Father sits in the armchair gripping the armrests and saying nothing.

“Where is she, Pappa?”

He bites his lips together theatrically and stares straight ahead.

“Pappa, for goodness’ sake, I’ve driven all the way up from Putney to try to get you out of this mess you’ve got yourself into, and you can’t even bring yourself to talk to me.”

“You tell me to be quiet, so I am quiet.” He damps his lips together again.

Big Sis marches through every room in the house, slamming doors as she goes. She even looks in the outhouse and the greenhouse. Then she goes back into the room where my father is sitting. He hasn’t moved. His lips are still pressed tight.

“Really, Nadia,” she tells me, “I could quite understand why Valentina threw a cup of water at him. I felt like doing just the same. I suppose he was trying to demonstrate how clever he was.” I say nothing. My lips are clamped tight. I am trying not to laugh. “Of course it was easy to get him talking again. I just asked him about Korolev and the space programme.”

“And what happened in the end? Did you meet Valentina?”

“But I thought she was quite wonderful. So…dynamic.”

Apparently, Big Sis and Valentina got on like a house on fire. Valentina admired Vera’s style and panache. Vera admired Valentina’s up-front sexuality and her ruthlessness. They both agreed that Father is pathetic, crazy and contemptible.

“But the peach pearlised nail-polish? The high-heeled peep-toe mules? The Roller on the lawn?”

“Ah yes. Of course she is a tart. And a criminal. But still, I had to admire her.”

My heart sinks. I have been so looking forward to this confrontation: the Zadchuk matrimonial canon v. Mrs Divorce Expert; the green satin rocket-launcher v. the Gucci handbag. I realise how much I have been depending on Big Sis to take on Valentina. Now I recognise that in some ways they are two of a kind.

“Poor Pappa. I know he’s a bit eccentric, but I wouldn’t call him contemptible.”

“Look at all the trouble he has caused everybody-us, the authorities, even Valentina. In the end, she will realise that she would have been better latching on to somebody else. It would have been better if he could just have said no right from the beginning. He thinks he really is a suitable match for a tarty thirty-six-year-old. If that isn’t contemptible, tell me what is.”

“But she led him on. She flattered him. She made him feel young and sexy.”

“He let himself be flattered, because in his heart he believes that he is rather superior. He thinks he’s so clever he can outwit the system. It’s not the first time he’s done something like this.”

“What do you mean?”

“There are a lot of things you don’t know, Nadia. Did you know, he almost had Baba Sonia sent off to Siberia?”

“I remember a story Pappa told me-it was all about the Ukrainian pioneers of aircraft design. And I remember Mother’s story about how Baba Sonia got her front teeth knocked out.”

After he graduated from the Aeronautical Institute at Kiev in 1936, my father wanted to go to the University of Kharkiv, where Lozinsky and others were pioneering developments in jet propulsion. But instead he was sent east to Perm, in the foothills of the Urals, to teach in a Soviet air force training college. He hated Perm: full of drunken soldiers; no intellectual or cultural life; thousands of miles away from home; thousands of miles from Ludmilla, who was now pregnant with their first child. How to get himself sent home? Nikolai had a cunning plan. He would fail the security check. On one of the reams of forms which had to be filled in, he told the authorities that he was married to an enemy of the people. And just to put himself in an even worse light, he invented an older brother for Ludmilla, a counter-revolutionary terrorist living in Finland, dedicated to the overthrow of the Soviet state.

The authorities could hardly believe their luck. Naturally they wanted to know more about this counter-revolutionary brother. They arrested Baba Sonia and subjected her to several days of intensive interrogation and beatings. Where was this older son? Why was he not mentioned on any of her paperwork? What else did she have to hide? Was she, like her late husband, a traitorous enemy of the people?

Sonia Ocheretko had been lucky to escape in 1930, when her husband was taken away and shot. But those were just the first ripples of the purges. By 1937, the waves of arrests were mounting. Now shooting was too good for the enemies of the people-they were to be sent away to camps in Siberia for corrective re-education through labour.

Aunty Shura came to the rescue. She told the examiner how, as a young trainee doctor, she had travelled to Novaya Alek-sandria in 1912 to deliver her sister’s first baby, my mother Ludmilla. She signed a sworn statement that Sonia Ocheretko had been a primigravida. It helped that Shura’s husband was a friend of Voroshilov.

But Sonia the survivor never recovered from her six days of interrogation. Her forehead was scarred above the eye and her front teeth were knocked out. Her movements which had been quick and lithe became lumbering and painful, and she blinked nervously all the time. Her spirit was broken.

“Of course Aunty Shura threw him out after that. They had nowhere else to go, so they went back to live with Baba Sonia in her flat. Really, it was unforgivable.”

“But Baba Sonia forgave him.”

“She forgave him for Mother’s sake. But Mother never forgave him.”

“She must have forgiven him in the end. She stayed with him for sixty years.”

“She stayed with him for our sake. For you and me, Nadia. Poor Mother.”

I wonder-is this true? Or is Vera projecting her own drama into the past?

“But Vera, does that mean you’re going to sit back and let Valentina abuse our father? Rip him off? Maybe even murder him?”

“No of course not. Really, Nadezhda, I can’t understand how you could want me to sit back and do nothing in such a situation. We have to defend him, for Mother’s sake. Useless though he is, he is still our family. We can’t let her win.”

(So Big Sis is still on board!)

“Vera, why does Father always go on about you smoking? He’s got a thing about cigarettes.”

“Cigarettes? He talked to you about cigarettes?”

“He says you’re obsessed with divorce and cigarettes.”

“What else did he say?”

“Nothing else. Why?”

“Forget it. It doesn’t matter.”

“Obviously it does matter.”

“Nadia, why do you always go scrabbling around in the past?” Her voice is tense, brittle. “The past is filthy. It’s like a sewer. You shouldn’t play there. Leave it alone. Forget it.”

Valentina has received a wedding invitation from her sister in Selby. She has shown it to my father, waving it under his nose with a few nasty gibes. The accompanying letter describes the husband-to-be as a doctor, forty-nine years old, married (no longer married, of course) with two children of school age (both in private school) and a good house with good garden and double garage. The no-tits wife is making plenty trouble but husband is too much in love, no problem.

In double garage is Jaguar and second car Renault. Jaguar is good, says Valentina, but not as good as Rolls-Royce. Renault is little better than Lada. Nevertheless, her sister’s letter has fired up in Valentina a new dissatisfaction with her plenty-money-meanie no-good husband and the second-rate life-style he has condemned her to.

As my father burbles on down the phone, stopping from time to time for a violent fit of coughing, I cannot help glancing across at Mike, who is sitting there with his feet up and a glass of beer in his hand, watching the Channel Four News. He looks so decent, so nice, greying a bit, with the slight beginnings of a paunch, but handsome still, so loved, so-husbandly. But…an anxious thought brushes my mind.