‘You can never be sure of that. Look at us!’ His gesture includes them both: a pair of freethinking cosmopolitans with no apparent Jewish heritage.

‘I am sure.’ Her revolutionary broadmindedness surrenders to a blush.

Oh God, thinks Nicolas. She’s seen his cock.

‘You and he are … intimate?’

‘Pierre and I are close friends, but he is faithful to only one mistress.’

And now she’s going to say ‘the revolution’.

*

‘The revolution?’ Nicolas interjects.

‘Exactly.’ She pushes away her empty plate, burps adorably, and bursts out laughing.

‘Lizaveta Gelfman was her name, but she called herself Bessie.’

Notovitch sits silently for a while. The sound of an angle grinder from a plumbing emergency in the room next to where I am writing these words penetrates his reverie. I wonder what extraneous sounds you are battling with. That Theroux, he’s always thinking of his reader.

‘Twenty-three is old for a first love, nowadays?’ muses the old man.

‘It always was,’ says Vincenzo. ‘Surely when you were fifteen or sixteen, there was someone?’

‘Puppy love. That’s not what I’m speaking of. The breathlessness, the sleeplessness, the yearning. The Himalayas of elation and despair. Some people never feel it, you know.’ The old man goes still. He is a husk. His soul is elsewhere, taking refuge in the chamber of memories. When he returns, his voice is subtly altered, softer, mellowed by the recollection of this love. ‘You know, not only did I persuade her I was a sincere revolutionary; looking into her eyes, I almost persuaded myself.’

‘She was a member of Verzilov’s inner circle.’

The revolutionary enthusiasm which seems to arise in Verzilov from innate narcissism, from a Napoleonic urge to crown himself emperor of the world’s dispossessed, has more benign roots in Bessie. With her, it starts as a sincere wish to alleviate suffering. So much misery is avoidable. The planet is rich and fecund. Properly managed, there’s enough for everyone. Progress is not some mystical belief in Utopia, it’s just a series of practical steps: antisepsis, education, drainage, street lighting, universal suffrage, clean water and contraception so that women won’t jeopardise their health from enjoying the one pleasure that belongs to poor and rich alike.

And of course she likes Nicolas too. Something in her has been nurtured to respond to the prospect of a nice Jewish boy from home. Have I mentioned how handsome he’s become? He’s grown into his slightly awkward face. The moustache has darkened and filled out. He has the thoughtful introspective features of someone who misses nothing and thinks deeply. He’s dapper, too. He needs to be: his job means he could be called upon to visit an ambassador, or turn up for a press conference in the Elysée Palace at a moment’s notice.

But as he grows closer in spirit to her, a conventional urge to marry and procreate comes to dominate his other feelings. Bessie is adamantly otherwise. ‘Men and women ought not to live in bondage,’ she says. ‘But we can honour each other with our bodies, if you’d like.’