One Friday, towards the end of March, he asked Helen out to lunch. He was wearing a yellow corduroy coat, a black shirt, had clean hair, and looked less unattractive than usual. Inevitably, the conversation got around to blood sports.

“They think we’re all lefties or students on the dole living in towns,” he said, whipping off his spectacles. “But we come from all walks of life. You see, the fox,” he went on in his flat Northern accent, “beautiful, dirty, hard-pressed with so many people after him, hounds, foot-followers, riders, horses, terriers, he needs us on his side to tip the balance a little.”

Helen’s huge eyes filled with tears. For a moment, in his blaze of conviction, Nigel reminded her of Harold Mountjoy. He speared a piece of stuffed eggplant with his fork. “Why don’t you come out with us tomorrow? We’re driving down to Gloucestershire to rot up the Chalford and Bisley. It’s the last meet of the season. Dave’s got hold of a lot of fireworks; it should be a good day.”

Helen, unable to face another weekend on her own, trailing round galleries or visiting the house of some long-dead writer, said she’d love to.

“And afterwards, we might have dinner in Oxford,” said Nigel. “They’ve opened a good vegetarian restaurant in the High.”

And now she was rattling down the M4 to Gloucestershire and wondering why the hell she’d agreed to come. The dilapidated car was driven by a bearded young zoology graduate named Paul, who had cotton wool in his ears and was already losing his hair. Beside him sat Nigel. Both men were wearing gum boots and khaki combat kit, and khaki, she decided, simply wasn’t Nigel’s color.

Even worse, she had to sit in the back with Paul’s girlfriend, Maureen, who was large, dismissive, and aggressively unglamorous, with dirty dark brown hair, black fingernails, and no makeup on her shiny white face. Between her heavy lace-up boots and the bottom of the khaki trousers were two inches of hairy, unshaven leg. She was also wearing a voluminous white sheepskin coat which stank as it dried off. It was rather like sharing the back with a large unfriendly dog. Even worse, she insisted on referring to Helen as Ellen.

Taking one look at Helen’s rust corduroy trousers tucked into brown shiny boots, dark green cashmere turtleneck jersey, and brown herringbone jacket, she said, “I don’t expect you’ve ever demonstrated against anything in your life, Ellen.”

Helen replied, somewhat frostily, that she’d been on several anti-Vietnam war marches, which launched Maureen, Nigel, and Paul into an unprovoked attack on America and Nixon and Watergate, and how corrupt the Americans were, which irritated Helen to death. It was all right for her to go on about corruption in America, but not at all okay for the Brits to take it for granted.

Sulkily, she buried herself in a piece in the paper speculating as to whether Princess Anne was going to marry Captain Mark Phillips. She’d been following conflicting reports of the romance with shamefaced interest. Mark Phillips was so good-looking, with his neat smooth head, and gleaming dark hair, so much more attractive than Nigel and Paul’s straggly locks. In America, hair like theirs had long gone out of fashion, other than for aging hippies.

They were off the motorway now, driving past hedgerows starry with primroses. Buds were beginning to soften and blur the trees against a clear blue sky. Flocks of pigeons rose like smoke from the newly plowed fields. Helen felt tears stinging her eyes once more.

“Spring returns, but not my friend,” she murmured, thinking sadly of Harold Mountjoy.

“I suppose foxes do have to be kept down somehow,” she said out loud, feeling she ought to contribute something to the discussion. “They do kill chickens.”

“Rubbish,” snapped Maureen. “These days, chickens are safely trapped in battery houses.”

“And Ellen,” said Paul earnestly, “only five percent of foxes ever touch chicken.”

Helen had a sudden vision of the five percent sitting down to coq au vin with knives and forks.

Now Maureen, Paul, and Nigel were slagging someone they referred to as R.C.B.

“Who’s R.C.B.?” asked Helen, and was told it was Rupert Campbell-Black, the one the Antis hated most.

“Male chauvinist pig of the worst kind,” said Maureen.

“Upper-class shit who makes Hitler look like Nestlé’s milk,” said Paul.

“Always rides his horses straight at us,” said Nigel. “Broke Paul’s wrist with his whip last autumn.”

“Remember that hunt ball when he smashed a champagne bottle on the table and threatened you with it, Nige?” said Maureen.

“What does he do?” asked Helen.

“Show jumps internationally,” said Paul, “and allegedly beats up his horses. But he’s so loaded, he doesn’t need to do anything very much.”

Helen noticed the curling copies of the New Statesman and Tribune on the backseat and a tattered copy of Bertolt Brecht in the pocket of Maureen’s coat. These are people who care about things, she reproved herself, I must try to like them better.

