Galina hung up the phone. What on earth had she done? She should have waited, as she had numerous times before, waited for the loneliness to ease. Be a Russian, she had told herself, seek out what you need. What about Russian resilience? She should have gone for a walk, she should have forced herself to work, she should have telephoned Zara or one of the Soviet Jews. Or she could have sought solace at the cathedral — the Catholic or the Anglican, it made no difference; all churches, she had discovered, were havens for the lonely. Surrounded by the glorious windows and the silent statues, she could have settled in a pew and waited for the loneliness to slip into solitude. But she hadn’t gone to the cathedral and she hadn’t worked, she’d been impatient and foolish. She held nothing against Andrew; she was happy to see him, but not as a solution to her weakness.

There were four days to prepare for the visit to the market. Andrew said they could buy food and later make themselves a meal — either at his place or hers, he did not specify. Galina had heard about this market, and expected she would enjoy the expedition, despite the circumstances that had brought it about. But as a novice cook, she would not enjoy cooking with a stranger. Yet when Andrew suggested they prepare a meal together, she had not hesitated. This, she decided, was a measure of her desperation. What on earth had she done?

Two years had passed since her mother had died, two years since Andrew Morrow had toppled her in the street, yet Galina thought she had retained a clear image of him; but at exactly nine o’clock the following Saturday morning she opened the door to a stranger. In her memory his hair had been white-blond and closely cropped, but this man’s hair was golden and fell past his shoulders in lush, Jesus-like waves. And the body, bulked out by the sheepskin jacket he had worn in Leningrad, was now slender, even thin, and he was just a couple of centimetres taller than she was, and not the two-metre man of her memory. He was wearing jeans and a sky-blue, tie-dyed T-shirt, and he was unrecognisable.

He stood outside her door, arms dangling in the awkward space of an Australian greeting. Russians were lavish kissers, and in Italy you shook hands, but here the men seemed at a loss to know how to greet a woman. In exasperation, she held out her hand. He grasped it — gratefully, she thought.