Carefully, I unfolded the second sheet. This handwriting was familiar too. It was Ted’s and I recognised a complex perfume formula. I stared at the heading, and my heart thumped in my chest. I glanced down the list of essences, noticing some of the names that chimed from my childhood: lavender, bergamot, vanillin. But my eyes were drawn to the foot of the page where my father had added a note: My dear friend Marie-Ange. I think this is a fine fragrance, maybe even one of my best. If you can use it, please take it as part payment of my debt to you. The date was October 1965, just after the end of my Grasse summer. I looked back at the page heading again. It read, ‘Orphan. For Sadie.’ Well, I thought, with a lump in my throat. The name isn’t going to do much for it.

I took the liberty, Philippe continued, of making the fragrance up for you.

Very carefully, I unscrewed the gilt stopper and lowered my nose to the neck of the tiny bottle. The scent flowed into the chambers of my head. It was fresh and flowery, innocent with a marked sweetness, like an afternoon’s sunshine in a bright garden. A young girl’s scent from almost forty years ago.

‘It is a pretty fragrance, I think, but not a record breaker. I think my mother must have shared my opinion, because she put it to one side. But I am sure that you will like to have it, just the same.’ He signed himself, ‘Your old friend PL.’ Philippe was quite right. I did like to have it.

I looked searchingly around my kitchen, as if I might catch my father there, but there was no trace of him. On a shelf stood the photograph of Lola and Jack and me on holiday in Devon. Next to it was the one I thought of as Ted’s film star picture, and tucked into the frame was a snapshot of him with Lola and Jack. They were posed in front of a Christmas tree and they all had red-eye, but they were laughing. Beside it was the one of Faye and me in the garden at Dorset Avenue. I longed to look into my mother’s eyes and read her thoughts, but she was still looking away, out of the frame, while my frowning gaze locked with the camera lens. Faye was the mystery. She would remain so, now.

My fingers closed round the smooth contours of the scent bottle. ‘Thank you for this,’ I said aloud to Ted. I couldn’t hear his voice or smell his cheating citrus cologne. It was so like him to use my perfume to try to settle a debt. It was so like him that I found myself laughing as if I had just heard the best joke in the world.

‘Mum?’ Jack called from the stairs. ‘Is that you?’