‘Yes,’ I said shortly. In all my dare-devil boyish childhood it had been the only thing which made me ill with fear. Only on birds’ nesting expeditions was I never the leader of a game. I always insisted on staying on the ground while other travellers’ children climbed trees. Only once, when I was about ten years old, I had forced myself up a tree for a dare, and then frozen, terrified, on a low branch, quite unable to move. It had been Dandy, of all people, who had climbed up with placid confidence to fetch me. And Dandy who had been able to give me the courage to scramble down. I pushed away the memory of the swaying branch and the delighted cruel upturned faces below me. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I am afraid of being up high. It makes me ill just thinking about it.’

Robert said: ‘Damn,’ under his breath and jumped down from the caravan step to pull on his boots. ‘Horses ready for the show?’ he asked absently. The little puffs of smoke from his pipe came out quickly, as they did when he was thinking hard and biting on the stem.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Not tacked-up yet, of course.’

‘Aye,’ he said. He stood up and stamped his feet down into the boots and then tapped his pipe out on the wheel of the caravan and put it carefully by the driving seat.

‘What about Dandy?’ he said abruptly. ‘I suppose she won’t climb. I suppose she’s no good up high too?’

‘Dandy’s all right,’ I said. ‘Were you thinking of something for the show? You’d have to ask her, but she used to climb trees well when we were little.’

‘I’m just thinking aloud,’ he said, snubbing my curiosity. ‘Just thinking.’

But as he went towards the show field I heard him muttering under his breath. ‘Amazing Aerial Act. An Angel Without Wings. The Amazing Mamselle Dandy.’

He visited the trapeze act at Bristol; but he came back late and said nothing about it in the morning. Only Jack was allowed to ask over breakfast: ‘Any good?’ Dandy and I were eating our bread and bacon on the sun-drenched step of the caravan, so only Jack heard more than a mumbled reply. But I had heard enough to guess that Robert’s promise to Dandy of being in the centre of the ring might come true.

She welcomed it when I told her what he had said. Already our work for the show had been expanded. When Jack went crying-up the show into new towns and villages he often took Dandy riding on the crupper behind him. I had seen Robert frown the first time he saw the white horse and his son with Dandy looking so pretty, riding behind him with her arms around his waist. But he was thinking of business and not love.