The first object her fingers encountered was Dr Linz’s Venus Apparatus. The rubber perished at her touch. Her hand closed next on a sheaf of paper. Sheet music for “On the Promontory”! She threw back the score.

Two hours later, at twelve-thirty, she tottered onto her balcony. “Señor Consul General! Look!”

She beckoned Wavery from the chair where he had been reading, to the wall. “Forgive me, I didn’t wish to disturb your reading. I can see it must be very important, but I had to show you these.”

“By all means, señora.”

“If you will join me, we can look at them together over a drink. I can explain them to you. Do you like vodka?”

“That’s kind of you, señora. I would like so much to say yes. But I do need to go out.”

Genia Ortiz looked at Wavery. He was so polite, so considerate, so unlike Tromso. She was reluctant to let him go. A brilliant idea inspired her. “Then why don’t I show them to you now? Can you see?” Five feet away she held up a blurred rectangle.

“Wait, I’ll get my other glasses,” and Wavery went indoors, hoping by some miracle that she would have disappeared by the time he returned to the terrace.

“A portrait of myself at thirteen.” She stretched a hand towards him over the gulley. Wavery looked down at the dustbins thirty feet below. He accepted the ancient black and white photograph.

“How very pretty,” said Wavery. He turned it over. The photographer’s name was stamped in violet on the back. A. Vyotsky photographe de la cour de S.A. Imperiale Alexandra S.

“My mother insisted on the retouched pupils.

“Myself, a year later.” Sharing a joke with Prince Orlov, who always carried a thousand roubles in his pocket and considered it bourgeois not to decant vodka.

“The prince with his morganatic wife.” A founder member of the Kiev Temperance Society.

“My mother.” Ravishing, at the ball of the coloured wigs given by Stolypin’s niece, a collector of menus. If only Stolypin had lived!

“My father.” The cavalry officer, a melancholy study in damp elkskin breeches, already suspecting their age was under the gavel.

Wavery returned the photographs one by one. Like Penny, Genia Ortiz seemed to require of him a response he was unable to give. “Marvellous,” he said, but her images had unleashed in him an awful romantic despair.

She continued dealing. The photographs of Balnasharki lay at the bottom of the stack. They had been taken by Vyotsky’s rachitic assistant on a cold afternoon before Christmas. He had trimmed the edges with pinking scissors and written at the foot of each Balnasharki, January 1917, the date they were developed. He smelled of carbolic soap and his camera lens was scratched. Each print was marked in the bottom left-hand corner by two long white lines, one above the other like the wires of a fence. Her father had objected to this recurrent imperfection. Peevish, raising his voice, as straight as the cleft in his chin, he succeeded in reducing Mr Vyotsky’s bill.