‘It must be men’s day on the golf course,’ Diana said.

David was comically alarmed at the golfers’ attire. Old men went by in bright pink, egg-yolk yellow, and lime-green trousers with garishly patterned shirts, sporting billed caps from the major tractor companies of the nation.

‘They must all be prairie farmers,’ David said.

‘Did you bring a sun hat?’ Diana asked.

‘Yes, and I’ve even got prescription sunglasses. Oh, I’m prepared all right, but I’m not going to look like it.’

‘I seem to be the latest thing,’ Constance said, looking down at herself, ‘but I’m sure I’ve got on Diana’s shirt.’

‘There’s quite a good men’s shop in town,’ Diana said to David. ‘You’ll have to get yourself something outlandish.’

She expected him to protest, but he didn’t. He looked tempted.

After breakfast they went for a walk around the settlement. Though all of the some three hundred houses were mobile units, most of them double like their own, they didn’t look alike. Sidings and roofs varied, and each landscaping of their tiny front yards was distinctive. Most people had accepted the desert and had chosen from a large variety of cacti at home in this climate, set out on crushed rock of various colours, but one garden they passed could have been found in southern England. Constance paused before it for some minutes.

‘My mother had a sister in Sussex,’ she said.

As they turned into the most northerly road, they felt the wind, degrees colder than the sunny still air they had been sheltering in, and they saw the tumbleweed speeding across the open desert to be stopped by a wire fence where it was piled nearly six feet high.

A roadrunner, looking as ridiculous as it did on ashtrays and cocktail napkins, dashed across their path, appraising them with one startling red, white, and blue eye.

‘The owner?’ David asked.

‘They’re all over,’ Diana said. ‘People feed them ground beef.’

They circled round, sometimes stopping to watch golfers tee off on the little course that wound around the settlement, admiring great patches of desert daisies, trees lit with grapefruit and oranges and lemons, until they reached the pool enclosure. No one was in the pool, but two women sat amiably chatting in the Jacuzzi.

‘I do want to try that,’ David said.

Constance was persuaded into her suit and wrap, but she eyed Diana with critical scepticism.

‘We’re really going out like this?’

‘Everyone does. It’s only across the road. Come on.’

David waited for them on the screened porch, his thin hairy legs exposed below his short terry cloth robe. Constance burst into laughter.

‘Come on,’ he said in his turn, taking Constance firmly by the arm. ‘We’ll be Beauty and the Beast.’