‘Sit down here, miss,’ Mr Phebus said and I slid into a seat. As well as having alarming eyebrows, I thought he talked in a funny way, as though ‘s’s and ‘th’s were ‘z’s. When I was older I learned that the old man had been an analytic chemist in Warsaw, but he had come to London with his wife before the war. He started work with a cosmetics house and he turned himself from a chemist into a perfumer by sheer hard work.

‘Your father, Mr Ted here, he has what we call a nose,’ Mr Phebus grandly announced.

I remember looking at my father’s face and realising it was a handsome one compared with Mr Phebus’s, and feeling proud of my father’s youth and good looks. But his nose seemed relatively unremarkable. ‘So have I,’ I retorted, pressing the end of mine and squashing it.

‘We shall see,’ the old man said. I thought he was not very observant if he couldn’t see it already.

The three of us sat down at the plain wood table and Ted gave me my own jar of the flat white pencils. Now I could see that they were in fact strips of thick blotting paper, the same size as the spills my mother used for lighting the gas. Mr Phebus was humming and setting a line of the little glass bottles between us. He unscrewed the top of one with a flourish and told me to take my blotter. I glanced at Ted and he pointed to the white paper strip. Mr Phebus already had one and as I watched he slid the tip of it gently into the liquid in the bottle.

‘Now you,’ he said. I copied him exactly as he lifted the blotter to his nose and breathed in. His eyebrows twitched and I looked again at Ted, wanting to laugh. My father pressed his forefinger against one nostril and winked again. I sniffed hard at my dipper, as Mr Phebus had done. A dense, sweet cloud instantly filled my nose and rushed up through the secret insides of my face until it seemed to squeeze its fingers round my brain. I coughed and closed my eyes, and as I let my hand fall the scent’s power receded, although I could still feel the pressure of it above my cheeks and the stinging shock in the tender membranes of my nose.

‘What is that?’ I whispered.

Mr Phebus said, ‘That is lavender. It will be one of the top notes of the scent we are working on today.’