‘Dear Misha, I think you are wonderful and I am going to marry you. I am not going to let Eugenia marry you. I hope you still love me. Who are you going to marry? With love from Anna.’

‘God, you were bossy,’ Finn said when he saw the letter one day as he leafed through my scrapbook that Nana had kept. Afraid of my father, I had never sent it.

Misha had learned to be afraid of me because his parents were afraid of my father. I’d go to his house for tea sometimes, or to play games, and his parents’ behaviour towards me was a combination of hope and dread. So I learned that I was apart. As an only child, the solitude of specialness was greatly reinforced by my father’s position among the secret elite.

In very different circumstances to mine this is what Finn, too, learned as a child.

It was the summer holidays that, oddly, I dreaded most. I went to see my parents in Damascus and was bored in the confinement of the Soviet compound. We called it the ‘colony’ and referred to our homes as ‘white houses’, a typically white, racist Russian expression; in Russia anyone with even a faintly dusky skin-which included everyone in the Soviet southern republics-was considered inferior. But I yearned to be outside the compound, to meet people other than embassy and KGB children with whom I played endless games of table tennis. I felt more like I was a prisoner in our own privileged compound than one of the elite.

It was during one of these summer holidays, when I was fourteen, that I lost my virginity to a teacher from my school in Moscow who my father had paid to come to Damascus to give me private tuition. The teacher and I flew first class from Moscow and, as he was a nervous flyer, he bought a bottle of vodka. He recounted a number of near air crashes he’d been in, then drank three-quarters of the vodka and fell asleep for the rest of the flight. I drank the rest and was sick.