And so, although Greece has been liberated by his old unit, Tom has been forced to wait in a small town outside Salerno for almost a month for the government of national unity to be given the all-clear for their return to Athens. Cava de’ Tirreni would, under normal circumstances, be a delightful place to spend an enforced and rather highly paid holiday. But he is going slowly mad. He has drawn all the Greeks several times. He has painted them in conference and strolling through the grounds of their digs, the impressively turreted Villa Ricciardi. Bored to distraction, he has wandered about in Naples and clambered over the ruins of Pompeii, which reminded him, unpleasantly, of Caen.

He lightens brown with house paint, blocks out a trapezoid of interlocked squares on which he paints a line of dark shapes, all receding to a horizon of concentrated blue. Below this, a smooth white shape, a pod or a pregnant belly tapering to a point at one end, floats in a bath of green-blue. He starts another canvas. This time, the pregnant pod is an upright slash in a deep field of black tempered with brown, the white made livid with green.

‘An African mask?’ Tom, startled, twists round and finds a man standing behind him, looking at the painting. One of the Greeks, a diplomat who is staying at the hotel along with his wife. Tall, dark hair going thin above a slightly pear-shaped face. Large dark-ringed eyes behind black-rimmed spectacles; he looks like a great, solemn child. I haven’t drawn you yet, Tom thinks.

‘No. It’s a … it’s a capsized ship,’ he says.

‘Really.’ The man comes closer and studies the canvas. ‘Powerful. Frightening, in fact. Do you mean it to frighten?’

‘It frightens me,’ says Tom. ‘That is, it’s something I see more often than I’d like.’

‘The curse of our times,’ says the man, and smiles gravely. ‘To walk through these terrible dreams not knowing if one is asleep or awake. I should think it would take a brave man to be a war artist.’

‘I don’t know about bravery,’ says Tom, surprised. ‘Anyway, this wasn’t a dream. I saw it.’

‘Did you?’

‘In Piraeus in 1941. The Hellas. She’d been dive-bombed, and capsized with something like three hundred men still aboard her. I saw her the next day.’

‘When I first looked at it I thought it was one of those fertility masks from Africa, the ones that mimic a pregnant belly. But now I see that this is pregnant with something quite different.’

‘Pregnant. Yes, I suppose that’s my intention.’