Free The Rich Are Different by Susan Howatch

was unsurprised. Replacing the bottle, she selected a third. ‘What about this?’
    I put my nose obediently to the rim and was once more back in the English garden. But this time I could see the woods at the edge of the lawn, the leaves on the trees, the moss on the ground. ‘I like that,’ I said sniffing again. ‘You’ve caught the scent of flowers but now it’s overlaid with something else.’
    ‘Would you say it was a natural scent?’
    ‘Without question.’
    She smiled. ‘The only natural ingredients are the herbs which are cheap and easy to produce. The rest is a chemical compound.’ She picked up the first bottle. ‘This is the scent made entirely from natural ingredients including flowers which are expensive and impossible to obtain all the year round. I couldn’t market it as a commercial proposition. This—’ She turned to the second bottle ‘—is the scent which contains nothing but chemicals. The result is similar, but I’ve never been able to get rid of that cloying sweetness without adding the herbs. They disguise it, though I’m not sure how.’
    I wanted to make sure I had understood her correctly. ‘Give me an example.’
    ‘Well, for instance, it’s easy to make an artificial lemon scent. You useglycerin, chloroform, nitrous ether, aldehyde, acetate of ethyl, butyrate of amyl, alcohol and a couple of other chemicals. But you’ll know it’s an artificial scent unless you blend it with some natural ingredients. Conversely, many synthetic products often intensify the odours of the natural products, so if you get the right combination your product can be even better than a scent which is made entirely without chemical ingredients.’
    The idea of man improving on nature always appeals to my basest nineteenth-century instincts. I asked what artificial scents could be used.
    ‘The most important are ionone (for violet perfume) and terpineol (for lilac) and …’ She talked on knowledgeably, and I learnt of essential oils dissolved in alcohol, of pomades and tinctures, of liquid perfume and dry perfume.
    ‘And here’s my recipe for Indian sachet powder: 3½ ounces of sandalwood, 10½ ounces of cinnamon, 30 grams of cloves …’
    The exotic formulae filled a thick exercise book, but at last we descended from the heights of perfumery to the prosaic instructions for making vanishing cream.
    ‘Four pounds 12 ounces of stearic acid (white triple-pressed) …’
    The list rolled sonorously on. I imagined a million women smoothing their faces with the contents of a million jars of vanishing cream, and soon the landscape surrounding them became dotted with dollars and cents.
    ‘… and the chemicals are all easy to obtain,’ Dinah was saying. ‘Of course you have to be careful of adulteration so your supplier must be quite above suspicion …’ And she began to explain how one could recognize the adulterates of essential oils.
    ‘… so they add paraffin of spermaceti to make the mixture congeal readily because that’s characteristic of
true
oil of aniseed,’ she concluded earnestly. ‘You do understand, don’t you?’
    ‘Absolutely.’ I mentally allocated another fifty thousand dollars for further expansion and pictured a future public company launched by a flotation designed to seduce even the most cautious investor. It was only when we went indoors and she showed me her packaging designs that I realized how far she had to travel before I could risk making her small business a public enterprise. Glancing at the fanciful gold lettering which curved bewilderingly against a pale blue background I forgot my vision of a million-dollar annual turnover and came down to earth with a jolt.
    ‘Very pretty,’ I said, ‘but I can’t read it. I guess this flowered script is supposed to conjure up an Indian atmosphere.’
    ‘Exactly!’ said Dinah in triumph. ‘I’m calling my product Taj Mahal.’
    I groaned.
    ‘Well, why not?’ she demanded angrily.
    ‘My dear, your purchasers among