The night was dark, the cloud cover making it unusually warm. The scent of the tobacco plants drifted across the lawn. They were flowers for the blind, that you saw all the better when you closed your eyes. Claire heard the shots from the field. They must be getting a lot of rabbits. In all the time she had lived with them, husband and sons, she hadn’t come to understand why men so liked to kill things.

First Jonathan driving, then they would change places. The canvas roof of the Land Rover rolled back, Richard standing with the shotgun and leaning against the roof of the cab. The field naked, the rabbits exposed, which had lived and bred all summer hidden within the crop. Where the rabbits showed, like rocks strewn on the bare land, the Land Rover drove fast and directly towards them and Richard fired. The rocks moved. They moved fast but the Land Rover was fast, bumping over the stubble, skidding on the turns because of the slipperiness of the cut straw. They ran from its lights but at the same time they were caught in them. They kept to the beams as if the beams were tunnels from which they could not escape, and only now and then did one by sense or accident veer off out of the beam and into the safety of the darkness alongside it. The gun fired, reloaded, fired again. The rabbits fell. Some of them fell directly, simply folding or rolling over in the beam. Others were wounded, and the Land Rover slowed or diverged then from its path to follow the erratic animal for the gun to finish it off. Why had he said he would do this? It was Richard’s game, not his. So often he had found himself playing Richard’s game.