‘So … Tom.’ She tries out the word again. ‘I have told you two secrets about me. You must tell me one.’

‘Is that a Greek custom?’

‘A new one. Just for this house.’

‘I don’t have any secrets. I’m very dull,’ he says. ‘But … well, I think I told you that I was born in India. My father was there in the army, met my mother, and I was born in the hills. You could see the Himalayas from our bungalow, apparently, though I don’t remember it at all. When I was tiny we moved all the way south to Kerala where my father had a go at planting rubber. He hated Kerala. Hated India. But … I suppose my secret is that I loved it there and I still do love it. We left when I was five – in 1922, in fact – and never went back, but I’ve never felt that I’ve belonged anywhere else. And I didn’t belong there in India, so … there’s my secret.’

‘Why did you not belong?’

‘Because I was British, you see. You – we – aren’t supposed to like India. We’re supposed to suffer it. You live amongst all that insane beauty, all that life, and you pine away for the drizzle of England.’

‘I understand.’ She does, keenly. She sighs, and pours another inch of tsipouro into their glasses.

‘Do you know any happy songs?’ Tom asks suddenly. He doesn’t want to make this lovely woman miserable, and the little house is beginning to feel like a mausoleum.

‘Do you?’

‘Of course!’

‘Then sing me one.’

‘What? I mean … I’m a terrible singer.’ He shakes his head, but she is looking at him from under her dark eyelids. In the lamplight, her face has taken on the quality of a painting: the more than real and the less than real. The curve of her mouth could only have come from an artist’s mind, not from nature.

In the pass at Vevi, when the German tanks appeared out of the mist, he felt that every second of his life, every experience and sensation had come down to that one point: there, behind the wall, a drop of water hanging, reflecting grey, from the rolled rim of his tin helmet. He has the same sensation now, watching Zoë Valavani’s mouth, seeing her lips gather in amusement. The whole of life contracts to the painter’s eyes, the singer’s lips. He takes a deep breath. ‘Umm …’ He can only think of the words to one song, and so that is what he sings.

If you were the only girl in the world

and I were the only boy

Nothing else would matter in the world today

We could go on loving in the same old way

A Garden of Eden just made for two

With nothing to mar our joy

I would say such wonderful things to you