Then Nikolai looked chastened and swung his coat around her shoulders. Ushering her back in, he declared, ‘We need champagne!’ Weaving his way to the bar, he returned with two flutes, passing one to Paul and raising the other. Noticing Paul’s surprise that Darya was left out, he grinned and said, ‘But that’s why we’re drinking – to the baby!’

The baby? Paul reeled. He looked at Darya, who was now flushed.

‘I’m pregnant,’ she said.

Pregnant – but since when? He did some arithmetic. She wasn’t yet showing, and they hadn’t been together since December. It must have been Nikolai, a conception in January or February, perhaps. Feeling unreasonably betrayed, he wished he could speak to her. At that moment the bell rang and he had to traipse back in. He should have been (according to the itinerary in his phone) eating dumplings with his friends at an Uzbek restaurant. Instead he had to sit through the whole of the second act, trapped in his seat in the bel étage. He was acutely aware of Nikolai putting an arm around his girlfriend, only removing it to clap and call, ‘Bravo, bravo!’

Darya’s father was an affable, donnish type. In a button-down shirt and cardigan at lunch the next day, he held forth on the oil industry in Russia. With a degree from the city’s Mining Institute, he oversaw natural resources in the Northwestern Federal District. He lectured Nikolai on the perils of offshore drilling, which he called ‘a cat in a bag’. For Paul’s benefit, he explained, ‘You never know what you are going to get.’

No kidding, Paul thought darkly. They were at Darya’s parents’ flat for an informal celebration. He took a slug of vodka. Darya was eating determinedly and refusing to meet his gaze. Her mother, in Art Nouveau pinks and greens, had gone into the kitchen where she was making a curd cake.

Talk to me, he wished to say, but Darya wouldn’t meet his eyes. She stared at the TV with its low-volume news of skirmishes in Ukraine. Since he couldn’t break through to her, he drank to pass the time. Before lunch, there had been a lot of tedious baby talk, and a discussion about Miami, which was where Darya wanted to have the baby. Nikolai agreed: American hospitals were superior, no question about it. She was dealing with an agency that could organise it all; it was their mailout that Nikolai had discovered. There was further discussion about Anton, who at some point would be sent to stay with his grandparents, and it jolted Paul to realise that he wouldn’t be needed for much longer.