But after today, I felt that I was a part of his other world. There had been beer on his breath as we walked back to the warehouse after the pub, and he had put pennies into a chewing gum machine on a wall. We were both chewing one of the little white pillows as we walked diagonally across the bomb-site to the warehouse door. I had heard him joking with Miss Mathers, although I didn’t like the soft teasing sound that crept into his voice when he spoke to her. At Miss Mathers’s suggestion, I had carried their pot of tea into the lab at four o’clock. Ted and Mr Phebus were both in their shirtsleeves with scratched notes and discarded dippers spread everywhere, and I understood that they were too preoccupied to glance at me. I accepted my lack of importance with proper humility.

The impression of that day stayed with me for years. It defined my notion of work, as the utterly exotic somehow hemmed in by the tedious progress of hours. At the end of it, as Ted and I marched up the garden path to the house where my mother was waiting for us, I kept my thrilling new awareness locked inside me.

My father was an artist of the first degree. He was a nose.

The house that night seemed colourless and smaller and overfamiliar and my mother even quieter than usual. ‘What did you do?’ she asked, as she brushed my hair. The sheets on my bed were smoothed down and I knew without looking that my hot-water bottle with the rabbit cover was in its proper place.

‘Drew some pictures,’ I answered evasively. I didn’t want to share the experience, even with her.

‘That’s nice.’

I didn’t ask about her day’s absence. Maybe she had been to see the doctor about her headaches. Sometimes they made her eyes red and swollen so she had to lie down on the double bed, a small shape hunched up on the green candlewick cover with her back turned to the door.

‘It wasn’t boring,’ I told Ted now. ‘I loved it.’

‘He was a good perfumer, the old man, a craftsman. I learned everything I needed to know from him. No business sense, though. None at all.’

I had to lean closer to catch his words. His voice seemed to be fading to an echo of itself and his eyes were gradually falling shut. I thought he might be drifting into sleep and I had to stop myself from grasping his hand and shaking it hard to keep him with me. I watched the shallow rise and fall of his chest under his pyjama jacket.