leisure; on most days, he took long walks through the city and sometimes, on a whim, would follow a particularly fragrant woman in the hope of a closer encounter. He had cultivated a succession of these, but he was fastidious and discarded his subject if she did not smell “right”. He even classified them by type and aroma: Thyme and Basil (blondes); Sandalwood and Vetivert (brunettes); and Lemon and Petit Grain (redheads). But then came Shem-el-Nessim, the perfume worn by the raven-haired mystery woman. And it was in a London winter that he first crossed paths with the creature that was to be his downfall.

Klinge & Schneider, the barbershop on Jermyn Street renowned for the closest shave in London, was a haven of sandalwood and Turkish soap; a darkly timbered respite from the rumble and clatter of the city. Tooprig particularly enjoyed cold mornings when there was a touch of frost; 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, his barber had left him to strop the razor when a spicy, oriental perfume wafted deliciously between the hot towel and Tooprig’s nose. He didn’t recognize the scent, but by the time his barber had turned back to him with a keenly glinting cut-throat, Tooprig had cast off his towel and was at the door, which was still closing against its jamb as though someone had left the shop but a moment before.

“Who was that just now?” Tooprig asked.

The barber 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.” Although Tooprig had no idea what fragrance the young woman had been wearing, it was on his nose nonetheless. Tipping the barber for his trouble, Tooprig resolved to follow her; the bouquet was so heady and distinctive. His eye soon settled on the only woman within a plausible distance of the barbershop door. She was waiting to cross at the next junction: a tall, even willowy creature, with her raven hair very straight and short for the fashion.

He followed her at a distance as far as the eastern reaches of the city, north of Paternoster Row, even more fascinated by her scent than by the woman wearing it. His pursuit continued towards St Paul’s Cathedral, across the junction of Newgate Street, beyond the Alpine Club. She did not look back, was untroubled by the traffic and moved swiftly. Her hair 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. She paused only at side roads to ensure she would not collide with turning traffic and, in profile, her skin seemed so pale that it was almost luminous. She had slightly plump cheeks and widely set eyes. Her face was a harmony of curves and palenesses. There was a 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.

It was on Newgate Street, at the corner of Ivy Lane, that the woman disappeared into a doorway. By the time Tooprig had reached it, the door had closed behind her. Tooprig had to step into the street in order to read the sign, J. Grossmith & Son, but there was no mention of the business being conducted within.

The door opened with a chime when he pushed against it. Inside, a display 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 sachets, soap, face powders and dentifrice.

Behind the counter, a man with a balding head and a waxed moustache eyed Tooprig who, feeling discomfited that he had entered the store with no plan in mind, was at a loss for words. “That woman, the one who just entered . . . I, er, she . . .”

“You are mistaken, sir,” said the man, with a hint of a foreign accent. “You are our first customer. 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 tried to buy time as he considered what his next move might be. His gaze settled on the perfume displays. It seemed an odd but perfect coincidence. “If I were looking for a particular scent, for a lady, do you think you might carry it?” Tooprig asked.

The man smiled. “It’s highly likely that we would be able to obtain it for you, sir. Or, if you can describe it to me, I would be happy to assist you in blending a scent that matches your requirements. We distil our own perfumes, and also sell a range of proprietary scents from other manufacturers.”

“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 introduced himself as Monsieur Duat. “Is the scent fresh and of a citrus nature, or something deeper and more musky?”

“I can only say it had a kind of oriental quality.”

“Well sir, that certainly narrows the field. I shall be back in a moment.” He disappeared into a back room, returning with a wooden box into which were set a number of vials capped by rubber bulbs. He siphoned one drop of perfume from each of the three vials on to a strip of blotting paper. The scent Tooprig was looking for drew its richness – or so Duat surmised – from musk and vanilla. It was exotic and spicy rather than floral, but there was some other substance, perhaps a precious wood, that remained elusive even to the expert. Duat experimented by adding lighter, woodier notes to his existing blends.

