The Russian wives club

The Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Knightsbridge is nestled in a maze of mews streets and embassy rows somewhere between Harrods and Hyde Park. It’s as much an expat social club as it is a place of worship, and on Sunday mornings it’s packed to the rafters. In what can sometimes look like one big game of Grand-mother’s Footsteps, the congregation of headscarved women and men in leather jackets quietly make a dash to circulate every time the priests turn their back, while old women maunder about kissing icons and hushing grandchildren.

Tatyana Ivanova was conspicuously aloof from all this. I first saw her one Sunday morning in a ray of stained sunlight, her face angelically upturned. She didn’t mingle like the rest; she stood stock-still facing the altar, careful to cross herself and mutter all the Amens at the appropriate moments; and at the end of the service, when all the prayers were said and done, she climbed into the back of a blacked-out Bentley and was swept away by her chauffeur.