Galina was watching him, she could see his struggle, but on this topic she would not help. Every Russian knows that art saves lives; poetry, music, novels, paintings, all these have saved lives. A million people died in the siege of Leningrad, but the number would have been even greater if not for poetry. Throughout those nine hundred desperate days, so her mother had told her, Olga Berggolts’s radio broadcasts encouraged with inspiring words and stories, but most of all it was her poetry that sustained the people. Who knows how many more Leningraders would have died in the siege if not for the poetry of Olga Berggolts, she wanted to ask Andrew, who had probably never heard of the siege of Leningrad, much less of Olga Berggolts. And another story from the siege: a young woman, an artist, starving like everyone else, who made herself paint through a long freezing night, knowing that if she didn’t she would succumb to the overwhelming desire to curl up on the floor and let death take her.

This meticulous ability to mute pain — that’s what art can do, and Andrew was denying it. Andrew with his comfortable, fear-free life didn’t know what he was talking about.

Then there was Shostakovich’s life-saving Seventh Symphony first heard in Leningrad during the siege. Andrew probably knew nothing of the great Dmitri Dmitriyevich. The Germans tried to stop the performance, they wanted to silence so powerful a weapon. But they failed and the performance went ahead; recorded and played over the wireless, it energised hundreds of thousands of Leningraders. The Nazis knew what Andrew was now denying: art saves life, art gives life. And the reams of literature circulated in samizdat in the post-Stalinist years — people risked their life for this art because they knew it would make them stronger. And Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem. ‘Can you describe this?’ a woman asked the poet as they stood in the prison lines in Leningrad at the height of the terror. ‘Can you describe this?’ And when Akhmatova said she could, the woman smiled: people would know of these terrible times. Akhmatova’s life was hard. She survived the death of her husband and the imprisonment of her son; she survived censorship and repression; she wrote poetry and she survived.

Galina wondered what had made Andrew say something so demonstrably wrong. Given his own frailties and the fact he was an artist himself, she expected there had been many times when he had turned to art to pull him out of the mire. Of course he must know about the power of art to fortify and save.

At last he was speaking. He was apologising, although not entirely coherently. Then, after another silence, he summoned a fresh breath, heralding a change of topic — a less contentious one, she hoped, or, to use one of her favourite Australianisms, one that was less dodgy.

‘Do you think love can save lives?’ he said.