She gently reached behind her back and took his hand away. Then she went over to the bed and sat down. There was a silver cigarette box on her bedside table and she took out a Kool and perched it at the side of her pale-lipsticked mouth as if she was Humphrey Bogart.

‘Isn’t it enough?’ she asked him. ‘I used to be a magazine editor. Now I’m like something out of an A. B. Frost drawing.’

‘Who the hell’s A. B. Frost?’ he demanded. ‘For Christ’s sake, isn’t that typical of you? You complain that you’re discontented, and when I ask you why, you say that it’s because I’ve condemned you to live like some person in some picture by some goddamned obscure artist I’ve never even heard of. A. B. Frost, for Christ’s sake.’

‘A. B. Frost was very well known,’ said Season, lighting her cigarette. ‘He travelled through Kansas and Iowa in the eighteen-nineties, sketching fanners. Good, devout. Godfearing, crop-loving farmers.’

‘You make that sound like a disease.’

She blew out smoke. ‘I don’t mean to. But this bucolic existence is just about driving me crazy. I have to get away.’

‘You knew what it was going to be like. We talked about it for long enough.’

‘Of course I knew what it was going to be like. Well, I had a fair idea. But it was what you wanted, wasn’t it? Even if I’d told you that wild mules wouldn’t have dragged me to South Burlington, you still would have found a way to get me here.’

He looked at her for a long time. The way the bedside lamp shone on her long blonde hair, and cast those curving shadows from her breasts. ‘Do you really hate it that much?’ he asked her.

She tapped ash from her cigarette and shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Maybe I’ll get used to it.’

‘Do you want me to give it up?’

‘How can you give it up? You’ve signed all the papers, you’ve taken out all the loans, you’ve made yourself responsible for the lives and jobs of hundreds of people.’

‘I could sell it,’ he said.

‘Oh, sure, you could sell it. And then you’d spend the rest of your life complaining because I made you give up the only thing you ever really wanted to do. Face it, Ed, that’s been your destiny since you were born. To reap and to sow, to plough and to mow, and to be a farmer’s boy.’

He sat down next to her. She didn’t look at him, but smoked her cigarette as if she was racing to finish it.

‘It’s me, too, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘It’s not just South Burlington.’