Achilles—who wore the Greek-Australian service industry uniform of grey shorts, white shirt and long white socks—liked to tell Eleftheria of his determination to never again work for someone else, to rather kill a man than work for one. He taught his wife English and ignored most of her attempts to communicate in Greek. When she teased or taunted him in their first language, Achilles responded in English, because he didn’t want a word of Greek spoken in the cafe: he said using a foreign language in front of customers was rude, terrible for business.

As a new husband, Achilles felt disposed to remain wilfully ignorant of his wife’s emotional life; he reckoned they had time to get to know each other. He didn’t want to hear what Eleftheria missed about Ithaka, didn’t ask her questions about her past, didn’t want to spend any time on matters that might inflame her sadness and bring it into the open. To him, she remained an immensity of private feelings.

Eleftheria gave up speaking Greek but did not abandon her artistic inclinations. In spare moments stolen from the cafe, and for reasons Achilles couldn’t understand, she sketched what her husband considered to be the most unremarkable objects in the cafe, things unworthy of representation, barely deserving of notice: the shop fittings, boxes of powders, stacks of aluminium ashtrays, the clock, jars of fat. Yet she made not one sketch of their two daughters. Achilles worried that Eleftheria’s unfathomable interior life was somehow coded in these drawings, that each picture was an expression of disgust.

‘Why do you draw?’ Achilles once asked.

‘I don’t know,’ said Eleftheria. And she left her still lifes in a pile on the side table in their bedroom.

‘What will you do with these pictures?’ Achilles would ask.

‘Nothing,’ she would say. ‘I have to make them, I have to put them somewhere.’

When Eleftheria was especially unhappy she’d tear up and dispose of these sketches. The next week she’d start drawing again: the same objects, the things that stuck up like icebergs in her visible world. They were yet to properly fit together, Mr and Mrs Asproyerakas. Maybe one day they would make a good life possible for each other: this was how Achilles thought of his marriage, as cold stuff that would slowly melt into some better shape. But Eleftheria died before any such transformation could occur.

In 1938, during her last days at Prince Alfred Hospital, in a room to herself, with cancer in her bowels and lungs and liver, Eleftheria kept returning in her mind to the problem of her marriage.

She asked the nurse: ‘Why my parents make me marry that man?’

The nurse said: ‘I don’t know. Arranged marriages aren’t the custom here.’