I won’t quote any more from that piece I wrote. It attributes thoughts and feelings to Daniel I don’t in the least know that he had. For instance, I’ve no idea if by climbing the pylon he thought he was proving his love for me or even proving to himself that he was not afraid. Perhaps and perhaps not. But I knew then as I know now that he wanted to do it. Nor was he under some kind of malign influence exerted by me, for I’ve never been what Guy (referring to someone else) calls a femme fatale. But I could have stopped him and I didn’t.

The guards on this pylon were the sort that Daniel had defined as the garter type, shelves or frills of barbed wire encircling each upright just below the second crosspiece. Because the steps only started higher up Daniel had to swing himself onto the lowest crossbar, get a purchase with his feet and pull himself upright. The pylon shone that afternoon, that early evening, every bar and strut gleamed in the slanting sunbeams. Pylons sing in wet weather, the damp rustling and humming through the wires, but that day ours was dry and shining. Daniel stood on the crossbar and began cutting the wire. He did it more methodically than I ever had, snipping each separate strand and bending it away from him against the upright. I climbed up beside him and let him go ahead once he’d made it easy to pass the guard. I read the DANGER OF DEATH notice as I went by and so did he but he didn’t say anything about it. As I passed that notice the sun was setting. I watched it drop and vanish beneath the horizon or, as anyone who honors Galileo and is a humble sort of scientist should say, I watched the earth turn away from the sun toward darkness.

Even from as low down the pylon as this, we had a good view of things, the fields and woods, the river valley and the slope of the hills on the other side. The long shadows had gone as soon as the sun went, there was a duskiness lying over the land and in the west the sky was a dull red striped with thin black clouds. The only house to be seen was our house. A light had come on in the living room and one of the bedrooms. The pylon would be nearly invisible to my parents by now but it and its fellows generally were, even in broad daylight. They were among those who “didn’t see” the pylons, somehow managing to envisage the field as it was when Constable painted it nearly two hundred years before, a deep meadow, low between thick lush hedges and overhung by shaggy trees.