‘Well . . . But I’m sure the hamburgs won’t be very good.’

They weren’t, but Hazel left unconsumed only one snippet of fried butcher’s paper which had got in among the onions.

From the Daisy Dell, only a couple of farmhouses were to be seen, far off, but by eight o’clock the place was filled with rustic versions of Sara and Howard. The café did smell, rather, of frying pans, paraffin, cabbage and Stickles, but it was lively with yellow paint and pink paper doilies and soft-drink posters showing bathing girls, and it crackled now with jokes fresh from the radio. Fred admired one young lady in a silk frock decorated with red poppies, in silk stockings and silver slippers, who sat on a high stool delicately sipping a lemonade into which her escort, a young man with a plaid pullover and an irremovable camel’s-hair cap, kept pouring gin.

‘Expensive-looking pair,’ Fred hinted to Pa Stickle. ‘The young lady in silk.’

‘Her? Oh yes. Smart girl. She’s daughter of Ole Man Bocks, up the road here a piece — the one that’s doing time for burning down folks’ barns, seems like he just can’t keep from it, somehow, and she’s got a fine job, working for Doc Onderdonck’s folks down in the village — eight dollars a week, yessir, and the washing sent out.’ You bet. But that ain’t no silk — it’s rayon — eleven-fifty for the dress and ‘tain’t paid for, neither!’

‘Oh dear, I’m afraid this place is too fast for conservative people like us,’ yawned Hazel. ‘I’m going to bed right away.’

‘I’m going to hit the hay pretty sudden myself,’ agreed Fred.

But at eleven, when Hazel had slipped off to their cottage, Fred was playing poker in the kitchen with Pa Stickle, a brush salesman, the local auctioneer, who was also the local assemblyman, and a hired man, and was losing steadily to all of them and enjoying it. Afterward Ma Stickle invited them to share what she called ‘couple sandwiches or something’, which proved to consist of beans, brown bread, clam chowder, honey, cold fish and applejack. All of it Fred devoured; he imitated Pa Stickle in lying preposterously about his travels; and he went across the cinder courtyard to bed in his cabin, weaving and inclined to music.

Fred did not look very closely at their cabin at Daisy Dell until he awoke, in the sway-backed bed, on a mattress filled with iron ore and paving stones, at eight in the morning. He had a head, and he knew that Dr. Kamerkink would have been profane about his liver and blood pressure, but he lay and chuckled at his idiocy of the night before.

With slight whimpers as the sutures of his skull cracked open and closed again, he sat on the bed, surveying the caravansary in Samarkand for which they had given up their pink-and-cream bedroom. It was the largest cabin at the Dell; a double one, containing no furniture except the two wiggly iron beds, two straight chairs, a piano lamp minus its shade, a mirror, and a bureau which lacked one drawer. The wall was covered with plaster the colour of withered lettuce, with map-shaped holes where the plaster had fallen, but gloriously, startlingly, on it were hung, by count, nine pictorial calendars, presenting kittens in baskets, cherries in baskets, little girls tormenting little dogs, and a church beside a moonlit lake.