There were spots of colour showing through her face powder.

‘Did he create it for you?’

Yes, of course he did. The face-cupping routine.

Audrey nodded. Then her mouth crimped with a mixture of pain and triumph that made me uncomfortable. There was too much here that was too complicated and I didn’t want any of it touching Jack. I really should have left well alone, I thought. My need to explore the past had a forensic feel to it now and I might want to forget the truth as soon as I had uncovered it. I recapped the perfume phial.

I tried to tell myself that I was being fanciful. Audrey had been in love with Ted and he had taken advantage of her, like plenty of others. It was Audrey herself who was making me uneasy, not my father’s past history. ‘Why Nameless?’ I asked, for the sake of something neutral to say.

‘Because it suited me,’ Audrey snapped. Jack half turned from the fridge in surprise. There was a small silence in which I could hear water dripping in the sink and a jet passing overhead.

I handed the bottle back. Ted’s handwritten volumes of formulae were on a shelf upstairs. If the one labelled ‘A’ was really hers, it could almost certainly be recreated. The brown smear left in the bottom of her teardrop, Ted’s promise in a bottle, could be made to live and breathe its roses and neroli and sandalwood once more.

If that was what she wanted.

‘When did he make it for you?’ I asked.

‘Nineteen fifty-six.’

It was a very precise answer, given that she had claimed to be so vague about dates. The timing was right for the position of the formula in Ted’s chronology of perfumes. It would have been during his rise to eminence at Phebus Fragrances. Just before or even at the same time as the business trip to Paris, when he bought the little checked costume for Audrey to wear.

Another thought came to me. ‘I found a photograph, among his things.’

‘You gave it to me.’

I frowned, and then remembered that she must mean Ted’s film star picture. ‘No, not that one. This one was a picture of you. You were sitting on a wall somewhere with the wind blowing your hair.’

The date of that would be about right too. Audrey’s hair and her clothes looked as if they belonged in the mid-Fifties.

Jack dropped something on the worktop behind me and I heard the scuffle he made to mop up a spill.

I added, ‘Only I’m afraid I’ve stupidly gone and lost it. I’d love you to have had it.’

‘I have got it.’

I frowned again.

Jack sidled round into my field of vision. ‘Er, Mum? I gave it to her. You know. I thought it wouldn’t matter. It was only an old photo.’