The real basis for his success with women, though, was his interest in them. He had a stagy trick of cupping his target’s upturned face in his hands and then breathing in the warmth of it as if the skin’s scent were the most direct route to knowing its owner. He would close his eyes for a moment, frowning in concentration, then murmur, ‘I could create such a perfume for you. The top notes sweet and floral to reflect your beauty but with the firmest base, cedarwood with earth and metal tones, for your great strength.’

Or some such nonsense, anyway.

‘His job was to mix essences, the building blocks of scent, to create perfume. He told me it was like painting a picture, making the broad brushstrokes that give the first impression and then filling in the details, the light and shade, to create the fragrance that lingers in the memory.’

As I talked I was thinking about the words from my childhood, ambergris and musk and vetiver. Not the scents or essences themselves because I didn’t inherit Ted’s nose and could barely have distinguished one from another, but the pure sounds of the words with their velvety textures. I recalled them the way other children might remember television programmes or ice-cream flavours, and I was back to being ten years old again. I could hear the click of heels on the unloved parquet of our hallway and the scrape of unpruned garden branches in the wind, working like fingernails at the glass of the front room’s bay window.

‘Why did I never know that? It sounds highly exotic.’

‘Yes.’

It was exotic, in its way, Ted’s world. But you couldn’t describe my growing up on the edge of it as anything of the kind.

‘What about the other thing? The con artist bit?’

‘That’s a manner of speaking. Perfume is nothing more than a promise in a bottle, Ted used to say. It exists to create an illusion.’

My discomfort was growing. I didn’t want to talk to Mel about my father. We had reached an unspoken truce long ago, the old illusionist and me, and chatting about him and his life’s work, even to Mel, was outside the terms of the agreement.

‘I thought smell was the truest of the senses.’

‘Smell may be. But perfume, on the other hand, is meant to disguise and flatter, and lead the senses astray.’

‘I have just realised something. You never wear it, do you?’

‘No,’ I said.