As odd as it might seem, Tooprig had almost forgotten about the woman and was now more eager to solve the mystery of her perfume. After some deliberation, Duat produced an elaborate cylindrical carton and offered it to Tooprig. Floral designs in pink intertwined with curlicues; abstract urn shapes repeated around the base, and large, blue stylized lettering with drop shadows spelled out the transverse words SHEM-EL-NESSIM. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before. 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 on to one of his blotting paper strips.

Tooprig soon ascertained that it was indeed the perfume that the woman had been wearing. It was her very essence. Duat was evidently a master parfumier, a veritable alchemist in fragrances, to be able to identify a perfume from the clues provided by a neophyte.

Tooprig was eager to discover Shem-el-Nessim’s formula, but Duat would say only that its recipe was protected and registered “in all the leading countries of the world”. He purchased as much of it as seemed judicious in a single transaction, wary that Duat might consider him unhinged, which indeed he may already have been.

In the following weeks, Tooprig haunted the British Museum’s reading rooms, looking for information on Shem-el-Nessim. After a painstaking search, he found but one solitary reference, in the works of an eccentric occultist. In The Confessions of Aleister Crowley, Tooprig read that Oscar Eckenstein, an acquaintance, 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.”

Tooprig’s desire to be with the mystery woman, now that he had identified her perfume, grew like a strange addiction; he craved her closeness although he could not explain why. The days came and went and often it was only his valet who roused him from a trance as he came into the study with his cocktail, whereupon it became apparent to him that he hadn’t moved from his wing-chair since retiring there after breakfast. All the while, the scent of Shem-el-Nessim filled his senses and his mind. What did these reveries expect of him, he wondered; had its mysterious wearer been but a figment of his imagination?

It wasn’t until much later that I discovered why, soon after, Tooprig booked himself a cabin on a steamer at the Port of London. And it was only my own research that led me to discover it had been on a French-registered vessel named Cachous that sailed to Alexandria, where he boarded a felucca up the Mahmoudieh Canal and the Nile, to Cairo.

I had been in Cairo for five years, ever since we declared Egypt a sovereign country, working mainly as a reporter for the English language Cairo Gazette. To my mind, we were treating the Egyptians rather more as enemies than as friends, but I was well treated by the locals and found life in the city most pleasant. I had airy rooms off Al Geish Square and the pace of life was slower than in Europe; one achieved in a week in Cairo what one might in a day in London. The boys were alluring if not always compliant, and there was an abundance of kif and majoun with which to help stave off the boredom.

But Cairo brought Stan Tooprig no luck whatsoever. When I first set eyes on him he looked emaciated. His skin had the leathery appearance of the mummified corpse of Sethos I in the Cairo Museum. He toadied up to me in the coffeehouse and, from behind the semi-transparent skin of his face, a refined English accent said, “I say, nobody else will buy me a drink. Would you?”

I acceded to his request and he rewarded me with his story. “It’s quite the most remarkable thing,” Tooprig claimed and, by the time I had heard the foregoing, I must say I had to agree with him.

Although he had elected to live in the most luxurious hotel in all of Cairo, the hideously expensive Hotel Savoy, there was no trace whatsoever of the mysterious Shem-el-Nessim woman on either side of its daunting white façade. Although its employees were open to all manner of bribes, none even dared to feign an encounter with this woman. Tooprig hadn’t yet apprised me of the reason he believed she was in Egypt – or why, apart from its magnificence, he had chosen this hotel for his accommodation.

He enjoyed no special knowledge of Cairo’s geography, its businesses or its people to help him in his quest. Since arriving, he had carried out reconnaissance missions at all of the other fine hotels to no avail. He made a mischief of himself with the officials at the British Embassy on Ahmed Raghab Street and became a regular of the expatriate cocktail circuit, but there wasn’t a solitary sighting. He realized his journey had been in vain: if the woman had ever been in Cairo, she was no longer.

When he tired from the exertion of his account, we ordered more coffee and sized one another up. “There’s an Egyptian chap I’ve heard about from my contacts on the Gazette who entered the grave of a Pharaoh and his Queen. He claims to have been possessed by her perfume,” I told him.

Tooprig pleaded with me to take him to this man.

