I spun around and caught her hands but Katie tore me away from her and pushed me through the barn door. I saw Jack wheel around from the mirror. I saw his stunned face, blank with incomprehension at what he had overheard. Rea had one of the doors and was pulling it shut behind me. I knew that Jack had heard. I knew he had caught Dandy’s exultant tone, I knew he had heard the words. He had turned in time to see her smile as she said: ‘I’ve caught him now, and he’ll not get away.’

I stood helplessly before the audience as if I had forgotten what I was there for. I looked behind me. The barn door had stuck on some roughness on the ground and Jack had come forward to help Rea shut it, obedient as ever to the orders of his father who said that it must always be kept closed during acts.

I walked over to the low trapeze slung underneath the girls’ frame and kicked off my clogs and held my arms above my head. Robert lifted me up and I hung for a moment as if I had forgotten what to do. Then I started working the trapeze and it seemed to go backwards and forwards like the clapper of a bell tolling inside my head.

I could make no sense of what Dandy had said to me. I was too weary and overworked to make any sense of it at all. And the show had its own inexorable rhythm. I saw the man in the front row look at me and I smiled my shallow unreal smile and turned and hooked my knees through the trapeze bar and hung upside down. There was a little ripple of clapping. I swung my head up and leaned outwards, gripping the trapeze with my hands behind my back, and held the bird’s nest pose. They clapped me again, more warmly. The trapeze seemed to go tick…tock…tick…tock in my head as I worked it to pick up speed.

I felt as if a long way away there was the red-haired woman in the big house waiting for her destiny to come to her. And that here I was, a ticking clock, waiting for mine to come to me. I raised myself up and over the trapeze in the pose that David called the kip, with the bar of the trapeze against my hips and my head up and smiling. My red ribbons blew across my eyes but I did not even blink. I was in a deep spiralling haze and I could not think nor see.

I leaped down from the trapeze with a cheating half-somersault and landed on my feet. They clapped me very loudly, someone cheered from the back. I looked around for Dandy.