as he could manage, his arms wrapped round one knee and his donkey jacket bundled up beside him.
‘If I buy you something,’ Anna said, ‘will you drink it this time?’
Early afternoon at the de Spencer Arms. Warm sunshine. A light wind bringing the scents of gorse and salt over from the other side of the Downs, blowing deflated crisp-bags between the outside tables. The car park was empty. Skylarks hung in the air like clockwork toys, whirring and pouring out notes of music, rising and falling abruptly according to no obvious plan. Inside, it was wall-to-wall weekday afternoon: rank smell of carpet grease, cheese & vegetable fritters, ancient beer fumes; madness of boredom in the blue eyes of the pub collie behind the bar. A couple in matching dark blue double-breasted suits stood by the fake wood fire, posed as if it was October, the woman distinguishable mainly by her stature and the way her bottom stuck out. She sported ear-rings like little wheels, a piece of ribbon worn as a bow-tie, the air of an American comedienne in a knockabout film of the 1950s. ‘I told him at Niagra,’ she was saying as Anna entered, ‘as I’d told him in Datchet.’ They looked like tour guides. It was the usual warning, Anna thought, against getting old.
She carried the drinks out carefully.
‘This time I got us both Harvey’s. I enjoyed the last one. Where are your beautiful dogs? I was looking forward to seeing them again.’
‘They’re dead, those dogs.’
‘Dead?’
‘Wasted away,’ the boy said. ‘Some say it’s nature, but I’ll have none of that.’
‘You must be heartbroken!’
He seemed to consider this. Then he shrugged. ‘See over there? Over the Western Brow? Buzzard.’ He laughed shortly. ‘He’s out for something, that bugger,’ he said. He drank half his beer in one long swallow. ‘Them down the fields say it’s my fault, but I’m having none of that.’
‘I don’t understand.’
The boy shrugged. ‘Why should you?’ he concluded. ‘But they ran well to the lamp, those dogs.’
Though Anna waited for more, that seemed to be the end of it. They sat in the sunshine, half-awkward, half- companionable, then she bought another drink. The Downs were gilded. Something about the slow drift of afternoon to evening, the slow lengthening of shadows under Streat Hill, made objects seem closer than they were. Distant sounds seemed louder, too. Everything seemed more present. Behind them, the car park began to fill with people down from London: single men squeezing their TVRs and Italian motorcycles in between the ill-parked SUVs; single-activity tourists descending from the Downs in their cycling, walking or birdwatching outfits. Half a dozen women, one of whom wore two-tone breeches and brown suede boots with fringes, arrived together on immaculately turned-out horses. Two of them went to get drinks. The boy watched the women. Anna watched the boy.
‘Tell me about lamping,’ she said.
He thought about that. ‘You want a good dark night,’ he said eventually.
She could see how hard he found it — how emotionally clouded it was for him. How do you describe something you know so well? His focus was too close. It was a struggle to distinguish sensation from practice, to find sufficient distance without merging all the subtleties; and now his dogs were gone too. ‘And you want a good lamp, an old Lightforce or like that. You can get that second hand. Another thing, get a battery with a flat discharge curve. Them down the fields know all that, they’re always talking about what lamps to get. It’s a million candlepower this, a million candlepower that with them.’ He thought for a moment. ‘I don’t pay much attention to all that,’ he confessed, as if surprised by himself. ‘I like it when the dog runs down the light.’
‘You’re hunting the rabbits with your dogs?’ Anna said.
He looked at her as if she was mad, as if she had made some statement so simplistic he didn’t know how to refute it. At the same time it was a relief to him: it was somewhere to start. ‘Rabbits, foxes,’ he said. ‘Anything.’ He’d preferred hares until the last time he was out: now he couldn’t seem to care about them at all. ‘You want a good dark night and a bit of a breeze.’
‘You find the animal with the light?’ she said. ‘Then you encourage the dogs to chase it? That seems cruel.’
‘I don’t know about cruel,’ he said.
‘But it’s killed?’ Anna said. ‘They kill the animal?’
