Della appeared at the living-room door, with her hair brushed and her make-up restored. There was a faint stiffness about her smile, but Shearson was too pleased to notice it. ‘You wait till you hear what’s happened,’ he grinned. ‘It seems like every damned farmer in the whole middle West is getting hit by this blight. So if we play our cards right, if we can keep the public’s personal anxiety way down low and their sympathy way up high, we might be in for more than we originally bargained for.’

Della said, ‘Good,’ in an abstracted voice, and then walked over to the cocktail cabinet, where she poured herself three fingers of scotch, straight-up, and drank it back without blinking.

Six

It was a dry, hot, windy morning. The sky over southern Kansas was already the odd mauvish colour of burned notepaper. Ed drove Season and Sally along Highway 54 into Wichita with the air-conditioning in his Caprice stationwagon right down to freeze. Every time he glanced in his rear-view mirror he could see the three Gucci suitcases packed in the back, with the tags that read LAX.

Season was wearing a smart camel-coloured suit, and her hair was tied back with a scarf. Sally had brought along her favourite dolly, a floppy and unsavoury rag creature with bright pink hair. Its name was Merry, for reasons that Ed and Season had never quite managed to understand.

They didn’t talk much. There wasn’t very much to say. He had tried this morning to ask her not to go, as they lay – side by side in their soft curtained bed; but she had kissed him, and said that it was necessary for her own survival. He had made love to her, more doggedly than passionately, and afterwards she had lain there amongst the rose-patterned sheets and smiled at him gently, but still without changing her mind. He knew she had to go, too. She needed to remind herself that Kingman County wasn’t the whole world, and that South Burlington wasn’t the sum of her life and her intelligence.

All he had said to her over breakfast was, ‘You’ll come back, won’t you, when you’ve made up your mind?’

Sally had looked up from her bowl of Grape Nuts, puzzled. Season had touched her lips with her fingertip to tell Ed that he shouldn’t say any more. But a few minutes later, she had said, gently, ‘You know I will.’

The early sun had shone through the window across the breakfast table, and with Dilys bustling at the stove in her gingham apron, the kitchen had taken on all the appearance of one of those happy 1950s television series, the ones where hearty neighbours kept popping in through a swing door, and everybody ate heaps of bacon and sausage-links and wheatcakes, and never suffered anything worse than an occasional misunderstanding.