I leant down and gently kissed her cheek and though my lips touched the surface of something, that something, the corrugated pelt of old Grandmother, seemed barely there at all, as if I’d kissed a cobweb. Brussels sprouts. That was the smell, mostly.

‘Sit, Clodius, sit.’

I sat on the edge of a neighbouring sofa, an empire sofa all upright and hardness and no sink to it at all. I perched there and tried not to look into those old yellow eyes.

‘Sit up, Clodius.’

‘Yes, Granny.’

I looked about the room, most specifically at the mantelpiece, at the marble ladies there, still lovely. And, between the moans of the storm and the tics and the tocks of Grandmother’s many timepieces, I heard the marble tell me, ‘Augusta Ingrid Ernesta Hoffmann.’

And so, I thought that early evening, you’re a person too, Miss Hoffmann – I could certainly not think of you as plain Augusta; to be so familiar to my grandmother’s own birth object couldn’t be done. What sort of a person were you before you became a marble mantelpiece? Quite some person, I thought, quite an extraordinary thing to have turned out so striking. Outside, an old empty dress, stained and ripped, slammed against the windows, and I shook. Grandmother paid it no heed.

‘Well, Clodius, how good of you to visit your old grandmother. How long has it been, pray tell, since last you came?’

‘It has been a good few seasons, Granny.’

‘It has. You have grown. Not well perhaps, not exactly upright, at an angle shall we say, like a truculent plant seeking out the sun through a crack in a curtained window. So long it has been.’

‘I should have come sooner, Granny, but –’

‘You should not have come sooner. You should not have been received. But you are here now, because you have been sent for. I wished for it. I wished to see you before you go away. To catch again some hint of Ayris’s face. My daughter. My own dead daughter.’

She was silent again a while and so I sat, upright, and listened to all those clocks and their marking, to the storm outside whistling and cackling, and to the mantelpiece telling its name in a clear young voice. Tic. Tic. Tic. Smack. Tap. Crack. Was one of those tics the ticking of Grandmother’s old heart pump, thrusting and sloshing the old, but so pure, Iremonger liquid all about her, to every Iremonger corner of her? Tic. Tic. Tic. Crack. Plick. Snap. There was a whoosh as some old blankets were blown up by the storm and hovered a little before the window, as if they wished to take a peek, before falling down again, actually falling, unlike the cloth around the marble women.

‘You are wearing trousers, Clodius.’

‘Yes, Granny, new today.’

Tic. Tic. Tic.

Plick. Plack. Crack.

‘How do they feel?’

‘A little prickly, Granny, to tell the truth.’