In those quiet evenings that I spent reading my father’s notebooks I realised how much I would have liked there to have been a perfume marked ‘for Sadie’. I searched all the way through, but there was no word-picture and list of ingredients marked ‘for Faye’, either. I didn’t know anything about my parents’ courtship or their early years together: I wondered if my mother had once been breathless and flirtatious, and as mesmerised by Ted’s charm as one of the aunties. She must have been, I thought. He must have held her face between his two hands and gazed into her eyes. I wished I could remember her like that, instead of as the turned-aside profile in the photograph and the muted but constant presence of my childhood.

If I had known I was going to lose her, I wouldn’t have taken her for granted while I yearned for Ted’s attention. I rested my fingers on the pages of notes. My poor mother, I thought. Ted’s shadow overlaid hers now and his opacity obscured her for me. I couldn’t reach back through the layers of years to touch her again and I knew I never would be able to.

Where are you? I whispered to her, but I heard nothing.

I tried to keep Ted in the back of my mind, fending him off. He was dead, wasn’t he? I wanted him to go away and let me think for myself.

Near the beginning of the first volume of notes I did come across the description of a fragrance with no name. The first word Ted reached for in his word-picture was ‘mystery’. Then, to enlarge on the notion he wrote ‘multi-layered, teasingly complex. A veiled woman with the curves of her body showing through rich folds of velvet. Heady with smoke and incense.’ I knew for sure that this wasn’t a description of Faye.

I remembered that the word perfume itself came from the Latin per fumare, from smoke. And I thought I had read somewhere that the ladies of the harem would let their draperies billow over an incense burner, so they carried a drift of the fragrance with them wherever they moved. The idea of smoke and incense therefore went right back to the origins of perfume; I wondered idly if the roots of this particular creation were as deeply embedded in Ted’s heart and imagination.

A long formula followed the description of the perfume, running to well over a hundred items. I scanned the list but couldn’t begin to decipher what such a compound might smell like. No distinctive fragrance rose from the page to wind itself in my imagination, as it would have done for Ted. Then I noticed what I hadn’t seen before. At the bottom of the last page, the formula was labelled simply with a tiny pencilled ‘A’. Maybe the initial stood for Audrey.