Away on a job, that was where he now claimed to have been all summer. I believed him, queasily, with an underlying sense that whatever else there was to know I wouldn’t like and so it was better not to ask. I had been ‘learning French, on a valuable cultural exchange’, which was how my absence during the first month of the school year had been explained at school. All the alliances in the new form had been made by the time I got back, and the loose friendships I had cultivated with Daphne and the others the year before seemed to have been forgotten. There was some interest to start with in the details of my exotic summer, but the truth was that I had little to tell even though I tried hard to embroider the story of Philippe. Some of the girls giggled and whispered about me but I closed my ears and ignored them, and they soon found some other misfit to focus on.

So I didn’t mind feeling isolated among the other temporary hands, because I was used to solitariness. The best thing about working at Restall & Jackson, even better than the money, was Ted’s proximity. I worked early or late shifts and so we didn’t very often catch the bus together (the car had long gone), but at least I saw him every day. I knew where he was and the absence of anxiety – the gnawing fear that one day he would simply be gone and this time would never come back – was better than a coal fire or a steak and chips dinner.

The factory was housed in a big metal shed near Wormwood Scrubs, on a flat, windy piece of ground near a railway line. Litter caught in bare bramble arches, the puddles were like dead eyes and there was always the sound of shunting on the sharp wind. It was a long, cold walk from the bus stop and even inside the metal walls of the factory it wasn’t noticeably warmer. I could see my breath condensing while I performed whatever repetitive task the fat foreman set me to do.

Restall & Jackson manufactured cheap toiletries, and we temporaries were there to fill the extra bottles, and pack boxes of shampoo and bath oil and body creams ready for vans to take them out to the Christmas trade. The factory floor was a series of big metal vats where paddles restlessly stirred vanishing ellipses into thick seas of lotion. The base material always seemed the same, a whitish runny fluid that the machine-minders poured into the vats from big unmarked drums. Other jars of ingredients were mixed in until the floor manager indicated that the resulting compound was ready for bottling.