‘Are you going out?’ I demanded.

Was this before or after my mother died? It must have been after.

I hadn’t minded before about him being out of the house so much of the time. It was the normal state of affairs, and Faye and I were used to being on our own together. I remember watching and helping her to bake cakes. The first Victoria sponge that was all my own work was decorated with the wobbly word ‘Dad,’ piped in blue icing using a paper bag and a serrated icing nozzle. It was two days before he came home to taste it and the lettering had bled into the sponge beneath.

‘I’m only nipping out for an hour or so,’ Ted said.

I had heard that one before. I wheedled, ‘Don’t go.’

He only winked at me, impatient to be gone. ‘Tell you what, I’ll ask Mrs Maloney to come and sit with you.’

Mrs Maloney was a widow who lived a few doors away. Our north London outer suburban street was on a steep hill and the semi-detached, semi-Tudoresque little houses stood in stepped pairs in their strips of garden. Mrs Maloney’s house was higher up than ours and I hated the thought of her looking down at our roof and the leggy rose bushes that lined the creosoted fence. She had wind, and was smelly and lugubrious. I hated being alone in the house, because of the spectres in the folds of the curtains and the whispers in the empty rooms, but I hated Mrs Maloney even more. She had to be fed tea and biscuits, and she sat in my mother’s chair swallowing belches and asking me nosy questions.

‘Can’t I come with you?’

I remembered the day at Phebus Fragrances so clearly because it was so unusual for Ted to take me anywhere.

‘Not this time, Princess.’

The doorbell rang, a long, shrill sound that meant the caller must be leaning hard on the button. Not all that many people came to visit us, not unexpectedly, and Ted and I glanced at each other in surprise. He went quickly to the bedroom window and looked down, making sure that he was shielded by the nets.

‘Do me a favour, Sadie. Go downstairs and open the door and tell this man I’m out. You don’t know when I’ll be back. Right?’

I opened the front door. There was a man in a pale fawn coat with leather buttons that looked like shiny walnuts. ‘Is your daddy in?’

I looked him in the eye. ‘No.’

‘When will he be back?’

‘I don’t know.’

The man stared at me so hard that it made me uncomfortable. But this wasn’t the first time I had had to do something like this for Ted. I prided myself on being good at it. I made my face a moon of innocence.