Throughout the feast his mother waited on us with embarrassing anxiety to please, bringing new dishes, removing empty ones, watching us, fussing around, gently urging us: ‘Yest! Yest! Eat! Eat!’ Sasha, though clearly devoted to her, did nothing to help, but ate and drank to keep up with Rick and me.

By the later stages of the meal, the vodka had got to all three of us. Sasha was gabbling away about how his brother, a taxi driver, had made millions of roubles from illegal sales of booze in the period when Gorbachev tried to bring alcoholism under control. ‘It was a kind of prahibeetion,’ he kept saying. ‘Everyone was crazy for vodka.’

‘You mean booze was banned altogether?’ said Rick incredulously.

‘Not absolutely. But rationed. One half-litre of vodka a week – that was all.’

‘Why, though?’

‘Russian people were drinking all day, all night. They were falling down in street, running over by cars. They couldn’t work. Very many died. Alcohol was our national disease.’

‘And did the prohibition have any effect?’

‘Konechno nyet! Black market was immense.’

Rick began to converse freely with Lyudmila in Russian. I sat listening, smiling genially at everyone, but my spirits were sinking. Once again guilt was clawing at me.

After many entreaties, we finally persuaded Lyudmila to join us for tea, and she sat at the other end of the table, obviously pleased that we had enjoyed ourselves, but still watching anxiously for any possible deficiency in her arrangements.

Suddenly Sasha raised his glass and shouted, ‘Your Queen!’

‘The Queen!’ we echoed, slurping champagne.

‘My mother, she say your Queen is beautiful woman.’

‘Thank you!’

‘My mother is big monarchic.’

‘Monarchist.’

‘Yes – big monarknik. She make beautiful book of royal peoples.’ He switched into Russian, asking Lyudmila to fetch her prize tome. With a show of simulated reluctance she got up, opened a drawer and produced a large, cheap scrapbook carefully jacketed in tissue paper, which she laid on the table for our inspection. The pages contained dozens of photographs cut from newspapers and magazines, almost all to do with England, but including a few of Tsar Nicholas II and his family, taken in the last few months of their lives before they were executed by the Bolsheviks in 1918. Towards the end, the cuttings went fast-forwards, and pride of place inevitably was accorded to Diana, Princess of Wales.

‘Such kind of tragedy,’ Sasha kept saying, repeatedly translating a remark of his mother’s.

‘I know,’ I said. ‘But she’d become a bit of a loose cannon.’

‘Excuse me?’

I explained that the phrase was used about people whose actions tended to be unpredictable.

‘Yes, yes,’ said Sasha impatiently. ‘But British people loved her. When she died, they came in millions.’

Lyudmila had gone off on another tack. ‘Something about the Second World War,’ Rick said. ‘Can’t quite get it.’