Little less than two hundred feet below, the microscopic occupier of a doll’s house stooped minutely to a garden like a green inkpad. Except for a dwarf lorry tracing the horizon, I could see no other movement anywhere on the levelled landscape. As Roy joined me I straightened up, to be met by a surge of dizziness that made me grab the parapet. Despite my momentary panic, I found I was in no danger of toppling over the edge. Perhaps up to that moment I’d hoped the woman at the cottage had been wrong about my aunt. “I think we’ve seen all there is to see,” I said.

“You saw that, dad.”

This sounded like a question that wasn’t quite sure of itself. When I looked where Roy was pointing, I saw an irregular line of greyish marks that led from the doorway, ending close to us. At first glance I could have taken them for footprints, which made no sense. There was just one set of marks, none returning to the stairs, and they were composed of lichen, however closely some of them resembled the prints of bare feet. It was even more ridiculous to fancy they’d been there since my aunt’s fatal visit, and I could have done without the way they clung to the edge of my vision as I headed for the stairs. “Nothing to do with Thelma,” I said, “and nothing to do with us.”

Chapter Six

Chapter Six

Tales

“Another thing you can say the play’s about, Patrick,” my aunt said. “Trying to control magic.”

“He’s meant to be on holiday, Thelma. Give the poor fellow a chance.”

“There’s never harm in thinking, Neville. He’ll have a head start on his class when they go back next term,” my aunt said but appealed to me anyway. “You don’t mind, do you?”

“I like talking to you about art and stuff.”

“So Caliban’s the product of a kind of magic but he’s made into a slave, and Prospero binds Ariel when he sets him free of the curse.”

“He lets him go at the end, though.”

“What do you think would happen if you let your familiar loose? That’s a spirit somebody’s called up to help them.”

“I knew that,” I said with a hint of teenage pique. “Shakespeare doesn’t say.”

“There might be good reasons to limit its powers, do you think? Otherwise who knows how the world might end up.”

“Sounds as if there’s scope for somebody to write a sequel,” my uncle said.

My aunt looked not just disappointed but frustrated, and I tried to help. “Maybe you could paint it.”

I had a sense that she’d already finished talking about Shakespeare, but now she gave me the impression that I’d missed the point. So as not to leave my uncle out I told him “You could make a game of it.”