He shook his head. ‘No. We’re what we in Australia call middle class.’ He paused before adding, ‘It’s a government high school for boys.’

She gazed up at Andrew’s school, and felt a twist of envy — nothing to do with the grandeur of the place, it was its mere presence. She couldn’t pass a school and say ‘That’s the school I attended’; she couldn’t identify an apartment building and say ‘That’s where I grew up’. She couldn’t point to the granite embankments of the Neva where she watched the ships, or the Tauride Palace where she went for the children’s concerts. Without her own landmarks, her Soviet self, still so dominant in her, became impossible to share with others, and what they saw was an amputated version of who she believed herself to be. There were times when she felt a stranger even to herself.

Leningrad landmarks, experiences and friends explained who she was and how she had come to be this way. Forced to live detached from all that had formed her, she had tried so many ways of melding her Russian experience of self with the Australian one she was struggling to construct. After a while, she suspected her Russian connections were somehow sabotaging the nascent Australian ones. So a few months ago, like a pumice applied to calluses on the feet, she had rubbed and scraped at her Russianness. She rationed her time with other emigrés, she shed most of her Soviet clothes, she restyled her Soviet hair, she applied less make-up to her Soviet face, she removed throatiness from her Australian speech and installed articles into her English sentences. She shed, she rubbed, she scoured until she was sure that if she were seen walking in the street or shopping at the supermarket, she would be taken for an Australian.

All of it had been futile. A year after arriving in Australia, and nearly two years since leaving Leningrad, she was coming to believe that home was to identity as blood was to the body. Yes, she had her own home at the saddlery, a domicile, a physical sanctuary; but home in the sense of identity, home in the sense of belonging, still eluded her here in Australia. She felt adrift in some never-never land, caught between the familiar yet no longer possible, and the new and far-from-secure.