Tom has found a place to sit wedged between lashed oil drums outside the wheelhouse. Even with his paratrooper’s smock zipped up over the oily submariner’s pullover he has had since Normandy, it is still chilly. He shivers and remembers the pass at Vevi. Cloud-swathed mountains like these, the same cutting wind and the smell of snow. As they come closer to Piraeus they are joined by a tug flying a large Greek flag – the royal flag, with a golden crown in the centre. It takes the lead as they steam past Salamis and a motley fleet of ships riding at anchor: Greek Navy, Royal Navy, rusty merchantmen. He has borrowed a pair of binoculars from another officer and through them he watches the dun-coloured hillsides to the north of the harbour, the lattice of low white houses spreading up their flanks. That must be Kokkinia: where is Hozanitas Street? He squints and adjusts the focus but the geography tells him nothing. When he sleeps, more often than not he finds himself in front of the little corner house with the blue door. Sometimes it is like Wonderland: he is far too big to fit through the door. Sometimes he can’t find Zoë’s house amongst endlessly replicated, cube-like huts. But sometimes the door will open and he will step inside. It doesn’t matter now. She’s there, inside the blurred circle of the binoculars. They are just a couple of miles apart. But as he gazes, puffs of smoke blossom among the houses, and above the hiss of water and the thud of the LSTs comes the sound of small arms fire and artillery. He winces. Probably looking in the wrong place, he tells himself.

Tom has been prepared for ruins in Piraeus, because it had been half destroyed when he left it, but the scale of the destruction around the harbour shocks him. There is almost nothing left of the waterfront or the docks. The grain silo that guards the western entrance to the harbour is still standing, but not much else. He walks down the ramp, the sound of engines deafeningly loud behind him. Three years, seven months and twenty days. He walks away from the noise of the disembarkation, looking for familiar sights. There are almost none except for the curve of the quayside. And then his memory meshes with the scene in front of his eyes. That was where the Arethusa was moored. That, surely, was where he sat with the wounded and talked with that medical orderly. He lights a cigarette and walks along the quayside. Yes, he went aboard the Arethusa here. The anti-aircraft guns were here, and here. There was a row of corpses laid out here, on this innocent-looking patch of concrete. He looks over the edge, but where the upturned belly of the Hellas had rolled, the water is filled with brightly painted fishing dinghies. He feels a small prick of dread.