Sitting at their dining table, a felt hat hooked over his knee, Achilles made little effort to hide his disapproval of everything (their table was unsteady, his coffee not sweet enough), and it occurred to his mother that Achilles might have been angry with them on a day-by-day basis, year after year, when they’d spent that same time in various degrees of worry and regret over him. Now this was the result. The three of them could hardly have a conversation. To Achilles, the rain on the village and the dark condemning sky approximated his feelings and offered him a kind of support.

‘You should be ashamed of sending me away,’ he said.

‘We wouldn’t have done it if we’d known you’d be this unhappy,’ his mother replied. ‘But you’re here now. Why don’t you make a life in Ithaka or even Kefalonia?’

‘It’s too late for that.’

By this time Achilles had acquired the heated, brisk tone of voice that would characterise him for the rest of his life. A marriage was quickly arranged with Eleftheria, the artistically minded daughter of the village tailor, and they were wedded on 22 August at The Chapel of the Transfiguration of the Saviour in Vathi. The combination of her dowry and his savings would give them enough money to start their own cafe in Sydney. Achilles already had the spot picked out.

Achilles’ block of land in Bardwell Park allowed for a shop, an adjoining home behind and a large yard, where he intended to plant olive trees, figs, oranges, lemons. Most important of all, he planned to grow grapevines, under the shade of which he might one day sit and feel content, no longer driven so unhappily by ambition, by anger.

The cafe building went up in six weeks.

‘What does your last name mean?’ asked one of the bricklayers, a man named Tom.

‘Asproyerakas is a white hawk.’

‘Then change your name to White or Hawke,’ said Tom, as if solving for Achilles some problem they’d been working on for weeks.

He had no intention of altering his surname. Not all early Greeks were convinced to abbreviate or Anglicise: he followed the examples of Kalokorinos, Varvaressos, Papadamatis, Morfopoulos. As for the name Achilles, he’d already modified it from Achilleas: he thought this by-the-letter allusion would only aid his aspirations. The hero of The Iliad was uncompromising, singular, no one’s employee, not a person to be cheated.