“I’m not having this argument again,” Julia said, a response familiar from the last years of our marriage. “Please keep an eye on what Roy reads and what he does while he’s your responsibility. I’ll be home once the conference is over.”

As our son took refuge in the book, which didn’t save his face from growing mottled with embarrassment, I said “I think we’re both responsible for him.”

Someone unfamiliar with Julia might have thought she’d grown briefly deaf, since she said only “Call me whenever you need to, Roy. And make sure you two don’t get into any mischief.”

“Yes, miss,” I said but heard no sign that she’d taken it as a joke.

When a further silence made it plain that she’d gone, Roy slipped the phone into one of the several pockets of his elongated shorts. As he reopened the catalogue at Thelma’s best-known painting – the red London bus perched on the highest Himalayan peak – he said “What was your aunt like?”

“She’d have encouraged you to look further than people ordinarily do. That’s what she did to me when I used to stay with her, though I can’t say my parents were altogether in favour.”

“That’s how all the books with her pictures on them used to make me feel. Have you still got them?”

“They’re over in the corner where the sun can’t get at them. All the books with anything to do with her are, just in case they fade.”

Roy was making to replace the catalogue when he peered into the corner I’d devoted to my aunt. “What’s back here?”

Reaching into the gap the catalogue had left, he coaxed out an item. He might have been extracting a slice of darkness, a concentrated essence of the shadows in the corner, but just the covers of the exercise book were black. I had no idea when I might have trapped it behind the other volumes, and it touched off memories I hadn’t visited for years. “That was Thelma’s,” I said.

Roy perched on the edge of my desk while he leafed through the book. “What’s it meant to be?”

“I was never really sure. Maybe they’re notes for some of her work. I thought the names were places she based paintings on.”

“It’s more like a diary at the start, but it doesn’t end up much of one.”