Tom seemed very close and solid beside her in this airy, swinging emptiness. The noise and clatter of the fair sounded far off.

‘Don’t be,’ he said softly. ‘There’s no need.’

Awkward in the confined space he reached for her. Helen had the confused memory of another dark space where they had once sat together, isolated above a carpet of light. She had rejected him then. Now she couldn’t do it. Something like greed rose in her. In the half-second as their eyes met before they kissed, Helen and Tom saw that they came together under the same compulsion. He kissed her lightly at first, tasting her mouth and then her skin. Helen’s fingers found the crisp hair at the nape of his neck and she drew him closer, her mouth opening to drink in the taste of him, forgetting herself in her own hunger for him.

‘Helen?’ His mouth moved against hers and she answered, ‘I’m here. I’m here.’

When she opened her eyes again she saw the shadow in the hollow of his cheek, and the dark line of his eyebrows fiercely drawn together. Behind him was the wide open blackness of Port Meadow and beyond, so far off that it scarcely mattered at all, the faint orange glow of Oxford.

The wheel jerked again and they rolled forward, swinging out into space, swooping down past the bored attendant and back into their own world of silent, windy nothingness.

The momentum of the great wheel possessed them as they rocked in one another’s arms. The alternating dark of the high-point and confused brightness of the low swept over their closed eyelids. Just once, Tom tried to pull her closer so that their bodies could touch but they were confined by the brutal metal bar.

‘Curse this little box,’ he groaned.

But when the wheel described a slower circle, and their car stopped at the wooden platform at the bottom, Helen said, ‘No. I don’t want to get out yet.’

‘Again,’ Tom said, and stuffed the money into the attendant’s hands. Helen saw the man’s tattooed forearms with bemused clarity before the wheel swept her away again to the place where there was only Tom.

When they were suspended again above their kingdom of space, Tom said, ‘We can’t stay up here all night, darling. I can’t reach enough of you.’ She felt the tightness in the muscles of his throat as he spoke, and heard the happiness in his voice. ‘I want to take you home to bed.’

Helen was possessed by a delicious sense of abandonment, of being beyond reality suspended here above the mysterious, deserted fair.

‘When the wheel stops,’ she said dreamily. ‘When the wheel stops.’

Almost at once, it seemed, they were slowing again and coming to rest in the intrusive glare of the lights.

‘Ready this time, guv?’ said the wheel man.