She would dress quickly and forget me, rushing into the night with shouts about a party, too impatient to burden herself with any needs of mine. A little deflated, I was usually relieved to see her go. I was nervous of the empty syringes I found in the lavatory cistern. Worryingly, she stole money from the children, as if trying to take back part of the affection she had given them. Alice and Lucy were too fond of Sally to care. When I tried to lend her money she waved her chequebooks at me, and I realised that she needed to steal the small coins from the girls’ purses. The carousel had tricked her into thinking that nothing mattered but its speed.

“Sally sweet … Jim, she got you out of that little Alcatraz of yours.” David stood glamorously by his Tiger Moth in a white flying suit, adjusting a fire extinguisher. He embraced Sally, treated me to a friendly but cool smile, and placed the extinguisher in my hands with a gesture implying that I might soon need it. “Let’s go, Henry—we’ll sneak off and bomb Shepperton…”

“Say, can we, David? Let’s bomb my school.”

I had guessed for some time that Sally was seeing him. They shared nothing in the way of temperament or interests—David loathed hippies and bikers and would try to run them down—but they could map their wayward needs onto each other.

Henry and I paused to peer at a Mignet Flying Flea, little more than an aerial skateboard, and Sally strolled towards the Tiger Moth, which David flew in a vermouth commercial. She peeled away her silk scarf as if they were about to make love under its wing. When he greeted Sally, David’s eyes were filled with the easy humour he had turned upon the Moose Jaw whores. He held her to his shoulder, pressing her blond hair to his lips, while giving Henry a cheery wave. Within minutes Sally was wearing a Bomber Command jacket and an antique helmet and goggles, a fetishist’s dream of a white-haired woman in flying leather. As she stood on tiptoe and kissed David, her crotch ruled the airfield.

Sally clung to his arm, glad to test this dangerous man. When they took off together in the Tiger Moth, David made a formal circuit of the airfield, and I sensed that he was exposing her to the entire air show, a naiad of the air he had brought down from the clouds. After they landed he lifted her from the cockpit, formally introducing her to the mortal earth. Sally’s face was white with cold, her nose and lips as pointed as an Arctic bird’s, the wind still blowing through her roused eyes. The sky behind her was a dream of heroin. I wanted to stay with them, fearing that Sally might incite David to some mad piece of stunt flying, but he avoided my eyes.