This was surely because it was so tragic: in Hélène’s mind it was transformed into a kind of mournful, poetic dream. In spite of herself she felt carefree, distant, light, free; she was ashamed, but thought, ‘Now that the poor woman is gone, nothing they can do will ever be able to hurt me.’

She went back to stand beneath the windows of the little sitting room, enjoying the sensation of wading through the hard, thick snow that crunched softly. A lamp covered in a piece of red cloth lit up the room. The woman in black who had called out ‘Fred!’ was now quietly playing a waltz. Her young husband leaned in towards her and kissed her shoulder. A feeling of mysterious poetry, of sweet exhilaration, rushed through Hélène. She jumped off the pile of snow where she sat perched, and they must have seen her little silhouette disappear into the night. The woman leaned forward and smiled; the young man laughed, then shook his finger at her. She ran away, her heart pounding joyously, laughing quietly, for no reason, simply out of pleasure at hearing the forgotten sound of laughter echo through the night.

2

The border had not yet been closed, but every train seemed as if it would be the last. Each trip to St Petersburg was an amazing feat, an act of madness and courage. Yet Bella Karol and Max went back every week on some different pretext, for they were never as happy anywhere as in the empty house in St Petersburg: Boris Karol was stuck in Moscow, unable to get away. The Safronovs had left the Caucasus, but Max didn’t know whether they had managed to reach Persia or Constantinople. At the beginning of December he received a letter from his mother begging him to come to her, saying she was alone, old and ill, complaining that he had abandoned her ‘for that horrible woman’. ‘She’ll be your undoing,’ she wrote. ‘Be careful. I’ll die without ever seeing you again. You love me, Max. You won’t forgive yourself for ignoring how I’m begging you. Come back to me, do everything you can to come back to me.’

But he had delayed his departure until finally it was impossible to cross southern Russia, as it was occupied by the White Army. The day he learned this he had gone into Bella’s room. Ignoring Hélène, who was also there, he said, ‘I have a feeling that I’m never going to see my family again. You’re all I have left in the world.’

When they went to St Petersburg, Max and Bella left Hélène behind, vaguely relying on others to look after her, in particular Zenia Reuss, the young woman she’d seen that first evening, and an elderly woman named Madame Haas, who said, when talking about Bella, ‘That creature a mother? The caricature of a mother more like!’

Several different groups of people lived together in Finland; they were on good terms with each other, like passengers caught in a storm, bonding regardless of social class or wealth: Russians, Jews who came from ‘good families’ (the ones who spoke English together and followed the rites of their religion with proud humility), and the nouveaux riches, sceptics, free thinkers with masses of money.

In the evening they all gathered in the shabby little sitting room. The card players sat round a bridge table; they were always the same people: the fat Salomon Levy with his pot belly and scarlet neck, the Baron and Baroness Lennart, Russians of Swedish origin who were both tall, thin, pale and half hidden in a cloud of their own cigarette smoke. The Baron had a soft, hushed voice and the affected, gentle laugh of a young girl, while his wife spoke with the harshness of a grenadier; she told risqué stories, drank a small decanter of brandy every night, but automatically crossed herself every time the Lord’s name was spoken, without pausing for breath.

Madame Haas’s elderly husband was also there, a blanket thrown over his shoulders: a fragile man with a weak heart, he had a bluish puffy swelling under his eyes, the sign of the slow death eating away at his flesh. He played cards while his wife sat next to him, gazing at him with the look of anxiety, hope and bad temper unique to people responsible for caring for someone they love who is terminally ill; occasionally she would look away, briskly lifting her head above her pearl ‘dog collar’ and aiming her lorgnette at anyone in sight. The servants lit the gas lamps. The young women sat on uncomfortable little bamboo settees, flimsy and creaky, embroidering doilies. Madame Reuss was one of them. When the other women talked about her they said, ‘She’s beautiful …’

After a moment of silence they added, ‘She has a charming husband …’

Then they would slowly shake their heads and with a spontaneous, indulgent smile hovering on their lips and the secretive, proud, scandalised, hypocritical expression of women who know more than they are saying, they would murmur, ‘That Fred, he’s such a devil …’

Fred Reuss was thirty years old yet looked extraordinarily young; he had shining, playful dark eyes, a lively, mischievous expression and white teeth. Just like the children, he never sat still, always ready to leap up, skip away, never able simply to walk round a chair if he could jump over it, running and playing in the snow with his sons, while his calm, serious, beautiful wife watched him and smiled with maternal tenderness.