In one of the bars a short barrel of a man with oiled hair came and placed himself nervously in front of them. He said something in Chinese.

Liev Popkov fixed his eye on the questioner but grunted to Lydia in Russian. ‘He says, who are you looking for?’

‘Tell him the name is not for his ears. Tell him to say to all his…,’ she hunted for the Russian word, ‘… pyanitsam… customers that the girl with red hair was in his bar. She searches for someone.’

Liev frowned at her.

‘Tell him,’ she said.

He told him.

Outside in the street once more, the big man took root, indifferent to the snow flurries that were burrowing into his black beard, and put a hand on her shoulder. It felt like a truck had landed on it.

‘Why don’t you tell his name?’

‘Because it is too dangerous for him, slishkom opasno.’

‘A Communist?’

‘A person.’

‘How will you find him if you will not say his name?’

‘I am here. People talk. He will hear.’

‘And he will know it is you?’

‘Yes. He’ll know.’

Lydia lay in bed fully clothed. Shivering. She couldn’t get the dockland ice out of her bones. They felt as if they were cracking open, and even though she tucked her fingers under her armpits the chill air still managed to spike needles through them. Her old eiderdown was wrapped around her, tight as a cocoon, with every scrap of clothing she possessed draped on top, but still she was cold. The old black stove spluttered. Not that it was short of kerosene. Not now they had Alfred. But the meagre heat coaxed from it was no threat to the breath of the Chinese winter that climbed in through the window each night.

The door to the attic banged open.

‘Blin! Sorry, darling, I didn’t mean to wake you.’

Lydia heard the church clock strike two.

‘I wasn’t asleep.’

‘I’ll just light a candle. Go to sleep now.’

Valentina had gone out with Alfred to a party. She’d been drinking. Lydia could tell by her footsteps. There was the flick of a lighter, a faint glow in the darkness, the noise of a chair dragged across the floor, then silence. Lydia knew what her mother was doing. Sitting in front of the stove. Smoking. She could smell it. And drinking. She knew it. Though Valentina could open a bottle and pour a glass of vodka without a single sound. Still, she knew it.

‘Mama, I saw something bad today.’

‘How bad?’

‘I saw a dead baby. Naked. It was lying in a gutter and a rat was biting off its lips.’

‘Ach! Don’t, sweetheart. Don’t let such things into your head. This God-cursed country is too full of them.’

‘I can’t forget it.’

‘Come here, little one.’

Lydia slid out of bed, still wrapped in her eiderdown, and pushed aside the curtain wall. Her mother was hunched in front of the stove, cigarette in one hand, glass in the other. She was wearing a new fur coat, the dense colour of honey, and her cheeks were flushed.

‘Here, this will make you forget.’ She held out the glass to Lydia.

Lydia took it. Never before had she done so. But now… now she needed… needed something. To help her hold on to the belief that somewhere out there Chang was safe. Her head was drowning. Great suffocating pools of blackness had opened inside it. Faces. They floated to the slimy surface, faces and faces and more faces, Chang’s eyes so wide and watchful and so eager to make her understand, and then came a dead baby with no lips, a Chinese jaw smashed to a pulp, Mr Theo’s huge echoing pupils, and all the street faces full of hatred and spite and venom.

She drank the vodka.

A kick in the gut. Then warmth. It seeped up into her chest and made her cough. She drank again. Slower this time. The black pools were turning grey. She sipped again. It tasted foul. How could anyone like this stuff?

Her mother watched her but said nothing.

Lydia sat down on the floor in front of the stove and Valentina stroked her head.

‘Better?’

‘Mmm.’

Valentina took back the empty glass and refilled it for herself. ‘Do you like my coat?’

‘No.’

Valentina laughed and ruffled the beautiful soft fur. ‘I do.’ Lydia leaned her head back, rested it on her mother’s knee, and closed her eyes.

‘Mama, don’t marry him.’

Slowly and gently Valentina continued to stroke her daughter’s hair. ‘We need him, dochenka,’ she murmured. ‘In this world when you need something, you have to ask a man. That’s the way it is.’

‘No. Look at us. We’ve survived all these years without a man. Between us we managed. A woman can…’

‘That’s balderdash, to use one of Alfred’s words.’ Valentina laughed again, but this time there was no humour in it. ‘It was always through men that I got my concert bookings, never women. Women don’t like me. They see me as a threat. C’est la vie.’

But Lydia heard the loneliness in the words.

‘It is not balderdash, Mama. It’s true. We can manage.’

‘Dochenka, don’t make me mad at your stupidity. Look at yourself. When it’s a rabbit you want, you get it out of Antoine. For a hutch or money, it’s Alfred. Oh yes, don’t look so surprised. He told me you came to him for a few dollars.’

‘It was for… things.’

‘Don’t worry, I’m not prying. In fact Alfred was quite touched by it because you asked him instead of going out and stealing it.’

‘That man is easily pleased.’

‘He said he believed it was a sign of your growing maturity. And of a better sense of morality.’

‘Did he really say that?’

‘Yes.’

‘But, Mama, I ask women for help too. Like Mrs Zarya and Mrs Yeoman, and even Anthea Mason showed me how to bake a cake. You taught me how to dance. And Countess Serova taught me to walk taller.’

Valentina snatched her hand away from Lydia’s head. ‘What?’

‘She told me to hold my…’

‘What in the name of all that’s holy has it got to do with that witch of a woman?’ Valentina threw the vodka down her throat. ‘How dare she? How dare…?’

‘Mama.’ Lydia twisted around to look at her mother, but her face was swathed in deep shadow from the single candle on the table behind her. Only her eyes glittered. ‘Don’t get upset, Mama. She’s not important.’

Valentina drew hard on her cigarette, a bright pinprick of fire, and exhaled fiercely as if she were spitting poison.

Lydia rubbed her cheek against the fur-covered knee. ‘She can’t hurt you.’

Valentina was silent, then stabbed out her cigarette, lit another, and refilled her glass. Lydia felt her own head swirling gently with a pleasant drowsy slowness that made her eyelids too heavy to raise. Behind them Chang’s smile floated in mist.

‘Where do you go these days, Lydochka? After school, I mean.’

‘I go to Polly’s house. We’re working together on a project for school. I told you.’

‘I know you did.’ She drank more of the vodka. ‘That doesn’t mean it’s the truth.’

Lydia almost told her then. Everything. About Chang and his crazy leaps and his foot and his fierce beliefs and the way his mouth curved into a perfect… The drink had loosened her tongue and words were longing to pour out, to tell someone. Someone.

‘Mama, what did your parents say when you married a foreigner? ’

To her horror she felt her mother’s knee start to tremble beneath her cheek and when she looked up, tears were rolling down her mother’s face. Lydia gently stroked the knee, over and over, the fur almost as soft as Sun Yat-sen’s under her fingers.

‘They disowned me.’

‘Oh, Mama.’

‘They had the eldest son of a fine Russian family from Moscow all lined up for me. But instead Jens Friis and I eloped and they cursed us. Disowned me.’ She brushed the tears from her face with the back of the hand that held the cigarette, only just avoiding setting fire to her hair.