‘Nothing,’ she said. She shot me a sly smile through a tumbling wave of black hair. ‘I just have to sit on his knee and cry and say, “Oh! Please don’t Daddy,” like that. Then he gives me a penny and sends me out through the kitchen and they give me a rabbit. He says I can have a pheasant tomorrow.’

I looked at her with unease. ‘All right,’ I said unhappily. ‘But if he promises you a rib of beef or a leg of lamb or a proper joint you’re not to go back again. Could you run away if you had to?’

‘Oh yes,’ she said airily. ‘We sit near the window and it’s always open. I could be out in minutes.’

I nodded, only slightly relieved. I had to trust Dandy with these weird frightening forays of hers into the adult world. She had never been caught. She had never been punished. Whether she was picking pockets or dancing to please elderly gentlemen with skirts held out high; she always came home with a handful of coins and no trouble. She was as idle as a well-fed cat around the caravan. But if she sensed trouble or danger she could slip through a man’s hands and be gone like quicksilver.

‘Call them,’ she said, nodding towards the doorway.

I went out to the step and called: ‘Robert! Jack! Dinner!’

We were on first-name terms now, intimate with the unavoidable closeness of caravan-dwellers. Jack and Dandy sometimes exchanged a secret dark smile, but nothing more. Robert had seen how they were together the very first evening we had spent in the caravan and had pulled off his boots and started blacking them, looking at Dandy under his blond bushy eyebrows.

‘Look here, Dandy,’ he had said, pointing the brush at her. ‘I’ll be straight with you, and you can be straight with me. I took you on because I thought you’d do nicely in the show. I have some ideas which I’ll break open to you later. Not now. Now’s not the time. But I can tell you you could have a pretty costume and dance to music and every eye in the place would be on you. And every girl in the place would envy you.’

He paused, and satisfied with the effect of this appeal to her vanity went on: ‘I’ll tell you what I want for my son,’ he said. ‘He’s my heir and he’ll have the show when I’m gone. Before then I’ll find him a good hard-working girl in the shows business like us. A girl with a good dowry to bring with her, and best of all an Act and a Name of her own. A Marriage of Talents,’ he said softly to himself.