AT THE MOST SECLUDED edge of the Fetch Estate in a small, but dazzlingly well-equipped cottage, Mrs Julia Fetch rearranged her extensive collection of glass octopuses (or octopodes). She had them made in Venice by an increasingly elderly team of master glass blowers, lamp workers and glass artists. She softly ran her – she had to admit – increasingly elderly fingers across the rounded head of an Octopus rubescens and gently waved at the perfectly modelled tentacles of a red-spot night octopus, or Octopus dierythraeus. She smiled.

As the years had passed, she’d found that she had become slightly forgetful, perhaps even very forgetful – she could barely picture her long-ago husband’s face – but she had perfect recall when it came to the names of octopus species. She had always been fond of octopodes (or octopuses) and she was using a tiny fraction of her monumental cash reserves to have every variety of octopus modelled in glass. There were over a hundred to reproduce and each exquisitely delicate sculpture took nearly a year of the craftsmen’s work. It was very possible that she wouldn’t quite manage to see the collection completed. She was also sole patron and very generous supporter of the Julia Fetch Foundation for the Care and Support of Octopuses (or Octopodes). These were really her only two remaining indulgences, apart from the cottage’s fantastic kitchen – which she hardly used – and the marble-lined bathroom and generously proportioned bath in which she soaked her sometimes rather achy limbs, while wishing that she had more legs. Or more arms. Or both.

When she was younger, Mrs Fetch had enjoyed the usual toys and treats of the ultra-rich: buying sports cars and villas on sun-kissed coastlines, owning a London townhouse and a moderately sized castle (with village attached) quite near Folkestone, running stables full of racehorses and country estates all of which were seething with fat, juicy, slow-moving game birds and succulent deer. But she didn’t really enjoy driving, and paying other people to drive her Bugattis and Duesenburgs and Alfa Romeos had seemed silly. Filling her villas (and the townhouse and the castle) with loud strangers hadn’t been nearly as much fun as she’d expected, and filling them with friends was very difficult because having friends when you’re vastly rich just gets quite complicated. Rattling around next to her swimmerless swimming pools or wandering alone across her dusty ballrooms had been depressing. She’d caught herself talking to the geckos in one place and half expecting them to answer. Her racehorses were beautiful, but had never seemed that fond of her – they tended to be slightly highly strung. And she had never been able to bring herself to kill anything on her estates. In fact, she’d been vegetarian for at least twenty years, if not forty, or sixty…Eventually, she’d given away all her homes apart from this cottage. They’d been turned into community centres and octopus research facilities. She’d sold her sports cars and horses and let her estates go back to nature and be overrun by un-shot-at animals and, by now, some quite rare plants, which nobody shot at either.

Or that was the past which she currently remembered. She sometimes had the feeling that she had previously remembered other pasts, but she couldn’t be sure. Being this old was slightly confusing. Then again – as the twins often told her – it was very reasonable to be confused when she knew so much and had been to so many places and done so many things, occasionally in diving gear (but never dressed as a pirate).

And as long as she had the twins – her beautiful, kind and charming Honor, her handsome, kind and charming Xavier – she knew that everything would be all right. That was something she didn’t forget.

She never left her cottage these days. She didn’t need to. A dedicated geostationary satellite poured a constant flow of information into her personal communications hub – located in what used to be the pantry – and she could spend all day, if she wanted, learning more about octopus camouflage techniques, or the cunning ways in which they could impersonate other sea creatures, or reading her Foundation’s latest test results on octopus intelligence. From the hub, she could also keep an eye on the stock market and watch her money quietly making more money.

But she did feel the need for a little company now and then. She did think – perhaps regularly, perhaps only once a month, she wasn’t entirely certain – that it would be nice to invite some pleasant people to take tea with her. Nothing grand, or fussy – just tea with small sandwiches and perhaps slices of fruit cake and maybe scones.

She did sometimes tell the twins about arranging to have tea and they did promise to go and find her suitable guests, but she couldn’t – if she was honest – absolutely recall how often this happened, or if she had ever served anybody tea, or discussed the mating rituals of squid while buttering very thin toast and handing out napkins. Occasionally she dreamed that the inside of her mind was somehow becoming occupied by a being much cleverer than she was, something with dark tendrils, or tentacles reaching into her personality and softly wriggling about across her memories in a way that made them jumble and fade.

Still, it didn’t matter. She was entirely happy and probably had forgotten her last tea party in the usual old lady type of way. Probably, if she concentrated, she could say how many cucumber sandwiches this or that visitor had eaten and whether there had been enough jam. And there was no reason to worry if she couldn’t. As she stared out through her window at the well-groomed trees and glossy shrubs bordering her golf course, she nodded to herself and smiled again. She had a good life. And sixty-eight perfectly lovely Venetian glass octopodes. Or octopuses.