We rattled along the road before turning at speed into a one-way street populated with new blocks of flats, and I fell forward as the driver stamped sharply on the brake pedal. A line of vehicles was crawling one by one through a police stop point. My driver swore and turned tightly, accelerating away to take another route through narrow backstreets. The police watched but didn’t stop us, probably because we were in a Party car. A stroke of luck. Well, perhaps.

We drove through ruts and past the many trenches where the road was being dug up because the Soviet system of communalized heating was being installed: it would pump hot water from a central station to all the homes in the new tower blocks. It was happening alongside a big overhaul of the telephone network too. First, our lovely old exchange names had been replaced with drab numeric codes: no longer could we ask the operator to connect us with ‘Whitehall 5532’; we had to ask for ‘Exchange 944, Number 5532’. And then residential numbers had changed in readiness for a mass expansion that would see us all connected with one another for the common good.

As we charged past wrecked houses, my mind tumbled with thoughts. One moment I was sure Nick was with her; the next I told myself that Charles was right: he had simply gone for a walk and nothing more.

Still, my fingers were white with tension when we eventually pulled up outside a row of Edwardian townhouses, and I handed the driver a pound note emblazoned with Marx’s grey image. Out in the smog again, I hesitated before pushing the porcelain doorbell button on a house with its plaster cracking away like an old mausoleum. If I pressed it, would she open the door and confusedly ask me why I was on her doorstep? Would she know full well and laugh at me? There was no way of telling. I had to push it home.

A dull ring sounded somewhere inside. I waited.

Nothing. Behind me, a platoon of Young Pioneers marched past. ‘When you salute Comrade First Secretary Blunt, just remember what you all owe him,’ their CO called out. ‘The peace that you live in.’

I tried the bell again. Still nothing.

But then, if Nick were there, they wouldn’t answer, of course. They would be in her room. He would be slipping off her dress.

I looked up and down the street, past the marching Pioneers. And I thought: most of these high houses had rear entrances through which they had once admitted tradesmen: butchers with boxes of fresh meat and soot-crusted chimney sweeps. There would be one for her house.