I think I did a good job. It’s based around the scent of salt air, because I was thinking about his brother and how his spirit might be hovering above the bush, beach and sea. I tried the perfume out on my fruit-picking friends one night as we sat around the campsite. I had three versions, all slightly different, and I set up a blind test, asking them to rank the samples from best to worst. I thought there would be a clear winner – the one I eventually posted off – but the results were completely mixed. I hadn’t given any clues to what I made, and everyone came up with their own take on the scent, something within the perfume that spoke to them. Ross, the retired builder, liked the perfume because it smelt like wood shavings.

‘Which one is that?’ I asked. He held out a blotter and I took it from him and waved it before my nose.

‘It’s cedar,’ I said. ‘I was trying for driftwood. You picked it out from all the other notes.’

‘My first job was helping my dad down at the mill,’ he replied. ‘I’d never forget that smell.’

Rosemary, his wife, identified a metallic, fishy smell in one of the testers. An afterthought on my part, falling back on my old trick of oil from a tin of smoked oysters.

‘I like the pretty one,’ said Miriam. ‘The rose one.’

There was no ‘rose one’, but I’d used geranium oil in the scent she identified, and geraniol, present in both geranium and rose, is rose-like. I’d added geranium to the blend to bring out the impression of flax.

In the end I chose the perfume I liked best, gave it the manly title of West Coaster and sent it off with a piece of the pumice I’d collected from Rotorua when I was there with Archer. I suggested to my customer that he apply a few drops of the oil to the porous stone and carry it in his pocket or on a string around his wrist or neck. I tried it myself on another piece of pumice and enjoyed the way the perfume interacted with the sand-scented volcanic rock.

After making West Coaster I started quizzing visitors to my stall about what, to them, was the smell of New Zealand. Most people responded with either ‘the bush’ or ‘the sea’ and I had to probe them to give more detail. ‘It’s the smell of honey dew on beech trees,’ said one woman. ‘That’s such a great smell, it’s so peaceful.’

‘The smell is peaceful?’

‘I don’t know. I guess so. The bush is peaceful, that’s what I mean.’