Conor stopped running. Such was his exhilaration, he found himself jumping on the spot as he looked back at the spot where he had seen Richard drop from view.

He ran back to the edge of the gap and looked down. Seven or eight feet below Richard law sprawled on a rocky outcrop. It was immediately obvious that he had landed on his backside.

Already the people at the cove were climbing over the low rocks and coming towards them.

Conor, who had never entirely stopped laughing, stood on the bluff and pointed down at Richard, who stared up at him, his eyes huge with fury and embarrassment. Now Conor’s laughter increased in volume and complexity. He pointed down at his friend, who sat in what was surely the most ridiculous of positions: rubbing his bruised backside and glaring incredulously upwards.

The people from the cove arrived and hurried over to Richard, who by this time had started to cry.

Conor continued to laugh, in amusement and delight. He wasn’t able to stop. He knew he had gained an advantage over Richard. All the authority in their unbalanced friendship seemed suddenly to have accrued to him.

It soon became evident that Richard was acting like someone who had been quite badly hurt.

‘High jinks, lads,’ said the father of the children they had seen playing on the secret beach, shaking his head parentally.

He helped Richard to his feet. Richard’s hands and forearms had been scratched by briars and wiry grass as he fell. He had twisted his ankle, though not so badly that he was unable to walk.

When Conor had stopped laughing – when the seeming seriousness of the situation had imposed itself on him – he climbed down and told the people from the cove that he would help Richard walk back to the big white house. And so he did: the two boys walked home in silence, Richard with the pursed, frowning face of someone deeply insulted, Conor with the thickening heart of someone who knows he has made a mistake.

When they got to the house Katherine Culhane, roused from her afternoon nap, made a show of tending to Richard. She put iodine on the cuts on his hands and made him iced tea while he lay on the couch in the conservatory.

Silently the boys had agreed to pretend that Richard had fallen by accident, that no one had been there to see it, and that Conor had acted with prompt and becoming solicitude when he found his friend was injured.

For two days Richard refused to speak to Conor. Because neither of them was willing to let Peter and Katherine know that they had fallen out, they sat in the same rooms and pretended to play together. Richard laboured over video games and waited for his ankle to heal. Conor read comics and adventure stories and felt miserable.

On the morning of the third day Richard invited Conor to play football on the beach.