She crossed to her work area, switched on the lamp, and laid out her materials exactly as she would have back in Leningrad. Her Australian table was larger than her old one, but with a similar pale wooden surface; her art materials were much the same, although far easier to come by here. Of course the work was different, but she’d adapted to that. The most significant and disturbing difference was Lidiya’s absence. In the evenings, after days spent in their respective jobs, the two of them would work, Galina at her table and, an arm’s length away, Lidiya. They were well aware that their sixteen-hour days revealed a work ethic that was not typically Soviet — with the obvious exception of the black market, which operated at full throttle around the clock. The old joke You pretend to work, we pretend to pay you still elicited, if not a laugh, then a knowing groan.

She had almost finished one of the pattern packets when the phone rang. So engrossed had she been, it took a moment for her to surface, and the caller had to repeat himself.

It was Leonard Morrow.

After a brief greeting, he launched into the purpose of his call. ‘I don’t know if you’re needing extra work, but if you are, I might have something for you.’

His company was in the process of putting together a new catalogue. They would be using photographs for the actual products, but they were wanting some illustrations of library scenes as well. ‘To provide a more creative aura.’ He paused to pull on his cigarette. ‘Might you be interested in doing the illustrations?’

With the sewing patterns and her real estate job, Galina was earning enough to meet her needs and save a little as well. Nonetheless, she worried that a slump in real estate would see her out of that job, and the new computers might render her obsolete in the sewing-pattern business. So she thanked Leonard for thinking of her, told him that yes, she was interested, and arranged to meet him at his office the following Friday. Not that illustrating catalogues for library furniture, for real estate, for any merchandise come to that, was what she wanted as a career. But it was good interim work until she gained an entrée into publishing, and a return to book illustration.

As far back as she could remember, Galina had wanted to be a book illustrator. It was the marriage of words with images in her childhood books that had first ignited her interest. There were books that were all words, and other books that were all pictures, but comparing these with the combined books was the difference between living in a kommunalka and having your own flat, or hearing a single aria as against the entire opera. She knew at a young age that she wanted the flat, she wanted the whole opera.