It must have been that day, too, when she began to get what I should now call obsessional about the vinegar mother. Several times, three or four times certainly, when I went into the dining room, I found her standing by the Romford factory antique on which Lady Elsworthy’s present stood gazing, with the fascination of someone who views an encapsulated reptile, at the culture within. It was not to me in any way noisome or sinister, nor was it even particularly novel. I had seen a dish of stewed fruit forgotten and allowed to ferment in my grandmother’s larder, and apart from the fungus on that being pale green, there was little difference between it and this crust of bacteria. Mop’s face, so repelled yet so compelled, made me giggle. A mistake, this, for she turned on me, lashing out with a thin wiry arm.

‘Shut up, shut up! I hate you.’

But she had calmed and was speaking to me again by suppertime. We sat on the wall above the road and watched Mr Gould’s Herefords driven from their pasture up the lane home to the farm. Swallows perched on the telephone wires like taut strings of black and white beads. The sky was lemony-green and greater birds flew homeward across it.

‘I’d like to put a spoon in it,’ said Mop, ‘and then I’d see it shrivel up and die.’

‘She’d know,’ I said.

‘Who’s she?’

‘Your mother, of course.’ I was surprised at the question when the answer was so obvious. ‘Who else?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘It’s only an old fungus,’ I said. ‘It isn’t hurting you.’

‘Alicia! Aleeciah!’ A sharp liquid cry, the sound of a sight, and the sight wine or vinegar flung in a curving jet.

‘Come on, Margarine,’ said Mop. ‘Supper’s ready.’

We were given no wine that night, but on the next a bottle and the glasses once more appeared. The meal was a heavier one than usual, meat pie with potatoes as well as salad. Perhaps the wine was sweet this time or of a finer vintage, for it tasted good to me and I drank two glasses. It never occurred to me to wonder what my parents, moderate and very nearly abstemious, would have thought of this corruption of their daughter. Of course it didn’t. To a child grown-ups are omniscient and all-wise. Much as I disliked Mrs Felton, I never supposed she could wish to harm me or be indifferent as to whether or not I were harmed.

Mop, too, obeyed and drank. This time there was no demur from her. Probably she was once again trying methods of ingratiation. We went to bed at nine and I think Mop went to sleep before me. I slept heavily as usual, but I was aware of some disturbance in the night, of having been briefly awakened and spoken to. I remembered this, though not much more for a while, when I finally woke in the morning. It was about seven, a pearly morning of bird-song, and Mop was sitting on the window seat in her nightdress.