With me, Uncle Aliver was generally very attentive and excited, he spent a good deal of worry over me and was so very fond of my head, and I wished he were not so much. On the days he was quick with me and gruff I knew I was doing better. He was a first-rate medical man and knew everything about the stop and go of the human unit.

‘You appear very underslept,’ said Uncle Aliver to me that morning; he felt my head and listened to my heart. He laid out my pills for the week and there, save for a few brief questions, his visits would usually stop.

‘Poor Rosamud, Clod, she suffers so. Her hair is falling out. Her skin has darkened.’

‘Indeed, poor Aunt.’

‘The whole house is set off by her. How busy I have been. My brother Wrichid thought he saw his own pelmet sliding about his bedchamber, but I think it’s more likely the claret cup. Mr Groom has reported a sudden curdling of substances, from milk to marzipan, and a pig carcass hung up in the cold room has grown strange blue lines all over its pelt. Not to mention the birth of Cousin Lolly’s latest; she’s calling him Kannif after her own father, very frail indeed. And Great Aunt Ommaball Oliff, your venerable grandmother, foul-mooded without cease, presented the poor child with a single curved pencil shaving for a birth object, so it’s unlikely to last the night. And of course the heaps are up and that’s enough to make anyone tense. I haven’t known such distress since Rippit was lost to us. But you, Clod, at least you remain constant, constantly Clod.’

‘I have listened out for the door handle, but I haven’t heard it.’

‘And yet it must be somewhere. Clod, perhaps we might run you around a bit, up and down the house, see what you can hear. We’ll not make a parade of it, there’s no need for Timfy to know. Yes, perhaps we might. Worth a shot. Would you be up to that? It would get you out of school.’

‘Certainly, Uncle.’

‘And how was your Sitting anyway? I forgot to ask. Nice girl?’

‘It was all right, I suppose. And, Uncle, at the Sitting –’

‘A doily, I believe.’

‘A doily, yes. And, Uncle, there was something else. The sofa in the Sitting Room, it spoke, quite quietly, it said its name was Victoria Hollest.’

‘Victoria Hollest, did it?’ said Uncle perfunctorily.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and I shouldn’t mention anything about it especially except the fact it said something else, something other than its name, it was asking where someone called Margaret was. I’m pretty sure that’s what I heard, I could go and have another listen if you like.’