I went back to Ted’s notebooks and reread the entries for the spring and summer of 1965, just before he sent me to Grasse. Nothing looked much different, at least to my inexpert eye. There were the same lists of natural and chemical ingredients, occasional names and the jottings from which everything else sprang. Maybe Ted’s writing was more hurried, maybe there was less fluency in the expression of his ideas, but there was nothing to indicate that he was about to go to prison. Then there was a gap of almost four months, from the middle of July to the end of October. The last formula before the lacuna was labelled ‘MAL’.

When the notes did resume, in November, there was a difference. The new formulae were short and to my eye they looked ugly because the ingredients were all of synthetic origin with no natural oils or extracts. Ted’s scrawl was careless and I imagined that I could read dismissiveness in every stroke of his pen. The heading they came under was R & J.

I remembered the time very clearly.

I had a job in the Christmas holidays of 1965, working for Restall & Jackson, who were also Ted’s new employers. This cash in hand was the first money I had ever earned and the half-crowns and ten-shilling notes in my purse seemed to generate raw heat that I warmed my hands on while I waited to catch the bus from Hendon to work and back again. ‘Christmas shift temporary hands’ Ted’s bosses called us and we were a strange collection. There were Jamaican women whose bright clothes seemed to bleed colour into the clammy winter atmosphere, thin and anxious white mothers in headscarves, and gangs of careless teenagers who smoked in defiance of the signs that decorated the factory floor. I was the youngest faceless possessor of a pair of hands, but not by very much. There were two sixteen-year-olds, one of whom was visibly pregnant, but they popped bubblegum and shouted taunts at the tattooed machine minders and ignored me. No one else paid me any attention either, but I didn’t care. I was doing something, getting paid for it and I was out of Dorset Avenue for hours at a time.

Ted had got me the job, of course. ‘It’ll give you some cash, Sade,’ he said. ‘Things are a bit tight all round and anyway we need some extra hands on the line this time of year.’

I knew that things were tight, as he put it. Our house was cold, and we had run out of even basic supplies like detergent and tea.

‘We’ll soon be flying on two wings again,’ he told me and winked. ‘Since I was away on that job I haven’t had a chance to get properly organised.’