Etcetera. Hilary etcetera Braithwaite. Onwards and onwards though so soon the Evensong gong must sound. A tap and a watering can in ballad together. To escape those private sounds I stepped down the last few steps of the marble staircase and into Marble Hall and there in the great hallway of Heap House, the absolute centre of the whole colossal edifice, was the enormous glass-fronted famous furniture, the Great Chest which stood on eight large carved feet shaped like a lion’s. Inside upon the numerous shelves were kept the various objects of the late Iremongers. Each object had a piece of string tied around it and a paper tag on which was written someone’s name, the name of the person who had once belonged to that object. Here were some of my ancestors, as seen through the thick glass of the great chest:

Idwon, inkpot

Agith, pillbox

Arfrah, washstand

Robitt-Fridick, penknife

Slibolla, fish kettle

Borrid, ewer

Naud, tweezers

When each Iremonger died their birth object was placed in the Great Chest in the hall, all of them never made a sound, I couldn’t hear them, they’d stopped talking. There on the fifth shelf were my mother’s and father’s.

Ayris, key to a pianoforte

Puntias, chalkboard rubber

I look a little like Mother I was told, and so my presence caused distress. When I was born my mother died. My grandmother found it particularly difficult to observe me and so I did not see her for months at a time. My mother had been the favourite of the house, she was my grandparents’ youngest child and their first daughter after twelve sons. I know very little about her. I know that she sang. Her voice, I have been told, was extraordinarily beautiful. Now, since my birth, there was no singing any more. Grandmother had forbidden it.

My father was not very much talked of at all. He was a quiet, peaceful man, born with a weak heart. Wrapped in cotton almost all his existence, carefully fed sugar cubes in muffled rooms, and brought out every now and then to visit my mother, for Grandfather had decided shortly after Mother was born that she should marry little Puntias, before it was discovered he had a weak pump. He had been kept carefully until he could marry Mother, he never went out into the heaps. Two weeks after I was born, in grief at Mother’s death and in joy at my birth, my father’s heart stopped.

I would often go to Marble Hall and think of Mother and Father, of their objects and of all those other ones besides theirs, of all those finished people.