‘What does it say about the British?’ she asks the man opposite her.

‘They’ve parachuted onto Megara Airport!’ he says, sweeping off the shiny straw boater he is wearing – He must have been guarding it like dragon’s gold this whole time, she thinks – and waves it happily, to the consternation of the elderly women on either side of him. ‘It says here that some are going north to chase the Bosch, and the rest are coming here.’

‘Is it the Royal Artillery?’

‘Artillery? No, it’s the …’ He squints. ‘2nd Parachute Brigade.’

‘Oh.’ She doesn’t let the man see that the news has deflated her a little.

‘It’s over,’ the man says, settling the boater at a defiant angle on his carefully combed but thinning hair. ‘We’ll have a proper government. We won’t need artillery!’

‘Yes, you’re right,’ says Zoë, and laughs. It feels beautiful to laugh. ‘We’ll be ourselves again, won’t we?’

Back in Kokkinia, she falls into the embrace of the narrow streets, the tiny, orderly refugee houses. And the people, hanging out their laundry, selling this and that from their front steps, gossiping: the refugees have survived once again.

She turns into Hozanitas Street. There is the cafe. The lamp post knocked crooked by a German truck in August, the sagging overhead wires, still carrying nothing since the Germans blew up the power station. The brown flank of the mountain at the end of the street, the bright tiled dome of the church of the Annunciation. I’ve only been away for a week, she thinks, so why does it all look so different?

Then she sees. The corner. Her corner. It is gone. The house has vanished. All that is left is an impossibly small space, a black rectangle. enclosing a low, angular heap of blackened timber. She is still walking. Her mind and her legs are refusing to believe what they are being shown. Because it isn’t possible. Then she sees Venetia Kodjagas sitting on her front step, left stranded by the emptiness beside her. Standing in the middle of the street – her legs understand now, they won’t carry her any further – she flings out her arms, but there is nothing left to catch hold of, not even ghosts.

‘How?’ she whispers. ‘How?’

She feels a hand on her arm. ‘Come here, my darling. Come on. Sit down next to Venetia.’

Mrs Kodjagas is leading her gently but firmly past the black absence of Katina Valavani’s home. The old lady, who is herself shrinking, fading into the black folds of her widow’s costume, lowers herself onto the step and pulls Zoë down beside her.

‘How?’ Zoë whispers again.