‘You know, I’m in the press office but I’m also military intelligence,’ he said. ‘If you like, I can put out some feelers. The Germans left their usual terrifyingly efficient paperwork behind, so there are lists of people they didn’t like, and people they killed. Ditto the police and the gendarmerie. You don’t want to find your Zoë on one of those, but I can look. We have our own lists: casualties; ELAS members and sympathisers; men and women we’ve rounded up. We’ve been sending them to camps in North Africa. Did you know that?’ Tom shook his head. ‘We have. And there are lists for them, obviously. Now I’m not saying she’s going to be on any of these, but perhaps it would be a good thing to check?’

‘Would you, Chris?’ Tom’s hand was trembling again, and he pretended to look for his cigarettes.

‘Sure. She was from Smyrna, wasn’t she? Like me. Children of the Catastrophe. I’d like to help if I can. Valavani isn’t a very common name so it won’t be difficult.’

‘Thank you, Chris. She has a brother called Pavlo but I don’t think there’s any other family.’

‘Leave it with me. Goodnight, Tom.’

‘Night, Chris.’

George Seferis and his wife live in a ground-floor flat in one of the narrow streets of Plaka. Tom drives over from Syntagma in a diplomatic car with Dimitriou. Maro welcomes him like a long-lost relative and ushers him into rooms lined with bookshelves and piled with more books and manuscripts. The other guest is George Katsimbalis, a poet and evidently one of the Seferises’ oldest friends. He dominates every conversation but only, somehow, to make it more interesting and entertaining. The house, as Seferis explains over a bottle of wine from Cyprus, belongs to his family. His brother Angelos – whose wife has just left him, Maro explains – lives on the middle floor, and his sister and brother-in-law, a government minister, live at the top. One of the ground-floor rooms is being used as an army dressing station. ‘There was another body in the street this morning,’ Maro says. ‘The dreadful things that Athenians have grown used to. And we, of course, safe in Cairo …’ Maro stares at her plate for a moment, then smiles at Tom and asks him whether he knows Lawrence Durrell. The circle of friends, from all over Europe and beyond, with George and Maro at its centre, seems immense, and Tom can’t help feeling that, just for this evening, he is included.