The next day he gets up before dawn, washes in the hotel’s rusty water and eats breakfast in the Grand Bretagne’s vast, almost deserted dining room. A tall, gaunt general with protuberant ears is drinking coffee at the far end of the room – it is General Hawkesworth, head of military operations – and trying to ignore Earl McCall, who is obviously trying to wheedle a story out of him. For some reason, the hotel has superb bacon and eggs – there is no other decent food on offer, at the Grand Bretagne or anywhere else in the city. He stayed up late, reading The Waste Land in Greek, which seems more and more appropriate these days. He slept badly, and dreamt of Pavlo, in an odd way: he was trying to buy him a train ticket at Paddington Station, but there was some confusion over the change at Newton Abbot, so he went back to the window again and again, Pavlo waiting patiently in the noise and smoke of the station, until at last Tom came out with the right tickets, to find him gone. After he has eaten he goes out into the early morning. Unreal City / Under the brown fog of a winter dawn. He walks slowly up Ermou, listening for gunfire, making for the sounds of battle as they start up with the rising sun.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

‘Zozo!’ Zoë struggles to the surface. Sleep, for the past days, has been like drifting under a thin skin of ice on a dirty, frozen pond. She spends most of her time on the floor by Andromache’s bed, wrapped in an old peach-coloured quilt. She falls asleep when exhaustion wins over desperation, and wakes with her eyes and mouth crusted with the residue of fever dreams.

Apostoli is shaking her. ‘Andromache is worse. I’m worried, Zozo. I’m so worried!’

Someone is screaming outside, a high, almost mechanical sound. Andromache is gripped by a spasm and gasps. Suddenly the room feels completely unreal, like a photograph, like Mickey Mouse. I’m going to die here, Zoë thinks. No, Andromache is going to die … In her mind she sees the room, the house, the street flickering, like at the cinema when the projectionist makes a mistake and the film slows down. Everything’s coming to an end, she thinks. It’s all going to end, and no one else will know. We’ll be gone, and it will be as if we were never here.

Zoë struggles upright and looks at the woman on the couch. Andromache’s colour is livid and sweat is trickling over her sharpened cheekbones. ‘She has to have a doctor, Toli.’

‘Where is there a doctor? And I can’t leave her …’