‘I fell in the brook!’ he tells Tom, hugging him around the waist. ‘You smell like mints. Give!’

‘He fell in again,’ says Dora, rolling her eyes extravagantly. ‘He’s always falling in. Mummy says we should tether him. Like a goat.’

‘Goat yourself,’ says Ivo good-naturedly. ‘Anyway, if I were a goat, I’d eat everybody’s underwear off the line, and serve you all jolly well right.’

‘You’re damp, Ivo,’ says Tom, ruffling his hair. ‘What were you doing? Looking for dragonfly larvae?’

‘No, panning for gold,’ Ivo says. ‘Where are those mints?’

Tom takes out the crumpled bag of humbugs. Ivo and Dora dig into it, and their cheeks are soon bulging. ‘Where’s Mum?’ asks Tom. ‘Inside?’

‘Yes,’ says Dora. She suddenly looks a bit worried. Sucking pensively on her mint, her eyes drift down and to the side. ‘She’s upstairs. I told her Ivo had fallen in the brook, and she just, well, she just …’

‘I expect she’s just fed up with you both,’ says Tom. He gives Dora the bag of sweets. ‘Don’t eat all of them at once, you two, or you’ll be sick.’

‘I want to be sick!’ Ivo says happily.

‘No, you don’t. Anyway, I’m going to say hello to Mum.’

He thumbs the latch of the stable door, steps into the little stone hall with its ancient wooden bench set into one wall. The temperature is several degrees colder inside and it smells of damp plaster, but through the inner door, the house is homely, familiar. His parents’ tastes fight for prominence on walls and shelves. An Augustus John painting of a group of half-dressed women; a set of framed Kalighat pictures (cat with fish in mouth, the black goddess complete with huge eyes and waist-length tongue, a musician, a monkey); a mirror in an inlaid frame: these are Mum’s. Alongside these, defiantly, Daddy has hung his Snaffles prints: jolly huntsmen crashing through hedges on jolly horses; chaps in pith helmets riding after wild boar; a horse artillery gun train at full gallop. There is Daddy’s own boar’s head trophy, his mounted warthog skull, various tusks, teeth and claws, trophy shields for polo, rugger, point-to-point. Several fox paws. The tiger skin is in the sitting room, fighting it out with William Orpen’s portrait of Mum, and the alabaster Mandalay Buddha.

‘Mum?’

There is a copper pan steaming on the Rayburn stove, but the kitchen is empty. ‘Mum?’

‘Tommy …’ Mum appears from the back room they call the brewery, though it is a glorified larder, filled, when Daddy is taken up with shooting, by curtains of fur and feathers, all dripping blood, all smelling not very nice. She is wearing an apron and her hair is slightly disordered. She smiles when she sees him, but …

‘Mum? Are you all right? Dora said …’