The reading and musing and the effort of comprehension that went with it brought yet more pictures of Ted into my mind, even though they were unwelcome.

Instead of seeing him standing by the chimney breast at home, in his cravat and checked shirt, with four fingers of one hand dipped into the blazer pocket, I saw him at his work. There was a stepped bank of bottles enclosing him in a semicircle. He was holding a paper dipper to his nose and smelling, with his eyes closed and his body completely still. His face was expressionless. He looked relaxed enough to be asleep, but at that moment no other world existed for him, only the tiny miniature landscape conjured on the tip of a paper strip. He was smelling not just with his nose but with his entire mind and being.

This image must have been locked inside me since the day I accompanied him to Phebus Fragrances. Or it might conceivably have dated from a later, very brief period when he had a shop in South Audley Street. I remember that there was a cubbyhole of a lab behind the showroom, where he worked on new fragrances to be sold over the counter. But this was at the height of Ted’s grand period. He was busy playing the role of master perfumer who kissed the hands of Mayfair ladies and promised them the scent of desire itself, caught in a crystal bottle and named after them. I couldn’t associate him then with the rapt and motionless man who brought every faculty to the point of concentration on a single scent. That version belonged to Phebus Fragrances and the days when Ted was learning his art from the old man.