She finds the Englishman sitting with his back against the driver’s door, boots propped on the passenger seat. In his lap is a flat leather case, on which is laid out a pad of white paper, a small metal paintbox and another flat tin full of pencils of various lengths and some delicate paintbrushes. The Englishman, to her utter amazement, is painting. A cigarette smoulders in his left hand, which holds the improvised table steady. His right hand moves delicately yet deliberately, the brush drifting and pecking. Scratch, shush, shush. Forgetting her pain, Zoë leans forward, watching in disbelief. The stiff leather of the seat creaks and the Englishman looks up and she sees him properly for the first time. He has a longish face, thin enough to show angular cheekbones, which are shadowed with several days’ worth of stubble. The eyes are striking: large and dark – though puffy and bruised-looking with tiredness – under arched black eyebrows. A lick of heavy black hair hangs down over his forehead. He has a nice mouth, though his lips are badly chapped from the sun.

‘Oh!’ he says. Is that embarrassment? She looks over the seat at the sketchpad. What she sees under the wet point of the brush is, at first, a meaningless whorl of light and shadow: blacks shading into greys and browns, a blotch of yellow. The colours of a black eye. She squints and it appears: a car, Apostoli’s Citröen, on its back like a dead fly, oily smoke boiling out of it. Beside it, shrubs of broom, their flowers livid, acidic. She breathes in sharply. The Englishman closes the pad hurriedly. ‘I didn’t mean …’

‘What are you doing? What are you doing?’ she demands.

The Englishman takes a drag on his cigarette; Zoë notices that his hand is shaking very slightly. He lets the smoke out slowly through his mouth and nose. ‘I’m trying to see,’ he says.

‘What?’ Zoë doesn’t believe she’s heard him properly.

There is a long silence, in which Zoë almost reaches out and grabs the sketchpad. She wants to throw it into the olive grove, destroy it. But then the Englishman closes the lid of his paintbox with a snap. ‘I’m trying to see. The war. All of this …’ He waves a hand, impatiently. ‘It seems so meaningless. Painting’ – he holds up the pad – ‘it helps to make sense of things. I don’t expect you to understand because I certainly don’t.’

‘You are a soldier.’ Zoë tries to sound disapproving but instead she hears petulance.

He shrugs. ‘I’m a painter. You’re a singer – if you really are a singer?’ He glances at her as he tucks his paints and brushes back into the leather case, but there is no judgement in his eyes, just curiosity.

‘Yes, I am a singer!’ she says indignantly.

‘Well, then. Have you stopped singing, now there’s a war?’

‘Why would I?’

‘Exactly.’

‘But here, now …’