As he passed me the journal it emitted a faint earthy smell, presumably of age. My aunt had made an entry on the inside of the front cover, which suggested she’d written it later than she’d begun the journal. 21st March, first year, the elaborately cursive writing said. Met A on walk. I glanced at a few of the place names she’d annotated with obscure quotations – Monks Cross, Slatevale, Goodmanswood – and then let Roy have the journal, since it intrigued him. “Why did she give you her book?” he said.

“She didn’t, but I think she’d have liked me to have it. She tried to inspire me whenever I stayed at her house. She thought her sister, that’s my mother, didn’t bring my mind out enough.” With a twinge of guilt I said “Maybe I should have passed it on to her biographer.”

“Do you think they’d have understood it?”

“If anybody could.” As the railway station’s voice turned female, warning listeners to be aware of suspicious items, I said “I was hoping it would help me understand what happened to my aunt, but that’s one more thing I don’t think we’ll ever really know.”

Roy blinked at the journal and laid it on my desk with a thump as muted as the voice below. “We could go and see some of these places,” he said, and now I wish we’d never found the book.

Chapter Two

Chapter Two

Absences

“Mummy, what did grandma say about dad’s auntie?”

“Roy, you’ve been really good all day.” Julia’s delicate but determined face barely hinted at a frown. “Don’t spoil it now,” she said. “You know you shouldn’t interrupt while grown-ups are talking.”

“But I only nearly heard what she said.” His quirk of language earned him an indulgent smile from an art critic. “She said something was a pity,” Roy insisted.

“She wasn’t talking to little boys. Would you like to play in the back garden? Just don’t go out of the gate.”

“I don’t like playing there by myself. Someone kept looking at me over the fence.”

“Now, nobody could do that, could they?” My mother lowered her round face, which routinely resembled a badge of concern, towards him. “It’s taller than you and your daddy put together,” she said and told the rest of the family “Someone looking over it, that’s the kind of thing my sister would have made up, and our parents would have encouraged her.”

“No need to squash his imagination, Astrid.” While my father’s face looked weighted by generous jowls, his slowness denoted thought. “I expect they were up a tree, were they?” he told Roy, adding an unhurried smile. “That’ll be what you saw, son.”

“They were in a tree, but—”