‘No,’ she said. ‘I am here on a short visit. Jean-Louis,’ she explained, ‘is an exceptionally kind and generous man.’

‘Jean-Louis?’

‘That is my friend,’ Titina answered, shaping her mouth in such a way I knew my aunts would have thought it common.

‘This person, is he old or young?’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘he is mature.’

‘Does your mother know?’

‘Oh, Mother! Mother is very satisfied things have arranged themselves so well. She has her own apartment, too. If this is the world, then live in it. That is what Mother has decided.’

‘And your father?’

‘Papa is always there,’ Titina said, and sighed.

As for myself, I began to fill with desperate longing. Here was Titina, so kind, so close, so skilled, so unimaginable. My clothes tightened on me as I sat.

And Titina talked. All the time her little bracelets thrilled and tinkled. She would turn her eyes this way and that, admiring, or rejecting. She would narrow her eyes in a peculiar way, though perhaps it was simply due to the glare.

‘Tell me, Dionysi,’ she asked, and I experienced the little hairs barely visible on her forearm, ‘have you ever thought of me? I expect not. I was so horrible! Awful! And you were always so very kind.’

The fact was: Titina Stavridi did sincerely believe in her own words, for she had turned upon me her exquisitely contrived face, and I could see at the bottom of her candid eyes, blue as only the Saronic Gulf, I could see, well, I could see the truth.

‘There is always so little time,’ complained Titina, both practical and sad. ‘Dionysi, are you free? Are you free, say, this afternoon? To take me to the sea? To swim?’

‘But this is Greece,’ I said, ‘where men and girls have not yet learnt to swim together.’

‘Pah!’ she cried. ‘They will learn! You and I,’ she said, ‘will swim together. If you are free. This afternoon.’

And at once time was our private toy. We were laughing and joking expertly as Titina Stavridi pared away the notes, to pay for all those ices we had eaten at Yannaki’s.

‘First I have an appointment,’ she announced.

‘With whom?’ I asked.

I could not bear it.

‘Ah!’ She laughed. ‘With a friend of my mother’s. An elderly lady, who has a wart.’

So I was comforted. There were youvarlakia for lunch. Nobody could equal Eurydice at youvarlakia, but today, it seemed, sawdust had got into them.

‘You will offend Eurydice,’ Aunt Thalia had begun to moan. ‘You have left her youvarlakia’.

I decided not to tell my two, dear, stuffy aunts of my meeting with Titina Stavridi.

It became the most unbearable secret, and to pass the time -to say nothing of the fact that I should probably have to pay Titina’s fare on the rather long journey by bus.

‘Oh, no,’ she was saying at last, there on the steps of the Grande Bretagne. ‘Call a taxi,’ Titina insisted, which the man in livery did.