Ed walked across the pasture, vaulted the split-rail fence, and made his way around to the front of the house. It was a neat, well-proportioned house, with white carved balconies and shuttered dormer windows and a shingle roof that sloped all the way down to the roof of the front verandah. It didn’t look like the kind of house that Dan Hardesty would have chosen for himself, but only recently Ed had discovered that it wasn’t. An early partner of his father’s called Ted Zacharias had constructed it, and sold it to his father along with twenty thousand acres of arable land. Ed hadn’t been surprised by the discovery: his father had always been a man of business, not of taste.

As Ed crossed the yard, he saw the grey Cadillac Seville parked in front of the steps, and the buff-uniformed chauffeur leaning against it smoking a cigarette. His mother was here. He rubbed the muscles at the back of his neck as he walked through the verandah and opened the gentian-blue front door. His mother always gave him a feeling of suppressed tension, and it sometimes took Season an hour of gentle talk and a massage to calm him down after the old lady had gone.

Mrs Ursula Hardesty was another reason he had left home.

She was standing in the hallway as he came in, primping her hair. She was tall, bony as a clothes-horse and wearing a light green Yves St Laurent dress that was at least twenty years too young for her. Her eyes were as pale and watery as Little Neck clams, and her neck was withered and white, although it was sparklingly decorated with three strands of diamonds and pearls. She gave him a lopsided smile, and raised her arms like someone signalling to a passing ship.

‘Edward. My dear. I thought I’d surprise you.’

‘Hello, Mother.’

He embraced her as circumspectly as he knew how. Curling his arm around her waist and yet not quite touching her; kissing her cheek from a fraction of an inch away.

‘You’re looking peaky, dear,’ she said. ‘Are you still taking that tonic wine I brought you?’

‘When I remember. I’ve just had a bad night, that’s all.’ Mrs Hardesty glanced towards the living-room, where Ed could see Season’s arm on the back of the settee, holding a smoking cigarette.

‘I hope you’re not having any trouble,’ she said, her voice as brittle as fractured porcelain.

‘You mean you hope I’m not having too many arguments with Season? Is that it?’

Mrs Hardesty looked pained. ‘I’ve never had anything against her, Edward, but I can’t say that she’s really cut out to be the mistress of a wheat-farming empire, can you? I mean – fashion and style are all very well,, but has she bought herself any galoshes yet?’