The country was burning. Every evening, the television news ran footage of fire devouring crops, bushland and dwellings. Galina saw kangaroos in a frantic leaping from the fury; wombats, echidnas and bandicoots were incinerated in the undergrowth. As for the sheep and cows corralled in paddocks, the poor creatures did not stand a chance.

Her fear of fire was an inherited terror. Her mother had lived through the siege of Leningrad: nine hundred days with the Germans at the gate, no water, no food, no electricity, and death perpetually on the prowl. Lidiya was just thirteen when it began. The cold of those winters was excruciating, she said. People broke up furniture, they broke up buildings, they broke up paintings and pianos to feed the stove; and the cruelty of it was you were never warm. Later it became even more difficult, not simply because of the scarcity of timber, but strength also was in short supply. Starvation, her mother said, shrivels not only the body but also the will.

And then came the fires you didn’t want. They broke out in the kommunalki, small fires that spread through the dry crackling rooms and passageways. And outside, in a macabre and terrifying light, the constant shelling and incendiary bombs whipped up towering conflagrations all over the city. Leningrad was burning, and there was neither strength nor water to douse the flames. The siege ended, the war finished, Lidiya grew up, she married and bore a child, but her terror of fire died only when she did. There was ample opportunity for her daughter to inherit the fear.

‘There are no fires in the High Country at the moment,’ Andrew said as he packed the car. ‘And none en route either. I’ve checked.’

At last they were going to the mountains. It had been Andrew’s idea they go in summer. Galina had laughed. ‘An alpine resort without snow. What would we do?’

He suggested hiking, picnics, reading, staring into the wild blue yonder, but it was his mention of a temperature a good ten degrees cooler than in the city that convinced her. She had adapted to Australian English, she’d adapted to the food, she’d even adapted to the mysteries of private enterprise, but she doubted she would ever adapt to the Australian heat.