‘I’m delighted to see,’ he remarked, grim-mouthed, ‘that good socialists - at least two of you call yourselves socialists, should find that so very humorous.’

‘I don’t find it humorous,’ said Maryrose.

‘You never find anything humorous,’ said Paul. ‘Do you know that you never laugh, Maryrose? Never? Whereas I, whose view of life can only be described as morbid, and increasingly morbid with every passing minute, laugh continuously? How would you account for that?’

‘I have no view of life,’ said Maryrose, lying flat, looking like a neat soft little doll in her bright bibbed trousers and shirt. ‘Anyway,’ she added, ‘you weren’t laughing. I listen to you a lot’ - (she said this as if she were not one of us, but an outsider) - ‘and I’ve noticed that you laugh most when you’re saying something terrible. Well I don’t call that laughing.’

‘When you were with your brother, did you laugh, Maryrose? And when you were with your lucky swain in the Cape?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘Because we were happy,’ said Maryrose simply.

‘Good God,’ said Paul in awe. ‘I couldn’t say that. Jimmy, have you ever laughed because you were happy?’

‘I’ve never been happy,’ said Jimmy.

‘You, Anna?’

‘Nor me.’

‘Willi?’

‘Certainly,’ said Willi, stubborn, defending socialism, the happy philosophy.

‘Maryrose,’ said Paul, ‘you were telling the truth. I don’t believe Willi but I believe you. You are very enviable, Maryrose, in spite of everything. Do you know that?’

‘Yes,’ said Maryrose. ‘Yes, I think I’m luckier than any of you. I don’t see anything wrong with being happy. What’s wrong with it?’

Silence. We looked at each other. Then Paul solemnly bowed towards Maryrose: ‘As usual,’ he said humbly, ‘we have nothing to say in reply.’

Maryrose closed her eyes again. A pigeon alighted fast on a tree in the opposite clump. Paul shot and missed. ‘A failure,’ he exclaimed, mock tragic. The bird stayed where it was, surprised, looking about it, watching a leaf dislodged by Paul’s bullet float down to the earth. Paul ejected his empty case, refilled at leisure, aimed, shot. The bird fell. Jimmy obstinately did not move. He did not move. And Paul, before the battle of wills could end in defeat for himself, gained victory by rising and remarking: ‘I shall be my own retriever.’ And he strolled off to fetch the pigeon; and we all saw that Jimmy had to fight with himself to prevent his limbs from jumping him up and over the grass after Paul. Who came back with the dead bird yawning, flinging it with the other dead birds.