Galina supposes she is suffering from shock, or perhaps this is how grief and mourning feel, and she knows she needs to think about the future, but it’s beyond her at the moment. She glances at the Australian, he really does seem innocuous, and besides, with night falling and the weather deteriorating, there’ll be few people to observe her fraternising with a foreigner. And again it strikes her: she doesn’t care who is watching because she doesn’t care what happens to her now that the worst has happened. She shrugs and nods. It’s permission enough and all she has energy for.

‘Tell me about yourself,’ she says, knowing she’ll manage better if she doesn’t have to speak.

There’s more blushing, and his hands knot together in a white-knuckled grip. He’s clearly very uncomfortable, or perhaps he’s shy. A shy Westerner: it seems such an unlikely combination.

He tells her his name is Andrew Morrow, that he is twenty-five years old, from Melbourne, Australia. He speaks hesitantly, and there’s a long pause before he adds, ‘I’ve come to Leningrad to study mosaics.’

‘You are an artist of mosaics?’

He shrugs. ‘I try to be.’

Of all the artistic students at her gimnaziya, and later at the art college, none had wanted to be a mosaicist, yet mosaic was such a Russian art and, given the Australian’s presence here, clearly famous across the world. He tells her he has been in Leningrad for a month. He says he has permission to view a range of sites, but most of the next three months will be spent with the mosaicists who are restoring the Church of the Resurrection of Christ. ‘The Church on the Spilled Blood, as you call it.’ He pauses. ‘You know it, of course?’

She nods. Like most Petersburgers, she has a special fondness for this great Russian-style church in the centre of Baroque and Neoclassical Leningrad. Resilient, like the Russian people, it has survived against the odds.

He’s looking at her expectantly. What’s she to do? Talk or not talk? And does it make any difference now? And it occurs to her that nothing makes any difference now.

‘This church where you will be working has a chequered history.’ Her throat is dry and she gulps down some air. ‘At one stage it was used as a store for theatre props. Later, during the Great Patriotic War, it was used as a mortuary, and after the war when it was a warehouse for vegetables it became known as “The Saviour on Potatoes”.’ And then a wayward comment escapes. ‘Whether palace, church, or person, we fight for our survival in the Soviet Union.’

The terrible words freeze in the quiet, still air. What on earth is she thinking to speak so carelessly? And to a foreigner, of all people? But then she isn’t thinking. That’s the problem.