Ted brought some bottles from the shelves and they drew their notepads and jars of blotters towards them. The two of them began nosing and muttering together, and I half listened while unfamiliar words washed over my head. They talked about heart and base notes and aldehydes and sparkle and synthesis, and the names of natural essences and the chemical polysyllables of synthetics rolled off their tongues. I didn’t remember tongue-twisting phenylethylene or galaxolide, but the mysterious-sounding beauty of naturals – vetiver and musk and mimosa – did stay with me.

They were still with me now as I sat by my father’s bed and held his dry hand. Only the names, not the scents. I failed Mr Phebus’s first test and I knew I was not an artist like Ted.

I was talking too much, I realised. It would be tiring for him. ‘Do you remember?’

‘How old were you?’ he asked, restlessly moving his legs and frowning with the effort of recollection.

‘Six, or seven.’

‘Back in ’56, then.’

I was pleased that he knew the year of my birth. I wouldn’t have placed a bet on it. ‘Yes.’

‘We were working on contract for Coty.’ His hand moved a little in my grasp, as if he were trying to reach for something, and then fell back again. ‘I don’t remember the day. It must have been boring for you.’

We’re so polite to each other, I thought. We are like a rough sea swirling under a thin skin of ice.

While the old man and my father continued with their sniffing and scribbling I began to fidget and rock on my chair. I made a wigwam of dippers and then, with a hasty movement to stop it collapsing, I knocked over a bottle. The bottle rolled across the table and stopped in front of Ted.

He raised his head, his forehead corrugated with irritation and his eyes cold. It was a look I had seen often enough. ‘Why don’t you go out and sit by Miss Mathers?’

Miss Mathers was the woman with piled-up hair. I had seen them laughing together and heard Ted call her Babs, but I understood that she was Miss Mathers to me. I stood up obediently.

Miss Mathers gave me some pencils and some sheets of paper to draw on, then went back to her typing. She rolled letterheads and pale-pink and green flimsies sandwiched with carbon paper into her black-and-gold typewriter and busily stabbed the keys. Once or twice she answered the telephone in a sing-song voice: ‘Phebus Fraygrances.’