The next morning, Dotter goes straight to the glasshouse after breakfast. Tessie is there, watering the plants. He�s hoping to spend the day with her, listening to her stories. Alan was telling him that she loves telling stories as she works � he often goes to see her just to hear the stories, and sometimes Soots drops by too. Alan loves to listen to the stories about her knees and her adventures with Hessy Dress. When he listens to her tell these stories it feels like a deep breath of summer, an afternoon and start of evening; they�re full running and jumping, the white trail of jets across the clear blue sky, voices and water, and knees. Tessie always has knees in the stories. It has to be obvious that she has knees � or at least for Alan it has to be obvious, because he hasn�t any knees himself. He loves hearing stories in which Tessie uses her knees. In all of the stories, Tessie is chased by Hessy Dress, but she always comes out of her adventures still wearing her bikini, after Hessy Dress fails to clothe her. You can almost take it for granted that Hessy will fail to clothe Tessie, but that doesn�t stop Hessy from trying, and it�s the chase that makes the stories so enjoyable. And the knees. You can always take it for granted that Tessie has knees, but Alan loves the way she always points out when she uses her knees � most people don�t mention their knees when they tell stories, even though they use them all the time. Alan never takes it for granted that anyone has knees. And the fact that Tessie�s knees are always visible makes the stories even more enjoyable � they seem even more real. He likes hearing about the dress called Hessy too, because he once had a clock called Hessy.

The stories have become even more exciting over the past year, after Hessy saw a cartoon on TV about some people trying to stop a pigeon. She got the idea of buying a bi-plane, and she hired a dog to fly it. The plane would appear from nowhere and Hessy would drop from it, but she still hasn�t landed on Tessie. Last week, Tessie managed to get back to the glasshouse just in time, and Hessy landed on the roof. Soots has very good hearing, and he can hear the plane coming before anyone else, so he starts barking to warn his nanny. Soots doesn�t like Hessy�s dog at all.

Dotter finds Tessie watering some plants in the glasshouse. He takes a box of chocolates from behind his back and says, �I got you these.�

�Thanks Mr. Gramargan. That�s very sweet of you.�

�Call me Dotter, please. I thought, what type of sweets would Tessie like, and the first thing I thought of was toffees. Tessie, toffee. I hope they�re okay.�

�They�re perfect. Dresscoat loves toffees.�

She goes looking for Dresscoat, the gardener, and she finds him cutting one of the lawns. �Look Dresscoat, Mr. Gramargan brought us some toffees.�

�Dotter, please.�

Dresscoat thanks Dotter and takes one of the toffees. As he�s eating it he suddenly points to the sky and says, �Look, a cloud.� Tessie looks to the sky and he starts talking about the cloud. �It feels a bit like dancing lessons. No, it�s more� yeah, dancing lessons, but in candle light, and dancing very slowly. And there�s a yellow canary in there somewhere too. People with dancing hearts might be able to describe the cloud better, but that�s what I see.�

Dresscoat Summertime grew up in Mizzenwood. When he was young, a famous composer, Bow-Legend Snowy, lived in the town. He was famous in Mizzenwood anyway. Bow-Legend had composed the theme tune to a few popular TV shows. He spent the last years of his life working on a fly symphony. It took him a few months to write it, but he spent years trying to teach the flies how to perform it. He trained individual flies how to sound like a certain note, and then to �play� that note at the correct time. After a few months, the B flat fly figured out what was going on. He told all the other flies about it, but they continued to cooperate with the composer. The B flat fly was fascinated by Bow-Legend�s methods of composition and teaching. The fly studied them closely. He wrote his own symphony and he taught the other flies how to play it at night when Bow-Legend was asleep. They learnt how to perform it very quickly. The B flat fly was a much better teacher than Bow-Legend because he had a much better understanding of flies. During the day, they continued to practise Bow-Legend�s symphony.

After four years of working on it, the debut performance of Bow-Legend Snowy�s first fly symphony finally came around. The theatre was packed. People came more out of curiosity than anything else. There was complete silence as Bow-Legend walked onto the stage. The flies were in place. He picked up the baton and the performance began, but they started playing the B flat fly�s symphony.

Bow-Legend stared at the flies in shock for a few seconds, but then he realised that the music they were playing was beautiful. He started moving his baton around, trying to pretend that this was his work.

The music sounded very familiar to him. He knew he�d heard it before, but he couldn�t say where, and he could never remember a performance of anything like this before.

He had heard the fly�s symphony every night when he was asleep, when the flies performed it in the attic above his bedroom. This was the first time he�d heard it during his waking hours, and as he listened, the thought occurred to him that he�d composed it in his own mind. Every note sounded so familiar to him and by the end of the performance he�d convinced himself that the flies had read his mind. He was thrilled by this idea. He had never composed anything as good as this before; this made him an even better composer than he had previously thought. In his subconscious he was a great composer and it took the flies to unlock it.

