‘At your service.’ As they pull away, an air raid siren begins to howl and Zoë tenses, shivering, hugging herself. Trying to hide. I’m trying to turn myself inside out, she thinks. But then she hears his voice, gentle, foreign but not foreign. ‘Don’t worry, Miss Valavani. You’re safe.’

‘Nothing is safe,’ she whispers.

‘You’re right. But you’ll be OK. I promise. My word as an officer.’

‘British soldier. You’re leaving.’ She sighs, without meaning to, and their eyes meet. She blinks in surprise: she will miss him.

The officer looks startled as well. He seems about to say something. But then he shakes his head and grins. ‘My word as a painter, then. Means more. Not much, but a bit.’ That wasn’t what you were going to say, she thinks, and the sting of regret that she feels surprises her for a second time.

‘All right.’ His voice, oddly, does make her feel a little less scared. She dares to lift her head, in time to see the entrance to the metro station in Omonia Square slip by.

‘But one thing does make me sad in all this.’

‘What?’

‘It’s such a shame I’ll never hear you sing.’

CHAPTER TWELVE

Tom parks the Austin beside a twisted black cage that has recently been a tram car and lopes across the rubble of Piraeus’s waterfront. Petrol Company headquarters is supposed to be in the warehouse of G. Leoforos Bros, but there is no warehouse. There is barely a waterfront. The green-painted lorries and oil tankers parked as neatly as the rubble permits are all deserted. He sees pyramids of crates, abandoned cranes, a big 5.5-inch gun, its barrel neatly sealed with oil cloth. Out in the sea, the black smoke they have been driving towards all day is roiling up from an oil tanker which is lying on its side in the centre of a ring of blazing fuel. All around it, masts and cranes jut out of the water. Warships lie a little further out. Motorboats, lighters and dinghies are plying back and forth, avoiding the flames and the wrecks. His boots crunch through broken glass and he jumps over festoons of cables. The girl – Zoë – had been right: the whole waterfront area of Piraeus is completely wrecked.

The girl … In the end, she hadn’t taken him out of his way at all. She had decided that she would be safer with friends near the harbour, which hadn’t made much sense to him, but he couldn’t argue with her. So she directed them through ever seedier quarters of Piraeus, past the railway station, which was half ruined and smouldering and down a narrow street lined with low buildings, some faced with grainy, crumbling plaster, some just rough brick. Telephone wires criss-crossed between tile roofs, tin roofs.