Neville was focusing on Roy as if he’d just noticed him. “You look like a grand chap,” he said, delivering a large loose handshake. “My grandnephew, will you be?”

“He’s our little helper, aren’t you, Roy?” my mother said.

All this felt like my excuse to be elsewhere. “Back in a few minutes,” I said and sidled through the crowd.

Outside the room a man appeared to be miming a bird, his arms held behind his back while he cocked his head at a framed painting. Three guests seated on consecutive stairs reminded me of plaster poultry mounted on a wall. In the bathroom a woman I didn’t think I’d ever seen before was restoring her makeup in front of a mirror. The bedroom I used to stay in looked diminished, stripped of memories, awaiting some visitor other than me. My aunt’s studio faced it across the landing. As I stepped into the large room scattered with paintings and the makings of them a woman said “Can I help?”

She might have been addressing a potential customer at her gallery, which had been the first to support my aunt’s career. In the church she’d spoken at length about Thelma’s achievement – how the intense lyricism of her early landscapes had grown hallucinatory before advancing into a highly personal form of surrealism, where enigmatic elements recalled the magical suggestions of Leonora Carrington, Thelma’s favourite painter. Towards the end Thelma Turnbill seemed to grow dissatisfied with her success, perhaps feeling too much of her fame depended on her early painting of a bus up Everest, used by London Transport for their Taking You Everywhere poster. In the pulpit Barbare had sounded close to proprietary, but I wasn’t going to let her treat me like an intruder in the studio. “Just looking for an item,” I said as firmly as I could.

Barbare thinned her eyes, lowering her multicoloured eyebrows. They and her cropped rainbow hair might have been designed to contrast with her severely funereal suit and polo-neck. “May I ask what?” she said.

I didn’t answer until I located Thelma’s attempt at a journal, lying on the sill of the broad high window that overlooked the woods behind the house. Leaves rusty with autumn massed into the distance, where their tints were diluted by mist. My son’s complaint about a watcher made me peer into the forest, but I’d seen nothing except trees when Barbare said “Excuse me, could you leave that? It was Thelma’s.”

I picked up the book I’d laid my hand on. “I’m her nephew.”

Barbare narrowed her eyes further before letting them relax. “I do know you. I haven’t seen you for years, or much.”

“Thank you for everything you said today. I’m sure everyone would want me to say so. I’ll leave you to it, then.”