Zoë bends her head to light her own cigarette. A fighter plane roars overhead, low enough to make the windows rattle. The guns up on the Acropolis are firing again. Sometimes spent bullets fall onto the roof. ‘My mother taught me the songs from Smyrna because she didn’t want the old world to be forgotten,’ she says. ‘Do you remember Smyrna, Apostoli?’

‘Sure. I was ten in 1922. My father was a baker … We’ve talked about this a hundred times, Zozo.’

‘I know, but …’ There is a long burst of gunfire very close to the house, then yells and the sounds of running feet in the street below them. More gunfire: a tense, measured tat tat tat from the corner, a shouted order, an ear-splitting burst from a heavy calibre machine gun. A tank’s engine growls at the opposite end of the street, clashes its gears, recedes. Zoë draws her knees up to her chin and clasps her shaking hands together. ‘If I die—’

‘You’re not going to die.’

‘But if I do, then … I have to tell you something, so it doesn’t get lost. Apostoli, Katina Valavani wasn’t my real mother. My mother died with my father: they drowned together. Her name was Mary. Mary Hurrell.’ The word sounds shockingly foreign. ‘And my father was George Haggitiris. Apostoli …’

She never finishes, and she will never remember, afterwards, what she was going to say. A plane swoops overhead and there is a whoosh and an explosion only a few yards away. The house shakes and something falls off a table in the next room and breaks with a crash. Andromache startles awake.

‘Toli!’ she moans.

‘I’m here, sweetheart,’ Apostoli says, squeezing her hand.

‘My head hurts so much …’ The sick woman curls up and begins to sob into the stained cushion.

‘She has cholera,’ Zoë says, stroking Andromache’s forehead, which is cold and slick with sweat. ‘She needs a doctor.’

‘Of course she needs a doctor. But where is there a doctor, for God’s sake?’

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE