‘Well,’ she said. ‘Shearson Jones has plenty of enviable things in his life. Money, power, influence, and scores of women. But you have plenty of enviable things, too. A farm, and a beautiful wife, and a lovely daughter.’

‘What are you trying to do?’ Ed asked her. ‘Make me eat ashes for what we just did?’

‘How could I? We both wanted it and we both enjoyed it. And that’s as far as it has to go. No guilt. No recriminations. No nothing.’

‘Are you really that blasé?’ he wanted to know.

She shook her head. ‘I’m not blasé at all. If I was blasé. I’d cling on to you for all I was worth. I wouldn’t care about who you were, and what your farm meant to you. I wouldn’t care about your wife or your daughter.’

‘You don’t care now. Don’t give me that.’

‘I do care, as a matter of fact, because I think you’re somebody special. You’re a nice man. Good-looking, hard-working, and prepared to fight for what you believe in. I wanted to make love with you because I wanted to please you and I wanted to please myself. Now, it’s over.’

‘You mean we’re never going to make love again?’

‘How do I know? I thought it was up to the man to do all the chasing.’

He frowned, and rubbed the back of his hair with his towel. Then he grinned, and chuckled.

‘You know what you are, don’t you?’ he asked her.

‘What am I?’

‘You’re beautiful. That’s all. Just beautiful.’

*

On Friday morning, the president called a delayed news conference and informed the White House Press Corps that he had been holding ‘urgent and concerned meetings’ with the Department of Agriculture, and that he had also talked directly on the telephone with the governors of nine states, including Kansas, Iowa, Montana, Washington, California, and Florida. The damage to crops caused by various blights and diseases was ‘difficult to assess in terms of the nation’s foreseeable lunchpail’ – a phrase which he would later have cause to regret he had ever spoken, and not just for grammatical reasons, either. But most of the governors had believed that the blight situation was ‘containable’ and that food stocks were generally high enough to see them through until next year’s spring crops.

What none of the governors realised was that the blight crisis was already well beyond disaster level. Most of their state agricultural departments had sent samples of the mystifying disease to Washingon for assessment, but Washington had so far given them nothing in return except the words of Shearson Jones – that the federal researchers were ‘on the brink of solving the problem’ and that ‘the agricultural cavalry is on the way.’