‘They would kill themselves first,’ said Jimmy. ‘Wouldn’t you, Anna? Wouldn’t you, Maryrose?’

‘Of course,’ said Maryrose, good-humoured.

‘Of course,’ I said.

The pigeon cooed on. It was visible, a small, shapely bird, dark against the sky. Paul took up the rifle, aimed and shot. The bird fell, turning over and over with loose wings, and hit earth with a thud we could hear from where we sat. ‘We need a dog,’ said Paul. He expected Jimmy to leap up and fetch it. Although we could see Jimmy struggling with himself, he in fact got up, walked across to the sister clump of trees, retrieved the now graceless corpse, flung it at Paul’s feet and sat down again. The small walk in the sun had flushed him, and caused great patches to appear on his shirt. He pulled it off. His torso, naked, was pale, fattish, almost childish. ‘That’s better,’ he said, defiantly, knowing we were looking at him, and probably critically.

The trees were now silent. ‘One pigeon,’ said Paul. ‘A toothsome mouthful for our host.’

From trees far away came the sound of pigeons cooing, a murmuring gentle sound. ‘Patience,’ said Paul. He rested his rifle again and smoked.

Meanwhile, Willi was reading. Maryrose lay on her back, her soft gold head on a tuft of grass, her eyes closed. Jimmy had found a new amusement. Between isolated tufts of grass was a clear trickle of sand where water had coursed, probably last night in the storm. It was a miniature river-bed, about two feet wide, already bone dry from the morning’s sun. And on the white sand were a dozen round shallow depressions, but irregularly spaced and of different sizes. Jimmy had a fine strong grass-stem, and, lying on his stomach, was wriggling the stem around the bottom of one of the large depressions. The fine sand fell continuously in avalanches, and in a moment the exquisitely regular pit was ruined.

‘You clumsy idiot,’ said Paul. He sounded, as always in these moments with Jimmy, pained and irritated. He really could not understand how anybody could be so awkward. He grabbed the stem from Jimmy, poked it delicately at the bottom of another sand-pit, and in a second had fished out the insect which made it - a tiny ant-eater, but a big specimen of its kind, about the size of a large match-head. This insect, toppling off Paul’s grass-stem on to a fresh patch of white sand, instantly jerked itself into frantic motion, and in a moment had vanished beneath the sand which heaved and sifted over it.

‘There,’ said Paul roughly to Jimmy, handing back his stem. Paul looked embarrassed at his own crossness; Jimmy, silent and rather pale, said nothing. He took the stem and watched the heaving of the minute patch of sand.