I felt as if I were encountering Thelma’s late works for the first time once I set about examining them. I knew each painting contained a distant figure, an element one critic had called the imminent presence. My aunt had refused to say what the figure represented, which had led one hostile commentator to liken it to Wally, who lurked in a series of children’s books – Wally, who adopted different identities around the world: Waldo in America, Charlie in France, Holger in Denmark, Van Lang in Vietnam… One analysis suggested that Thelma’s motif was designed to entice the viewer to look deep into the image, and as I moved from canvas to canvas it felt like a secret key to each landscape it inhabited, if not the seed of some kind of transformation. I’d always taken the figure in a meadow to be far away, but now I wondered if it was much closer and no larger than a flower. As I went close enough to nuzzle the canvas and then backed away to take in the entire image, the elaborate patterns of grass and weeds appeared to shift until I could have fancied they were about to reveal a hidden form. None made itself plain, and I moved to the next painting, where a remote watcher stood at the far edge of a faintly luminous swamp. The treacherous ground was bordered by mist and trees, and there was no telling where solidity ended or began. As I peered at the painting it started to flicker, so that the traces of ground mist twitched as though eager to converge and take a shape. None of this helped me understand the entries in the journal. “The deeper it is dug, the more ancient are the secrets which the excavation shall awaken” – but I saw no sign of this in Thelma’s painting of a slate mine almost indistinguishable from the depths of the night, in which a figure perched high above the jagged entrance became only very gradually visible. Though I couldn’t distinguish a face, I felt as if one was implicit in the image. The yawning entrance to the apparently abandoned mine could be the mouth, an impression that led me to feel other features might be scattered through the stony landscape, eager to be gathered by the spectator. Might this be true of all of Thelma’s final paintings? The spectacle of the slate walls around the entrance slowly forming from the blackness – the sense of a secret assembly – felt as though it was fastening on my mind. I didn’t know how long the sight had held me motionless when Roy said “Dad.”