‘Well, I shall leave you to your work.’ The diplomat turns and walks away, hands clasped behind his back. Well, thinks Tom, that was interesting. Not the sort of conversation he has come to expect from the Greek contingent, who are so fixated on their goal, and so much in disagreement with each other over how to achieve it, that they don’t seem to be able to think, let alone talk, about anything else.

The next day Tom is working again. He has intended to start another version of the Hellas, but he finds that, instead of the swollen leaf shape of the floating hull, he has outlined a face. He closes his eyes, listens to the parliament of sparrows in the olive trees, and sees a woman crouched beside him under a canopy of shadowy fronds. A pregnant cat picks her way across a litter of bricks. The woman turns to him. They are in her house, two rooms, walls no thicker than a cardboard box. She stands up and holds out her hands. In the uneasy, gin-clear light of early morning she turns to him, her hair webbed across a lace pillow.

‘Very Byzantine.’ The diplomat is there again. Tom sees his wife reading at a table in the shade near the hotel. ‘I mean that as a compliment, obviously.’

‘Byzantine? I’m not sure …’ Tom looks at the half-finished painting. The beloved face, emerging from or – the thought makes him shudder, but he considers it – sinking into heavy, textured black. The man is right: the face has the huge eyes and transfigured seriousness of an icon.

‘Yes, there is that quality to it,’ the man says. ‘A modern icon.’

‘I’m not sure what I’ve done,’ says Tom, truthfully. He realises what the face he has painted reminds him of: Arnold Böcklin’s Medusa, beauty ruined, staring out of darkness with blue lips and dead eyes, mouth open to curse or to plead.

‘Another dream?’

‘I’m not sure,’ Tom repeats, half to himself.

‘The Orthodox Church believes that an icon painter, if he is doing his job properly, is actually making his subject incarnate. Making the spiritual into touchable reality. So the worshipper is gazing, not at a piece of painted wood, but at the soul, if you like, of the saint depicted.’ The diplomat chuckles drily. ‘I am not sure of the implications of that in the context of modern art.’