“What do we do when we get there?” she asked.

“The basic idea, Ellen,” said Maureen, “is to copy everything the huntsmen do. We bring our own horns — Paul here actually plays the horn in an orchestra — and use them to split the pack. We’ve perfected our view halloos, and we also spray the meet with a special mixture called Anti-mate, which confuses the hounds.”

Nigel looked at his watch, which he wore ten minutes fast, on the inside of his wrist. “Nearly there,” he said.

Helen got out her mirror, added some blusher to her pale, freckled cheeks, ran a comb through her gleaming dark red page boy, and rearranged the tortoiseshell headband that kept it off her forehead.

“You’re not going to a party,” reproved Maureen.

Defiantly, Helen sprayed on some scent.

“Nice pong,” said Paul, wrinkling his long nose. “D’you know the one about the Irish saboteurs, Ellen? They spent all day trying to sabotage a drag hunt.”

“Don’t tell ethnic jokes, Paul,” said Nigel, smiling as widely as his small mouth would allow.

They were beginning to overtake riders and horses hacking to the meet. A pretty blonde on an overexcited chestnut waved them past.

“You’ve no idea how we’re going to cook your goose later, my beauty,” Nigel gloated.

Soon the road was lined with boxes and trailers, and Paul drove faster through the deep brown puddles in order to splash all those riders in clean white breeches standing on the grass verge. Now he was fuming at being stuck at ten mph behind a huge horse box which kept crashing against the overhanging ash trees.

The meet was held in one of those sleepy Cotswold villages, with a village green flanked by golden-gray cottages, a lichened church knee-deep in daffodils, and a pub called the Goat in Boots. A large crowd had gathered to watch the riders in their black and scarlet coats saddling up, supervising the unboxing of their horses and grumbling about their hangovers.

“What a darling place,” said Helen, as the sun came out. The Antis, however, had no time for esthetic appreciation. Paul parked his car on the edge of the green and, getting out, they all surged forward to exchange firm handshakes and straight glances with other saboteurs. Both sexes were wearing khaki anoraks or combat kit as camouflage, but with their gray faces and long straggly hair and beards, they couldn’t have stood out more beside the fresh-faced, clean-cut locals.

“Here’s your own supply of Anti-mate,” said Nigel, dropping two aerosol cans into the pockets of Helen’s coat. “Spray it on hounds or riders, whenever you get the chance.”

Helen thought irritably that the cans would ruin the line of her coat, and when Nigel insisted on pinning two badges saying “Hounds Off Our Wild Life” and “Only Rotters Hunt Otters” on the lapels of her coat, she wondered if it was necessary for him to take so long and press his skinny hands quite so hard against her breast. Perhaps she’d have to use the Anti-mate on him.

Two sinister-looking men walked by with a quartet of small bright-eyed yapping dogs.

“Those are the terriers they use to dig out the fox,” whispered Maureen.

Helen also noticed several crimson-faced colonels and braying ladies on shooting sticks giving her dirty looks. A group of men in deerstalkers and dung-colored suits stood grimly beside a Land Rover.

“They’re paid by the hunt to sabotage us,” explained Maureen indignantly. “Given a chance, they’ll block the road and ram us with that Land Rover.”

Helen was beginning to feel distinctly uneasy. She edged slightly away from the group of saboteurs, then said to herself firmly, “I am a creative writer. Here is a golden opportunity to study the British in one of their most primitive rituals.”

Listening to the anxious whinnying from the boxes, she breathed in the heady smell of sweating horse, dung, and damp earth. The landlord of the pub was dispensing free drinks on a silver tray. His wife followed with a tray of sandwiches and sausage rolls. Helen, who had had no breakfast, was dying to tuck in, but felt, being part of the enemy, that she shouldn’t.

Nigel and Maureen had no such scruples.

“Good crowd,” said Nigel, greedily helping himself to three sandwiches. “Oh dear, they’re ham,” he added disapprovingly, and, removing the fillings, he dropped them disdainfully on the ground where they were devoured by a passing labrador.

Suddenly, as the gold hand of the church clock edged towards eleven o’clock, there was a murmur of excitement as a dark blue Porsche drew up.

“There he is,” hissed Maureen, as two men got out. Helen caught a glimpse of gleaming blond hair and haughty, suntanned features, as the taller of the two men vanished in a screaming tidal wave of teenagers brandishing autograph books. Others stood on the bonnets of their parents’ cars, or clambered onto each others’ shoulders trying to take photographs or get a better look.