I remember him sitting at the table in our front room in Dorset Avenue, staring through the dim net curtains at the unvarying vista of mock-Tudor gables opposite. The house was ticking with silence and I was – as always – greedy for his attention. I would play some game that would gradually encroach on the space around his armchair and try to engage him in it until he snapped at me, ‘Be quiet, Sadie. Haven’t you got anything to do?’ It wasn’t fair, I thought. He wasn’t doing anything. But now I understood that he was thinking, trying to flesh out an image through that most incorporeal of means, perfume.

I have no idea how he set about it. How could a ‘sultry whisper’ be caught and translated and compounded via the orchestration of base and heart and top notes to make a fragrance that was finally packaged and sold as Whispering? I deal in solid forms myself and I work with my hands. The only abstracts I have to contend with are the curved or fretted spaces between letters, or the most pleasing balance between cloth and calf on a library binding. I turned the pages and my admiration for Ted’s gift steadily grew.

He could take a brief and devise a perfume to order. On the one hand it was a dry and commercial business, to do with budgets and market positioning, but on the other it was pure romance. He could sell the formula to the client or he could make up the perfume himself in sufficient volume to retail it to the customers in his shop. Or, if he was in the throes of a seduction, he could mix just enough of the liquid to fill a single phial and present it to the latest of his women as if it were a bouquet of flowers. Except that this was a bouquet created with the greatest ingenuity and the caress of intimacy, and it would never fade because the formula was written out here in his notes.

No wonder my father had been so successful with that face-cupping and breathing-in routine. What woman could resist it? It was only a pity that his abilities as a businessman had come nowhere near matching his talents as a seducer.

In those quiet evenings that I spent reading my father’s notebooks I realised how much I would have liked there to have been a perfume marked ‘for Sadie’. I searched all the way through, but there was no word-picture and list of ingredients marked ‘for Faye’, either. I didn’t know anything about my parents’ courtship or their early years together: I wondered if my mother had once been breathless and flirtatious, and as mesmerised by Ted’s charm as one of the aunties. She must have been, I thought. He must have held her face between his two hands and gazed into her eyes. I wished I could remember her like that, instead of as the turned-aside profile in the photograph and the muted but constant presence of my childhood.