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Surrounded by the bustle, the creak of the hauling gear, the putter of the engines, the shouts of the dockers, I found peace. The docks stretched for miles along the Neva. They were one of the few areas not radiating that peculiar atmosphere of terror found everywhere but in the bohemian cafés.

Yet even some of those girls, whose apartments I visited, no longer offered me quite the retreat and escape I had first found. They seemed neither so warm, so carefree nor so soft. The apartments themselves were as comfortable, cut off from the outside world; they still swam with the scent of Quelques Fleurs and were draped with Japanese silks and white towels. The girls broke the unspoken pact, and referred increasingly to their nervousness. Women are more sensitive to the Zeitgeist. They are the first to consider emigration during troubled times and they are nearly always right. They are the first to warn of treachery and cowardice in our ranks. They have this sensitivity, I believe, because they have more to lose than men. Sadly, I was too young to appreciate the feelings of these various Cassandras. I became, instead, impatient with them. I gave up sleeping with intellectuals and girls of good breeding. I sought the company of ordinary whores whose job was to mollify, to console, to keep the world at bay. I think quite a few of us dropped the beauties we had once courted and contented ourselves with brainless, good-natured creatures whose paint, dyes, cheap furs and cheaper satins became increasingly attractive as we grew tired of thinking. Thought meant considering the world and its war. The world was too full of fear to be any longer palatable. Because of this mood, I suspect, my second encounter with Mrs Cornelius did not develop into an amorous affair.

I had heard of the ‘magnificent English beauty’, a favourite of Lunarcharsky and Savinkoff and their radicals, but I had not associated her with the girl I had helped briefly in Odessa. The revolutionaries had their own haunts. It was those with literary or artistic pretensions who appeared infrequently at The Harlequinade.

On 5 September 1916, I saw her again. She was the only female at a table where bespectacled, mad-eyed men in ill-fitting European jackets plotted the reorganisation of the poetry industry. She seemed more than a little drunk. She was dressed in a beautifully cut and simple blue gown. On her blonde hair was a small hat of a kind just becoming fashionable. It matched her dress. It had a cream ostrich feather following the line of her hair and neck, half-curling under her chin. She was drinking the Georgian champagne we were all by that time substituting for the real thing, but she gave every appearance of relishing it. In a holder blending the colours of her hat and her feather, she smoked a Turkish cigarette. Her skirts were lifted a little so that her sheer silk stockings were revealed above blue suede boots. She was the only woman in the café who gave any appearance of enjoying herself. All the others wore the painted smile of the harlot or the nervous grin of the intellectual. I was sure she would not recognise me as I raised a hand. She frowned, sat back, asked something of her fiercely-arguing companion (Lunarcharsky, I think: he had one of those goatee beards they all wore). He looked up, glanced in my direction, shook his head and returned to the fray. I lifted an eyebrow and smiled. She grinned, saluting me with a glass of champagne. I heard her familiar tones drifting through the general din:

‘Ere’s lookin’ at yer, Ivan!’

It was Mademoiselle Cornelius to be sure. I began to rise, to join her. She shook her head and pointed at an empty table. It was close to the stage where the negro violinist squeezed discords from his instrument which would have horrified the maker. She joined me there. She still smelled of roses. She put a friendly hand on my arm with none of the ambiguity I had come to expect from Russian women. ‘Yore ther lad from ‘Dessa, ain’t yer?’ She spoke in her usual English. I bowed and said that I was. She commented that it was ‘a turn up an’ no mistake’. It was an even smaller world than they said it was. She was doing nicely in Peter and had learned ‘Russki’ enough to get by. When she gave me an example, it was perhaps the worst example of grammar and the most romantic accent I had ever experienced. I could see why she had so many admirers. I asked her how she had come to the capital and what she was doing with Lunarcharsky. Did she not know they were all wanted by the police?