News of her always came to me, with a glint, through the prism of my sister. The two of them met up about once a month, and when Kitty gave her reports she assumed the air of a hard-pressed social worker describing a particularly obstinate case. On the other hand, she was liable, as she spoke, to sudden physical expansions; for minutes on end she lost her slenderness, her meagreness, and swelled with possibilities… Often reaching for her inverted commas, Kitty had me know, for instance, that Zoya had ‘fallen in love with “a wonderful choreographer”’, that Zoya had been ‘swept off her feet by “a marvellous costume-designer”’. Over the years her menfriends seemed to decline in both calibre and staying-power. I prepared myself for the era of the wonderful prop-shifter, the marvellous ticket-puncher, and so on. But as the old decade turned into the new, two things happened, and Zoya changed. She turned fifty-three and buried her mother in the course of the same week. And Zoya changed. Early in 1981 she told Kitty, very quietly, that she had accepted a proposal of marriage.