The symphony was hailed as Bow-Legend�s best work and his fame spread (he spent most of the rest of his life either accepting awards or staring at flies), but the B flat fly became famous amongst all the other flies in the area. And not just flies � bees, spiders, birds, even dogs and cats. He performed for all of them and gave �singing� lessons.

When Dresscoat was in secondary school there was someone in his class called Plundey Tuesday who gave names to everything he didn�t like. He once slipped in the mud and he called the mud �Jessica jumped-up stupid mud� (he had something else in mind after �Jessica jumped-up� but it didn�t work out, so he changed it to �stupid mud� on the spur of the moment). People used to joke that his parents can�t have liked him very much if they called him �Plundey�, but he gave those people names too. One day in the school yard a bee flew around his head and he called it �Bitchey Bee�. He shouted �Bitchey Bee� after it as it flew away.

A week later, Plundey had to leave school early for a dentist�s appointment. As soon as he stepped outside he was attacked by a swarm of bees. They couldn�t see Plundey from the classroom, but they could hear the bees.

After Plundey called the bee �Bitchey�, it went back to the hive and told the story to the other bees. They decided to visit the B flat fly and he spent a few days teaching them how to make a certain sound. In Dresscoat�s classroom they all listened to the sound of the bees. Dresscoat thought he could hear the words �Plundey Tuesday is a horse�s ass�.

Dresscoat never paid much attention in school. In fact, this was the only time he ever paid attention in school, and it was also the only time his teacher was distracted from what he was doing. He was writing something on the board as he listened to the sound of the bees, and he didn�t notice that he�d written �experience = clouds�.

This was the only thing Dresscoat learnt in school, but when it came to getting a job, it proved to be more of a hindrance than the thousands of things he didn�t learn. In interviews he�d be asked about experience and he�d say, �Oh yeah, the clouds. I know.� And he�d point at the clouds outside the window. They�d ask him to expand on this and he�d say, �Y� know, the clouds.�

After Andrew Shelf retired from politics he spent his time walking through the gardens or the woodland, or in his library. One morning in Autumn he walked through the woods, in shelter from the wind, with leaves falling all around him, white clouds flying by above. In the afternoon he sat in his library with a book about clouds in front of him, but he didn�t take much notice of it because he was looking out the window at the leaves in the wind. He had a pen in his hand and he wasn�t paying attention to what he was doing with that either, until he looked down at the book and noticed he�d written the words �Russian Space Agency� across the top of the page.

He walked through the woodland again the next morning, through the leaves and wind. He took a deep breath of Autumn air and remembered the words he wrote on the book yesterday. It was a beautiful image � the sight of the words rather than the words themselves, the colour of the dark blue ink on the paper, just above the black text, the way the ink soaked into the page.

He rushed back to the house and went to the library. He opened the book and started writing again. He didn�t pay much attention to what he was writing � in his mind he was out in the woods again, with the wind and leaves, that smell in the air, the white clouds in the blue sky.

The next morning when he walked through the woods, all he could see was the blue ink on the white pages. He rushed back to the study and started writing in the book again, at the top and bottom of the pages and in the margins, and in his mind he was out in the woodland. His hand was sore but he kept writing until his shoulder woke up (his shoulder was old then and it slept most of the time).

This happened every day. Andrew couldn�t remember at exactly what point these writings became his memoirs, but the idea was probably at the back of his mind since the first few days. He paid little or no attention to what he was writing, but the idea of using these as his memoirs made sense because a lot of people were asking him to do it, and he just didn�t know how he�d go about it.

He had no idea where the words �Russian Space Agency� came from, but it seemed an obvious title � they were the first words he wrote and they were on their own at the start. It bore absolutely no relation to his life or his political career, and from that point of view it was an appropriate title because neither did the rest of his memoirs.

He had a problem finishing them because he used up all the free space in the book about clouds and he still had more to write. He didn�t know what else he wanted to write about (he didn�t really know what he�d already written about either) but he just had a feeling that he had more to write. He tried writing on other books, but they just didn�t feel right. He bought as many books about clouds as he could, but none of them felt right.

And then he interviewed Dresscoat for the gardener�s job. This was fifteen years ago. Andrew asked him about experience and he said, �Oh yeah. The clouds. Up in the sky.� He pointed to the window.

Andrew suddenly got a desire to write again, so he started writing on Dresscoat�s CV in front of him. He said, �Tell me more about the clouds.�

�Yeah, the clouds. In the sky. And the wind blowing them across the sky. Those little white clouds.�

Andrew kept writing. He hired Dresscoat, and every day for the next few months they�d walk through the woodlands and Dresscoat would tell Andrew what he thought of the clouds. He�d say things like, �That cloud reminds me of walking under an oak tree, but that one is like the sound of a key in a door.�

Andrew�s memoirs were published in three volumes and Dresscoat was credited as a ghost writer. Andrew died a month after the publication of the final volume, but his shoulder lived for another two years. The shoulder wrote its own chapter in �Russian Space Agency�, but it was similar in style to what Andrew had written.

