Mitzi, Fritzi, Blitzi, Ritzi, and Kitzy.

“Alice Long’s dogs are all she’s got to herself”

The dogs go about together and sometimes all answer at once when Alice Long calls one of their names. Mamie does not know them apart. They vary slightly in size, fatness, and in the black scars on their brown coats.

The path has become a ridge of frozen earth where the field has been ploughed right up to the verge of the wood. The daylight is turning blue with cold while Mamie struggles with the leads. One gumboot digs deep in a furrow and the other stabs to keep its hold on the ridge. The dogs snuffle each other and snort steam. They strain toward the wood, and Hamilton is suddenly there—Alice Long’s gamekeeper—coming out of the trees, tall and broad, with his grey moustache and deep-pink face. He looks at Mamie as if to say, “Come here.” The dogs fuss round him, cutting into her gloves.

Mamie says, “I’ve got to go that way,” pointing down towards her home across the field.

“I’ll see you back at the House,” he says, and stoops back into the wood, examining the undergrown branches.

Hamilton looks after old Sir Martin when he becomes beyond a woman’s strength.

“I’m afraid my father is not very well anymore.”

“I don’t know how you do it, Miss Long.”

Mamie’s mother says that anybody else but Alice Long would have put the old man away.

Hamilton sees to the boilers that heat the heated wing. He has too much to do to air the dogs regularly.

“Without Hamilton, I don’t know what we should do. Before your husband left us, we had it easier.”

Mamie has turned away from the wood. She has taken the path to the houses, looking back all the time to see whether Hamilton is following her with his eyes, those eyes that are two poached eggs grown old, looking at her every time he sees her.