Excerpt

Chapter One, The Journal:

I could never have believed I would wish my son loved books less, let alone dread the consequences. That August afternoon he'd been in my apartment less than half an hour before he ended up in the room with shelves on every wall. He was sprawled in a leather armchair several times his age, and leafing through an exhibition catalogue, when his phone gave its vintage ring. A glance at the screen let him say "It's mum."

"Shall I leave you to talk?"

Roy's features – the long sharp-nosed face and thin lips he'd inherited from me – twitched in a fleeting grimace. Just the deep brown eyes were his mother's, but their habitual preoccupation was all his. "You can hear," he said.

Just the same, I turned to the window. Double glazing fended off much of the noise from New Brighton Station down below, but I was being told a train was late. On the far side of the railway, beyond a cluster of chain restaurants at the bottom of the hill, the sea led to a crowd of windmills spinning like cogs of the sky. A microscopic oil rig and the distant filament of Blackpool Tower might have been components as well, helping maintain the pellucid blue. None of this distracted me from hearing Julia say "Are you at your father's now, Roy?"

"Have been for hours. Do you want to talk to him?"

"I will when I've spoken to you. Are you settling in all right?"

"Don't know what you mean."

I could tell this meant yes in a fifteen-year-old's parlance besides protesting at the question, but Julia persisted "Will you be comfortable there while I'm away?"

"Mum, dad can hear."

"Then I'm sure he understands."

"I'm good." As I hoped this wasn't dutifully aimed at me Roy added "I'm reading in his book room."

"No need to bring any of those home. That's what your tablet's for."

"The modern librarian," I murmured and felt sly at once.

"I didn't hear that," Julia said, which generally meant she had. "What's your reading, Roy?"

"A book of dad's aunt's paintings."

"Just don't let them tempt you to imitate her. You make sure he doesn't, Patrick."

"I haven't done paintings since I was little," Roy said.

"You know perfectly well what I mean," Julia retorted forcefully enough to be rebuking both of us. "All the things she was mixed up with obviously harmed her mind, or she wouldn't have done what she did to herself."

"It was never proved she meant to," I said.

"I'm not having this argument again," Julia said, a response familiar from the last years of our marriage. "Please keep an eye on what Roy reads and what he does while he's your responsibility. I'll be home once the conference is over."

As our son took refuge in the book, which didn't save his face from growing mottled with embarrassment, I said "I think we're both responsible for him."

Someone unfamiliar with Julia might have thought she'd grown briefly deaf, since she said only "Call me whenever you need to, Roy. And make sure you two don't get into any mischief."

"Yes, miss," I said but heard no sign that she'd taken it as a joke.

When a further silence made it plain that she'd gone, Roy slipped the phone into one of the several pockets of his elongated shorts. As he reopened the catalogue at Thelma's best-known painting – the red London bus perched on the highest Himalayan peak – he said "What was your aunt like?"

"She'd have encouraged you to look further than people ordinarily do. That's what she did to me when I used to stay with her, though I can't say my parents were altogether in favour."

"That's how all the books with her pictures on them used to make me feel. Have you still got them?"

"They're over in the corner where the sun can't get at them. All the books with anything to do with her are, just in case they fade."

Roy was making to replace the catalogue when he peered into the corner I'd devoted to my aunt. "What's back here?"

Reaching into the gap the catalogue had left, he coaxed out an item. He might have been extracting a slice of darkness, a concentrated essence of the shadows in the corner, but just the covers of the exercise book were black. I had no idea when I might have trapped it behind the other volumes, and it touched off memories I hadn't visited for years. "That was Thelma's," I said.

Roy perched on the edge of my desk while he leafed through the book. "What's it meant to be?"

"I was never really sure. Maybe they're notes for some of her work. I thought the names were places she based paintings on."

"It's more like a diary at the start, but it doesn't end up much of one."

As he passed me the journal it emitted a faint earthy smell, presumably of age. My aunt had made an entry on the inside of the front cover, which suggested she'd written it later than she'd begun the journal. 21st March, first year, the elaborately cursive writing said. Met A on walk. I glanced at a few of the place names she'd annotated with obscure quotations – Monks Cross, Slatevale, Goodmanswood – and then let Roy have the journal, since it intrigued him. "Why did she give you her book?" he said.

"She didn't, but I think she'd have liked me to have it. She tried to inspire me whenever I stayed at her house. She thought her sister, that's my mother, didn't bring my mind out enough." With a twinge of guilt I said "Maybe I should have passed it on to her biographer."

"Do you think they'd have understood it?"

"If anybody could." As the railway station's voice turned female, warning listeners to be aware of suspicious items, I said "I was hoping it would help me understand what happened to my aunt, but that's one more thing I don't think we'll ever really know."

Roy blinked at the journal and laid it on my desk with a thump as muted as the voice below. "We could go and see some of these places," he said, and now I wish we'd never found the book.