During one of his obligatory evening calls, she pleaded ill-health and demanded that he return home.

It was a demand. He had to obey.

In a fit of passion and self-mortification, probably after dipping into Dostoevsky, Mum packed her bags, and with only the name of the city to go on, she went in search of him. In Moscow, cut off from the influence of his mother and the shallow waters of Slovyansk, he had become another man. Upon his return, he even dared to push back against Grandma, complaining that she had ruined his life. In response, she placed him in front of the mirror. He realised he had become just like her: helpless, old and in need of love. Him! Him! Him a prisoner, sentenced to a life of love and honourable duty to another. He might even have thought of turning it into a novel, but Grandma yelled and keened: “Off you go then, off to your frump, go back to your Moscow and leave me here alone, me who sacrificed her life for you, who starved so that you might become a man!”

Once again he hit the bottle, although not to the point of needing rehab.

Mum found him. He opened the door and tried through the fog of a severe hangover to work out who was in front of him. It took him a few seconds. “God, Natasha, what are you doing here?” His admirer stood on the landing, her hair loosened. He staggered aside in confusion and watched as she lugged her suitcase into the hallway. No help from him, of course. That’s how she told the story.

I don’t know if he was in love with her then. What I do know is that Grandma was livid. “Insolent hussy!” she shouted. “Get out or I’m fetching the broom! It’s all down to you that he’s drunk and in this state.” She reached for the broom. She would not hear of Mum staying. God, what a woman.

Mum backed down, but she was determined to fight. Dad had no clue what to do. He asked her to wait while he wore Grandma down; he bought time, he avoided dates. She was startled by his transformation. Not long before he had appeared to her as this defiant, unacknowledged genius. She stayed at a student dormitory with some acquaintances and went out of her mind with love for him. She bounced off the walls coming up with plans of action. She held vigil at the local newspaper where he freelanced and at the doorway to his flat. She hit peaks and troughs. In the evening, she’d decide it had come time to leave; by the morning, the hunt resumed. She got a hold of books and would leave them in a string bag on the doorknob of his flat. Good books. When he returned home, he lifted them off the handle and hid them in a cupboard where Grandma wouldn’t see them.

Her dormitory companions thought she was mad. When his indifference really got to her, she cut out pictures of his face and pasted them onto the bodies of saints in holy pictures and hung the collage from the pendant light.