I could imagine this much more easily, how I would turn the pages of big bound volumes of newsprint, with their reports of Princess Margaret’s party-going and Helen Shapiro’s concerts, and local events like school summer fêtes and flower shows, until I stumbled across a picture of Ted. Maybe it would even be the one that I had had copied for Angela and Audrey.

‘Do you remember I told you that my father was a con artist?’

‘A perfumer and a con artist,’ Mel said, leaning back in her chair.

‘It was more true than I realised. I found out some more about him,’ I said. ‘He went to prison.’ I told her about going to Suffolk to see Angela.

‘Does knowing that make you feel any different?’

I considered briefly. ‘No.’ I wasn’t shocked or dismayed, which is what Mel was meaning.

‘And so what is it that you do feel?’

This made me think more carefully. ‘In the dark,’ I said at length.

That was just what it was. Ted had put up so many smokescreens. It can’t have been just my mother and me he hid from, but his other women too and his creditors, and the consequences of his doings that were ranged around him in a circle like so many precariously vertical dominoes.

When I was a girl Ted had always seemed to be so strong and so self-confident that I bought into his image without questioning it. (I wasn’t alone in that, of course, as the list of aunties demonstrated.) As an adult I thought I saw through him, yet even while I was convincing myself of this he still made me angry and sometimes intimidated me, which was a measure of his lasting power over me. And now, behind the puffs of coloured smoke that drifted at the far end of the hall of mirrors where my father dwelt, I was beginning to think there had only been a void. There was nothing solid there and perhaps nothing so very significant to hide either, except my father’s fear of being exposed for what he really was.

It was fitting that his great gift was as a perfumer, the creator of illusion, and it was sad that even his gift had come to almost nothing except some old-fashioned and mostly forgotten fragrances, and three volumes of notes.

I looked into Mel’s face across the plates and glasses, with the muted noise of the restaurant like a shell held to my ear.