I liked his cabin at once. Like the man himself it consisted of savagery and opulent luxury in exactly the right proportions. The wooden panels of the walls were intricately carved into nautical motifs - mermaids and dolphins, ships and waves and fishes. Some of them were gilded. The chairs were upholstered the finest red silk velvet, but rather clumsily so, with great big tacks attaching them to the mahogany. The weapons on the walls were nothing like the handsome cavalry swords in Lord Slightly's study - despite the fripperies that adorned some of the hilts, they were clearly big sharp pieces of metal intended for killing people. In corner, there was a harpsichord.

"I believe we have met before," was the first thing he said. "I am Captain James Hook. My memory is not what it was, but I believe you to be Wendy Moira Angela Darling."

I almost corrected him, but stopped myself. My ring finger twitched with guilt. I half thought I noticed Hook's eye's flick down and take this piece of information in. I warned myself neither to over-estimate nor to underestimate his powers.

"I remember you," I said.

He poured the tea in silence.

I could think of many things to say next, "I thought you were dead," "so, are you still trying to kill Peter?" and "how come Peter isn't Peter any more" were chief among them, but they didn't seem quite the done thing for a polite tea party, so instead I gestured to the harpsichord and asked him if he played.

"Yes," he said. "Or at least I'm trying to learn. I am a little more skilled at the flute - I have been playing it for rather longer." I thought that frankly a little unlikely, but Never Land is Never Land, so I supposed anything possible and indicated that I should like to hear him sometime. He thanked me graciously for the compliment.

"What have you been doing since we last met?" he asked. "This and that," I said, trying to think of what I bdo/b do apart from being a wife and mother. "I read a great deal. I like to paint watercolours. I was very involved in the women's suffrage movement when I was younger."

He nodded. "Very admirable. I often wish Never Land were a democracy as opposed to an absolute monarchy."

I laughed. I had never seen it like that before. I tried to picture Pan and Hook standing against one another in elections, and all the fairies and lost boys and Indians solemnly lining up to vote. They would probably eat the ballot papers or something.

The tea was lovely - a nice strong Assam, though the biscuits tasted a little strange. ("Smee made them," said the Captain, perhaps by way of apology.)

After that, the conversation became surprisingly easy and enjoyable. I'd forgotten that Hook was an old Etonian. John's boys are at Eton now, and I quite often go up for sports days and so on. It was good to have something in common other than the last time we met, a subject which both of us were delicately avoiding. We talked about books we'd read and plays we'd seen. Both of us have a passion for Shakespeare. The oddest moment was when he revealed he'd played Puck at school. So had I. I suddenly and vividly remembered what it was like to hold the whole audience enraptured - to have it in my power to make 300 people look wherever I wanted them to look, to make them look at me. How did I do it? By pretending to be Peter, of course. By bbeing/b Peter - by drawing through me his youth, his strength, his assurance, and throwing it out into their faces like fairy dust.

Between us we described that feeling, a feeling that neither of us had been able to express before. "I was invincible, for those few days," said the Captain, echoing my own thoughts, "I was immortal." It was curious to think of him as a boy, curious to see him from the inside like that, curious to know we had something in common...

"I normally have a tot of rum at this hour," he said at some point. "Would you care to join me?"

I surprised myself by assenting. I'd never tasted rum before and found it delicious - like brandy only sweeter and darker-tasting - something like brown sugar. A pleasant surprise - I had somehow expected it to taste more rough and masculine.

It emboldened me to be more personal in my questioning. I asked him about his life before Eton.

"I don't remember anything."

"How do you mean?"

"My earliest memory is crossing the school threshold and being shown to my dorm."

"But surely your mother..."

"I don't have a mother."

"Oh Captain!" The rum and my maternal instinct had momentarily overwhelmed me. Involuntarily I put my hand to his arm. He flinched but did not withdraw. Something felt strange - something beyond the mere shock of first physical contact, but I couldn't tell what. Feeling a little foolish, I returned my hand to my lap and sought a new subject.

Quite suddenly, like the lights being switched off, the sky outside went dark. An absolute monarchy indeed, where the child-tyrant even has power over day and night.

He insisted that I should spend the night in his bedchamber - a tiny room leading off from his main cabin - while he slept with Smee. The idea made me a little uncomfortable, but he would not take no for an answer. I write this in bed. It is surprisingly soft, and the sheets smell of him, which is far from unpleasant.