“I don’t think—” It had snowed in the night. I tried to picture myself flushing a load of pheasants from their hiding places toward a row of shotguns. That morning, I’d only made it as far as the kitchen and a cup of tea, and from there looked out into the white day and the mist. The contours of the hills were fading in and out of sight as though struggling into being. I waited there, at first thinking and then not-thinking, with the sensation of being emptied, as though through the corridors of my vision something was passing out of me, expending itself in the snow. Now it was dark. Where had the day gone? The week, the month, the last three years? “Marcus, I’m not sure I’m up to it.”

“You’re coming,” he said.

The alarm went off at six in the dark. Marcus had stayed at his mum’s again. I pulled my clothes from off the chair next to the bed and struggled into them still under the bedclothes. When I heard the van, I got up and half fell down the stairs and out the front door into the snow. I took a handful and rubbed it across my face.

“You better have made tea.” And he had, a thermos of it, and as we took the road to the shoot I poured myself a cup, spilling scalding drops on my thighs. The Collingwood Estate lay out past Hungerford and the road wound there through villages and hamlets and over hills where the tarmac was frosted, and then down among darkly wooded dells.

In the car park near the big house, we met the other beaters and then walked down to the river. The black water flowed clear and fast, and a lick of vapor was curling from it. The water was warmer than the air, and although the sky was clear there would be more snow. The guns were parked up by the house while the beaters, mostly old boys, had congregated round the game cart, a pickup with rails in the back to string up the birds. They were exchanging gossip while the dogs nosed about their feet. A pair of Labradors, sisters with fox-red coats and black-tipped ears, cried with excitement. It was their first season and as they danced and fretted, I felt a little of their joy seep into me, like a tiny drop of dye—yolk yellow—falling into a pool of white paint. Col, an old friend of Darren’s who’d taken Marcus fishing and to shoots when he was a boy, offered me his hip flask.

“That’s the one, one Marcus is talking to.” A young man in tweeds was going round shaking hands with the guns, all of whom had paid upward of five hundred quid for the day’s shoot.

“The one what?”