‘Don’t you both see?’ said Poppy, her eyes shining. ‘This means he’s alive. As long as he’s still moving, it means he hasn’t killed himself (or anybody else, touch wood) with his mad wino behaviour. Oh, God, this changes everything!’

And it had. From then on, the mood had lightened considerably: Poppy’s face had lost its pinched, drawn look, and all three of them were treating the road trip as far more of a holiday than would otherwise have been possible.

It was just a pity the scenery hadn’t been more spectacular, thought Bella as she looked out at the bleak landscape beyond her window. Aside from Washington, DC, the cities they had passed through had been disappointingly homogenous, all gleaming skyscrapers and vast superhighways; or, in the case of the smaller ‘cities’, four or five shabby-looking skyscrapers in the downtown area that gave them their city status. Admittedly, they hadn’t stayed long enough to explore anywhere properly – it was quite possible that each city had its picturesque old quarters, and that she was being deeply offensive by tarring them all with the same brush.

But she had always associated St Louis, for example, with the Judy Garland film Meet me in St Louis, Kansas City with Oklahoma, and indeed Kansas itself with The Wizard of Oz (she had cried at all of them). She knew she was being silly – of course the greatest power in the Western world was hardly going to be trapped in a 1940s Hollywood timewarp – but the skyscrapers and enormous shopping malls that were almost all they’d encountered so far were pretty bloody depressing.

The best bit had been the autumn colours between NY and DC. Bella had gazed out of the back window, utterly enraptured by the extraordinarily vibrant golds, rusts, topazes and corals bringing the countryside alive in a glorious fiery blaze. But it was the reds that had differentiated this autumnal landscape from any she had seen before: proper vermilions, scarlets, crimsons, poppies – she had even seen one tree whose leaves had turned Schiaparelli pink. Bella smiled to herself: she did get carried away when it came to colours. She would definitely be returning to New York State some autumn in the future, with both Andy and her easel.

The upside to the relative lack of external stimulus was that there had been little else for the three of them to do but bond. And bond they had. Poppy had poured her heart out about how difficult it was trying to make a success of her new career against a backdrop of constant, unsettling resentment from her husband. Bella had told them how guilty she felt about not being ecstatically happy all the time – after all, she had both the man and the profession of her dreams; she had no right to be feeling bored, lonely and restless. Lars, in turn, had wiped away a tear as he described his feelings of complete worthlessness at losing his girlfriend as an immediate consequence of losing his job. Sensitive soul that he was, he had honestly thought that the Romanian stunner had loved him for himself.