In his own room Sir Randolph opened the window wide and leant out. It was a clear night and seemed colder – there might even be the first slight frost of the season. He breathed deeply. From the trees on one side of the lawn over which he was looking, the vixen whom he knew to frequent that particular copse suddenly emerged and crossed the lawn, stiff tail straight out behind, at a steady trot, preoccupied with her own concerns, indifferent to his.

He half closed the window, undressed and folded his clothes neatly on his chair; then he climbed into his high, many-pillowed bed and reached for his bedside copy of White’s Selborne.

‘Good little fox,’ he said aloud, without bothering to think what it was about the fox which so merited his approbation.

It was hardly light when Tom Harker got up and went into his kitchen to rake out the embers of his stove and coax it back into flame. He filled a kettle and a big saucepan with water and put them on the stove, before he went outside to let out his dog and push some food through the wire door from behind which his foul-smelling, yellowish ferret’s pink eyes stared at him without blinking. He pee-ed onto the path beside the cabbage patch – the privy was half-way down the garden and not worth the walk except for more serious concerns – and set up a brief plume of steam. There had been a slight ground frost and the air was still cold, although the rapidly brightening sky was clear and it looked as though it would be another fine day.

He went inside again and set about skinning the rabbit; the stove would take some time to heat up and he could not make himself a cup of tea until it did. His sharp knife moved with precision. Soon he could remove the skin like a jacket and lay it flat to be salted. The bare, bloody rabbit was quickly disembowelled, cut into joints and put into a pot with some onions and carrots. He put it on the stove in place of the saucepan of water, which he now moved onto the table and into which he put, having first removed them from his feet, the socks he had been wearing all night. After a moment’s thought he added the handkerchief he had been wearing round his neck. He went into the bedroom and put on a clean pair of thick woollen socks, then reached under the bed, grunting slightly, to find another dirty pair and two more handkerchiefs. These he added to the contents of the pan, then fetching a piece of hard yellow soap from the kitchen cupboard began to rub them vigorously, humming through his teeth in a kind of tuneless buzz.

When the kettle boiled he made himself a pot of strong black tea and cut himself several thick slices of fat bacon, which he ate with brown bread. He hung his washing on the line in the garden; it was full daylight by now and the low morning mist was beginning to clear. Still humming, or buzzing, he walked down the path between the beds of vegetables, of which some were weeded and some were not, and went into the lavatory.