I thought I must resemble a criminal posing for an official record as I opened the journal for Roy to photograph the entries. Just my fingertips appeared in each shot, shifting as if troubled by holding the book. Roy even photographed the final entry before I returned the book to the shelf. “We’ll take the train,” I said.

Though the sun had been doing its job for hours, the heating was turned on throughout the train. Someone had opened every window, which didn’t help much. When we sped underground the tunnel roared at us like a beast with no need of breath. Roy pored over his phone all the way to Liverpool, and on the escalator up to James Street too. As I and a number of commuters – not quite as many as I’d thought at first – followed him into the lift that would raise us to street level, I saw he was scrolling through the photographs of Thelma’s journal.

Most of the pedestrians on the road that paralleled the waterfront were intent on their phones, like quite a few of the drivers speeding by. Some walkers were following maps or listening to them. As Roy and I made for the dockside, the relentlessly bright simulated voices issuing directions fell behind. We waited while a swing bridge let a barge painted with giant flowers into the Albert Dock. Reflections of visitors to dockland passed through the windows of the barge like film through the gate of a projector. There Roy and I went, and here we came again with somebody between us, so close that the figure appeared to have its arms around our shoulders. It must be a trick of perspective, not just because I could feel nothing of the kind but since our apparent companion’s face, unlike ours, was an undefined blur. When I glanced around, nobody was even close behind us.

Across the bridge a colonnade with pillars painted redder than the converted sandstone warehouse brought us to the Tate. A lift carried us to the third floor of the gallery, which was occupied by the exhibition of my aunt’s work, Reaching Further. Other canvases provided context – paintings by Laila Hallack, Frida Kahlo, Ithell Colquhoun and others, not least Leonora Carrington. Landscapes bristling with imminence were the work of Californian psychedelic artists – Gage Taylor, Bill Martin. I saw how these related to my aunt’s vistas on the edge of revelation, but I was looking for an explanation of the entries in her journal. While Roy followed the chronology of the exhibition I made for the further room.