‘I say, hallo.’ Vivian Owens stood right behind him. He barely recognised her at first. Thought she was a boy. She was wearing men’s clothes, a fact he noticed at the same moment she seemed to remember; she flicked her eyes down over her get-up. A pair of trousers made from heavy, coarse fabric and held up by braces; a shirt that drowned her – she’d rolled up the sleeves but the shoulder seams were halfway down her arms. She looked like a child who had raided a dressing-up box. The only thing that contradicted the impression was the baby strapped to her back in a home-made papoose. She coloured, shrugged and then tried to explain. ‘I was working up in the field near my house. I saw you. I saw the children.’

‘Have you come to protect me?’ She looked confused. ‘From their taunts,’ he clarified.

‘No, I brought lunch. I thought you were a long way from home and you might not have anything with you. I imagined that feral lot hadn’t eaten breakfast either.’ She nodded her head back over her shoulder. The sunlight caught her hair.

He felt a bit ridiculous. He hadn’t needed to be defensive or cutting. It wasn’t his way. He didn’t know why he felt a need to be curt with her, but he couldn’t seem to help himself. The words just came out that way. ‘I do have my lunch with me, as it happens.’ He pointed to his bag, where a ham sandwich and a bottle of ale nestled.

‘Oh, well, more for the children then.’ She turned and beckoned over the gaggle of kids, who didn’t need to be asked twice. They seemed to guess what was in store, suggesting she had fed them before. She set the basket on the ground and then stepped back; the children pounced on it urgently, like kittens at a cat’s teats. They had hard, sharp eyes. Flints in their too thin faces. Vivian Owens looked a tad stunned by their zeal as they devoured the apples, cheese and buns. They lit up when they saw the bottle of lemonade.

‘Can we keep the bottle, missus? Our mam will use it.’

She nodded, focusing on carefully removing her sleeping baby from her back. She laid her on the grass, still sleeping in the swaddling. A rosy, contented-looking thing. The village children ate quickly and then ran off, manners forgotten if they’d ever been taught. Vivian Owens gathered up the debris. There was not so much as a crumb of food left, but the napkins that the food had been wrapped in had to be collected. The entire picnic had been devoured in the time it had taken Howard to have just three bites of his sandwich. He was sitting on the ground but she still stood, towering above him, her hands on her waist, arching her back, no doubt needing a stretch after working in the fields with a baby strapped to her.