I hadn’t, I had never thought about it. Something to do with business and psychology seemed indicated. I wasn’t going to say that. I needed to say something that would make him angry. No doubt, in some ways, I had been the prototype rebellious teenager, and now that I had left my own parents, I was projecting parenthood onto Max and Selina. Perhaps I learned that was possible and even common from the few months I stayed the psychology course. This was what I’d have said to Dad if he’d asked me that question.

“I’d like to be a steeplejack.”

His face hard again and his eyes bulging, Max shook his head this way and that. “I was serious, Clodagh, as you well know. Don’t you think I deserve a serious answer and not a rude, frivolous one?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “To both, I mean. I don’t know.” I got up and asked, like someone half my age as I well knew, “Can I go now?”

He shook his head again, then nodded. I went downstairs, feeling a bit hollow inside, as if I had done something appalling. Would they throw me out? And if they did, where was I to go? Once inside old Mrs. Fisherton’s, old Mabel Fisherton’s, I broke Max’s rule and lit a cigarette. I thought about the answer I had given to his question (“What are you going to do when you grow up?”) and what I had meant by it. Of course it had been frivolous and not considered at all, I might as well have said I wanted to be a plumber or a bus driver. On the other hand, had it? Had it been so frivolous? Ever since the pylon—well, not ever since but lately—I had been thinking, as part of my continual facing what I had done, that I needed to atone and not only to atone but get something positive out of the experience as well. I had failed and Daniel had died because I, who had instigated the whole thing and badgered him into it, knew nothing about the pylon. When I said to Max “I want to be a steeplejack,” maybe in my unconscious was a feeling that I ought to be, that I ought to make a career of climbing up tall buildings and repairing them, for working constructively on heights was what I owed the world and Daniel’s memory and myself.