I knew of Ahmed Rezk quite by chance. One evening he had told me an implausible tale about his exploits as an erstwhile grave-robber. Since Rezk’s adventure also involved the supposed supernatural effects of a perfume, I agreed to arrange a meeting between them, feeling sorry for Tooprig and foolishly thinking it might comfort him. He was eating practically nothing and virtually subsisting on coffee, in the hope that if he remained awake long enough he would eventually see the Shem-el-Nessim woman again. “Rezk broke into the undiscovered tomb in the western branch of the Valley of the Kings in Thebes,” I explained as I walked Tooprig back in the direction of the Savoy. “They sold most of their spoils to foreigners around town, but Rezk retrieved a canopic jar he claims reeks of the perfume from the tomb.”

Each year, in early spring, the Egyptians celebrate “smelling the breezes”, an anniversary dating back to the time of the Pharaohs, over 4,000 years ago. Tooprig was so frail he could barely manage the short journey to Rezk’s apartment in the old city but, with the aid of my interpreter from the Cairo Gazette, we eventually conquered the staircase and arrived at his door.

His wife led us to Rezk, who was on the balcony, eating fisikh: salted, almost rotting fish. The sulphurous stink of it was noticeable two floors below. There are many cases of food poisoning each year in Cairo, suffered by those who purchase improperly preserved fisikh from unlicensed salting factories. Rezk looked terrible. His skin was sallow and his breath came in wheezing gasps. His wife was clearly distraught, beseeching him to eat fruit and to drink water, but Rezk brushed her aside as she attempted to dab at his brows with a damp cloth.

Rezk and an accomplice, he purported, had tunnelled through rock to the tomb’s burial chamber and eventually found the king and queen in their sarcophagi. “We opened their coffins, where we found the mummy of this king,” our interpreter translated as Rezk guzzled down mouthfuls of the stinking fisikh in the pauses in his confession. “There were amulets and golden ornaments at its throat; its head had a mask of gold upon it. The mummy was overlaid with gold, its coverings all wrought with silver and inlaid with lapis lazuli. We stripped off the gold and all the amulets and ornaments, then found the king’s wife and stripped off all that we found on her, too. We stole their furniture and vases of gold, silver and bronze. We divided the gold from the mummies, and the amulets, ornaments and coverings between us.”

Both Tooprig and I found Rezk’s explanation for consuming so much of the rotting fisikh extraordinary, and it was linked to his confession: “It’s the only way I can think of to be rid of this smell,” he told my interpreter with a defeated expression on his face. Rezk went on to explain how, once the queen’s mask had been removed, the chamber had filled with a beguiling perfume. The thieves narrowed down its source to an alabaster canopic urn in one corner of the tomb. They packed it into one of their swag bags and took it with them.

However, upon their return to Cairo they discovered that the urn contained but the foul, stinking viscera of the embalmed mummies, and no longer exuded the pungent perfume that had so intoxicated them. Nevertheless, it had somehow pursued the grave-robbers ever since, and they couldn’t shake it; even rotting fisikh succeeded only in masking it slightly.

“Show me the urn!” Tooprig pleaded, but Rezk explained that his wife had forced him to abandon it in the desert, so foul had its smell become. I began to doubt Rezk’s story; in particular that such a large and elaborate tomb could have existed undiscovered for so long in the Valley of the Kings, which was famously crawling with archaeologists. Rezk stubbornly refused to return to the tomb and also proved incapable of describing its location, so we had him draw a map of the site.

Tooprig was so infirm by this stage that I offered him my services and those of my interpreter to accompany him on an expedition to Thebes. It took us several days to get to the Valley of the Kings by train, by camel and finally on foot. The place Rezk had marked for us was close to a cliff-face about nine feet high. But there was no sign of an entrance, concealed or otherwise. The wind was whipping up the dust and so, in spite of Tooprig’s pleas, after several hours of searching, we were forced to admit defeat as the sun began to rise.

When, at Tooprig’s insistence, we returned to Cairo and to Rezk’s dwellings, we found his wife in mourning. Her beloved Ahmed, she said, had stopped eating altogether – even the stinking fisikh – and had wasted away. The identity of his accomplice thus went with him to his grave.

