Her desk was constructed from a door suspended between two banks of shelves, and it was here she was working, just after eight in the morning, drawing slender female figures. These illustrations would be used on packets of sewing patterns sold to the home seamstress. It amused her that a Soviet girl was bringing fashion to Westerners, a Soviet girl moreover, who was a hopeless seamstress. The current crop of patterns depicted the new season’s fashions, the ‘new season’ referring not to the summer about to begin, which if today’s weather was any guide had already begun, but rather summer 1988, more than a year away.

She had the whole morning to finish the current batch of sewing patterns before leaving for her other job, her real estate job — in the middle of a day, she suddenly realised, when the temperature was expected to be in the mid-thirties.

‘Today will be a stinker,’ she said aloud, indulging in the earthy Australian vernacular that both confused and delighted her. She regarded Australian English as an outlaw form: much like the saddlery, much like herself.

This would be her second summer in Australia. Last year had been so stupendously hot, she’d viewed the heat with the same fascination as a scientist might the atmosphere on Mars. The saddlery, a low-pitched dwelling shaded by taller two-storey buildings, fortunately remained quite cool, and despite today’s heat she was wrapped in her mother’s shawl, and her feet were snug in Lidiya’s old tapochki.

Her place was located in Carlton, the area she had chosen during her time in Rome for her Australian home. Carlton was on the opposite side of Melbourne from where most other Russian émigrés lived, and where she herself had stayed for the first several months in Australia. She had been tempted to remain there, with people she knew and among streets that had grown familiar, but the decision to live in Carlton had been made, and she was determined not to change her mind.