‘No. I’m just going back to get dressed. The thing is I went to feed the duck and I was just moving the cage so as to let her get at some better grass because I meant to keep her in all day and it tipped over and I fell in the pond. But it will be all right.’

‘You were moving that big heavy cage all by yourself? What about the duck?’

‘She flew off. She thought I meant her to. But she’ll come back soon. She hasn’t had breakfast. She always has lots of wood-lice and meal and stuff before she goes so I know she’ll come back soon. I’ve left it open and I’ll keep on looking out for her.’

‘You’re dripping on the carpet, look. Never mind I’ll wipe it when I come up. Listen, I know where all the wild duck are. They’re down by the bridge, I saw them the day before yesterday when I had my evening off. If she’s not back after lunch I’ll come with you and find her. Does she come if you call her?’

‘Yes, when she can see me.’

‘That’s all right. You’d better run then. Don’t let Nanny catch you.’

Ellen knew as well as anyone that the last day of a big shooting party ended with a duck shoot by the river at dusk. She also knew that the rules of sport and the rules of entertaining were both inexorable. Even Sir Randolph could not be expected to refuse to offer his guests the opportunity of shooting at wild duck just because a child’s tame duck might have chanced to be among them. She hoped fervently that Osbert was right about the attractions of the wood-lice.

Cornelius Cardew lay on his back in his hard bed at the Nettleby Arms and stared at the ceiling, which was discoloured by damp. Before he went to bed he had given the innkeeper’s wife a packet of peppermint tea with instructions to make a pot of it and bring it up to him at eight o’clock the following morning. It was now eight-fifteen and there was no sign of the tea.

He felt he needed it. The previous evening’s discussion in the public bar had not gone well, and he had been forced to the conclusion that the villagers’ political and philosophical attitudes were more influenced by their suspicion of outsiders than by their desire for reform. He had seldom come across a group of men who agreed with each other so consistently. ‘You’re right there, John,’ ‘What Jed says is right, sir,’ and so on, all through the evening. ‘Where you’re wrong, sir, to my way of thinking.’ He’d had to drop the question of animal rights almost immediately – that had aroused positive hostility – but they had hardly seemed more responsive on the matter of their own rights. ‘They’d never give the vote to such as we,’ seemed to be their view, but they also averred in the first place that political meetings were perfectly enjoyable and you could make a lot of noise at them without the vote, and secondly that if they got the vote then a lot of other much less sound people would get it too, ‘towns-people, slum-dwellers and that, gypsies,’; this was not at all the sort of class-solidarity a good Socialist expected. Land Reform interested them a little more, and he had the feeling that he might have roused them there had they not already written him off as a crank.