The next day was colder. The wild geese came, the pink-footed geese from Iceland, and the men went out to shoot them. Jim did not go. He said that he was too busy, though Sarah thought he had stayed at home to spare her feelings. She had seen the geese flying over the house and heard them calling.

Alec came to ask Jim to go with him.

“I thought you wanted to start the second-cut silage,” Jim said. “There’s too much to do.”

“You go,” Sarah said. “ I don’t mind.”

But she was pleased when he stuck it out and insisted he was too busy.

“You’re getting soft,” Alec jeered. “ You’ve been too long in the south. You’ll have to come to supper one night and taste what you’re missing.”

It was a still, clear day. It’s already winter here, Sarah thought, and in my parents’ house the leaves will hardly have changed colour.

“Can I help you?” she asked Jim. He was sitting on the wooden chair by the kitchen door, pulling Wellington boots over long knitted socks. He was in a hurry because Alec had kept him talking, and he hardly looked up.

“No,” he said. “There’s nothing for you to do. If you’re bored you could go to see Mother. She would like to see you.”

Robert heard the geese and watched the men go after them. Nobody asked him to go, too. Even when he was younger he was left out of expeditions like that. They had always laughed at him. He had always been left out. It was because he had no family of his own. It would be different if he had married and he had sons to the house who said: “Father, we’re off after the geese. You come with us,” or daughters to cook a goose and ask him to dinner to share it.

He had always liked the girls and would have asked any one of them to marry him, but he knew that they would only laugh at him. Perhaps it was his leg, white and withered with polio, that made them laugh. Sometimes he wanted to show them that he was a man like other men, take the smiles off their pretty faces.