When he wasn’t scribbling Ted unlocked his cabinets and mixed drops of liquid from phials and bottles. The floor manager would collect a full jug of synthetic perfume compound from him and tip it into one of the vats where the paddles blended the scent into the sea of lotion. The perfume element was a tiny proportion of the total volume but I thought that was no great loss in any case. All the Restall & Jackson products smelled more or less the same. They were sweet, with a powdery chemical after-note; old ladies’ smells, cloying and sickly. These were the formulae that Ted jotted down with little jabs of his pencil, labelling them R & J. Old Man Phebus must have trained him too well for him to fail to keep a record of the fragrances he created, even these, which he plainly despised.

I didn’t ask him any direct questions about what he was doing there. I knew better than that, and in any case I understood without being told that he had to work himself back, in some way, after the summer. He won’t be there long, I assured myself, not long at all.

For two weeks, until the day before Christmas Eve when the last van full of packed cartons pulled away, I had my father in the corner of my eye, and my brown-paper envelope full of coins and the occasional folded banknote.

On Christmas Eve Ted went out to buy groceries and I used some of my earnings to buy a little tree that I stood on a table in the bay window of our front room. The decorations were kept packed in cotton wool in a cardboard box that lived the rest of the year in the cupboard under the stairs. It was labelled ‘Xmas decorations’ in my mother’s handwriting and I thought about her as I hung the glass balls and wound the tinsel round the spiky, resinous branches and waited for Ted to come back. I would have liked to sit with my father that evening and maybe talk about her, remembering the Christmases we had all spent together even though they were fading, blurring too fast in my memory through lack of visiting. But Ted put on a crisp white shirt and his RAF tie, and announced with a smile that he was going out for an hour or so. He had recovered his gloss and vigour. He even looked taller than he did when he was at the factory, sitting hunched up in his white coat.

‘Don’t wait up.’ He winked at me. ‘Why don’t you pop up and say hello to Mrs Maloney?’

I watched television instead.

For Christmas, I gave him a book of art nouveau poster illustrations. I loved the colours and the sinuous forms, and I thought Ted would too, although he didn’t seem very interested in looking at them. My present was a five-pound note folded in an envelope.