She could see how hard he found it – how emotionally clouded it was for him. How do you describe something you know so well? His focus was too close. It was a struggle to distinguish sensation from practice, to find sufficient distance without merging all the subtleties; and now his dogs were gone too. ‘And you want a good lamp, an old Lightforce or like that. You can get that second hand. Another thing, get a battery with a flat discharge curve. Them down the fields know all that, they’re always talking about what lamps to get. It’s a million candlepower this, a million candlepower that with them.’ He thought for a moment. ‘I don’t pay much attention to all that,’ he confessed, as if surprised by himself. ‘I like it when the dog runs down the light.’

‘You’re hunting the rabbits with your dogs?’ Anna said.

He looked at her as if she was mad, as if she had made some statement so simplistic he didn’t know how to refute it. At the same time it was a relief to him: it was somewhere to start. ‘Rabbits, foxes,’ he said. ‘Anything.’ He’d preferred hares until the last time he was out: now he couldn’t seem to care about them at all. ‘You want a good dark night and a bit of a breeze.’

‘You find the animal with the light?’ she said. ‘Then you encourage the dogs to chase it? That seems cruel.’

‘I don’t know about cruel,’ he said.

‘But it’s killed?’ Anna said. ‘They kill the animal?’

It seemed cruel to her. For the boy, though, the light was the thing, the light and the chase: nothing was like slipping a dog then watching it run down the light. ‘It’s only the most exciting thing in the world!’ he said. He wasn’t even particular if he caught anything. Any rabbit could make a yard or two on the dog, parley it into an escape. ‘They’re in the hedge before you know it.’ He could show her if she wanted. ‘I’ve took videos of those dogs before they died.’ He gestured vaguely towards Wyndlesham. ‘I keep them over there.’ He kept the videos of his dogs over there, the other side of Ampney, in the bothy where he lived. It wasn’t far. ‘I could show you!’ he said.

Both of them were surprised by this. They stared at each other, puzzled by so much contact. The boy turned away.

‘If you wanted,’ he said, in a different voice.