I thought she was proposing to make for the shade, but apparently she meant to head for home. Despite her remark about the sunlight, she stayed in the middle of the gravelled track, well clear of the trees. I’d had enough of shadows myself, because the edge of my vision kept producing the illusion that a mass of them as tall as a man had solidified, slithering from tree to tree on my left, a swift indefinable shape scaly with bark. The impression vanished before we came in sight of the house, but as my aunt shut the gate in the fence I could have thought a tall flat intruder had slipped in, disappearing at once. Of course it was the shadow of the closing gate.

We had salad for lunch and then read in the garden. I finished the Bulgakov and started a Kafka. “He never reaches the castle,” my uncle warned me when he came home. “Old Franz never got to the end of his book.”

My aunt marked a location in her almanac as she said “All the more reason to keep on even if you don’t know what you’ll find.”

“That’s one way of working, dear. I’m afraid I’d get hopelessly lost.”

“I know you have to calculate everything in advance.” As she turned the page and poised her pen my aunt said “I wasn’t just talking about work.”

I waited for an explanation, but none came. I went back to the insidiously labyrinthine tale once I’d relished the cover again, my aunt’s painting of a spiky fortress that appeared to have crystallised out of the peak of a mountain. After dinner, her defiantly fiery version of lasagne, we watched an Arthurian film in which each spell exhausted more of Merlin’s power. “Tricky business, magic,” my uncle said.

My aunt clearly found this facetious, and I think he was as surprised as I was that she took offence. “They’ve earned powers like those,” she said. “You’d value them if you had them.”

“I think I’m liable to have to do without.”

She might not have heard him. “And you’d miss them if you lost them,” she said.

She and my uncle said nothing more throughout the film, and not much once it was over. I went to bed wondering how much they were leaving unspoken until I was out of the way. By the time I fell asleep I’d heard no further conversation, but towards dawn my aunt’s voice wakened me. “Wait till he’s gone.”

As I took this for a belated confirmation that they were delaying a discussion of some subject, my uncle emitted a snore stentorian even for him. I was muffling a laugh at his style of answer when I realised my aunt wasn’t talking to him. She was in her studio, and so was another voice. “Not long,” it said.