He laughed. “Not at all awful. Banal. I asked because it occurred to me you might think it a trivial thing to make such a difference.”

“Tell me.”

“My parents were away. They’d gone on holiday to France. I was home on my own for the weekend and I’d arranged to meet a friend of mine, a chap I was at school with, for a drink. We were to meet at the White Rose.”

First of all he thought he’d take his car, but that would very much restrict what he drank and he hadn’t seen the friend for a long time. Walk, why not? A mile and a half there and a mile and a half back if he went across the fields. In the event, of course, he never got to the pub. But he had set off about the time Daniel and I were looking at the pylon and thinking of climbing it, about the time Daniel said, “People do go up, you see. They go up using the footholds, like climbing a ladder.”

Guy had got as far as the bridge. Then he had one of those second thoughts or fears we all have sometimes, you don’t have to be an obsessive-compulsive to have them. He thought he had forgotten to lock the front door. The house was old and the front door had a doorknob that doesn’t automatically lock when you close it. There had been burglaries in the neighborhood recently. Those days were gone, he remembered from his childhood, when you could go out and leave your house doors and car doors unlocked. He turned around and went back.

“And the door was locked,” he said. “I needn’t have gone back. That going back meant a delay of ten minutes even though I took the car with me that second time.”

“If you’d got there ten minutes earlier, you could have shouted at us and warned us.” I said it almost sorrowfully, hating retrospective hope. “If you’d told us we were earthed and the current would go through us, maybe we’d have listened.”

After that I talked to Guy as I never had before. I told him about playing truant from GUP—it was happening more and more often as March came in—and about living below ground. He was sympathetic.

“Do a secretarial course instead,” he said, “and I’ll find you a job in my dad’s firm. Then you could get a mortgage and buy yourself a flat on top of a high-rise.”

He thought it was a joke, as it would be to most people. Anyway, I decided being a secretary might be worse than a psychological business person. I thanked him for the dinner, which was very good, and he said he’d phone me at Max’s. That would be a bit of fun for Selina, I thought.