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been. Dried flowers, really! Eva kept glancing over at the picture of Kolia, smiling in his grey suit, as if he were listening to the chatter, amused, a teasing look in his eye, until she felt the incomprehension of his loss, the affront of his absence, rear up like a tidal wave and she looked away. Luckily the doorbell rang and Irene rose to her feet to welcome the first of the guests. Eva sat on with her father, hearing the muffled tones of discreet conversation as coats and hats were removed, even a stifled burst of laughter, signalling that curious mixture of condolence and exuberant relief that rises up, impromptu, in people after a funeral.
    Hearing the laughter Eva's father looked at her; he sniffed and shrugged his shoulders hopelessly, helplessly, like a man who has forgotten the answer to the simplest of questions, and she saw how old he was all of a sudden.
    'Just you and me, Eva,' he said, and she knew he was thinking of his first wife, Maria – his Masha, her mother – and her death all those years ago on the other side of the world. Eva had been fourteen, Kolia ten, and the three of them had stood hand in hand in the foreigners' graveyard in Tientsin, the air full of windblown blossom, shredded petals from the giant white wisteria growing on the cemetery wall – like snowflakes, like fat soft confetti. 'Just the three of us, now,' he had said then, as they stood beside their mother's grave, squeezing their hands very hard.
    'Who was the man in the brown trilby?' Eva asked, remembering and wanting to change the subject.
    'What man in the brown trilby?' said her father.
    Then the Lussipovs edged cautiously into the room, smiling vaguely, and with them her plump cousin Tania with her new little husband, and the perplexing question of the man in the brown trilby was momentarily forgotten.
     
    But she saw him again, three days later on the Monday – the first day she'd gone back to work – as she left the office to go to lunch. He was standing under the awning of the épicerie opposite, wearing a long tweed overcoat – dark green – and his incongruous trilby. He met her glance, nodded and smiled and crossed the road to greet her, removing his hat as he approached.
    He spoke in excellent, accentless French: 'Mademoiselle Delectorskaya, my sincere condolences about your brother. My apologies for not speaking to you at the funeral but it did not seem appropriate – especially as Kolia had never introduced us.'
    'I hadn't realised you knew Kolia.' This fact had already thrown her: her mind was clattering, panicked slightly – this made no sense.
    'Oh, yes. Not friends, exactly, but we were firm acquaintances, shall we say?' He gave a little bow of his head and continued, this time in flawless, accented English. 'Forgive me, my name is Lucas Romer.'
    The accent was upper class, patrician, but Eva thought, immediately, that this Mr Lucas Romer did not look particularly English at all. He had wavy black hair, thinning at the front and swept back and was virtually – she searched for the English word – swarthy, with dense eyebrows, uncurved, like two black horizontal dashes beneath his high forehead and above his eyes – which were a muddy bluey grey (she always noticed the colour of people's eyes). His jaw, even though freshly shaved, was solidly metallic with incipient stubble.
    He sensed her studying him and reflexively ran the palm of his hand across his thinning hair. 'Kolia never spoke to you about me?' he asked.
    'No,' Eva said, speaking English herself now. 'No, he never mentioned a "Lucas Romer" to me.'
    He smiled, for some reason, at this information, showing very white, even teeth.
    'Very good,' he said, thoughtfully, nodding to show his pleasure and then added, 'it is my real name by the way.'
    'It never crossed my mind that it wasn't,' Eva said, offering her hand. 'It was a pleasure to meet you, Mr Romer. If you'll excuse me I have only half an hour for my lunch.'
    'No. You have two hours. I told