‘I don’t like wine,’ said Mop.

‘Yes, you do. You like sherry.’

‘I don’t like that dark red stuff. It tastes bitter. Daddy won’t let me have wine.’

‘Then we won’t tell Daddy. If it’s bitter you can put sugar in it. My God, any other child would think it was in heaven getting wine for supper. You don’t know when you’re well off and you never have. You’ve no appreciation.’

‘I suppose you want us to drink it so you can have the leftovers for your horrible vinegar thing,’ said Mop.

‘It’s not horrible and don’t you dare to speak to me like that,’ said Mrs Felton, but there was something like relief in her voice. Can I remember that? Did I truly observe that? No. It is now that I know it, now when all the years have passed, and year by year has come more understanding. Then, I heard no relief. I saw no baser motive in Mrs Felton’s insistence. I took it for granted, absurd and somehow an inversion of the proper course of things though it seemed, that we were to drink an expensive substance in order that the remains of it might be converted into a cheap substance. But childhood is a looking-glass country where so often one is obliged to believe six impossible things before breakfast.

I drank my wine and, grudgingly, Mop drank two full glasses into which she had stirred sugar. Most of the rest was consumed by Mrs Felton who then poured the dregs into the glass vessel for the refreshment of the vinegar mother. I don’t think I had ever drunk or even tasted table wine before. It went to my head, and as soon as I was in bed at nine o’clock I fell into a profound thick sleep.

But Mop was asleep before me. She had lurched into bed without washing and I heard her heavy breathing while I was pulling on my nightdress. This was unusual. Mop wasn’t exactly an insomniac but, for a child, she was a bad sleeper. Most evenings as I was passing into those soft clouds of sleep, into a delightful drowsiness that at any moment would be closed off by total oblivion, I would hear her toss and turn in bed or even get up and move about the room. I knew, too, that sometimes she went downstairs for a glass of water or perhaps just for her mother’s company, for on the mornings after such excursions Mrs Felton would take her to task over breakfast, scathingly demanding of invisible hearers why she should have been cursed with such a restless nervy child who, even as a baby, had never slept a peaceful night through.

On the Tuesday night, however, she had no difficulty in falling asleep. It was later, in the depths of the night (as she told me in the morning) that she had awakened and lain wakeful for hours, or so she said. She had heard the church clock chime two and three; her head had ached and she had had a curious trembling in her limbs. But, as far as I know, she said nothing of this to her mother, and her headache must have passed by the middle of the morning. For, when I left the house at ten to go with Mrs Potter to an auction that was being held in some neighbouring mansion, she was lying on a blanket on the front lawn, reading the book Mr Felton had brought down for her at the weekend: Fifty Haunted Houses. And she was still reading it, was deep in The Mezzotint or some horror of Blackwood’s, when I got back at one.