‘He sent you off to France.’

‘That’s right. It was you who took me to Victoria, remember, to the boat train.’

Ted knew about the boat train, of course; Audrey told me they went on it to Paris.

‘Your dad asked me to.’

I could see that other Angela, nested like a smaller Russian doll inside the huge one she had now become. She was wearing a summer dress, shirt-waisted, with a pattern of leaves on the full skirt. She helped me put my suitcase on the rack, and handed me a two-page set of instructions about the journey ahead. I was terrified, but there was no point in begging Angela for a reprieve.

‘It’s all a long time ago,’ she hedged.

I stared into her eyes. ‘What is it, exactly, that I don’t know?’

She looked straight back at me, making a decision. Then she said, ‘Your dad went to prison. For fraud. He served three months of a six-month sentence.’

My first sensation was relief. I had been afraid of something much darker. Ted had always been a fraud; to hear that he had actually done time for it was only a confirmation. ‘I see. How much more do you know?’

‘Not much. He embezzled some money, not a lot, something to do with the shop he had in Mayfair.’

‘Scentsation.’

‘Daft name, I always thought.’ Angela gave her girl’s giggle again. ‘He was caught and tried and found guilty, and that was the time I knew him. And when he was in prison he wrote to me to say it was finished.’

‘I see,’ I said again. The scale of his concealment was beginning to dawn on me.

The months leading up to that summer had no particular resonance. I remembered vaguely that Ted was busy and preoccupied. He was often absent and when he did come home late at night he was irritable, sitting with his piles of paperwork and answering in monosyllables if I tried to talk to him. But none of that was unusual. I fended for myself, doing my homework at the living-room table and making a sandwich for supper under the neon strip light in the kitchen. In the silent house the sound of the fridge motor shuddering into life could be startlingly loud. The fridge was usually almost empty. Evening after evening I would stare into the pastel-blue interior, willing it to fill itself up with food.

It was just before the end of the school summer term that Ted announced he had some business to do and he’d be away from home. He stood on the burn-marked half-moon hearthrug, rocking on his heels.