‘For now, sure. You’ll stay a few months, maybe a year, but eventually you’ll get bored with this place, it’ll lose its romance for you and you’ll go back to the safety of your husband and your life in London.’

I stare into the fire. ‘Why do you say that?’

‘Because you can’t make your escape your reality.’

‘You can’t make your escape your reality,’ I repeat.

‘No.’

I turn to look at him. ‘But this is reality. This is real, isn’t it? Right here, right now?’

‘No,’ he says. ‘This is a dream,’ and a hard edge creeps into his voice. ‘And one day you’ll wake up and find you crave the smell of tarmac and throngs of people, in the same way you once sought space and solitude.’

‘No.’ I stare into the fire, upset.

‘These few months here, tonight even, will become a memory, an amusing story to tell at dinner parties. Your year out in the Wild West.’

‘That’s unfair.’

‘Is it?’ he says evenly.

‘All I know is that the whole world over, ordinary people feel trapped – imprisoned by fear and loneliness, shoring up a crumbling business, holding together a bad marriage; every tired housewife unloading her dishwasher dreams of escape. And they don’t have to be driven by poverty, they don’t have to be in danger and they don’t necessarily deserve your contempt.’ I get up angrily and walk to the cliff edge but his footsteps are close behind me.

‘Alice . . .’

‘It’s as though you want to believe it,’ I say, and I can’t keep the hurt from spilling into my voice. ‘Why do you want to believe it?’

He spins me round. ‘Because there’s no return from a woman like you. Don’t you understand? You’ll take me and change the course of my life. You’ll fill every gap and hole I’ve opened up to lose myself, and then what?’

I look at him helplessly.

‘Then what?’ he says fiercely and pulls me to him.

His lips are dry, cool. I close my eyes. I’d forgotten. A woman leaves a man by degrees and I stopped kissing Robert a long time ago. Now I feel like a linnet who has cleared the winter twigs and cobwebs from her mouth and found she can sing again.

26

The road ahead is straight, empty. I lean my head dreamily against the window as mile after mile of shambolic dereliction flies by. Every so often, out of the sheer nothingness of the desert, something looms: a giant car-crushing business or an abandoned mining operation. A sign flies by. BUMP. It registers as a mere hiccup under the big truck as we roll on, east along the border to Douglas, a town about thirty miles from Nogales.