‘No, you’re not. What have you done to your hand?’ He lifted it up for inspection and she flinched and cried out. He parted her fingers to examine them. ‘Can you move them? If you can’t they might be broken.’

‘I fell on them when I left the theatre. It’s just bruising.’

He put his head on one side. ‘You fell, you said?’

‘Yes.’

‘Must have been a nasty fall. Wait in the sitting room, I’ll bring you something.’

She did as she was told and heard him shooing the children into their bedrooms with instructions to undress. She glanced down at her hand lying in her lap. Two of the exposed fingers were swollen to twice their size and a purple bruise mottled her thumb.

Petr entered with a glass of brandy. ‘Drink.’

She did as she was told and took a grateful mouthful.

He sat down beside her. ‘You’d better tell me.’

His proximity felt menacing. She closed her eyes and it flashed back.

The finger inside her… somehow so much worse than the penis. The pain of her hand. The terror and the disgust. The humiliation of her half-naked body.

The telephone rang. Petr raised a questioning eyebrow. ‘Should I answer it?’

‘Let’s enjoy the brandy.’

It rang for half a minute. From her bedroom, Eva shouted, ‘Stop it!’

‘She doesn’t like the noise,’ said Petr.

The telephone went silent.

‘Next time,’ said Peter, ‘and there will be a next time, I must answer it before it makes Eva feel worse.’

She arranged her hand on her thigh. ‘I am going to leave,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’

It alarmed her that he didn’t seem more surprised. ‘Are you going back home? You must let me arrange your ticket back to England.’

Thumps could be heard in the other room. The children were playing tag.

‘Yes. No, that’s very kind but not necessary.’

‘Where then? Have you got a new job?’

‘Actually, I have.’

‘You didn’t think that I could be trusted to protect you?’ That was the first admission that she had had from Petr of his influence behind the scenes. He spoke with authority and she wondered what it had taken to achieve that inner certainty. ‘When a country reaches a certain maturity, it is prepared to tolerate some dissent. Rock concerts being among them. It’s a question of how they are handled.’

She cradled her hand. ‘I want to thank you and Eva. You’ve been very generous…’

How long before the telephone rang? Five minutes? Three?

‘… I hope you feel that I was of use to you and the family.’ She licked her lips which had gone dry. ‘To Eva.’

Petr’s stillness was alarming. ‘I thought better of you,’ he said eventually. ‘It’s no light thing to leave an employer in the lurch. Especially when they have been good to you.’