When Grandmother was born, back so far in history that people were surely very different to the modern people we are now, back then it was Great Grandfather Adwald who was head of the family. Adwald was a hard one. It was known right from the start that Grandmother, Ommaball Oliff Iremonger, should marry Grandfather, and Adwald wanted everything to be right and proper for his heir, he wanted no complication of wife, no womanly disturbances. So he put Grandmother where Grandfather would always find her. He proclaimed that her birth object, which I had always heard call itself Augusta Ingrid Ernesta Hoffman, would be a large marble mantelpiece. The mantelpiece was, to my knowledge, the largest birth object ever given out. It was such a large thing, this mantelpiece, that it had taken a small army of Iremonger muscles to shift it (and one of those it was rumoured even perished in the process, quite crushed underneath it). The mantelpiece shelf was supported by two caryatids, full of bosom they were. Beautiful maidens, a little sleepy, with thin dresses that were slipping off them, but never, not ever, actually achieving a fall. They were one and a half life-size those figures, oh big and beautiful ladies. That such pretty women should be locked in marble was not right, I always thought. I used to long for them, to dream of them waking up and stepping out, of finding me wherever I was in the house, of visiting my bedroom.

Strange, I thought, that such lively-looking forms, that such beauty should be so heavy. I know they had never lived, and yet they always seemed to me so lifelike. Sitting as a child in Grandmother’s room, condemned to silence, to sitting upright and not making a sound, I thought I caught them breathing once or twice. I should dearly have loved to have spent some time with them alone, but Grandmother was always there. And that was the point: Grandmother never left that room.