"Meeting Coty" is rich with the senses. It evokes the perfumes of flowers and bottled scents, of food, of the rain or sun, of London and Jerez de la Frontera through the language chosen. The young Tessa fills a basin of water with the flower heads she has snapped from her mother's floral displays. The bathroom is sunlit. The flowers tumble in the light and are submerged in the rippling liquid. The rest of the household are still in bed, the air is thick with sleep, the anticipation of the day hovering through the rooms.
And then the eldest daughter awakes and she greets her younger sister in spanish. And the cacophony of the house begins. After the silence, the floors and walls resound with voices and sounds and movement and noise. The day has begun.
This is the world of the Garcia family. Two adults and nine children and each one pulling and twisting against the other in their individual ways. But one of the girls dreams of escaping. For a spanish catholic girl being brought up in London before the first world war, this was impossible. But in Tessa's mind, she already knew the young boy who ran barefoot through the pine groves, brushed his hands through the rosemary bushes and stood on the beach looking away from the island to the mainland where he dreamed of conquering the world. Their ambitions seemed impossible, yet he became Francois Coty, the greatest perfume maker in the world and if he became this, what was Tessa capable of doing?
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