In the night she woke to a noise. She thought she’d heard a wail, a heart-rending, plaintive cry. Her husband slept on undisturbed while she lay awake thinking of the breeding earth. It was now obliterated; it was as if it had never been. In the small hours of the morning, she mourned the loss of her childhood home. Of her mother’s memories, and of herself in those memories. She mourned the loss of her father, whom she’d barely had time to think of. He had been a popular man, her dad, a former steel worker. He had a big funeral, a big wake. Everyone was there, his workmates, his friends, the guys from the footy club. They had the wake in the backyard, a lot of food on trestle tables, everyone coming by to say how sorry they were.

In the morning, she called the workmen to pick up their tools and the cement. Then she called her brother. She told him, ‘You were right.’

‘I don’t want to be right.’

‘I know. But you are. I should have listened.’

They agreed to sell the house to pay for the residential home. They would put their mother on the waiting list to get in and hope the money lasted as long as she lived.

Nina rummaged to find the forms from their real estate agent of choice, the slightly less awful one. Looking up from the paperwork, she was startled to see a fox. They were still in the neighbourhood, people said.

Now one was in her garden again. The sight of the cub through the glass doors stopped her in her tracks. It was the one with the black-tipped ears, but bigger now, long-legged. He looked dirty, feral, wild and take-your-breath-away beautiful. If he was here, she thought, the others could be too. They could be out there, not far off, flitting through alleyways and gardens.

‘You little beauty,’ she said, standing still as she watched him go.

The invitation

Of the two of them, it was Nikolai who impressed Paul most at first.

Nikolai Kalinin, fortyish and greying, with his urbane good manners and habitual frown of concentration. Darya, at a decade younger, was not in the mould of a glamorous second wife. She dressed neatly but plainly and did not go in for makeup. Her lank fawn-coloured hair was pulled back in a practical bun, and her jutting lower jaw gave her a look of determination. When Paul got to know her, he thought her beautiful, but she was not the sort of woman he noticed on the metro, not among the striking faces he saw in the carriages, the faces of people from across the old republics who came to Moscow to try their luck.