She went on stroking the short stubble of my cropped hair.

‘Kyria Stavridi, you see, was the daughter of a chemist. They even lived above my father’s shop. It is not that I have anything against Kyria Stavridi,’ she thought to add. ‘For all I know she may be an excellent person by different standards. But we must draw the line. Somewhere. Today.’

Then my Aunt Ourania looked away. She was herself such a very good person. She read Goethe every morning, for a quarter of an hour, before her coffee. She kept the Lenten fasts. Very soon after her arrival, she had ordered the hair to be shorn from the heads of all us boys. We were to wear the tunics of ordinary working-class children, because, she said, it was wrong to flaunt ourselves, to pretend we were any different. She herself wore her hair like a man, and gave away her money in secret.

‘Still,’ my Aunt Ourania said, ‘there is no reason why you children should not be kind to Titina Stavridi, even if her parents are undesirable.’

Her eyes had moistened, because she was so tender.

‘You, Dionysi,’ she said, ‘you are the kindest. You,’ she said, ‘must be particularly kind to poor Titina.’

For the present, however, nothing further happened.

Our life continued. After the departure of our parents, you could not say anything momentous took place. There were always the minor events, and visits. Our Aunt Calliope, the professor, came from Paris. She made us compose essays, and breathe deep. My brother Aleko wrote for a course on hypnotism; Phrosso forgot her athlete, and began to notice a Rumanian; my second sister Agni won her prize for algebra; and the little ones, Myrto and Paul, each started a money-box. With so many unimportant, yet necessary things taking place all the time, it did not occur to me to refer again to the Stavrides. Or perhaps it did cross my mind, and I made no mention of them, because our Aunt Ourania would not have wished it. So the days continued more or less unbroken: the sun working at the street wall; the sea-water salting our skins; the leaves of the ficus sweating in the damp evenings of the old house at Schutz.

When, suddenly, on a Tuesday afternoon, there was Kyria Stavridi herself sitting in Aunt Ourania’s favourite chair beside the big window in the salon.

‘Which one are you, then?’ Kyria Stavridi called, showing an awful lot of gold.

‘I am the middle one,’ I replied. ‘I am Dionysios.’

In ordinary circumstances I would have gone away, but now I was fascinated by all that gold.

‘Ah,’ Kyria Stavridi said, and smiled, ‘often it is the middle ones on whom the responsibilities fall.’

It made her somewhat mysterious. She was dressed, besides, in black, and gave the impression, even at a distance of several feet, of being enclosed in a film of steam.

I did not answer Kyria Stavridi, because I did not know what to say, and because I had noticed she was not alone.