“To go to North Dakota,” she said.

“I know,” he said.

North Dakota was farmland. Stretches of roads with gaunt houses at thousand-acre intervals, where monosyllabic men with weather-beaten faces would climb into their battered trucks to drive to places that Emma could not imagine, to do what Emma was not entirely sure, except that she knew it would not involve either Ethiopian food or the Old Vic.

“And what would I be doing with myself,” she asked, “while you’re out installing the computers in Closker College, Lamott, North Dakota?”

“Well, that’s the problem,” he said. “You might be able to find work at the college—of course you already have citizenship because of Fee. I don’t know what sort of work it would be—to be honest, I don’t really know what’s available out there for you. But you really wouldn’t have to work at all if you didn’t want to, they’d be paying me enough that you could take time off if you want.”

“In Lamott, North Dakota,” she said.

In a small town in a rural district a hundred and fifty miles north of Bismarck.

“I know,” he said. “In Lamott, North Dakota.”

She thought for a few moments.

“You’d be quite enjoying yourself, though,” she said. “Wouldn’t you?”

“I would,” he said. “I can’t say the prospect of a year in North Dakota makes me want to turn cartwheels for joy, but the work itself would be certainly interesting enough that I’d be involved in it and looking forward to going to work every day. Look, there’s no way around this one, Emma. If I took this job, it would mean a huge change in our lives for a year or so, and more so for you than for me because your work would change more than mine would—which is why I want you to be the one to decide what we do here. I’ll take the job or not take the job—you can come with me or stay in London, whatever feels best to you. It has to be your decision, and whatever you decide, I’ll support fully. I don’t even want to talk to you too much about it because I don’t want to try to talk you into anything you might regret. All I will say is that opportunities like this don’t come along every day, that the job would last probably a year and certainly no more than two, and that afterwards, my career prospects would be very rosy indeed. Which would obviously be good for us, and would be even better when the children come, because we might be able to give them quite a nice life in material terms.”

“We’re not exactly planning to send them out cleaning chimneys as it is,” she said.

“That’s true,” he said. “And I’d far rather they had a happy mother than a slightly richer father. But it is an element of the situation that I thought I should point out.”

“Let me think about this,” she said. “I need to think.”