An hour or so later, having refreshed himself at the White Hart Inn in Cowfold, he was striding along the road again, Oxford behind him and the woods of Nettleby some considerable distance in front. As he went he sang the Liberal Land Song, to the tune of While We Were Marching Through Georgia. One might as well try, he thought.

Workers in the fields, bending over their task of lifting roots, straightened their backs to stare at the bearded head and swinging shoulders which appeared over the hedge.

‘The land! The land! ’Twas God who gave the land!

The land! The land! The ground on which we stand!

Why should we be beggars with the ballot in our hand?

God gave the land to the people!’

The October breeze carried away the reedy tenor. The men and women in the fields bent again over the soil whose deeply familiar demands, questions of ownership apart, dictated their lives.

Goodwood, Cowes, Scotland, the parties of the Little Season, the visits to country houses, the shooting, the hunting, the prospects for next year – and never an unfamiliar name. Olivia could hear her husband all the way from the other end of the table (his voice was quite loud), running through with Minnie the points of the Social Calendar they had jointly or severally most recently passed – so amusing or such a bore – and who’d been there (but everyone, of course) – and who was too beautiful for words, who had quite lost her looks, who was drinking too much and had made a frightful floater the other night in the House only luckily it was after dinner and no one had noticed – and she knew him to be doing no more than a kind of ritual checking of the points of the compass. He and Minnie were like two engines idling, keeping themselves turning over so that they should be ready to move the machine in a new direction when the exigencies of the occasion required it. Minnie was at the same time looking round the table to see whether everyone had finished eating and whether Sir Randolph was beginning to look impatient. Bob Lilburn was already mentally checking through his equipment for the afternoon’s sport.

‘The Barlows,’ he nevertheless continued, ‘at Rothermuir. Such views.’

‘We were there with the Charlesworths. You and Olivia had just left.’

Olivia had noticed that this checking of the compass points (or listing of names) seemed to constitute quite a large part of her husband’s conversation, and that often when engaged in it with another such practised hand at the game as Minnie, he could go on for what seemed to her a quite extraordinarily long time without feeling it necessary to extend his comments on the occasions or people mentioned beyond the most perfunctory kind of categorizing. The object of the thing appeared to be ennumeration rather than enlightenment. Once she had said to him, ‘Supposing there are some other people somewhere, people we don’t know?’