Thirty Years of Bad Presents, and the Small Bottle That Finally Made Sense

I am an electrician by trade, and I have wired half the houses in my part of Pietermaritzburg over the last thirty years. Give me a fault behind a wall and I will find it. Give me a distribution board that somebody's brother-in-law has butchered and I will make it safe by lunchtime. But for thirty years of marriage, ask me to buy my wife a present and I would freeze like a learner driver at a busy circle.

Sanet has put up with a lot from me on this front. There was the year I bought her a kettle. A kettle, for our anniversary, because ours had packed up and I thought I was being helpful. There was the year I bought her the same bottle of hand cream two years running, which she pointed out kindly, holding both bottles, one in each hand, like a woman weighing evidence in a court case. I am not a thoughtless man. I love my wife. I am simply, when it comes to gifts, a man wandering in the dark with no torch.

The Saturday I had nowhere else to be

The bottle I want to tell you about came from an ordinary Saturday when Sanet was away in Durban helping our daughter move flat, and I had a whole day and no jobs booked and the house too quiet. I drove into town to a craft market that runs near the botanical gardens, more to kill the morning than anything, and I walked around with my hands in my pockets feeling like a spare part among all the candles and the beaded bracelets.

There was a small stall near the end, just a fold-up table with a cloth over it and rows of little glass bottles catching the light. A woman about my age was sitting behind it reading a book, and she did not pounce on me the way some of the stallholders do. I stopped because the bottles were pretty in the sun, and she looked up and said I could smell any of them, no pressure.

I told her, honestly, that I did not know the first thing about any of it, that I was the sort of man who wore whatever green bottle of aftershave my wife put in the bathroom cabinet. She laughed, not unkindly, and she said most of her customers started exactly there. Then she uncapped one of the little bottles and touched it to a paper strip and handed it to me, and it was the perfume oils she made herself, and I stood there in the middle of a busy market and had, of all the daft things, a small revelation.

What I had never understood about scent

Here is the thing I had never grasped, being a man who thought perfume came in one form only, the sort you spray from a mist that fills the whole car. She explained that what I was smelling was carried in oil rather than in alcohol, that it sat close to the skin and warmed up slowly through the day instead of exploding into the room and then vanishing by lunchtime.

She let me try a few. The first went to the paper. The second she said I should put on the back of my own hand, because scent behaves differently on skin than on paper, which I had never known either. I stood there sniffing the back of my hand like a fool, and I thought about Sanet, and about the fact that in thirty years I had never once bought her something that was actually about her.

Because that was the real problem, I saw it standing at that little table. My gifts had always been about the house, or about my own panic, or about the shop being about to close. A kettle is a gift about boiling water. Hand cream, twice, is a gift about not paying attention. I had never bought Sanet a single thing whose only purpose was to make her feel like herself.

Trying to remember my own wife

So I did something I had never done in a shop. I stopped and actually tried to remember my wife. Not the wife who reminds me to take my tablets and books the car in for its service. The other one, the one underneath thirty years of ordinary life. What did she smell of, on the rare nights we went out properly. What was the scent of the perfume she had worn when we were courting, the one she stopped buying somewhere around the time the children came and money got tight and small luxuries quietly disappeared.

I remembered it was warm. Something with vanilla in it, and something darker underneath, a bit like the smell of the inside of an old church, though I could not have named it to save my life. I said this to the stallholder, feeling exposed, and she nodded as if I had said something sensible, and she reached for two or three bottles and started building me something.

She talked me through the scented oil perfume the way I might talk a young apprentice through a wiring diagram, patient, no jargon for its own sake, letting me smell each thing and say yes or no. Amber, she said, when I described the church smell. That is amber you are remembering. I felt absurdly pleased with myself, a fifty-something sparky learning the names of smells at a fold-up table.

The bottle the size of my thumb

I walked away with a bottle no bigger than my thumb, and it cost me less than I would spend on a decent braai for the family, and I drove home turning it over in the cupholder at every stop street, suddenly nervous in a way a kettle had never made me nervous.

Sanet came back from Durban on the Sunday evening, tired, complaining about the traffic on the N3, and I waited until she had put the kettle on, the kettle, my old crime, and I put the little bottle on the counter next to her without saying much. I told her I did not really know what I was doing, that a lady at the market had helped me, that I had tried to remember the perfume she wore when we met.

She went very quiet. Then she opened it and dabbed a bit on her wrist the way the woman had shown me, and she brought it up to her nose, and her eyes filled, and she said, this is it, this is the one I used to wear, how on earth did you remember. And I said I did not remember the name, I only remembered how it made me feel to stand next to her, and that set her off properly, and then I was standing in my own kitchen with my arms around my wife, both of us a bit teary over a thing the size of my thumb.

What a small thing taught an old dog

I have thought a lot since then about why that one worked when thirty years of presents did not. It was not that oil based perfumes are cleverer than kettles, though I have become quietly fond of the whole idea, the way it stays close and warm on her through the day rather than shouting across a room. It was that for once I had stopped and paid attention. I had tried to picture the actual person I married, not the running of the household we built together.

Sanet wears it most days now, only a dab, and when she leans past me to reach something in the cupboard I catch it, warm and low, and it takes me straight back to being a skinny young man too nervous to hold her hand at the bioscope. I have become the sort of husband who notices when the little bottle is getting low and quietly sorts out another before she has to mention it.

I am still a hopeless gift buyer, if I am honest. Christmas still finds me in a panic in some shop at half past four. But I learned one thing at that market table that I wish someone had told me thirty years earlier. The gift was never really the point. The paying attention was. Everything else, even the smallest bottle on the shelf, is just the shape you pour it into.