“Ziggy Lethbridge?” Ziggy Lethbridge was the proprietor of a coffee shop in Notting Hill who was seeking to open another branch in Belsize Park. He was pudgily boyish and affected a turned-around baseball cap in order to disguise his receding hairline.

“You may call him that. I do not recognize the first name and cannot say the second. But I should warn you that the offer he is making me for this property is becoming more attractive. He has money, and you know what they say in this country—money talks.”

“I don’t say that, Mr. Goncharoff—I haven’t got any.” Lulu laughed, and poured herself a cup of coffee from the pot in the corner of the office.

Mr. Goncharoff looked at her, gravely, from behind his spectacles.

“What will you do, Miss Atwater?” he asked. “If we sell the shop?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Mr. Goncharoff.” Lulu was touched. “You don’t have to worry about me!”

“But I do worry, Miss Atwater. You have been with us for almost a year now, and we regard you as part of the family. Employment is not so easy to come by these days as it once was. If we took your job away from you, what would you do? What do you think, Alexander?”

“Going to sell up the shop, old man?” Sasha Goncharoff, as everyone but his father knew him, loped in to throw an affectionate arm around the older man’s shoulders. Sasha was twenty-eight years old, heavy-featured and lithely sinewy of build. He smoked Gauloises cigarettes, liked to go to nightclubs, and occasionally was visited at the shop by one or another leggily glamorous young woman with whom his exact relationship was never made altogether clear. He was a good-hearted young man who openly loved both of his parents, but there was that about him which made Lulu feel stiff and awkward in his company, as though she were wearing a dress that was supposed to fit her but did not quite.

“And here is the answer to our question,” said Mr. Goncharoff now, slapping his son’s wrist, which looped his neck. “You shall marry my reprobate son here, you shall exert your good influence to stop his wild ways, and, at last, when Irena and I are gone, you shall inherit the untold-of wealth of the legendary Goncharoff fortune. What do you say, Miss Atwater, will you consider it?”

Lulu smiled, a little nervously. It was a joke of which Nikolai Goncharoff was fond, not least, she sometimes suspected, because it made both of its subjects uncomfortable.

“Hi, Sasha,” she said. “Maybe we should just do it and get it over with, to get some peace?”

Sasha only smiled back, his eyes not quite meeting hers.

Lulu sipped at her coffee, trying not to feel foolish: she had never been able to banter with young men. With other girls, she knew, Sasha was able to laugh and be flirtatious, but when talking to her, for some reason, he became every bit as awkward as she was.