She looked awful, as if she had got a bad cold coming or had just been sick.

‘I tried to wake you up in the night,’ she said.

‘I thought you had,’ I said. ‘Did you have a dream?’

She shook her head. ‘I woke up and I heard the clock strike one and then I heard footsteps on the path down there.’

‘In this garden, d’you mean?’ I said. ‘Going or coming?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said oddly. ‘They must have been coming.’

‘It was a burglar,’ I said. ‘We ought to go down and see if things have been stolen.’

‘It wasn’t a burglar.’ Mop was getting angry with me and her face was blotchy. ‘I did go down. I lay awake for a bit and I didn’t hear any more, but I couldn’t go back to sleep and I wanted a drink of water. So I went down.’

‘Well, go on,’ I said.

But Mop couldn’t go on. And even I, insensitive and unsympathetic to her as I was, could see she had been badly frightened, was still frightened, and then I remembered what had wakened me in the night, exactly what had happened. I remembered being brought to brief consciousness by the choking gasps of someone who is screaming in her sleep. Mop had screamed herself awake and the words she had spoken to me had been, ‘The vinegar mother! The vinegar mother!’

‘You had a nightmare,’ I said.

‘Oh, shut up,’ said Mop. ‘You never listen. I shan’t ever tell you anything again.’

But later in the day she did tell me. I think that by this time she had got it into some sort of proportion, although she was still very frightened when she got to the climax of what she insisted couldn’t have been a dream. She had, she said, gone downstairs about half an hour after she heard the footsteps in the garden. She hadn’t put a light on as the moon was bright. The dining room door was partly open, and when she looked inside she saw a hooded figure crouched in a chair by the window. The figure was all in brown, and Mop said she saw the hood slide back and disclose its face. The thing that had made her scream and scream was this face which wasn’t a face at all, but a shapeless mass of liver.

‘You dreamed it,’ I said. ‘You must have. You were in bed when you screamed, so you must have been dreaming.’

‘I did go down,’ Mop insisted.

‘Maybe you did,’ I said, ‘but the other bit was a dream. Your mother would have come if she’d heard you screaming downstairs.’

No more was said about the dream or whatever it was after that, and on Saturday Mr Felton arrived and took us to the Young Farmers’ Show at Marks Tey. He brought me my parents’ love and the news that my eldest brother had passed his exams and got seven O Levels, and I was happy. He went shooting with Peter Elsworthy on Sunday afternoon, and Peter came back with him and promised to drive me and Mop and Mrs Felton to the seaside for the day on Tuesday.