‘Didn’t you use to take the kale in the morning?’ Charles Farquhar was saying. ‘I was sure I remembered taking the kale in the morning last time I was here.’

‘There wasn’t any kale last time you were here. It was January.’

Sir Randolph considered Charles Farquhar a person of no significance. He was a good shot, though hunting was his real enthusiasm, and he gave one a good day’s partridge shooting at his place in Norfolk, so that Sir Randolph had no objection to asking him to stay every now and then, but saw no need to bother with him conversationally. Minnie had said he ought to be asked on this occasion because Aline Hartlip was coming.

‘It is de rigeur to ask them together nowadays,’ she had said.

Aline was a fairly demanding guest and if the presence of the handsome but stupid (in Sir Randolph’s view) Charles Farquhar would keep her quiet so that her husband could concentrate on his shooting, Sir Randolph was perfectly happy to ask him. Gilbert Hartlip was one of the best shots in England, if not the best of all, and it was a pleasure to see him in action – sometimes a bit of an anxiety as well, for he had some of the star performer’s temperament and could be very difficult if he thought he was not being given his due share of the best places. He also had a habit of allowing his loader to keep his personal score – Sir Randolph had seen him several times ask the man after a drive how many birds he had shot. Sir Randolph, although he knew this to be quite a common practice, privately considered it not sporting. He did not think shooting game should be competitive, although he supposed that if you had a reputation as great as Lord Hartlip’s you were allowed to compete against yourself. He hoped that that was all that Gilbert was doing. On the other hand he had happened to hear this same loader asking Lionel Stephens’s loader what his score was, and as Lionel Stephens had been shooting brilliantly all day it looked as if there might be a personal rivalry starting up; an uncomfortable thought.

He noticed that Lionel was looking calm and fit, unlike Gilbert Hartlip, who was pale – it was well known, though he did not like it to be referred to, that he suffered from bad headaches after shooting. Lionel was what you could call a fine figure of a man, and unlike Charles Farquhar he had a brain as well as a physique. He was not as tall, not really as massive as Bob Lilburn, to whose wife Olivia he was now talking; but Bob for all his heroic appearance was not half the athlete the other was. Had he not climbed the Matterhorn?

‘Well, dawn you know,’ he was saying, his boyish smile combining enthusiasm with modesty. ‘Of course the dawn in the high Alps is a marvellous sight.’