The Frenchwoman told me that she was a friend of a friend of my father’s. She took me to a café near the railway station and bought me steak frites and a salade verte. The food was better than anything I had ever tasted, but I was queasy with fatigue and loneliness, and couldn’t eat much of it. I remember spelling out the names of the Métro stations in my head and thinking that the curved shapes of the signs and the curled lettering were so beautiful and exotic compared with the workaday London tube.

At the end of the afternoon there was another train and a night in a stuffy couchette before I looked out of the window in the pearly morning and saw the Mediterranean for the first time. At Nice station Philippe Lesert was waiting to meet me. He took my suitcase as if it weighed nothing and opened the passenger door of a dusty 2CV for me. We drove away from the startling blue-whiteness of the coast, where the light was so strong it hurt my eyes, past farms and flower meadows and little houses with ochre tiled roofs. The road was quiet and dappled with the shade of mimosa trees.

At last Philippe pointed out medieval Grasse on its hill ahead of us, but we turned aside before we reached it and came to a house set in fields full of flowers. The house was ugly, too tall for its width and with a shallow grey roof like an afterthought, but it had pistachio-green shutters and tubs of marigolds, and kitchen herbs at the back steps. Philippe stopped the car on a patch of dusty earth, then opened the car door for me again, just as if I were someone who mattered. I stepped out and the cool, elegant scent of jasmine folded itself around me. The waves of perfume filled my head with wonder and I said in amazement, ‘Oh.’

‘Is strong, yes?’ Philippe laughed.

Mr Phebus had given me a jasmine dipper to sniff, all those years ago, but I didn’t remember it having the sweet and bell-like clarity of this perfect fragrance. This was Valerie and Auntie Viv and Mrs Ingoldby refined and softened and purified until it was the very essence of unattainable loveliness.

Philippe spoke a little English. He was eighteen, three years older than me, and he had one of those thin, mobile, olive-skinned French faces. Because of the suitcase-carrying and door-opening, and also because of the way he talked to me as if I were one of his friends and not just some inconvenience of a strange English girl, I already thought he was wonderful.

‘You smell at dawn, when we pick flowers. Then, ah.’ Philippe blew on his fingernails and shook his hand as if it were burning. His eyebrows made black circumflexes. ‘Voilà, maman, la petite est arrivée.’