‘I do beg your pardon, I truly do. I’ll get you home, somehow. I’ll get you back. Where are your people? What are they like, those Haywards of yours? If I get you there, shall I become an object? And what, James Henry, dear fellow, if I may, do you suppose I should be were I an object? Should I be something grand, like a lucifer, or something useful like a plunger? It speaks well of you, I think, that you’re a bath plug. It’s a fine thing to be a bath plug. Very pleasing, good to hold. Oh sorry, James Henry, I’m at it again, of course you’d rather not be a bath plug at all, would you? You’d rather be James Henry Hayward, himself in his own outfit, kitted out, at home with your own. I do so wonder what you look like. Do you have a round face, or do I only think of that because of the roundness of the plug? I am sorry, I’m so sorry, James Henry. I didn’t know before, but I do know now. And, by heavens, I wish it wasn’t so.’

‘James Henry Hayward.’

‘I know, I know.’

There I sat, taking it all in, head in a spin, wrung out, all those words of Grandfather’s and things of his and smell that’s his, still in the room somehow. Should get out, I thought. Should get out and far away, go somewhere. But where is there? And what to do with my plug? And all those other things up and down the house, the east of it and the west of it, the whole crammed prison of it, all those people stuck in objects, a fire bucket that’s a person, a sofa that’s a person, a tap that’s a person, a newel post, a barometer, a ruler, a whistle, a cuspidor, a box of matches, all people, all people! A box of matches! Lucy Pennant!

Lucy Pennant, they’re sending me away. I’m called to the city. I should have been proud of that. If Grandfather had only visited me a few days earlier I’d have gone with a hop and skip. But not now. Not any more. They were sending me the very next day. I should get on the train. That train that I’d heard so often screaming in and out, always wearing at me, always sending the house Iremongers into shock though they knew it would come. Oh, Lucy, Lucy Pennant.