There were no shortages where Comrades Burgess and Fellowman ate, that was clear. There were waitresses in black skirts and perfect stockings handing around trays of genuine French Champagne; plates of canapés stacked on tables; food I had never seen even in the pages of an old Vogue I had found in a pile on the floor of our wardrobe. All around it was as if the previous decades had never taken place, and we were still in the roaring twenties. The era of The Great Gatsby and all that excess. I couldn’t help but feel a shade of anger at the hypocrisy.

Burgess and Fellowman weren’t in the room – they had probably been escorted through to a more private place – and Charles was nearby, talking to a tiny man who kept wiping sweat from his head with a handkerchief. Nick was known here too, I found. Within seconds he had been grabbed by a fat Party apparatchik, accompanied by an unhappy-looking young woman, who wanted to know if Nick was treating any of the Politburo and if he had heard anything about the health of Comrade First Secretary Blunt. The tiresome man allowed his jacket to fall open so that we could see a copy of Blunt’s ruby-coloured treatise on our future, The Compass, tucked into an inside pocket. I sighed within myself. Men like this were the most irksome manifestation of the new regime, trying to ingratiate themselves here and intimidate others there.

It was Charles who intervened. ‘Dr Cawson,’ he said, attempting to suppress his excitement as he came towards us. ‘Comrade Honeysette is over there.’

‘So he is. I really must speak to him. Excuse us.’ Nick walked over to the small, sweating man, who was evidently his patient with the connection to Ian Fellowman, leaving me with Charles and the apparatchik.

‘So you’re just married, Comrade Cawson?’ the paunchy man asked me.

‘In May,’ I replied.

‘Church wedding?’ He was trying to sound friendly, not sly.

‘Lambeth Records Office.’

‘Ah.’ My distaste for this man made my stomach turn. But then I realized it was more than that. There was a sharp pain there too. I rubbed it involuntarily. He cocked an eyebrow. ‘Are you hungry? There is so much food here, all proof of the bumper harvests we have had recently.’

Charles volubly agreed. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘It is important to eat well. As Comrade Blunt said himself: we are the thriving muscles of the body politic. Just as the head relies on the limbs for movement, so those limbs rely on the head for …’ His voice drifted away.