I felt oddly hesitant about remembering. “In the autumn the trees in here used to catch the wind, keep hold of it, I mean. You’d hear the leaves fluttering like bats in a cave. That’s one thing she said.”

“Why would she if it wasn’t true?”

I was disconcerted by how eager to believe Roy appeared to be. “She may have thought it was. They’d given her the drug by then.”

“Or maybe she wanted to lend you her imagination. What else did she tell you?”

“I remember once she said in the winter some of the leaves stayed on the trees when they ought to have fallen. Just their veins hanging in the air, she said. When the trees turned to skeletons their leaves would too. Maybe that was a picture she never got around to painting.”

“Wish she had.”

The path turned a bend, beyond which it curved in the opposite direction through the trees, quite like a mirror image. I’d assumed the woods might bring my memories alive, but now I had the odd notion that the process could be reversed. Had my aunt’s fantasies affected me more than I’d realised? I felt as if something she’d shown me lay around the next bend. This was no reason to feel even slightly apprehensive, and I matched Roy’s eager pace. As our stony footsteps seemed to hush the birds, I saw a long object lying beside the path. “I think I remember that,” I said, only to feel absurd – it could hardly be the same log I’d seen decades earlier. I recalled thinking that one looked as if it was trying to hide in the grass, in which case it would have been thoroughly hidden by now. Just the same, it looked confusingly familiar – the four upheld stumps of branches situated regularly enough for legs, and the circular knots in the lopped end, suggestive of eyes blind with moss beneath a ragged smile in a flat inverted face. “She told me about something like that,” I said.

“It’s some wood.” Rediscovering enthusiasm, Roy said “What did she say?”

“She said if you turned it over it would waken the wood.”

“The wood,” Roy said before gesturing around him, “or the wood?”

“Maybe it was supposed to be both. She said a friend told her.”

“So did you turn it over?”

“You can see I didn’t,” I said and had to laugh at myself. “No, of course that’s not the one. Whichever it was, I didn’t touch it and she didn’t either.”

“Let’s try it now, then.”