Then there was the ease and closeness in the Morrow gathering, most evident with the husband and wife, still so loving after more than thirty years together; but it was also there in their grown-up son, and the friend of longstanding. A few hours with these people had unpicked her disturbingly fragile foreigner’s cladding.

There were, she was discovering, so many impossible pairings in the existence of the émigré. While gathered with this family in their home, Galina was soaking up their warmth and closeness while simultaneously being aware of what she was being forced to live without. Warmth and absence; gratitude and loss; resilience and despair. So many impossible pairings. Even émigré and immigrant. To the Soviets she was the former, to the Australians the latter, but to herself she was both. Always this double life: an old Soviet and a new Australian.

Even her work had suffered in the wake of the Morrow dinner. The current batch of sewing designs should have been finished last Friday, but following a nervy phone call to her boss, the deadline had been extended beyond the weekend to the end of business today. Even so, with two entire pattern packets not yet started, she worried she’d miss the new deadline. It would help if she could eat, but food had turned hostile. Her stomach ached and groaned, as if it had been invaded by a typhoon — or a Leningrad wind.

And suddenly she was laughing, the movement stretching muscles stiffened by misery. A Leningrad wind blustering in from the Gulf of Finland, this scourge of Petersburgers had blundered into her Australian life. The absurdity of it, the absurdity of her circumstances. And from one moment to the next, the breath went out of her misery. ‘Enough,’ she said aloud to the empty room. ‘You need to grow a thicker skin.’

Misery comes so easily, she was thinking, but being so unpleasant, only a fool or a masochist would give it the upper hand. Perhaps all dynamic lives are propelled by paradoxes and uncertainties; after all, perpetual smooth sailing is not a great builder of character.