She still didn’t look at him. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘These days, I find it hard to separate one from the other. It’s just like you’re always telling Sally. The Hardestys are South Burlington, and South Burlington is the Hardestys. It’s one of those homespun equations that don’t make any logical sense, or even any genetic sense, but which people believe in like E equals me squared.’

‘I love you, you know,’ he said simply.

‘You love the idea of me. I don’t know whether you actually love me. Not me, as a person. Not me, as an educated and independent person who suddenly finds herself isolated by her husband’s chosen way of life – cut off from friends and style and civilisation. I’m getting neurotic, do you know that? I have fantasies of shopping at Gimbel’s. I wake up in the night with unnatural cravings for one of Stars’ pastrami sandwiches.’

He took her hand. Her Tiffany engagement ring winked a tiny rainbow at him. ‘Listen,’ he said, hoarsely, ‘you can go to New York whenever you want. Fly tomorrow, if you feel like it.’

‘Ed,’ she said, slowly shaking her head, ‘that just isn’t the point. I want New York but I want you, too. New York on its own isn’t enough. I’m your wife, I happen to love you, but I also happen to have mental energies and psychological requirements which aren’t being fulfilled. At the moment, the two most important needs in my life are totally incompatible, and that’s the problem.’

He stared down at the shaggy pink rug. ‘I don’t know what to suggest,’ he said. ‘You don’t want to stay here and yet you don’t think it’s a good idea if I sell the place.’

‘I think if you sold the place it would gradually destroy our marriage,’ she said. ‘Not straight away, but gradually and very effectively.’

‘So going to Los Angeles for a while is going to hold it together?’

‘I don’t know. But it’s going to give me some time to think. You too.’

He said, unhappily, ‘I don’t think I feel like thinking. Not about us.’

Season leaned over and kissed him, twice, very gently and lovingly. ‘We have to,’ she said. ‘And if I were you, I’d go down to the kitchen and see if that omelette’s ready, otherwise you’re going to feel like you’re eating a window-cleaner’s leather.’