In a final attempt to convince Charles, I took my samples to work for him to sniff. He hated them all but kept them nevertheless.

Years later, after he died, I happened to mention this episode to a curator friend who was employed in an Australian museum. ‘Oh, didn’t you know?’ he said.

‘Know what?’

‘Charles phoned me out of the blue one day asking if I knew any olfactory wizards because he’d had an idea for a show matching weaving with smell. He even had a title: Whāriki: The Scented Mat.’

‘No!’

‘I couldn’t help him, of course. Korean ceramics were more my thing back then.’

Curated notes: wood shavings, cedar, pine resin, shell, seaweed, flax, oil paint, clay and a dose of bitterness.

Random smells often enter my mind and stay with me. I daydream in scents and perfumes. Recently these scents have reached me with a clarity and sharpness I haven’t experienced before. Phantosmia is the word that describes olfactory hallucinations, and I have only to detect a whiff of L’Eau d’Issey, imagined or real, to immediately think of Thora.

Thora must have bought L’Eau d’Issey as soon as it was released in the early nineties. She was certainly the first among my acquaintances to wear it. I suspect that the association with the Japanese designer and the simple profile of the bottle might account for her initial attraction to the perfume, but I don’t doubt that the clean and minimalist nature of the scent itself appealed to her sense of aesthetics.

Thora had started a chemistry degree and was the coolest woman I had ever met. Like me, she flatted in a large house in the Aro Valley and was part of central Wellington’s arty, politically engaged social scene. She was thin, with dark hair that was cut short at the back but had a long fringe that fell over her eyes. She bleached a section of hair by her side parting, and it was a kind of dirty, greenish blonde against the blackness of the rest. She had a long nose, slightly beaky at the tip, and a downwards-curling smile. She wore black, mostly, the only hint of colour coming from her bright red lipstick. She rarely talked and struck me as shy and intelligent. I don’t think we ever had a long conversation but I liked her enough to be gently teased by my two lesbian flatmates whenever her name came up in conversation.