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.

For all her apparent reserve, Tatyana turned out to be an open and friendly woman. Both outsiders at the cathedral, we became friends. After a few weeks, we arranged to meet for coffee in a café by South Kensington tube station, where I found her wrapped in furs drinking red wine and accompanied by a man named Kirill, whose exact purpose there I never did quite discover. ‘Thomas,’ she whispered as I sat down, all smiles and handshakes, ‘you mustn’t be so ostentatious.’

Come this spring, Tatyana will have been in London for 20 years. She lives in Knightsbridge, vacations in the Maldives, and has a daughter who studies medicine in the States. Naturally, she is the wife of a very wealthy man.