The enormous free-standing cast-iron bath was dragged out and in its place we installed a built-in rectangular plastic bath, a shallow, three-quarter-length model fitted to its edge with dark-brown shagpile that slowly rotted and moulted over the years until it finally went bald. I helped to paper the walls and ceiling, brushing paste over lengths of the brown, orange and white wallpaper my mother had chosen while Pete swore under his breath as he tried to make it stick to the ceiling.

I can remember my father’s face becoming tighter and more rigid as we went along so I tried to distract him with questions or statements intended to impress. ‘Did you know that the air is full of smell molecules?’

‘Hmm.’

‘Well, they go up your nose and then these things called olfactory receptor … things, can’t remember now … they recognise thousands and thousands of smells …’

‘That sounds a lot.’

‘Thousands, then. The olfactory reception neurons – see I remembered – send the information to these bulbs at the back of your nose and then they send that information to your brain and your brain goes, “I know what that is. That’s bacon.” Do you know what “olfactory” means?’

‘Yes.’

‘It means something to do with the sense of smell.’

‘Does it?’

‘You should try using it at work. If someone came in with a nose bleed you could really frighten them by saying they might have olfactory troubles.’

‘Hmm.’

The final hurdle with the wallpapering was trying to cut and fit the paper around the taps, which my father had not bothered to remove before papering. He was past the stage of being open to interesting scientific facts so I tried encouragement.

‘It looks really good, Dad, like in the magazines.’

He replied with a grunt.

‘I could put on more glue, eh.’

‘No.’

‘We could use PVA instead of paste. I’ve got some in my pencil case.’

‘No.’

‘It’s good where you put the paper round the taps. I like how it looks like starfish spikes where you cut it. You can hardly notice the gaps. We can patch them?’

Silence.

‘I love it. You’re so good at fixing stuff. It’s great, heaps better than it used to …’

‘Shush. It’s best you don’t talk any more.’

Nita placed stacks of House and Garden and bunches of dried flowers on the carpeted space at the head of the bath and, as time went on, the magazine pages wrinkled and stuck together and the flowers sprouted cobwebs and every time we shifted either the magazines or the flowers swarms of silverfish appeared, scuttling for safety, or slipping down the steep sides of the bath into the bottom, where they always died.

There were no shelves in the new bathroom cabinet we built under the sink. The pine louvre doors with white porcelain knobs – part Cornwall cottage, part Scandinavian chic – opened up to expose the plumbing and a large battered jute basket that contained everything from Vim and toilet rolls to lemon-shaped Bronnley soaps, bath salts, supplies of the medicinal shampoo my father made on prescription, hot-water bottles, dried natural sponges, crepe bandages, Dettol, potpourri and mouse poison.