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She said they were a more honest bunch of crooks than some she had met. She had a feeling that they ‘knew what was going on’. This was not true, she added disapprovingly, of the rest of the idiots in this bloody country. She had left Odessa with one of Dr Cornelius’s patients, an aristocratic liberal who had been holidaying there. When their affair ended she had fallen in with the radicals, whom she found amusing and, as she put it, ‘good sports’. She also had an eye, I believe, to the future, but her taste in men, together with her sense of humour, would often bewilder me. I am the first to admit, however, that I have never understood many jokes and that her taste was to serve both of us well in the years which followed.

She told me that I was looking ‘peaky’ and if there was anything I needed in the way of grub I should ask her. She had a few contacts. I said I was eating better than most. I was studying hard for my examinations. She wished me luck. She said that she regretted she had not stayed at school, but there had not been much point ‘in the Dale’. She referred, I learned, to Notting Dale, her birthplace. She had later moved to Whitechapel where she had ‘met a lot of Russians’. These Russians were actually Jewish immigrants fleeing the pogroms. When Mrs Cornelius suggested we go ‘somewhere quieter’ so that I could tell her how I was getting on, I was reluctant to accompany her. I had been picked up by too many women during that period. I had become sated and wary, even of her. A whore asked only which part of her anatomy would be required; whether one wished to stay the whole night for an extra rouble or two. Moreover, I was not always charged by the whores. For a few days I lived completely free at a whorehouse near one of the main canals. I could have stayed there longer if I had not needed to return to school.

I said I needed an early night. She laughed. ‘Don’t we all? I’ll see yer abart, Ivan.’ She patted my arm and got up to return to her party. I immediately regretted not taking her up on her offer. I do not believe, now, that it was sexual. She had wanted exactly what she had said she wanted, a quiet chat.

My friends congratulated me on my ‘conquest’ and one of the well-bred beauties leaned over and asked me loudly what ‘the English whore is like in bed’. Offended, I left The Harlequinade’s Retreat.

* * * *

The autumn term was remarkable only because we were allowed to wear hats, scarves and greatcoats in classes. There was no fuel allocation for heating the Polytechnic. The lectures were if anything duller than ever. As the world grew colder, life took on an entropic aspect. Social energy was running down. Within the first week of my return to the Institute the steam-trams were replaced by horse-trams. These were driven by haggard, pallid figures swathed in dark felt and serge from whose heads thin white fumes occasionally escaped. The men had been brought from retirement and were like the coachmen of the dead. Their horses, lean, sickly beasts, would eventually fill the stomachs, perhaps, of orphans - the first bezhprizhorni - who now swarmed about the railway stations and filled the parks. Displays of pomp and glory continued. We were advised to suffer all our discomforts because the War was almost won. More and more wounded men appeared on the streets. The theatres thrived, but many restaurants could not find enough food to make it worthwhile remaining open. Even Donan on the Moika Canal, that favourite of the jeunesse dorée and the Apollon group (who shared the building) had to close at lunch-time and became more of a bar than a restaurant. The sturgeon in mushroom sauce, the white partridges with klufka jam and bilberries, the other delicious Donan specialities, gave way to horse-meat in sauces which could not disguise the unpalatable odour of what Kolya called ‘long cow’. We would joke: recommending the ‘stuffed sparrow’ or the ‘Chat Meunier’, not quite realising what was to come. Together with the orphans and the wounded in the streets came a plague of rats. Newspapers reported the ‘scandal’ and suggested they originated from foreign ships, but the wild dogs and cats, released by owners no longer able to feed them, were unquestionably our own. In not much more than a year the same people who had let them go would be hunting them again for the pot. It would be like the days of the Paris Commune.