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above us, and as the captain correctly observed, it was confoundedly hot. So I took off my coat and hung it on one of the spikes of the anchor, and replied to him that there was at least one comfort in being above the clouds. Namely, that a gentleman could sit in public in his shirtsleeves.’
    He paused and laughed, expecting laughter in return, as in London, but she had a small smile on her face, and a quizzing look. Alarmed by her silence, he pressed on.
    ‘But then, you see, as we were sitting there, with so little wind that we felt almost becalmed, we dropped our eyes – well, one of us did, and then alerted the others – downwards. Imagine the scene. There was a broad expanse of fleecy cloud beneath us, preventing our view of the land, or the estuary, below, and then, there, we saw an amazing sight. The sun’ – he held up a hand to indicate its position – ‘was casting on to this flat surface of cloud the very shape and shadow of our balloon. We could see the gasbag, the ropes, the cradle and, strangest of all, our three heads clearly outlined. It was as if we were looking at a colossal photograph of ourselves, of our expedition.’
    ‘Larger than life.’
    ‘Indeed.’ But Fred was aware that he had rather garbled his story. The strength of her attention had panicked him. He felt deflated.
    ‘As we both are. I am larger than life on the stage, as you yourself remarked. And you are larger than life in your very being.’
    Fred sensed a pull and lift in his heart. He had deserved censure and received praise. He enjoyed flattery as much as the next man – but again, her words struck him as mere straightforwardness. And here was the paradox of their situation. They were each, by the standards of conventional life, exotic beings, and yet when they were together he discerned no play, no acting, no costume. Even though he was in the walking-out dress of the Blues, and she had only just cast aside furs and a hat which appeared to have a dead owl roosting in it. He was, he admitted, half confused and probably three-quarters in love.
    ‘If ever I take a balloon flight,’ she said, with a slight, faraway smile, ‘I shall think of you. I promise you that. And I always keep my promises.’
    ‘Always?’
    ‘Always if I intend to. Of course there are promises I do not intend to keep when I make them. But those are hardly promises, are they?’
    ‘Then perhaps you might honour me by promising to make an ascent with me one day?’
    She paused. Had he gone too far? But what was the use of straightforwardness, if not saying what you mean, what you feel?
    ‘But Capitaine Fred, might it not be a little difficult to balance the vessel?’
    This was a good practical point: he weighed at least twice as much as she did. They would have to put most of the ballast on her side, but if he then had to cross the basket in order to release it … He was imagining the playlet as if it were real, and only later began to wonder if she was talking of other things. But then, metaphor often confused him.
     
    No, he wasn’t three-quarters in love.
    ‘Hook, line and sinker,’ he said to his uniformed reflection in the cheval glass of his hotel bedroom. The dull gold of its frame yielded to the brighter lace edgings of his stable jacket. ‘Hook, line and sinker, Captain Fred.’
    He had often imagined this moment, tried to see how it would compare with those previous times when he had been only half in love – with a pair of eyes, a smile, the shimmer of a dress. On those occasions he had always been able to picture the next few days – and sometimes those next few days had turned out exactly as he had predicted. But then, the imagination and the actuality had stopped; the dream and the desire had been fulfilled. Now, though the desire had, in one sense, been fulfilled sooner and more giddyingly than he could possibly have dreamed, it merely aroused greater desire. The small time he had spent with her aroused the desire for greater