‘Money is for spending,’ she explained.

On the way, as she rootled after the lovely little lighter, I was relieved to see her bag was still stuffed with notes.

For the afternoon she was wearing a bracelet of transparent shells, which jostled together light as walnuts.

‘That,’ Titina said, ‘is nothing.’

‘My friend,’ she added, ‘advised me to leave my jewels in a safe deposit at the Crédit Lyonnais. One never knows, Jean-Louis says, what may happen in Greece.’

I agreed that the Crédit Lyonnais offered greater certainty.

It was like that all the way. As her body cannoned off me, as lightly as her bracelets of shells, Titina revealed a life of sumptuous, yet practical behaviour. She accepted splendour as she did her skin. All along the beach, that rather gritty Attic sand, Titina radiated splendour in godlike armour of nacreous scales, in her little helmet of rubber feathers.

‘Do you like my costume?’ she asked, after she had done her mouth. ‘Jean-Louis does not. Ça me donne un air de putain. So he says.’

At once she ran down into the sea, shimmering in her gorgeous scales. I was glad to find myself inside the water.

Then we swam, in long sweeps of silvery-blue. Bubbles of joy seemed to cling to Titina’s lips. Her eyes were the deeper, drowsier, for immersion.

I had asked the taxi to drop us at a certain bay along that still deserted coast. The shore was strewn with earth-coloured rocks. The Attic pines straggled, and struggled, and leaned out over the sea. It was a poor landscape, splendid, too, in its own way, of perfectly fulfilled austerity. I had hoped we should remain unseen. And so we were. Until a party of lads descended half-naked on the rocks. Several of them I had sat beside in school. Now they seated themselves, lips drooping, eyes fixed. They shouted the things one expected. Some of them threw handfuls of water.

But Titina squinted at the sun.

Faced with these gangling louts, of deferred muscle and blubber-lips, anything oafish in myself seemed to have been spent. Was it Titina’s presence? My head, set firmly on my neck, had surveyed oceans and continents. I had grown suave, compact, my glistening moustache had thickened, if not to the human eye.

Presently some of the boys I knew plunged in, and were swimming around, calling and laughing in their cracked voices. Their seal-like antics were intended to amuse.

But Titina did not see.

Then, as we were standing in the shallows, squat, yellow Sotiri Papadopoulos attempted to swim between Titina’s legs.

‘Go away, filthy little boy!’

How she pointed!

Titina’s scorn succeeded. Sotiri went. Fortunately. He had often proved himself stronger than I.

Afterwards I sat with Titina, dripping water, under the pines. She told me distantly of the visits to Deauville, Le Touquet, and Cannes. Reservations at the best hotels. I was only lazily impressed. But how immaculate she was. I remembered Agni, her goosey arms, and strings of wet, swinging hair.