When the flames and smoke and cursing died down, we had a hole six inches in diameter right through the basket, but no other damage. 'Baskets don't burn easily,' he said calmly, as if nothing had happened. 'Never known one burn much more than this.' He inspected his cap, which was scorched into black-edged lace, and gave me a maniacal four seconds from the bright blue eyes. 'You can't put out a fire with a crash helmet,' he said.
I laughed quite a lot.
It was the altitude, I thought, which was making me giggle.
'Want some chocolate?' he said. There were no signposts in the sky to tell us when we crossed the boundary of the airway. We saw an aeroplane or two some way off, but nothing near us. No one came buzzing around to direct us downward. We simply sailed straight on, blowing across the sky as fast as a train.
At ten past five he said it was time to go down, because if we didn't touch ground by five-thirty exactly he would be disqualified, and he didn't want that; he wanted to win. Winning was what it was all about.
'How would anyone know exactly when we touched down?' I said.
He gave me a pitying look and gently directed his toe at a small box strapped to the floor beside one of the corner cylinders.
'In here is a barograph, all stuck about with pompous red seals. The judges seal it, before the start. It shows variations in air pressure. Highly sensitive. All our journey shows up like a row of peaks. When you're on the ground, the trace is flat and steady. It tells the judges just when you took off and when you landed. Right?'
'Right.'
'OK. Down we go, then.'
He reached up and untied a red cord which was knotted to the burner frame, and pulled it. 'It opens a panel at the top of the balloon,' he said. 'Lets the hot air out.'
His idea of descent was all of a piece. The altimeter unwound like a broken clock and the rate-of-climb meter was pointing to a thousand feet a minute, downwards. He seemed to be quite unaffected, but it made me queasy and hurt my ear drums. Swallowing made things a bit better, but not much. I concentrated, as an antidote, on checking with the map to see where we were going.
The Channel lay like a broad grey carpet to our right, and it was incredible but, whichever way I looked at it, it seemed that we were on a collision course with Beachy Head.
'Yeah,' John Viking casually confirmed. 'Guess we'll try not to get blown off those cliffs. Might be better to land on the beach further on…' He checked his watch. 'Ten minutes to go. We're still at six thousand feet… that's all right… might be the edge of the sea…'
'Not the sea,' I said positively. 'Why not? We might have to.' 'Well,' I said, 'this…' I lifted my left arm. 'Inside this hand-shaped plastic there's actually a lot of fine engineering. Strong pincers inside the thumb and first two fingers. A lot of fine precision gears and transistors and printed electrical circuits. Dunking it in the sea would be like dunking a radio. A total ruin. And it would cost me two thousand quid to get a new one.'
He was astonished.
'You're joking.'
'No.'
'Better keep you dry, then. And anyway, now we're down here, I don't think we'll get as far south as Beachy Head. Probably further east.' He paused and looked at my left hand doubtfully. 'It'll be a rough landing. The fuel's cold from being so high… the burner doesn't function well on cold fuel. It takes time to heat enough air to give us a softer touch-down.'
A softer touch-down took time… too much time.
'Win the race,' I said.
His face lit into sheer happiness. 'Right,' he said decisively. 'What's that town just ahead?'
I studied the map. 'Eastbourne.' He looked at his watch. 'Five minutes.' He looked at the altimeter and at Eastbourne, upon which we were rapidly descending. 'Two thousand feet. Bit dicey, hitting the roofs. There isn't much wind down here, is there… But if I burn, we might not get down in time. No, no burn.'
A thousand feet a minute, I reckoned, was eleven or twelve miles an hour. I had been used for years to hitting the ground at more than twice that speed… though not in a basket, and not when the ground might turn out to be fully inhabited by brick walls.
We were travelling sideways over the town, with houses below us. Descent was very fast. 'Three minutes,' he said.
The sea lay ahead again, fringing the far side of the town, and for a moment it looked as if it was there we would have to come down after all. John Viking, however, knew better.
'Hang on,' he said. 'This is it.'
He hauled strongly on the red cord he held, which led upwards into the balloon. Somewhere above, the vent for the hot air widened dramatically, the lifting power of the balloon fill away, and the solid edge of Eastbourne came up with a rush.
We scraped the eaves of grey slate roofs, made a sharp diagonal descent over a road and a patch of grass, and smashed down on a broad concrete walk twenty yards from the waves.
'Don't get out. Don't get out,' he yelled. The basket tipped on its side and began to slither along the concrete, dragged by the still half-inflated silken mass. 'Without our weight, it could still fly away.'
As I was again wedged among the cylinders, it was superfluous advice. The basket rocked and tumbled a few more times and I with it, and John Viking cursed and hauled at his red cord and finally let out enough air for us to be still.
He looked at his watch, and his blue eyes blazed with triumph. 'We've made it. Five twenty-nine. That was a bloody good race. The best ever. What are you doing next Saturday?'
I went back to Aynsford by train, which took forever, with Charles picking me up from Oxford station not far short of midnight.
'You went on the balloon race,' he repeated disbelievingly. 'Did you enjoy it?'
'Very much.'
'And your car's still at Highalane Park?'
'It can stay there until morning,' I yawned. 'Nicholas Ashe now has a name, by the way. He's someone called Norris Abbott. Same initials, silly man.'
'Will you tell the police?'
'See if we can find him, first.'
He glanced at me sideways. 'Jenny came back this evening, after you'd telephoned.'
'Oh no.'
'I didn't know she was going to.'
I supposed I believed him. I hoped she would have gone to bed before I arrived, but she hadn't. She was sitting on the gold brocade sofa in the drawing room, looking belligerent.
'I don't like you coming here so much,' she said. A knife to the heart of things from my pretty wife.
Charles said smoothly, 'Sid is welcome here always.'
'Discarded husbands should have more pride than to fawn on their fathers-in-law, who put up with it because they're sorry for them.'
'You're jealous,' I said, surprised. She stood up fast, as angry as I'd ever seen her.
'How dare you!' she said. 'He always takes your side. He thinks you're bloody marvellous. He doesn't know you like I do, all your stubborn little ways and your meanness and thinking you're always right.'
'I'm going to bed,' I said. 'And you're a coward as well,' she said furiously. 'Running away from a few straight truths.'
'Goodnight, Charles,' I said. 'Goodnight, Jenny. Sleep well, my love, and pleasant dreams.'
'You…' she said. 'You… I hate you, Sid.'
I went out of the drawing room without fuss and upstairs to the bedroom I thought of as mine; the one I always slept in nowadays at Aynsford.
You don't have to hate me, Jenny, I thought miserably; I hate myself.
Charles drove me to Wiltshire in the morning to collect my car, which still stood where I'd left it, though surrounded now by acres of empty grass. There was no Peter Rammileese in sight, and no thugs waiting in ambush. All clear for an uneventful return to London.
'Sid,' Charles said, as I unlocked the car door. 'Don't pay any attention to Jenny.'