Why was she telling him this? He went to her and tried to put his arms around her but she said, ‘Go. I need you to go.’

He did as she said, going out to the corridor and around a corner, where he stood for a moment with his back against the wall. Then he heard her ask, ‘Are you there?’ Her voice was quiet, lonely – the loneliest words he had ever heard, coming though they did from someone who had no reason to be lonely, who was going to be a mother. ‘Are you there?’ she asked again, more insistently this time. Paul straightened and went back, full of an unreasoning hope.

They made love quietly so as not to wake Anton. This was the end of things, he knew, but everything felt heightened. Whatever his previous doubts about her feelings, he did not have them in her presence. Here, in the hotel room, he believed that she loved him, even though later it would seem impossible again and he would start to believe she’d never felt anything for him.

Afterwards, he looked at her body before she could disguise it, glimpsing before she turned away the curve of her belly, the noticeable tilt above the pubic patch.

‘You can’t be here,’ she said.

He left a second time. In his room he took out his phone and googled ‘sex with pregnant woman harm to unborn baby?’ Then he scrolled through the results, sagging with relief.

His job did not end straight away. He worked for the family until June. His departure, when it came, was unceremonious. Only little Anton was visibly affected, holding tightly to Paul’s leg and refusing to say goodbye.

There were no other positions available, he learned at the agency. The recruiter, a polished woman, apologised and shook his hand, making the resin bangles clack loudly on her arm. It was the uncertainty in the air; everyone in Moscow was watching and waiting, business was on hold. No one was hiring. From what Paul could gather, the main activity was that of wealthy Russians shifting their money out of the country as the rouble slipped.

Flying back to England felt strangely like defeat. Paul moved into the house in Kent. He put buckets under the new leaks, lining them with towels to silence the drips. By mid-autumn he had a job. The school was posh, the kind of place that would once have made him feel like a sell-out. He had always told himself he would work in rougher comprehensives. But he liked the boys in his classes, their deferential manners. ‘Tell us about Russia, sir,’ they would say to put off a lesson.

Not long after he started, a reporter on the Financial Times called him. Owen Dorsey had got his number from Julius. Julius was still in Russia but was thinking of leaving too – not for the house in Bulgaria, which was no longer mentioned, but to work for his father’s investment firm.