What were they doing to poor Percy Detmold, whoever he was? What was happening inside the room? I crept up to it and saw through the keyhole Grandfather, sat with his huge back to me and beside him Uncle Idwid, holding Geraldine Whitehead in his hand. But there was no one else in the room, no one at all, and yet the screaming went on, made worse each time Idwid pushed his nose tongs at something just out of my view. Idwid shifted and I saw that the whole agony and misery was coming from nothing more than a tea strainer. A very scratched and dented tea strainer lay on the table, which Idwid was clinking now and again with his Geraldine.

‘Percy, Percy Detmold!’

A tea strainer, a tea strainer in agony.

‘You shall stay as you are, Percy Detmold,’ Idwid said, his voice not so gentle now, I could hear the Timfy in him. ‘You’re nothing but a tea strainer! You know nothing of a moustache cup, nothing at all. You are, and shall be, a tea strainer. Here then – Umbitt has you now!’

‘PERCY DETMOLD! PERCY DETMOLD!’

Why were Grandfather and Idwid bullying the object so? What has happened to my home, what has happened? How will anything ever make sense again? Get rid of the door handle, I told myself, at least get rid of the door handle, and quickly before Idwid hears it or my James Henry.

There were so many doors with the wrong names – Nareen, my Great-great Aunt, and my Aunt Shorly, and Second Cousin Lorry – but then near the end in a back corridor barely lit was the little sign IREMONGER, ROSAMUD, and in I went, shutting the door fast behind me.

It was a simple room, a stool, a table, a bed, a lump in the bed that surely answered, ‘Present,’ if asked, ‘Rosamud?’

I went to the stool, it was quite a high stool. I could just make out on the side of it: PROPERTY OF STRANGERS CLUB, LONDON I placed Alice Higgs upon the stool, but to my abused ears Alice said not a word.

‘Hello, Aunt R.,’ I said. ‘It’s me, Clod. How are you? How have you been these last, however long it is? I have something for you, Aunt Rosamud. Here it is. Upon the stool. Are you there?’

There was no response, no movement, no sound at all.

‘Are you there, Aunt Rosamud, are you there? I have something for you, something you shall be very pleased to see. Wherever are you? Which bit, precisely, is you? I don’t remember you as a pillow, no, you never used to be a pillow.’