Paul obliged with a change of topic. He wanted to travel to see Russia’s far-flung reaches. He was thinking of those vast, snow-covered landscapes in Nikolai’s photographs, extraordinary swathes of white touched only by fox paws. He recalled in minute detail a Werner Herzog film, Happy People, depicting the people who still lived in the wilderness, solitary hunters who spent whole winters in the forests. Darya listened impatiently, then cut him off with a lecture on what she called ‘the reality picture’: Russia’s regions were depressed, there weren’t enough jobs, petty crime was rife and heroin cheap. She swigged her wine but was not drunk; there was something controlled in her. Before long she made her exit, ending the evening on a low.

He thought he’d blown it. He really did. On the fourth night, he waited. When he finally went to bed he lay awake thinking about the danger in what he was doing, the risk of Nikolai discovering what he’d done. Paul tried to guess how he’d react. Would he confront him, irate? Throw him out on the street without a job? And then there was the question of what he would do to Darya.

It was after two when he heard Darya knock. Having relented after all, she had come down wearing a tracksuit. Paul forgot his fears as soon as he let her in. This time they had sex with more urgency than before. Then she fell asleep with her arm across his chest, so that he lay awake not daring to move, despite a tingling sensation and then a spreading ache. When he woke shortly before dawn she had already left.

Nikolai returned, and Paul worried about how their first meeting would go, but as things worked out he didn’t see him. Several days passed in which he didn’t even see Darya, and then he flew back to England to spend Christmas with his family.

‘How are the Reds?’ Nan asked, a gleam in her eye. She had been removed from her aged-care home and brought to his mother’s place in Ashford, where she sat at the table’s head like a wizened sexless queen. She gave Paul, her favourite, most of her turkey slices. The dining room felt cramped, with the five of them squeezed in among the knick-knacks and clutter. Paul’s brother Richard had brought his girlfriend Elle, and they sat across the table discussing bathroom tiles for their flat in Dartford. On Paul’s other side, his mother asked how his job was going. With her constitutional horror of inequality, she suspected he was working as a kind of servant. When she said the word ‘tutoring’, her voice betrayed her doubt; it was as if she were stepping on a pane of glass.