‘I was a young twenty-year-old and your employee, and you had promised my mother to take care of me. In those days, I believed what people told me.’ She moved away, picked up the stone on the table and hefted it from one hand to the other. ‘Before I grew up.’

Laure was protesting too much but it was probably calculated. ‘I honoured that promise. I may have been a communist but not a predator.’

‘True. I owe you that honesty.’

Laure’s mother had sent him a letter, via the French employment agency, explaining that, because Laure was grieving for the unexpected death of her father, her daughter was postponing taking her degree to give her a chance to recover. ‘I would ask that, as a responsible family man, you and your wife take care of her.’

‘All the same, knowing your employer fancies you is grim and frightening.’

As yet, he had not worked out what she was driving at.

‘It didn’t stop your affair with Tomas.’

‘Tomas wasn’t grim and he wasn’t frightening.’

Petr winced. ‘In my defence, nor was I.’

At that Laure grinned. ‘Tomas wasn’t old and wrinkled.’

‘You wretch.’

It was the first time she had referred to that past with any humour and the atmosphere eased.

She disappeared and reappeared with a bowl of olives. ‘These are gold dust.’ She placed them on the table, along with a plate of sliced German sausage. Petr tossed an olive into his mouth and bit into it. The taste was bracing and astringent on the tongue.

She sat down opposite him. ‘There’s something that haunts me. I need to know if I ever told you… stuff. Inadvertently? You know when we talked after Eva had gone to bed? Or when we took the children out?’

He found it difficult to recollect those moments: what he had perceived as a growing intimacy, the fact of her physical presence.

He remembered her suppressed excitement on the evenings she went out. Her radiance on returning from Anatomie’s chata. Any fool would have deduced there had been discussions. Sex and politics were a combustible mix, and it didn’t take much to work out their content. ‘A hint here and there.’ Laure bit her lip and sprang upright. ‘Anatomie were known to be dissidents. You were from the West.’ Drink in hand, he gestured towards her. ‘And, in the end, you didn’t trust me to help you get out of Czechoslovakia.’

‘Of course not.’ Laure topped up their glasses and screwed the top back onto the whisky so hard that the bottles rattled on the tray. ‘You had warned me that you wouldn’t. Remember?’

He watched the movement of her mouth – today the lipstick was dusty pink – which so intrigued him. Employing Laure had resulted in his carefully constructed life tipping into jeopardy and it had been very nearly disastrous.