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Ashburner, when he had recovered. ‘Do you suppose they’re your average man in the street?’
    ‘Lumber men, oil men, collective farmers,’ Bernard said. ‘Ukranians, Georgians, Armenians – take your pick. They’re probably here on a convention.’ He stood up.
    ‘Where are you going?’ asked Enid.
    He didn’t answer her, but began to pace up and down in front of the swing doors, slapping his hip at intervals.
    ‘I keep thinking about my hat,’ said Ashburner. ‘I shall catch pneumonia without it. It’s below freezing out there.’
    ‘It was a nice hat,’ Enid said. ‘You suited it.’ She watched Bernard go into the hall and then ran after him.
    Ashburner wondered whether this was an opportune moment to discuss the sleeping arrangements. He realised it was too much to hope for that the Artist’s Union might accommodate Nina and himself in the same room. Photostat copies of the inner pages of their passports had been sent off to Moscow weeks in advance, though it did seem that neither Mr Karlovitch nor the interpreter had studied them very closely. Perhaps they had been mislaid along with the authorisation papers. ‘If we’re not actually in the same room,’ he said, ‘do you want me to come to you, or would you prefer it the other way round? We ought to work out some sort of signal and synchronise watches.’
    ‘We haven’t got any watches,’ Nina said. ‘And we may not even be on the same floor. I’m certainly not scampering along any draughty corridors in the middle of the night. I still feel ill, you know.’
    He was so filled with impatience and longing that all his movements became brusque and uncoordinated. He knocked a cruet to the carpet and held Nina’s hand so tightly that she winced. He said silly things to her, such as that he’d take care of her and make her feel better. She leant her head on his shoulder and told him she wasn’t making any promises. He was happy at the way she rested against him but alarmed at the prospect of a sleepless night spent waiting for her to summon him to her bed. He was nearly fifty years old and it had been a long day. He stared at a gilt dragon whose mouth belched lacquered flame, and stroked Nina’s hand. Please God, he thought, let my wife be sitting in the warmth, not out driving in the traffic. He didn’t imagine she’d bother to put a match to the fire he had prepared the night before. In her view, fires were dirty things, blackening the ceilings and contaminating the atmosphere. She preferred her central heating. All through his married life he had cut kindling and hauled buckets of coal. He didn’t know why it was that the sight of flames leaping up the chimney aroused such feelings of happiness within him; it wasn’t as if he were a miner’s son. In the cottage on the beach at Nevin, when the children had been put to bed, he had twisted strips of newspaper together to make firelighters. His wife had stood in the open doorway and shaken sand from the bath-towels. He had listened to the slap of waves on the shingle as the tide came in, and humming to himself had fashioned his twists of newspaper and his lumps of coal into an almost perfect pyramid in the apron of the grate. Even then, over twenty years ago, his hair had been receding; unlike the sea, it had never returned.
    ‘About my hat,’ he said. ‘Do you think Enid’s taken it?’
    Nina sat up and looked at him.
    ‘She did say she liked it,’ Ashburner said. ‘Being light-fingered, I don’t expect she could help herself.’
    ‘You seem to have formed a very low opinion of her,’ said Nina, startled. He protested that it was she who had put the idea into his head by mentioning on the aeroplane that Enid wasn’t altogether honest.
    ‘She cheated at algebra, for God’s sake,’ cried Nina.
    After an unhappy silence she informed him that she was going to see what Bernard was up to. She didn’t want him unsettling Olga Fiodorovna. The poor girl had enough on her plate; she