‘I wasn’t all there, you know.’ He shakes his head, remembering. ‘We’d been in action for days and there was some bad stuff. My unit had only broken it off a few hours before. But even so, even so …’ He brushes a breast gently with the back of his hand. ‘I still noticed that you were extraordinary. I knew you were completely done in, obviously. But you just had … You were the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. I actually thought you might be a hallucination. I’m glad you weren’t.’

‘I didn’t hate you,’ she says, reaching out for his hand. ‘I just didn’t want to be there. After what had happened. My head was going around and around. I was thinking about … things.’

‘I understand. It must have been awful.’

‘The car – Vangeli – that was terrible. But when I was driving with you … you don’t understand, but I’ll tell you so that you do.’

‘Go on.’ He slides next to her and pulls the sheet up over them. His hand finds the groove of her spine and rests there. She takes a deep breath.

‘It was hearing you speaking English – you and your men. After the shock of Vangeli being killed, perhaps. But all sorts of memories began to …’ She makes a claw of her hand and taps the side of her head. ‘My parents are dead, Tom. My Mama Katina, who gave me her name, Valavani, and found Pavlo and me this house to live in, was not my real mother. No, that is wrong. She was more real than my mother.’

He brushes a lock of hair away from her face. ‘I’m sorry I teased you about your nanny. I didn’t understand.’

‘You couldn’t have known. My parents spoke English at home. Perhaps my mother was English. We were what they called Levantines. There were great merchant families in Smyrna – the Whittalls were English, and the Charnauds, and the Girauds … English, French, Italian, German. They had all lived there for hundreds of years, all married each other. I’m one of them, but I don’t know how. My mother – I mean Katina, Pavlo’s real mother, who adopted me – used to say that the Levantines were the most cultured, the most civilised people in the world.’

‘Do you remember them at all, your parents?’

She closes her eyes. ‘My father had a yachtsman’s cap. White. That’s all. I think my mother had curly blonde hair. But then I remember a book that I had. Little Blue … a girl. She lost her sheep.’

‘Little Bo Peep?’