There were nine guns out that day. Sir Randolph considered eight to be enough and was proposing to be self-effacing. At a big shoot he often concentrated more on the organization and the placing of the guns than on his own share of the sport; he often said, though not in front of Glass, that he considered himself a first-class head-keeper. He set off in the brake with Lionel Stephens beside him. Bob Lilburn and Charles Farquhar, sitting opposite each other, were reminiscing about hunting, Sir Reuben Hergesheimer and Gilbert Hartlip, side by side, opposite their host, dissected one of the previous evening’s bridge problems. Behind the brake the three others followed in a smaller dog-cart, drawn by Minnie’s favourite fat black cob. Marcus and Tommy were listening to Tibor Rakassyi’s account of shooting parties on the estate of a certain bachelor uncle of his on the borders of Hungary and Bohemia; they shot partridges and hares all day, there would be a wonderful lunch spread upon tables in the shade of the acacia trees and a peasant band to play to them while they ate it, and then in the evenings, after dinner, every bachelor when he went up to bed would find a peasant girl from the village, ordered in for the night by the superintendent, tucked up there waiting for him. Tommy was embarrassed by this story. He was not sure why, because he went to brothels with his brother officers, so it could not be that he was prudish; it was probably because he thought Marcus was too young to hear that sort of talk or perhaps just because it was too soon after breakfast – anyway it seemed a bit foreign to him. Marcus also thought he was too young to hear that sort of talk and wished Tibor had not begun it. At the same time he hoped he might one day be asked to stay with this uncle, but not too soon, perhaps in about five years’ time. He had a schoolfriend who had been to a brothel in London twice, but he himself thought twenty quite early enough to be introduced to vice. Rather cleverly he thought, he managed to steer the conversation in another direction by saying how jolly it had been in Vienna when his father was en poste there, when he himself was only ten. Perhaps he might even have met this lively uncle, but it was unlikely that he would have remembered.

‘I was only Osbert’s age. Not that I was as vague as he is.’

They were approaching the starting point of the day’s sport, in front of the Home Farm buildings. A small crowd of beaters was already there, with Glass and the under-keepers standing a little apart from them. The men talked in groups as they waited. Tom Harker stood immobile, both hands on his tall stick, looking straight in front of him. The idle exchanges going on around him were of no interest to him. He had known most of these men all his life and though he was prepared to be loquacious should anyone raise what seemed to him to be a serious subject – the Drink Question, or the reform of the Poor Law, or the habits of game – the domestic trivialities with which they concerned themselves bored him; he was not prepared to join in their facetiousness or the bantering friendliness with which they exchanged small pieces of information about their families. He sniffed the wind and waited.