“That’s settled, then,” Julia said. “If you don’t want to play out, why don’t you see if anybody wants a sandwich? You were so good taking them around before.”

“You needn’t send him away, Julia,” my mother said. “He’s not too young to know what I was saying, and the sooner the better. Roy, sweetheart, don’t you ever get up to the kind of thing my sister did.”

“But mum and dad like me to paint.”

“Not painting, lovely. Don’t go in buildings nobody lives in, and never go up too high. We don’t want you falling over, do we?”

“Didn’t dad’s auntie mean to fall?”

“I’m sure she didn’t, son,” my father said. “She just didn’t take enough care.”

“That’s right, Jonathan,” my mother retorted, though not as if it wholly was. “Cared too much about her art and not enough about how we’d feel for losing her.”

“I shouldn’t think that crossed her mind, dear.”

“Too much didn’t that should have.” My mother appeared to recall Roy was listening. “Your family’s the most important thing in your life,” she told him. “Your mummy and daddy care for you and each other, and I know they always will.”

“I know too,” Roy said with a seriousness that seemed concentrated by his size and youth. “Dad’s auntie’s paintings are important, aren’t they? Lots of people said they were in church.”

“They’re very important,” Julia said, “to people who like them.”

“Don’t you, mummy?”

“I prefer art to be more like real life, I’m afraid.”

Perhaps I shouldn’t have felt provoked to respond. “As the lady from the Tate was saying, Roy, my aunt made people look again and further.”

“I don’t need to be told how to look,” Julia said.

“Don’t we all take things for granted sometimes?”

“Oh yes, Patrick,” Julia said. “You’ve been known to do that.”

“Now, children,” my mother intervened. “Shall we just talk about Thelma? That’s why we’re here, after all.”

Roy gazed around the room full of my aunt’s friends and colleagues, more of whom were audible in the kitchen and the hall. Beside the redundant red-brick hearth, above which hung a Leonora Carrington print apparently depicting a witch and her familiar, Thelma’s one-time husband Neville was arguing with an art critic. “Shall I tell everyone they have to talk about her?” Roy said.

“I’m sure they are already,” my mother said, only to look as if she’d missed the chance to send him away on a mission. Neville had finished disagreeing and was making for us.

His wide not quite shaven face with its greying hair and equally shaggy eyebrows looked unkempt with suppressed grief. “I hope nobody thought the worse of me for not speaking at the funeral,” he said. “I wouldn’t have trusted myself.”