It seemed cruel to her. For the boy, though, the light was the thing, the light and the chase: nothing was like slipping a dog then watching it run down the light. ‘It’s only the most exciting thing in the world!’ he said. He wasn’t even particular if he caught anything. Any rabbit could make a yard or two on the dog, parley it into an escape. ‘They’re in the hedge before you know it.’ He could show her if she wanted. ‘I’ve took videos of those dogs before they died.’ He gestured vaguely towards Wyndlesham. ‘I keep them over there.’ He kept the videos of his dogs over there, the other side of Ampney, in the bothy where he lived. It wasn’t far. ‘I could show you!’ he said.
Both of them were surprised by this. They stared at each other, puzzled by so much contact. The boy turned away.
‘If you wanted,’ he said, in a different voice.
Half past five: in an hour the de Spencer Arms would be rammed again. The sloping back garden would fill with people, shoulder to shoulder in the warm dark. There would be a run on nervous laughter and narcissistic shouting. By closing time the Downs would have bulked up black against the stars. They would absorb it all and provide no echo. Anna raised her glass, considered the inch of beer left at the bottom of it.
‘All right,’ she said.
The bothy, a long single-storey wooden structure which had once housed the unmarried male servants of the local fox hunt (an institution known in its heyday as ‘the Ampney’), stood in the middle of a field next to a few courses of brick and an overgrown cobbled yard. It was a shed, really, already cold in the afternoon, its untreated cement floors polished by decades of use. There was a kitchen at one end, a storage unit full of rusting bed frames and plastic-wrapped supermarket pallets of dog-food at the other. Between them, five or six empty rooms opened off a narrow windowless passage lighted by a single twenty-watt bulb. To the extent that he had any, the boy had moved his belongings into the kitchen, where it was relatively warm. Two shelves held packets of cereal, tins of baked beans and 8 per cent-proof lager. A single bed was pushed up against the wall in one corner. ‘I don’t need much,’ he said. ‘I was never much for things.’ There was a paraffin heater but no kettle. He made tea using lukewarm water straight from an ancient Creda heater mounted on the wall above the sink and paid his rent directly to ‘them down the fields’, who had acquired the bothy in some cash-free transaction he didn’t understand, and who sometimes dragged a bed into one of the other rooms for weekend use.
‘It’s cheap enough,’ he said.
The only contemporary thing in the kitchen was a reconditioned laptop from the early 2000s, wired into the overhead light socket through a brownout-protector. ‘It’s all in here,’ he said, with a kind of shy irony: ‘My life.’ He showed as much pride in the machine as in his uploads to YouTube. These unsteady, ill-lit glimpses, caught on a pocket camcorder, didn’t even seem cruel, only difficult to interpret. Jittery ellipses and smears of whitish light appeared and disappeared suddenly in a black rectangle. They picked out a hedge, a patch of long grass in a field, a fence post at an odd angle. Something zigzagged into the light and out of it again. Something else turned and turned and vanished suddenly into a hedge. At the end of each clip there was the boy, an ethereal smile on his face, holding up dead rabbits by their ears. Once, the dogs put up a deer, which stared at them then walked slowly out of camera. He had set some of the videos to contemporary pastoral music, others to thirty-year-old Death Metal. Watching them galvanised him all over again, the way a passing scent had once galvanised his dogs. He sat on the bed next to Anna. There was nowhere else to sit. She could feel him trembling with excitement. ‘What do you think?’ he asked her. ‘What do you think of that!’
Once she had got over her distaste, Anna felt bored. She was glad when he turned off the computer and with a smile half diffident, half sly, pushed her down. ‘Let me get these jeans off you,’ she said. She laughed. ‘They could do with a wash.’ And later: ‘You’re hurting me a little bit.’ He went on without seeming to hear and soon she had forgotten, the way you forget the creak and bang of the bed or the people coming and going in the corridor outside a hotel room. To fuck at all is a blessing. He wasn’t Tim Waterman, but he wasn’t Michael Kearney either, and he got hard again as quickly as most boys.
Anna fell asleep. When she woke the bothy was cold and the boy was standing naked by the window gazing out across the fields towards the village. The light had begun to fade. Wisps of mist were already coming up over the river. He’d had enough for the moment, she could see. His back, whiter and thinner than she had expected,