Dotter spends two hours listening to Dresscoat tell Tessie about the clouds. Dotter has no interest in it, but Tessie keeps saying �ooh� and �aah�. She never gets tired of listening to Dresscoat, when he talks about clouds or anything else, but he normally talks about clouds. He�s still not very good at predicting rain.

Some of the sisters spend the morning stapling things, mostly photos of the fox. The others pass the time in taping labels to things � that�s their other favourite hobby. They�ve often tried to tape labels to water, but they never stick, so they don�t really know what to call �water�. They have hundreds of names for snow � they love taping things to snow because it�s a bit like water, only you can tape labels to it. But then they use the same words for the things beneath the snow when the snow melts. Hilda will only tape words to moss, but she often gets bored with the word �moss� � over the years she�s accumulated 377 different names for moss, like �hello little kitten�. She tries to avoid using colours as names for things, because colours signify so many different things in her mind already, and over the years she�s found that there are more useful descriptions and definitions, like �hello little kitten�. She was always fascinated by tulips and the weather, and tulips in the weather. She set up an elaborate experiment to see the effects of a hurricane on tulips. She had to wait twenty years for a hurricane, but when it came and the experiment was completed, they asked her what the results were and she said, �Red.� She painted the tulips in the hurricane, but it was mostly just red, and she couldn�t help thinking that the experiment would have been more informative if she�d used a different experimental language than just �red�.

After lunch, Dotter goes looking for Tessie again, and he finds her with Alan. She�s telling him one of her stories about Hessy Dress and how she has knees. When she gets to the end, Dotter tells her everything he knows about clouds, but she just nods and says �hm�. He doesn�t get a single �ooh� or an �aah�. He obviously doesn�t know enough about clouds.

That night, after everyone has gone to bed, Dotter gets up and goes downstairs. He looks through some of the rooms, and he finds the study, but that�s just full of ants. The ants in the study do all the accounting. Tax is measured in height � in feet and inches. The ants stand on top of each other, and however many feet of ants is the height of taxes. Instead of ledgers, they have height marks on the wall to account for previous years. The ants were secretly relieved when the money was stolen because they didn�t know how to account for it. Accounting matters have always been fairly simple in this house.

Dotter opens the door of the study and looks around. The ants stop their work and look at him. They make Dotter feel uncomfortable, all those ants staring at him. So he leaves the study. He walks down the hall and goes into the drawing room.

The hinge on the door of the drawing room always creaks, so he opens the door very slowly. The hinge still creaks, but Dotter realises that it�s just saying the word �creak�.

�Hey, you�re just saying that.�

�No I�m not.�

�You are, I heard you.� Dotter opens and closes the door a few times and the hinge keeps saying �creak�. �You are � you�re just saying �creak� all the time.�

�Maybe I am. It�s just a bit of fun.�

�Isn�t there something else you could say instead of �creak�?�

�Like what?�

�I don�t know� How about �whooosh�?�

�Whoooosh� That�s not bad. I might try that.�

Dotter looks around the room. He goes through all the cupboards and drawers. When he leaves after about five minutes he steps into the hall and he sees one of the sisters, Cicely, coming down the stairs. He stops and looks at her, but she doesn�t see him. When she gets to the bottom of the stairs she walks down the hall and doesn�t take any notice of him. Then he remembers that she�s the one who asked Thomas about the sleep-walking.

When Cicely was young she used to try to surprise her eyes. In the dark, she�d leave some clothes out before she goes to bed � normally a costume of some sort. When she woke in the morning she�d dress in the costume with her eyes closed. Then she�d go to the bathroom mirror with her eyes still closed, and then suddenly open her eyes and say �boo�. She always thought she was frightening her eyes, but the eyes were never really frightened � they just got annoyed. So one night they made a deal with her brain. The brain made her go sleep walking in the middle of the night and switch the costumes. She woke up in the morning and dressed with her eyes closed and went to the bathroom mirror. She screamed when she saw herself. She never tried to frighten her eyes again, but the brain enjoyed the sleep walking, so it�s been doing it ever since.

Dotter goes to the library and turns on the light. He finds a book about clouds and spends the next hour reading. When he leaves to go back upstairs, he sees Cicely walking down the hall again, and she goes upstairs ahead of him. He looks around the rooms on the first floor. All of the rooms at one side of the house are deserted because the doors there talk to each other in knock-knock jokes for most of the night. The sisters� bedroom is at the other side of the house, where it�s much quieter.