Then it was decided – it was our Aunt Ourania who decided things – that as Dionysios was an exceptional, but reliable boy, he should leave school, and go to our Uncle Stepho at the Bank. Then there would be so much more to give to those poor people, the refugees from the Turks in Anatolia. It was exciting enough, but only for a little. Soon I was addressing envelopes at the Bank. The dry ledgers made me sneeze. And my Uncle Stepho would send for me, and twist my ear, thinking it a huge joke to have me to torture at the Bank.

So it was.

Summer had come round again: the eternal, powdery, white Athenian summer. The dust shot out from under my shoes as I trudged along Stadium Street, for although I had intended to spend my holiday at Pelion, Aunt Ourania had at once suggested: Will your conscience allow you, with all those refugees sleeping on mattresses in the hall? So I had stayed, and it was intolerable. My clothes were damp rags by eleven o’clock in Stadium Street.

When I heard my name.

‘Dionyst! Dionysi?’

It was a young woman. Or girl. Or girl. Who sprang from one of those little marble tables, where she had been eating a water-ice, on the pavement, at Yannaki’s.

‘Oh,’ she continued, ‘I thought. I thought it was some one. Dionysios Papapandelidis. Somebody I used to know.’

I must have looked so stupid, I had caused this cool, glittering girl to doubt and mumble. She stood sucking in her lips as though to test to what extent her lipstick had been damaged by the ice.

When suddenly I saw, buried deep inside the shell, the remains, something of the pale, oblong face of the child Titina we had known at Schutz.

My surprise must have come pouring out, for at once she was all cries and laughter. She was breathing on me, embracing even, kissing the wretched beginnings of my thin moustache, there in the glare of Stadium Street. I had never felt so idiotic.

‘Come,’ Titina said at last. ‘We must eat an ice. I have already had several. But Yannaki’s ices are so good.’

I sat with Titina, but was nervous, for fear I might have to pay for all those previous ices.

But Titina almost immediately said:

‘I shall invite you, dear Dionysi.’

She was so glad. She was so kind. The curious part of it was: as Titina fished in her bag for a cigarette, and fiddled with the stunning little English lighter, and a ball of incalculable notes fell out on the marble table-top, I had become the awkward thing of flesh Titina Stavridi used to be.

‘Tell me!’ she begged; and: ‘Tell me!’

Dragging on the cigarette, with her rather full, practised lips.

But I, I had nothing to tell.

‘And you?’ I asked. ‘Do you live in Athens?’

‘Oh, no!’ She shook her head. ‘Never in Athens!’

This goddess was helmeted only in her own hair, black, so black, the lights in it were blue.