Soon afterwards, Tom found another tank commander heading back to Syntagma. Bullets pinged against the armour of the tank he rode back in, and twice the commander stopped to give cover to platoons of soldiers trying to get across sniper-ridden avenues. He ate a passable supper of chewy meat – goat, he guessed – and went upstairs to paint what he had seen during the day. The pale guts of the tanks; ammunition stacked inside the Parthenon; the stomach of the plane that had buzzed them, so low Tom had been able to see the rivets holding it together. Robin’s egg blue. He worked in the wavering electric light until his eyes hurt. Once, he got up to pour himself a glass from the bottle of Greek brandy that the colonel had given him as a welcome present, and when he went back to his desk, he saw that he had painted the dead woman in Caen. He tore out the page, tore it to pieces. When he opened the window to listen to the night sounds of Athens – an armoured car idling in the street below him, the clotted thump of mortars a long way off – the winter air on his face told him he had been crying. It was late, but he knew that sleep would be impossible. Sleep has been an uncertain prospect after his wounding in Italy, and after Caen, he has often wished he hadn’t needed to sleep at all. The dreams that come every night are vivid, horrible and rigidly predictable. So he went downstairs to the Fortress Bar, where he found a loud party of journalists, press officers and photographers. The only booze on offer was Egyptian Stella beer, pale, weak and tasting of stale toast. He drank rather a lot of it while talking to an American, Earl Something-or-Other, who worked for the Chicago Enquirer. Then he went to bed and dreamt, as he always did, of the sleek, plump belly of the Hellas, splitting elegantly to reveal her cargo; Driver Tomlinson, gone from the waist down but still beckoning from his burning truck at Sidi Rezegh; a boy in SS camouflage, his guts in his lap, propped against a motorcycle near Falaise; a young woman in a neat black suit, perfect save for the line of blood drawn as if with a ruler from her nose across her powdered cheek.

He stares for a while at the ceiling, then gets up and washes in the marble basin of the once-sumptuous bathroom, the water now rust-brown and banging in the pipes. Going downstairs, he is chewing without enthusiasm on a stale breakfast roll and sipping black coffee that has all the appeal of peptic acid when he sees the journalist from Chicago negotiating blearily with a waiter on the other side of the dining room, which feels as big and as redundant as some hall in Versailles. Tom waves, and the man picks his way through the tables towards him.