Feature No. 01

They’d loved having us

A woman shouting at her butler beside the pool, and a rose field in Grasse where forty kilos of flowers make one of absolute. On what the guest contributes, and on why the perishing is where the material comes from.

An American woman was shouting at her butler. Warmth of the sun, mid afternoon, the pool water very still. She wanted something that hadn’t arrived, and her voice went up off the stone and crossed a courtyard that centuries of masonry had been arranged to keep quiet. He stood in front of her with his hands behind his back and took it. When she’d finished he said he’d see to it, and went, at a walking pace, unhurried, which was its own answer.

She’d paid a great deal to be there. She was inside one of the most considered houses on the riviera, in the best hour of the day, and nothing was coming off any of it. Nothing was staying. She would have the receipt, the photographs, the fact of having been, and she’d carry out exactly what she carried in.

The tuberose survives in Grasse because of a gift. The last grower handed Joseph Mul his bulbs on retiring.

In May the smell of roses reached me before the field did. I walked the rows, wellies on. Bent backs, straw, canvas aprons at the waist, the pickers going along the lines with both hands. The Mul family have grown flowers there since 1840, and Fabrice Bianchi, Mul’s son-in-law, runs the fields now. Since 1987, Chanel has taken the harvest.

They’d loved having us

You take the flower at its base and pinch, and it gives way. Picking stops at one, before the heat takes the scent off. The roses are weighed before they wilt and go into the vats that day, where pressure and solvent pull the scent into a wax. Forty kilos make one kilo of it. Nothing about it is efficient.

Bianchi said they had bloomed three weeks early this year. Drought changes the scent. The flowers perish. The sweet smell of vibrant blossom and summer remains for another moment. Chanel can protect thirty hectares indefinitely. In Egypt, pickings have fallen by two thirds.

Luxury clients seek longevity, eternal youth, eternal life. Luxury still can’t say the other thing out loud. The perishing is where the material comes from.

Two months later, on the morning we left, the woman who had looked after us all week came to say goodbye and told me quietly that they’d loved having us. I’ve thought about that sentence ever since.

They had been noticing us all week, and had reached a view. We had been received as carefully as we were receiving. Earlier a young man had brought lunch up to the room where I was writing and stayed to talk, and I sat in a doorway with a tray going cold and learned who he was. None of that was in anybody’s training.

Every hotel measures satisfaction, and it runs one way. There’s no line on the form for whether the guest was worth having. Hospitality is one luxury category where the customer truly is a factor of production.

The warm madeleines were the first gesture. At the door there was a loaf, out of the oven that morning, still hot through the paper. We ate it that afternoon, torn, with butter.

There’s no line on the form for whether the guest was worth having.

They’d loved having us