‘I know you do. But you don’t need an instrument,’ Mr Gounaris said. ‘You already have the voice of a nightingale.’ Zoë decided this was just the typical meanness of grown-ups, though Mama was always saying the same thing. Then Mr Gounaris was taken ill in one of the typhus epidemics that often burnt through the refugee settlements. The morning of his death, he asked for Mama Katina, who came back from his bedside with the bouzouki. ‘He wants you to look after it for him,’ she told Pavlo. Mr Gounaris died in the afternoon and Pavlo became the bouzouki’s owner.

The bride and groom appear. A priest blesses the party and the guests are called to table. Mama Katina is given a seat on the couple’s table, because she has made the bride’s dress. She has a dressmaking business in a shed behind a garage near the church of St Nicholas, and while it isn’t quite a Maison de Modes et Confections, she earns a small but steady trickle of money from making up dresses in cheap fabrics. People will bring her pages cut from magazines which they have probably found in dustbins in the nicer quarters of Athens, film stars or debutantes posing in far-off ballrooms, and she will run up a copy in scrounged or stolen material. Or she will make her own creations. When she is feeling flush she will give Zoë and Pavlo money for a tram ride, and send them into Athens to lurk around Kolonaki or Vasilissis Sofias Avenue or the Hotel Grand Bretagne on Syntagma Square, where they spy on rich women. Back in the warehouse or in Mama Katina’s workshop, which smells of oil and petrol fumes from the garage, they describe to her the fashions they have seen, Mama questioning them and questioning them until the tiniest details have been picked out. As they talk, she will be drawing with a stub of pencil on a piece of butcher’s paper, and when she has squeezed everything out of them, she will hold up the paper.

‘Like that?’ she will ask, and they will stare at the women flouncing across the dun-coloured paper and nod. ‘Like that,’ they will say. ‘Just like that.’