‘That’s debatable. Anyway, if you’d grown up in my country after the last war, the Great War, as they like to call it, you’d have seen all the misery it caused. A million dead, and millions of other bodies destroyed, minds ruined. My father, for instance. Artillery captain. Horse trainer, society darling … perfect on the outside. Inside, he’s a disaster, all because of the War. He made my mother’s life hell. I thought, I’m not going to end up like that, and if enough of us think that way, there’ll be no war. It didn’t work, though, did it?’

‘So you joined the army anyway.’

‘Actually, my bloody father got me into his old regiment. Thanks to him, I was in uniform less than a month after the war started. But yes, I suppose I would have joined up eventually. Not the artillery, though. Something safe. Royal Corps of Zookeepers. King’s Own Wigmakers.’

‘That is funny.’ She doesn’t laugh, though. Tom senses that she finds his presence here in her home uncomfortable.

‘So the upshot of it all is that I ended up in an anti-tank regiment. Straight out of advanced training onto a boat, two days in Alexandria and onto another boat. And there I was, in the snow, in action.’ He offers her a cigarette, watches as she looks for an ashtray. Her skirt swings gently as she moves around the little room. It is so … so domestic. He is terribly moved, perhaps because it has been so long since anything was this safe and ordinary, but also because it is as if a beautiful and terrible creature, an Indian goddess or a maenad, has manifested here to perform the most humdrum of tasks.

Zoë finds the ashtray and sets it on the table between them. She lets him light her cigarette and blows smoke at the ceiling. ‘Pavlo joined up. When the Italians invaded last year … everyone went mad. Joining the army, waving their flags. I tried to stop him. Is that very terrible?’

‘I don’t …’ Tom begins, but Zoë interrupts.

‘I promised him I would look after him. And our mother … she lost her husband in 1922. You know, we also grew up without men around, Lieutenant Tom, because all the men had died. Half a million, maybe more. The Turks killed them on the docks of Smyrna or they marched them off and they never came back. So I knew, you see. I knew what would happen if Pavlo went marching away. He wouldn’t have survived. He isn’t …’

‘You did the right thing,’ Tom says. ‘I didn’t know that, about Smyrna. So you lost your father?’

Zoë takes a deep breath, and turns away from him. ‘I lost … yes. You see why we sing those songs?’

‘I think so. But Pavlo came back.’

‘Yes. It’s funny … actually it’s sad. But yes, he came back.’

‘I’m glad.’