But Jo had been right about night time. The woman’s hair was tumbled, two red spots burned in her cheeks, her eyes shone, and we knew that they were kissing feet under the table. She had changed the blue pinafore for a white calico dressing-jacket and a black skirt. In the stifling room, with the flies buzzing against the ceiling and dropping on to the table, we got slowly drunk.

“Now listen to me,” shouted the woman, banging her fist on the table. “It’s six years since I was married, and four miscarriages. I says to ’im, I says, what do you think I’m doin’ up ’ere? If you was back at the coast, I’d ’ave you lynched for child murder. Over and over I tells ’im—you’ve broken my spirit and spoilt my looks, and wot for—that’s wot I’m driving at.” She clutched her head with her hands and stared round at us. Speaking rapidly, “Wot for—you know what I mean, Mr Jo.”

“I know,” said Jo, scratching his head.

“Trouble with me is,” she leant across the table, “I’m too much alone. The coach stopped coming and with him gone…”

“Mumma,” bleated the kid, “I made a picture of them on the ’ill, an’ you an’ me, an’ the dog down below.”

“Shut your mouth!” snarled the woman. Her face seemed a contorted mask in the light of the flickering oil lamp.

A vivid flash of lightning played over the room and we heard the mutter of thunder.

“Good thing that’s broke loose,” said Jo. “I’ve ’ad it in me ’ead for three days.”

“Where’s your old man now?” asked Jim, slowly.

The woman moaned and dropped her head on to the table. “ ’E’s gone shearin’ and left me all alone,” she wailed.

“ ’Ere, look out for the glasses,” said Jo. “Cheer-o, ’ave another drop. No good cryin’ over spilt ’usbands!”

“Mr Jo,” said the woman, drying her eyes on her jacket frill, “you’re a gent, an’ if I was a secret woman, I’d place any confidence in your ’ands. I don’t mind if I do ’ave a glass on that.”

Every moment the lightning grew more vivid and the thunder sounded nearer. Jim and I were silent—the kid never moved from her bench. She poked her tongue out and blew on her paper as she drew.

“It’s the loneliness,” said the woman, addressing Jo—he made sheep’s eyes at her—“and bein’ buried away in this God forsaken place.”

He reached his hand across the table and held hers, and though the position looked most uncomfortable when they wanted to pass the water and whisky, their hands stuck together as though glued. I pushed back my chair and went over to the kid, who immediately sat flat down on her artistic achievements and made a face at me.

“You’re not to look,” said she.

“Oh, come on, don’t be nasty!” Jim came over to us, and we were just drunk enough to wheedle the kid into showing us. And those drawings of hers were grotesque and repulsive. Childish scrawlings of gruesome, bloody scenes: a lamb nuzzling into its slaughtered mother, a headless hen lying prone beside a blood-soaked stump—all the butchered animals drawn with exaggerated smiles in thick red like a clown’s painted mouth. The creations of a lunatic with a lunatic’s cleverness. There was no doubt about it, the kid’s mind was diseased. While she showed them to us, she worked herself up into a mad excitement, laughing and trembling, and shooting out her arms.

“Mumma,” she yelled. “Now I’m going to draw them what you told me I never was to, now I am.”

The woman rushed from the table and beat the child’s head with the flat of her hand.

“I’ll smack you with yer clothes turned up if yer dare say that again,” she bawled.

Jo was too drunk to notice, but Jim caught her by the arm. The kid did not utter a cry. She drifted over to the window and began picking dead flies from the treacle paper.

We returned to the table; Jim and I sitting one side, the woman and Jo, touching shoulders, the other. We listened to the thunder, saying stupidly, “That was a near one,” “There it goes again,” and Jo, at a heavy hit, “Now we’re off,” “Steady on the brake,” until rain began to fall, sharp as cannon shot on the iron roof.

“You’d better doss here for the night,” said the woman. “You won’t be safe down there. Not with the storm like this.”

“Maybe if we wait till the worst of the rain has passed,” I suggested, eyeing the girl pocketing the dead flies.

“There’s worse than rain that’s out there to-night,” said the woman. Her eyes glowered and glittered in the lamp-light.