‘My mother had a friend whose husband was a concierge in one of the best hotels in Athens,’ says Zoë from the kitchen. ‘The guests would leave books behind when they left and he would sell them to Mama for a few drachmas. She used to read them herself, so she wouldn’t forget her English, and give them to me. Now I buy them when I can. There are Greeks there as well. Look.’

‘Ah. But I can’t read those.’ He slips his arms around her waist and watches over her shoulder as she swirls the coffee expertly and pours it out into two minute cups. He reaches out and takes one, chin still resting on her shoulder. ‘This is awkward,’ he says, ‘but I don’t want to let you go.’ He means it light-heartedly, but as soon as the words are out his mouth he realises that it is true. This is the happiest he has ever felt. Here, in this child’s toy of a house with the enemy outside, watching this girl making coffee. He knows, more clearly than he has ever known anything else, that this moment contains the only real sense he will ever be able to make of the world. He will let go – he will have to let go. When he does, the merciless world will have no reason to show them any pity.

‘Will you come back to bed with me?’ he says. ‘Please.’

Afterwards, Tom lies on his side propped on an elbow, trying not to fall backwards out of the narrow bed, and watches her. She is stretched out on her back, one leg twisted in the sheet, the other bare. Her arms are behind her head, fingers laced through the bars of the bedstead. He traces a rib gently with his fingertip, touches the beauty mark just below her left breast. Her skin is hot, almost feverish. He looks down at his own leg bent towards hers: sunburnt and singed below the knee, unearthly white above. He sees she is smiling.

‘What are you thinking?’ he asks.

‘I’m thinking about what the old ladies around here say about men and women,’ she says.

‘And what do they say?’

‘That a woman can hold out for a hundred years, but a man cannot control himself for a moment.’ She chuckles happily.

‘We don’t have a hundred years,’ he points out. ‘Besides, you did hold out.’

‘When you first saw me …’ She turns towards him and rests her head in the crook of her arm. ‘On the road. Did you … ?’

‘I thought you hated me from the very first moment,’ says Tom.

‘Oh, no!’ But she looks charmingly guilty.