‘It’s wonderful.’ She hoped she didn’t sound too childishly excited.

‘Good.’

The crowd in the room was thinning. She turned and found herself almost pressed up against him. ‘Where did you learn to speak English?’

‘My father was half-English. He made sure we spoke it together. I might need it, he said.’ Tomas looked at her. ‘I think he was right.’

The vodka was swishing through her. ‘My mother was French. She insisted that we spoke it together. Lucky us. We have two worlds in our lives.’

He frowned. ‘Depends which one you’re in.’ He was silent for a moment. ‘Many hoped that the better world was here. You will want to know why speaking English here can be dangerous? The goons consider it to be the language in which we plot against them.’ He kidnapped Laure’s glass and drained it. ‘What are your impressions? How do we look?’

She sensed it was an important question but was in no state to answer it coherently. She ran her fingers through her hair that – to her dismay – felt sticky with vodka (how did that happen?) ‘What I think is… what I think is that people are not talking about politics but they’re thinking and feeling it with their bodies.’ She frowned. ‘Am I making sense?’

He grinned. ‘Did you know that you look like a baby lioness? Wide-eyed but fierce, with hair that has a life of its own. My English is not that good. Please can you say what you said another way?’

She searched through the tatters of her reasoning powers. ‘You say you’re not allowed to voice certain political thoughts.’ He nodded. ‘So, if people are feeling rebellious about it, they let their bodies do the talking.’ She pointed to a couple writhing in a corner. ‘That’s rebellion.’

‘Lower your voice. Just in case.’

She did so. ‘Don’t you see?’

‘That’s why we need witnesses to how we live here.’ He brushed back a strand of the so-called lioness’s mane and her stomach turned inside out. ‘You’ll go home one of these days and you’ll be able to say what you wish. You can be a witness.’ He leant towards her. ‘In fact, I have chosen you to be a witness.’

What had happened? One minute she had been sitting next to a stranger in a marionette theatre, the next she was being recruited into a resistance.

He looked so serious, with an intense, haunted expression that she knew could destabilize every molecule of her common sense.

She said faintly, ‘Don’t come any closer.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I’ll kiss you.’

Oh, vodka.

‘Stop me, then.’

He placed his lips on her willing, yielding mouth and she felt her body liquify into want and desire.

Oh, goddess vodka.

‘You move fast,’ she said.

‘In this country we have to.’

‘But we don’t know each other,’ she said at last.