“I hope I won’t make anybody think they don’t know me,” Bella said.

“Then I’m sure you won’t. Can I ask why you wanted to meet me?”

“Roy was saying you knew Thelma Turnbill.”

“I stayed with her and my uncle quite a few times. I take it you’re an admirer.”

“It’s lucky we were here when you came,” Roy told her.

“I’ve been before. I was always interested in her work.”

“What’s the appeal for you?” I said.

“The mysteries. The things you aren’t supposed to understand but let them come to you. They’re what brings me back.”

“And have they? Come, I mean.”

“Maybe you need to know what she thought she was painting.”

“That’s what we think too, isn’t it?” Roy said. “We know some of the places she did. I think that’s Drummer’s Meadow there, and that one’s got to be Darkmarsh, and that’ll be Slatevale or else it’s Plumb Mine.”

Bella looked impressed and eager to be more so. “How do you know all that?”

“We’ve got a book she wrote the places down in. I’ll show you if you like.”

“Roy,” I said, “we haven’t talked about making it public.”

“Bella’s not the public. Can’t she see?”

“You mustn’t show me if your father wouldn’t like it. You’ve told me where she went.”

“There’s more in here than that,” Roy said, flourishing his phone. “You’d like how Bella sees things, dad. It’s the way your aunt would.”

I thought he was trying to prolong their encounter. More urgently than he might have wanted her to notice he said “Tell him how some of the pictures look.”

“Maybe that’s the face the night has.” It was the entrance to the mine, and Bella turned to the painting of the marsh. “The mist could be the swamp breathing,” she said.

Though I found her views a little studied, I said “Are you an artist yourself?”

This prompted an appreciative smile. “I’ve never tried to be one.”

“Sounds like you could be, though,” Roy said.

I felt they’d reached a point where they could do without me, if indeed they weren’t wishing me away. “I’ll leave you to it, shall I? I’ll be in the first room.”

“Wait, dad. She’s got a book. Show him.”

Bella reached into her capacious shoulder-bag, which might have been plaited out of dried grass, and produced a history of polar expeditions, graced with Thelma’s early painting of a thatched cottage halfway up a glacier. At the time the use of the image was criticised for being too narrowly English. “Is history your thing, then?” I said.

“We’d be nobody without the past and people who explore.” As I took this for assent Bella said “I got it for the cover.”