Tooprig and I would meet once a week for coffee at the Khan el-Khalili coffeehouse and each week he would appear thinner and to have lost a little more of his feeble grip on life. Occasionally, he would be 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, as though there had merely been a brief pause in a long stream of conversation, Tooprig lit his final cigarette and wheezed, “I say, do you know what happened to me at The Savoy in London? It was quite the damnedest thing. Buy me a coffee and I shall tell you all about it.”

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 her long limbs 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 before stopping in her tracks and turning to face him. She didn’t speak, just looked at him and smiled. “There was something terrifyingly lascivious about her lips,” Tooprig claimed, trembling as he recalled her. She held up a key to Room 941 at The Savoy Hotel, proffered it, then turned and continued on her way along the Strand and into the hotel lobby. When the elevator door opened, the woman entered it and turned to look at Tooprig with a sphinx-like smile. He followed her only after an interval and discovered her waiting outside the door to Room 941.

When he unlocked the door with the key she had given him, the room was dark and all the air had gone from it. In the twilight, she took off her coat and threw it on to the bed. 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 into the failing light of a late afternoon, all the while the indescribable oriental fragrance of her skin buffering the room’s airlessness. Hardly a word was spoken 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, and yet it was as though she were embalming and not making love to me. Her kisses tasted salty and bitter.”

Tooprig said he felt an obstruction in his airways, as if something viscous and too large for the passages was being pulled out of 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; 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 grew even weaker. My heart was suddenly heavy, as though it were about to fall through both me and the bed and on to the floor. And yet, her hands were soft, like clean linen. I felt as though I was being wrapped in her arms. 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; my senses were paralysed. And although my heart was beating hard, my blood felt 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 resistance to the sensations assailing him, and soon fell into unconsciousness.

“Afterwards, I was numb. In a dream of red velvet drapes, 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 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 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.

Some time later, he returned to The Savoy and approached the concierge’s desk, where he engaged him in conversation about his liaison with the woman. “She was staying in Room 941,” he said. “We met 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 no such liaison can have taken place in that room, as there is no Room 941 in The Savoy Hotel.”

Tooprig turned from the counter, quite sure that he had not misremembered the room number. He decided to try a different approach and bribed a bellboy who claimed to remember such a woman from Tooprig’s description. Although the boy didn’t recall the woman’s name, Tooprig asked where she had gone after she had checked out. He slowly spelled out a word he had memorized from the label on 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 that he died. He was buried here in Cairo at the Beb el-Wezir cemetery with a view of the Citadel and the Mohammed Ali Mosque, beyond.

In 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 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. Whether that woman existed only in the mind of Stan Tooprig has never been entirely relevant to me since, once imagined, she existed for him as did everything else in his world.

I am old now. I have memories, and that is all I have. They are like the loose leaves of a book that has lost its binding, the pages are in the wrong order, are torn and discoloured. Each year, on the anniversary of Tooprig’s death, his haunted, bony face comes back to me, and each year I doubt the veracity of his story more – he had woven a tale as one might a ghost story, seemingly omitting anything that did not assist his narrative.

But recently I have reproached myself for questioning Tooprig’s honesty. In recording the foregoing events, I was forced to refer to some back issues of the Cairo Gazette. And so, one evening, 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 to a full-page advertisement for the company J. Grossmith & Son. It featured a drawing of a turbaned woman on a night-time camel ride in front of the Great Pyramids. She had some of the allure of Louise Brooks. Two oversized bottles of Shem-el-Nessim hung like water vessels from either side of her camel as she smiled gaily at me from the newsprint. The advertising copy read:

While gazing at the woman’s face I was struck by an intense fragrance; something oriental laced with spice and perhaps a suggestion of sandalwood. It filled my nostrils, lungs and my imagination, and I almost swooned. I tried to ascertain its source but, apart from me, the room was unoccupied and quite still, save for an odd shadow that paused fleetingly against the open door and a curtain that billowed 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 her “scent of Araby” was tainted by the miasma of early death. I myself fell ill soon after that visit to the library. My vitality has been sapped and I doubt I shall live to see my seventieth birthday. She, though, will never grow old and I fear the lifelong curse of her fragrance, which seduced me like a memory of London long ago, will be on the air long after we are all gone.