He wanted to go up the pylon. I didn’t dare him to climb it or ask him to prove something by climbing it or tell him, as I suppose some girls would, that I’d know he really loved me if he’d go up there to the top. But I did tell him about the man lighting his cigar from the live wire and once he had heard that story he was wild to try it himself, only in his case it would be a cigarette he was lighting.

“I might light my cigarette from the conductor halfway up,” he said, “and smoke it at the top.”

“I’ll come up behind you.”

That brought him a faint chill, I wrote. It wasn’t only that he would have preferred her to wait down here, stand down here looking up and see him light his cigarette from the conductor, but that he felt for the first time responsible for her. She had said she loved him and that, strangely, put him in charge of her and made him her guardian.

Did it? Or was I just passing the buck?

The sun had barely gone. He thought he had never seen such a red sky, the clouds purple now, the great clear spaces that had been blue changed to flame and gold.

“Better start, then, before the light goes,” he said.

He set his right hand to one of the steel diagonals. It was the first time he had ever touched a pylon. He expected it to be hot or at least warm but it was cool. Again he looked up.

“There are footholds.”

The steps. They jut at right angles from one of the four uprights and, spaced a few inches apart, they can have no other purpose than to make ascent of the pylon possible. Whether Daniel really said that about footholds and starting before the light goes I can’t remember, but I know he said, at this point, “People do go up, you see. They go up using the footholds, like climbing a ladder.”

I should have said, for I knew it perfectly well, that when they went up the power was off. I didn’t say it. I didn’t remind him that the man in the anecdote was in a cage, not standing on the pylon. The pylons stand there in the fields, steady, strong, clean, they look harmless. You tell yourself, if you think about it at all, that they wouldn’t be allowed to be there, governments wouldn’t allow it, if they could really hurt people. Daniel and I would be quite safe if we were careful. When we came down we’d have proved they were safe and the people who had put up the notices just overcautious. I handed him the wire cutters.

“Got your cigarettes?” I said.

“In my pocket.”