‘This isn’t the end, though, is it? We’re here alone. We could just, I don’t know, lock ourselves in until it’s all over.’

‘I only have some onions and a tin of anchovies. And a couple of glasses of tsipouro. Do you think that will last the rest of the war?’

‘No. Probably not.’ He kisses her and slides his legs over the edge of the bed. ‘By the way, where’s the, er, the lavatory?’

‘The lavatory?’ she says delightedly. ‘I am the only person in the whole of Greece who says lavatory! And now you say it too.’

The lavatory proves to be a cement-floored cubicle not much bigger than an inverted sarcophagus, with a hole in the floor at one end, a tap with a length of half-perished red rubber hose protruding from the wall, a tin bucket with a wooden lid, a small iron washstand with a jug and basin. Like the house, it is immaculately clean. A light bulb hangs from the ceiling. Outside there is a narrow patch of earth separated from the yard of the neighbouring house by a board fence. His watch is inside but he guesses it is still early: around six in the morning. He stands in the doorway and listens. The chickens he heard through the window are scratching and conferring softly behind the fence. A cockerel starts to crow in the next street, which sets a dog barking. He can hear Zoë through the flimsy wall, filling the coffee pot, the trickle of water and the scrape of metal on metal. When he comes in she is standing in front of the gas ring. The absurd dressing gown is slipping off one shoulder. He bends and kisses her in the curve of her neck, brushes back the heavy curtain of her hair and breathes her in: warmth, the amber musk of her sweat and the ghostly iris and civet of her perfume. Her skin is startlingly pale, as white as the wild flowers beside the road down from Vevi. The pungent, oily steam of the boiling coffee swirls around them.

‘They are saying that when this coffee is gone, there won’t be any more,’ she says, scooping a spoonful of sugar into the brown foam in the briki. ‘And sugar. Is there sugar in England?’

‘Not very much,’ he says. ‘England is pretty miserable, to be honest. Queues and ration books. My mother and sister seem to spend their entire lives standing in line outside butcher’s shops. Or so I gather from their letters.’ He wanders over to the bookshelf wedged into the corner between the kitchen door and Pavlo’s bedroom, bends and studies the titles. ‘My God!’ he says in surprise. ‘P. G. Wodehouse! Hardy … Berenson? Mapp and Lucia, Zoë?’ There are others: Great Expectations, Zuleika Dobson, The Man Who Was Thursday.