‘Of course! We were at art school together. Dimitriou! How are you?’ The two men grab each other by the shoulders, and both of them wince.

‘Sorry, old man,’ Dimitriou says. ‘Forgot about your bad arm. When did we last see each other?’

‘It was that night at the Wheatsheaf, before D-Day.’

Christopher Dimitriou was one of Tom’s best friends at art school. He was a brooding, intensely serious young man, who favoured junk shop business suits that slowly, over the course of a few terms, would become encrusted with oil paints. He painted large, forbidding works, heavy slabs of glossy black, orange and pink, beautiful but haunted faces emerging from, or being swallowed by fog. Everything suffused with a rich, pessimistic Byzantine glamour. His digs near the river in Fulham were dingy in the extreme and thick with the fumes of turpentine and tobacco. He was reputed to be so poor that he had to drink the poppyseed oil they used for thinning paint. So it came as a surprise to Tom that Dimitriou came from a wealthy family who lived in a stucco-fronted house in South Kensington. To their mutual surprise, they both joined up in 1939, but it wasn’t until the end of 1941 that they met in Cairo, where Tom was recovering from the wounds he’d got in the battle of Sidi Rezegh, and Dimitriou was a military liaison with 1st Greek Brigade. They spent a lot of time together in London in 1944, both convalescing from wounds, waiting for postings and drinking in Soho.

‘It was Chris who got me my job as a war artist,’ Tom explains to Seferis. ‘What are you doing in Athens, Chris?’

‘I’m a press attaché, God help me.’ Dimitriou makes a face. ‘George and his lovely wife have adopted me, otherwise I’d have jumped out of a window by now.’

‘That’s Maro and George’s speciality, saving lost souls,’ Tom says. ‘They did the same for me in Cava de’ Tirreni.’

‘I shall order some drinks,’ says Seferis. ‘Might we join you, Tom?’

‘Please!’ Tom watches Seferis wander across to the bar. ‘I can’t tell you how good it is to see some friendly faces at last. But the press office? There’s an American journalist, McCall, who says the press office is like a seance, with Churchill’s line coming out of you like ectoplasm. Except he was a lot ruder than that.’

Dimitriou bursts out laughing. ‘I love Mac. He’s got it absolutely right,’ he says. ‘It’s really …’ He shakes his head. ‘Anyway. I would have run into you sooner, but I’ve been with the Winston circus on HMS Ajax.’

‘Ajax? So it was you shelling me the other day.’

‘They were shelling northern Piraeus,’ says Dimitriou, frowning. ‘You couldn’t have been up there?’

‘Yes, I was. With McCall.’

‘But North Piraeus, Tom,’ says Dimitriou. ‘That’s taking your commission a bit too seriously, surely?’