House of Many Ways by Diana Wynne Jones

table.”
    Charmain tried. The whole horrible business took ages. The wiping cloth hardly seemed to soak up water at all and the plate kept nearly slithering out of her hands. She was so much slower at wiping than Peter was at washing, that Peter soon had a heap of plates draining beside the sink and began to get impatient. Naturally, at that point, the prettiest patterned plate slid out of Charmain’s hands completely and fell on the floor. Unlike the strange teapots, it broke.
    “Oh,” Charmain said, staring down at the pieces. “How do you put them together?”
    Peter rolled his eyes up toward the ceiling. “You don’t,” he said. “You just take care not to drop another.” He collected the pieces of plate and threw them into another bucket. “ I’ll wipe now. You try your hand at washing, or we’ll be all day.” He let the now brownish water out of the sink, collected the knives, forks, and spoons out of it, and dropped them in the rinsing bucket. To Charmain’s surprise, they all seemed to be clean and shiny now.
    As she watched Peter fill the sink again withmore soap and hot water, she decided, crossly but quite reasonably, that Peter had chosen the easy part of the work.
    She found she was mistaken. She did not find it easy at all. It took her slow ages on each piece of crockery, and she got soaked down the front of her in the process. And Peter kept handing back to her plates and cups, saucers and mugs, and saying they were still dirty. Nor would he let her wash any of the many dog dishes until the human crockery was done. Charmain thought this was too bad of him. Waif had licked each one so clean that Charmain knew they would be easier to wash than anything else. Then, on top of this, she was horrified to find that her hands were coming out of the suds all red and covered with strange wrinkles.
    “I must be ill!” she said. “I’ve got a horrible skin disease!”
    She was annoyed and offended when Peter laughed at her.
    But the dreadful business was done at last. Charmain, damp in front and wrinkly in the hands,went sulkily off to the living room to read The Twelve-Branched Wand by the slanting light of the setting sun, leaving Peter to stack the clean things in the pantry. By this time, she was feeling she might go mad if she didn’t sit and read for a while. I’ve hardly read a word all day, she thought.
    Peter interrupted her much too soon by coming in with a vase he had found and filled with the hydrangeas, which he dumped down on the table in front of her. “Where’s that food you said your mother brought?” he said.
    “What?” Charmain said, peering at him through the foliage.
    “I said Food,” Peter told her.
    Waif seconded him by leaning against Charmain’s legs and groaning.
    “Oh,” Charmain said. “Yes. Food. You can have some if you promise not to dirty a single dish eating it.”
    “That’s all right,” Peter said. “I’m so hungry I could lick it off the carpet.”
    So Charmain reluctantly stopped reading anddragged the bag of food out from behind the armchair, and they all three ate large numbers of Mr. Baker’s beautiful pasties, followed by Afternoon Tea, twice, from the trolley. In the course of this huge meal, Charmain parked the vase of hydrangeas on the trolley to be out of the way. When she next looked, they had vanished.
    “I wonder where they went,” Peter said.
    “You can sit on the trolley and find out,” Charmain suggested.
    But Peter did not feel like going that far, to Charmain’s disappointment. While she ate, she tried to think of ways of persuading Peter to go away, back to Montalbino. It was not that she utterly disliked him, exactly. It was just annoying to share the house with him. And she knew, as clearly as if Peter had told her, that the next thing he was going to make her do was to empty the things out of those laundry bags and wash them too. The idea of more washing made her shudder.
    At least, she thought, I’m not going to be here