‘Disgusting!’ Phrosso decided, and went away to read a magazine.

You could not torture Titina for long; it became too uninteresting.

But Titina stuck. She stuck to me. It was as if Titina had been told. And once in the garden of our house at Schutz, after showing her my collection of insects, I became desperate. I took Titina’s blue bead, and stuck it up her left nostril.

‘Titina,’ I cried, ‘the holes of your nose are so big I’d expect to see your brain – if you had any,’ I shouted, ‘inside.’

But Titina Stavridi only smiled, and sneezed the bead into her hand.

In my desperation I continued to shout pure nonsense.

Until my Aunt Thalia came out.

‘Wretched, wretched children!’ she called. ‘And you! Dionysi!’

During the heat of the afternoon my aunt would recline in a quiet room, nibbling a raw carrot, and copying passages from R. Tagore.

‘My headache!’ she now protested. ‘My rest destroyed! Oh, my God! My conjunctivitis!’

On account of the conjunctivitis Aunt Thalia was wearing her bottle-green eye-shade, which made her appear especially tragic. Altogether Aunt Thalia was like a masked figure in a tragedy.

So that I was shocked, and Titina Stavridi even more so.

On the next occasion when I fetched her, her mother took me aside and instructed me in detail.

‘Your poor Aunt Thalia!’ She sighed. ‘Night and morning,’ she made me repeat. ‘Bathe the eyes. Undiluted.’

‘What is this bottle you have brought me?’ asked Aunt Thalia when I presented it.

She was standing in the big salon, and the sleeves fell back from her rather thin, but elegant arms.

‘It is for the conjunctivitis.’

‘Yes! Yes! But what is it?’

Aunt Thalia could grow so impatient.

‘It is a baby’s water,’ I replied. ‘Night and morning. Undiluted.’

‘Oh! Oh!’ moaned our Aunt Thalia as she flung the bottle.

It bounced once on the polished floor.

‘Disgusting, disgusting creature!’

‘It’s probably a very clean baby,’ I said.

It sounded reasonable, but Aunt Thalia was not consoled.

Nor did I fetch Titina again. I must say that, even without the episode of Kyria Stavridi’s prescription, we should not have been allowed to see Titina. For the Stavrides were always becoming involved in what our aunts considered undignified, not to say repulsive, incidents. For instance, Kyria Stavridi was butted in her broad behind by a piebald goat in the middle of the Rue Goussio. Then there was the thing that happened in our own street as Despo and Aphrodite, the maids from Lesbos, were returning home at dusk. The two girls were panting and giggling when they arrived. We could hear them already as they slammed the gate. What was it, Despo, Aphrodite? we called, running. It was to do with the Kyrios Stavridis, we gathered, who had shown them something in the almost dark. Long afterwards it was a matter for conjecture what the Kyrios Stavridis had shown our maids, though our sister Phrosso insisted from the beginning that she knew.