He walked past them up towards the obelisk and then turned and looked out towards the sea.

He never had any desire to go to the edge and look down.

‘Why can’t I fly?’ he had once asked his father. Dad had smiled at him and launched as was his wont into a long dissertation on aerodynamics. Laurence was none the wiser at the end and his fear of heights had remained the same.

That woman was there again.

It was the third time he had noticed her standing on the edge like that, her dark coat flapping in the wind, as if indeed her father had never lectured her on aerodynamics and she was about to take off across the bay. He had noticed how thin she was, and pale like a ghost.

Maybe she was a ghost. Maybe she could fly.

Her eyes were fixed each time he had seen her on the horizon, but he knew that they weren’t seeing the seascape there in front of her. She took a small step even closer to the edge and he began to run towards her.

‘Hello there!’

She didn’t seem to hear but moved her hands sideways in an awkward gesture as if she were addressing someone.

He slowed down as he got close to her. Maybe he was being unutterably foolish. He felt his face becoming hot; he wanted to turn and go back up the hill, back to the path wandering through the trees, back to his hotel.

‘Miss … ah … excuse me. Hello?’

She turned and looked at him. She frowned slightly as if he had interrupted some important thing that had been going on in her head.

‘What is it?’

‘I just wondered if you were all right.’

She looked puzzled.

‘All right?’

‘Yes. I just wondered. I do apologise for … You’re so close to the edge and I … well I …’

She looked down at the ground, at the steep hill falling away below her, at the trees hiding the coast road, the roofs and then the railway line and beyond that, the sea. A bird surfed on the wind, rose and fell, its wings outstretched. It looked lazy, she thought, a drifter.

‘I like the edge,’ she said at last.

‘I suffer from vertigo,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t bear to stand so close.’

‘I don’t. I have no fear of heights.’

‘I thought that perhaps …’ He left the meaning hanging between them, buffeted by the south-east wind.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I would never do a thing like that. I have thought of it from time to time, but rejected it as a solution.’

‘I thought you might slip. You know, so close … the wind. You didn’t seem to be looking.’

‘I wouldn’t slip.’

‘Well, that’s all right then.’

He turned and began to walk away. So much for showing a caring interest in human beings. He wondered where Pansy was.

‘Thank you,’ the woman called after him.