‘Go on, you can beat old Gilbert, it will do him good.’

Impatient to be off, Gilbert looked at his watch. It was only half-past one. The sharp little hammer in his right temple struck again. Just let him get back out there and show them. Thank God he had Jarvis picking up for him. Jarvis would never let another man get the credit that was due to him. He’d seen that ratty little fellow of Stephens’s trying to add a bird to his score that wasn’t his. He’d tell him.

‘Jarvis,’ he’d say. ‘We’re out for a high score. Right?’

That sort of talk had to be put a stop to, straight away, before it spread.

By the river it was very quiet, except for the sound of the water flowing over the stones in the shallower part just past the bridge, and the occasional splash of a water vole or croak of a moorhen. Osbert walked slowly along the bank, eating an apple. Nanny had made him take an apple because he had missed his pudding, insisting on leaving before the end of lunch to look for his duck. Nanny’s jurisdiction over Osbert was questionable, he having passed long ago from nursery to schoolroom and being therefore supposedly under the sway of Mr Fortescue instead, who took, Nanny considered, far too little interest in his manners, caring only that he should be sure to read in bed for at least half an hour before going to sleep at night (in Mr Fortescue’s view there was nothing wrong with Osbert’s manners anyway), and Osbert accordingly felt free to ignore her injunctions to wait. To please her, though, he took an apple.

Afternoon for Osbert started towards the end of lunch, as his thoughts turned to what he was going to do afterwards. Lunch was a hiatus which separated the morning from the afternoon to such an extent that any anxieties which the afternoon might hold went on seeming a long way away until the meal was nearly over; then suddenly what had seemed sufficient unto the afternoon and therefore hardly to be bothered about in the morning became an immediate preoccupation. He had been certain all morning that by afternoon the duck would have come home; but suddenly before the pudding it seemed to him that it was already afternoon and the duck was not back, so he stood up and pushed in his chair and said ‘I shall have to go.’ Nanny’s hands were full anyway, restraining Lucy from going with him.

Walking by the river took him into the river world, changed the scale of things so that the river seemed vaster and more varied, its bends and beaches, deeps and swamps more extensive, its life more self-sufficient, the threat of unseen guns accordingly more darkly terrifying. Osbert had seen duck shoots and knew how deadly the slaughter in the dusk could be; he had seen a female mallard turn back into the fire towards her wounded mate, veering from side to side bewildered as he fluttered on the ground for the moment before both were killed. Afterwards he had asked his brother if when he was old enough to shoot it would be all right if he only shot pheasants, and Marcus in his reassuring way had said it would.