If I had known I was going to lose her, I wouldn’t have taken her for granted while I yearned for Ted’s attention. I rested my fingers on the pages of notes. My poor mother, I thought. Ted’s shadow overlaid hers now and his opacity obscured her for me. I couldn’t reach back through the layers of years to touch her again and I knew I never would be able to.

Where are you? I whispered to her, but I heard nothing.

I tried to keep Ted in the back of my mind, fending him off. He was dead, wasn’t he? I wanted him to go away and let me think for myself.

Near the beginning of the first volume of notes I did come across the description of a fragrance with no name. The first word Ted reached for in his word-picture was ‘mystery’. Then, to enlarge on the notion he wrote ‘multi-layered, teasingly complex. A veiled woman with the curves of her body showing through rich folds of velvet. Heady with smoke and incense.’ I knew for sure that this wasn’t a description of Faye.

I remembered that the word perfume itself came from the Latin per fumare, from smoke. And I thought I had read somewhere that the ladies of the harem would let their draperies billow over an incense burner, so they carried a drift of the fragrance with them wherever they moved. The idea of smoke and incense therefore went right back to the origins of perfume; I wondered idly if the roots of this particular creation were as deeply embedded in Ted’s heart and imagination.

A long formula followed the description of the perfume, running to well over a hundred items. I scanned the list but couldn’t begin to decipher what such a compound might smell like. No distinctive fragrance rose from the page to wind itself in my imagination, as it would have done for Ted. Then I noticed what I hadn’t seen before. At the bottom of the last page, the formula was labelled simply with a tiny pencilled ‘A’. Maybe the initial stood for Audrey.

The reading and musing and the effort of comprehension that went with it brought yet more pictures of Ted into my mind, even though they were unwelcome.

Instead of seeing him standing by the chimney breast at home, in his cravat and checked shirt, with four fingers of one hand dipped into the blazer pocket, I saw him at his work. There was a stepped bank of bottles enclosing him in a semicircle. He was holding a paper dipper to his nose and smelling, with his eyes closed and his body completely still. His face was expressionless. He looked relaxed enough to be asleep, but at that moment no other world existed for him, only the tiny miniature landscape conjured on the tip of a paper strip. He was smelling not just with his nose but with his entire mind and being.