Tsars, anarchists, divine rule. It’s all so remote from 1930s London. Religion will decline, Vincenzo thinks, and some form of socialism will be the answer everywhere: rational economic planning and an end to the curse of unemployment. There’s no reason nowadays that anyone should go hungry. He gets up to reload the Imperator.

‘So you were in Saint Petersburg when the Tsar was killed?’

‘By chance, I was,’ the old man says. ‘I was visiting my cousin, Osip.’

I’m tempted, naturally, to put Nicolas at the scene of the assassination, have him perhaps minister to the dying butcher’s boy – a real character, incidentally, who figures in eyewitness accounts.

But Nicolas – now, at almost twenty-three, I think he merits his full first name – is at the offices of Novosti that day, the newspaper his cousin edits and for which he sends regular reports from Paris. Sales of the last two books were slow. Nicolas feels the envious glances of the paper’s younger staff, but he can’t pay the rent with those. ‘I loved your piece on Plevna,’ one young man tells him, a bit too eagerly. ‘And the profile of Skobelev. What a man! How well did you get to know him?’

That was three years ago, Nicolas thinks. What about the comic sketches of Paris life? The articles about the United States? What about the big think piece on the ten-year anniversary of the Commune that he slaved over for months?

Osip’s apartment is a short walk from the office and the cousins head there for lunch. ‘Irina nags me. New carpets at home. But she’ll be delighted to see you, of course.’

After Haussmann’s boulevards, the Tuileries, the mild south, it’s hard for Nicolas to summon up great enthusiasm for Saint Petersburg, which strikes him now as a demented Russian vanity project – a tyrant’s idea of rationality and elegance. Osip hums an anxious trumpet voluntary as he picks his way past the black puddles of melted slush. He is thirty-four, but looks older: paunchy, balding, henpecked. He calls out to his wife as he opens the apartment’s inner door. ‘Sweetheart! It’s me.’

Big, handsome rooms, but all in disarray. The shutters are closed, fireplaces dark. The cold and cheerless place smells of ink and sour milk. Osip seems not to notice. He is an intellectual, Nicolas thinks, and resides principally in the lofty book-created space inside his head.

Irina lies on a divan pulled right up to the single tiny fire, wearing a dressing gown, nursing a baby. ‘You said you’d be home at twelve. The soup’s cold. Hello, Nicolas.’

Osip manages to work his face into a smile that produces deep lines on his forehead. He kisses his wife’s hair. ‘Soup! Excellent!’ He dishes out two bowlfuls from the tureen. It is, as Irina warned, barely warm. With a single cautionary glance, Osip advises Nicolas against saying anything.