“Maybe not.” I watched Richard step from the Tiger Moth and stride towards us in his yellow flying suit. “I’ll take up flying.”

“Good—then you can teach me. I need to fly!”

She kissed me and stepped from the car, holding Richard’s helmet as I straddled the Triumph. We made a curious trio, the aviator, the schoolgirl, and the medical student. Richard watched me with his friendly actor’s smile. Thinking of Miriam’s American underwear, I wondered if this spunky young woman had been his gift to me, part of another experiment. He was always glad to see me, asking about the war in a casual but faintly prurient way, as if I were some kind of laboratory specimen exposed to too many images of violence. Sometimes in his office, while I waited for Miriam to finish her typing, he would watch me turning the pages of Life magazine, with its graphic photographs of the Korean War. Despite all this, I liked him for his energy and openmindedness, for Miriam and for his American car. He and his sister had been evacuated to Australia before the London blitz, and he had sprung free from the Sydney suburbs, a man with no past and only the present.

“Jim—Miriam says you’re going to take up flying. Come out next week and I’ll give you a spin. You can try some circuits and bumps.”

“Thanks, Richard. You trust me at the controls?”

“Of course.” Once, to his irritation, Miriam and I had overtaken him on the Triumph as he flew along the Newmarket road. “By the way, you’ve been to Lakenheath? The big American base?”

“A few times.”

“He goes every weekend.” Miriam took my arm, pressing her cheek to my leather jacket as if trying to read the wind in its bruised seams. “Jim will be the first to know when the war comes.”

“Absolutely. I’ve always taken that for granted. Jim, there’s a chance of visiting the base, part of some Anglo-American community project, so that we don’t feel left out when Armageddon begins. Come along—we might wangle a look at a nuclear bomber.”

“I’ll pass, Richard.” I guessed that I was being tricked into another experiment and remembered the term “imposed psychopathy” that he had used in the lecture I attended. He had moved around the podium like an actor delivering Hamlet’s soliloquy, ignoring the twenty students in the front rows of the auditorium and addressing himself exclusively to me as I sat high at the back under the fanlights, deliberately smoking under the NO SMOKING sign. Yet already he was appealing far beyond the empty seats, to a greater audience he had glimpsed from the air.

He watched me encouragingly while I kick-started the Triumph’s heavy engine. Miriam waved as I drove between the parked aircraft.

“See you tonight, Jim! You can take me to a flick. And keep away from that woman!”

*   *   *