My father’s routine.

‘I worked for a company called Phebus Fragrances. Just a couple of weeks of temporary telephone and secretarial work. I was eighteen years old.’

‘I remember Phebus.’

‘Ted was important there. Very enthusiastic indeed, very good at what he did, but he was irreverent too. He laughed at everything and he made me laugh with him. I thought he was very gentlemanly.’

I knew what that meant. Pigskin gloves and cravats. A car, usually. A confident manner with barmaids and waiters, and an unshakeable belief in the illusion of himself.

‘He never suggested anything while I was working there, but when I moved on to the next job he got in touch. Took me for a drink at a pub by the river.’

On one of those evenings when Faye put me to bed, read me a story with half an eye and half an ear cocked to the street outside, and then sat downstairs on her own. An evening when Ted was working late. There had been many, many of them. Times when he was away on business, meeting contacts. Enough opportunity, I now saw, to fit in another wife, another entire home life.

‘He told me he was lodging with a family in Hendon because he’d had some money problems. It wasn’t very nice, he said, but he was paying off his debts and he’d soon have a place of his own. I had a room in a house belonging to my married cousin. I grew up near Macclesfield and I couldn’t wait to get away from there to London.’

The picture she painted was clear enough, in its grainy monochrome mid-Fifties way. Audrey, buxom and fresh-faced, Ted cupping her cheeks between his hands and murmuring, I could create such a perfume for you.

‘It’s not what you imagine,’ Audrey snapped. And, indeed, I was imagining.

‘We made plans. Business plans, for a shop, a perfumery and cosmetics line. We went to Paris together. My first time abroad. We were going places, Ted and me. I loved him. And he was in love with me.’

Audrey lifted her chin and I saw beneath her skin into the face of the young woman she had been. An excited traveller, in her checked costume, with clouds of dark hair waving round her face. Or sitting on a wall, windblown, in the photograph Ted had kept and I had found so many years later. She was telling the truth. He had been in love with her; it was that simple.

‘I was a decent girl, I’ll have you know.’

The kind of girl who insisted on a ring on her finger. Ted loved her, they were a team and he looked into the future with her the way he never did with Faye. Hungry for Audrey, seeing no other way to get her for himself, he married her and overlooked the detail of an already existing wife.