She could have said that aloud to Lionel, who was walking beside her. Unlike her husband he would not have been shocked. Instead she turned on him a gaze of marvellous brilliance and said, ‘We are lucky, aren’t we? To have such weather I mean.’

They were to start on the outskirts of the woods, and work their way through them in successive drives. On the path by the river before they struck uphill to spread out on the edge of the first covert, Tom Harker in good humour smiled again as they passed a colony of rooks in a group of high elms (they were in the mixed woods now towards the beginning of the Park).

‘My first job,’ he said. ‘Scaring birds. Age of eight.’

He was walking beside Percy Maidment, the man from Lincolnshire, who did not answer.

‘Rook pie,’ Tom went on. ‘You don’t want too much of it. Ever eaten blackbirds? I remember my mother making blackbird pie at Christmas more than once.’

‘Ah,’ said Percy Maidment.

‘Picking dead daffodils, that was my next job. A shilling a day, all over the garden and the park, thousands of them, after they was over.’

‘You know that fellow Jarvis, then, you was talking to?’ said Percy Maidment, as if it followed in some way.

‘That’s his name, is it? Never met him till today. From your part of the world, is he?’

‘No. West of us someplace,’ he said. ‘Seems an ignorant kind of man to me.’

‘Would you say so?’

‘Jealous. Grabs any old bird and says his man got it.’

‘One of those, is he? You don’t want to pay any attention to that. We don’t count scores here, only the whole bag.’

‘Him and me are counting all right. And they are, his man and mine. It’s a close thing but we’ll get them all right. Mine’s a better man than his. Shoots better after lunch too. I’ve been with him long enough to know that. We’re going to smash the other fellow this afternoon.’

Tom looked at the small man beside him in surprise, a reaction to which the other seemed oblivious, continuing only to look straight in front of him with an unsmiling pale intensity.

‘You’d better watch out Sir Randolph doesn’t catch you at it,’ said Tom with a definite note of reproof in his own voice. ‘He’s what you might call a sportsman of the old school.’

‘Bugger that,’ said Percy Maidment.

The beaters having been sent off to the outskirts of the first covert, the shooters walked slowly towards their appointed positions along the ride between the trees.

‘Minnie is so clever,’ said Aline, who had decided to stand beside Sir Reuben Hergesheimer in the hope of annoying Charles Farquhar who would have been expecting her to stand with him. ‘She knows exactly how to time things so as to go home and have a nice little rest and get herself driven back just in time to see the last drive.’