He had always felt good in the morning. It had been his time of day, no matter how much he had drunk the night before. Back then he made himself a cup of coffee, unlatched the kitchen door, and with Raq the spaniel darting about in the bushes walked through the dewy grass to the pond and his heart lifted with the ducks that flew from his approach. Some mornings he took a shotgun with him but he never fired it. He thought of it as a companion like the dog. In the cold hour after dawn he believed in God. He liked the world without humanity when the sun began to peer through the mist. Then he would return to the house and his study and work for two hours till the household came to life.

That was when it was good and it was a long time ago now. He had conversations with himself and nobody else and they were the same things over and over again. When they've put you away there, nobody ever trusts you again, you're diminished. You poor old boy, he would say, and despised himself.

Some days he went and sat by his wife's grave. It was a sort of penitence. There had been a time when he was proud to have put her through hell; she deserved it, he would say.

Now she's having her revenge, he thought.It was better by the dog's grave. He had been a difficult dog, with a streak of meanness. He missed him a lot. He missed him more than he missed his wife.

It was two months since they had allowed him home and when he got to the cottage he found they had taken his gun away.

"Will you be all right on your own?" his son said.