Everyone I knew back in those days must have known. Mrs Maloney, Daphne and Daphne’s parents and the other girls in my class, and Miss Avery my headmistress and the other teachers, they would all have read or heard about my father going to prison. I sat in my library seat with the other readers coughing and shuffling around me, thinking that I didn’t care about this, either in the present tense or on behalf of the child I had been then. But what did strike me was the strength of my determination not to confront the truth or any shading of it.

I had seen but somehow managed to ignore the other girls’ whispers and the sympathetic but speculative glances of the teachers. Angela had said nothing to me either at the time or afterwards. Mrs Maloney must have made knowing remarks with her mouth pursed and her eyes darting but I had squeezed her insinuations out of my mind.

I didn’t want to know what Ted had done or where he was, and therefore I had remained completely ignorant. I had even believed the preposterous story that I was going to France in order to learn the language and experience another culture, when I hadn’t been away on holiday since before my mother’s death and Ted showed no other particular concern for my school progress.

Such tenacity betrayed the understood fragility of my world.

If I mistrusted Ted, if he let me down as he so easily might, I had no one else to turn to. And so what he did had to be right and what he said had to be true. From my adult perspective, the mental contortions that this must have involved felt utterly exhausting.

A perfumer and a con artist, I had told Mel, and the admission rose straight from a deep well in my consciousness. I had known, really, all along.

Other memories gather, and they are so unwelcome that I have to open my eyes very wide and stare hard at the window and the square of sky beyond. I don’t want to cry here, in front of the readers and the handlers of newspaper archives who trundle the volumes to the desks in wheeled trolleys.

I straighten the rippled pages of newsprint and carefully close the cover. I place the card that indicates I have finished with my volume carefully on top and collect up my belongings. Outside, the air is gritty and there isn’t a breath of wind. I can look down on the tube tracks through a chainlink fence and while I stand and try to collect my thoughts a tube train rattles into the station below me and foreshortened commuters step out on to the platform. A sluggish tide of people washes up the steps as the train jerks forward again.