The Scent Keeper

Emmeline heads to Vancouver on a bus. The city that unfolds around her is new and strange. With the help of a kind bus driver, Emmeline finds her way to a cheap boardinghouse where, if she watches her money carefully, she can stay in the city long enough to find Fisher. She lives on peanut butter sandwiches as she begins to check nurseries one by one in the city. It is a frustrating effort, and only occasional respites in a nearby park keep up her spirits. After 47 dead-ends, Emmeline finally finds the nursery where Fisher worked. He was fired three months earlier, Emmeline is told, over a problem with a girl who also worked there. Out of money and angry at how quickly Fisher moved on, Emmeline decides to make one last visit: to the corporate headquarters of Inspire, her mother’s perfume company: “After what I’d learned about Fisher, maybe my only real hope was that I’d have a chance to decide whether or not I wanted [my mother]” (205).

The high-rise building where Inspire is headquartered, with its lobby crowded with streams of business people, intimidates Emmeline. She waits for nearly three hours by the lobby elevator hoping to recognize a mother she only knows through grainy newspaper photographs. Late in the afternoon, two women emerge from an elevator, one of whom strikes Emmeline. Recognizing the woman from the photographs, Emmeline introduces herself to Victoria Wingate. There is some initial confusion: Victoria tells a stunned Emmeline her name is Violet; Emmeline was her paternal grandmother’s name. After resolving this, Victoria takes Emmeline to a nearby bar where she explains how Inspire uses scents to spike sales: “We streamed the scent of coconuts in this bar and sales of rum spiked 22% in a single month” (216). Victoria tells Emmeline that the Nightingale fiasco “nearly killed” (216) her father.

Victoria assures Emmeline that she can stay with her. Her mother’s spacious townhouse overlooking the city fascinates Emmeline, but she is most taken by her mother’s collection of liquid scents on shelves that run from floor to ceiling. At Inspire, Victoria tells her, perfumers construct scents designed for restaurants, hotels, bars, and department stores: “My job is to make things smell better—because when they do, people spend more money… We make them want [to spend]” (219). Emmeline realizes now that her sense of smell, which had long made her a misfit, is now an asset. It makes her special and might even make her mother love her.

The next day, Emmeline accompanies Victoria to Inspire where she is introduced to Claudia who will be in charge of training Emmeline. Sensing nepotism, Claudia has an immediate dislike toward Emmeline, an unqualified novice given the job only because her mother runs the company. The first day, she bombards Emmeline with dozens of specialized scents trying to overwhelm and confuse her. Emmeline “never felt so alive” (227). That night, she and her mother share a bottle of wine and talk about the construction of scents and the market value of aromas. Emmeline confesses she wants to design a scent, but Victoria cautions her to be patient. Meanwhile, Claudia keeps trying to trick Emmeline. In one cruel prank, Claudia mixes the scent of feces into a perfume and taunts Emmeline to recognize it. “I looked over at Claudia. I hated her right then, in a way I had never hated anyone, even the kids at my school” (231).

When Emmeline is walking home from Inspire along the city wharves with their specialty restaurants and upscale bars, she is nearly doused when an aproned restaurant employee tips a bucket of water over a balcony above her. Even in the dim streetlight, she recognizes that it is Fisher. She goes into the establishment, named The Island, which sports a trendy tropical ambience. Fisher works as a bartender, and Emmeline yearningly watches him behind the bar, every muscle and every movement “achingly familiar” (234). But she says nothing.

The following day, her mother takes her to lunch. Emmeline begins to understand how wrong Claudia’s approach to scents is. Claudia treats perfumes like formulas, made up of elements in some proportion. For Emmeline, scents are not formulas; they are living, organic things that shape themselves. She shares with her mother a perfume she designed on her own for a lucrative department store account, a scent that might make spouses splurge and purchase expensive gifts they otherwise would not. The scent is a combination of lavender, rose, vanilla, and indole—the last bit adding a touch of jealousy to the scent. Victoria is delighted. She pitches the scent to the store, which quickly agrees to the deal, and summarily dismisses Claudia, certain her daughter is ready to be a perfume designer. Victoria takes her daughter to a department store makeup counter to teach her one valuable lesson. She has Emmeline close her eyes and spritzes her with a scent. In the mirror, Emmeline sees herself as garish, splotchy, ugly. Then Victoria spritzes Emmeline with a second scent—this time Emmeline looks in the mirror and sees herself as beautiful, elegant, “luminous” (243). “It’s all about subtlety,” her mother whispers (244).

With the success of the department store bid, Emmeline becomes a wunderkind in the perfume industry. She is profiled in a business section of the city magazine where she is hailed for her new role in “the gold standard for olfactory branding” (249). Emmeline quietly realizes that it has been a year since she saw Fisher in the bar.