It sounds like an invitation, and just as she is working out a non-committal response — the last thing she needs is a lonely foreigner dragging her down — the clock tower sounds five. Andrew suddenly stops, checks his wristwatch in the light of a street lamp, and excuses himself.

‘So sorry. I’ve a meeting at 5.30.’ He thrusts a card at her. ‘Sorry,’ he says again. ‘Have to rush.’ He nods at the card. ‘Russian contacts one side, Australian on the other.’

She points him in the direction of the nearest Metro station, and watches him dash to the corner. He pauses, then turns around. ‘Your name?’ he shouts. ‘What’s your name?’

If she hasn’t already been noticed with a foreigner, she certainly will be now.

‘Galina,’ she shouts back. ‘Galina Kogan.’

Nothing matters anymore.

The foreigner disappears from view. She shoves his card into her pocket and continues on her way. Snow is falling more energetically, yet she makes no attempt to hurry. It is as if life without her mother will begin once she is home. Until then, her limbo state will continue.

Most girls of Galina’s age have loosened their attachment to their mother, but since her father vanished twenty years earlier there had only been the two of them. Her paternal grandparents withdrew soon after her father disappeared, and the maternal grandparents, Lidiya’s own parents, were long gone, both of them arrested in the desperate days of 1937 when Lidiya herself was a child.

For years after her father’s disappearance, in the hours before her mother came to bed, Galina would make up stories about him. She needed to explain his absence and, more importantly, she needed to believe in his eventual return. One of her stories had him working on the Russian space program, another saw him based in a remote region engaged in secret weapons work; one of her favourites made him the admiral of a submarine whose mission was to stay below the surface for several years. She would imagine his joyful homecoming, his pride in her schoolwork and his praise for her art, and she imagined most especially his promise never to go away again. Day after day, month after month, year after year, she fantasised how happy the three of them would be: mother, father and daughter together again. While she and her mother were still living at the kommunalka, she used to imagine that on his return her father would be rewarded for his secret work with a flat for his family: a kitchen, bathroom and toilet all to themselves. As it happened, when she and her mother were finally allocated their own flat soon after her twelfth birthday, she was so worried her father wouldn’t find them, she didn’t want to move. It took considerable persuasion on Lidiya’s behalf to convince her that, should her father turn up, the authorities would be sure to tell him their new address.