Tina produced fruits glacés.

‘We brought them, Jean-Louis and I, from the Côte d’Azur. Take them,’ she ordered.

First I offered her the box.

‘Ach!’ she said. ‘Eat! I am sick of them. The fruits glacés!’

So I sat and stuffed.

For a long time we remained together beneath the pines, she so cool and flawless, myself only hot and clammy. She began to sing – what, I really cannot remember.

‘Ah,’ she exclaimed, lying back, looking up through the branches, ‘they are stunted, our poor pines.’

‘That is their way,’ I told her.

‘Yes,’ she sighed. ‘They are not stunted.’

I walked a short distance, and brought her vissinada from a roadside booth. We stained our mouths with the purple vissinada. All along the Saronic Gulf the evening had begun to purple. The sand was gritty to the flesh. I believe it was at this point the man with the accordion passed by, playing his five or six notes, as gentle and persuasive as wood-pigeons. Unlike the boys earlier, the man with the accordian did not stare. He strolled. I think probably the man was blind.

‘Ach, Titina! Titina!’

I was breathing my desperation on her.

The darkness was plunging towards us as Titina Stavridi turned her face towards me on the sand. A twig had marked her perfect cheek. She lay looking into me, as though for something she would not find.

‘Poor Dionysaki,’ she said, ‘at least it is unnecessary to be afraid.’

So that I had never felt stronger. As I wrestled with Titina Stavridi on the sand, my arms were turned to sea-serpents. The scales of her nacreous maillot, which Jean-Louis had never cared for, were sloughed in a moment by my skilful touch. I was holding in my hands her small, but persistent buttocks, which had been threatening to escape all that afternoon.

‘Ach!’ she cried, in almost bitter rage, as we heard her teeth strike on mine.

Afterwards Titina remained infinitely kind. The whole darkness was moving with her kindness.

‘When will you leave?’ I dreaded to ask.

‘The day after tomorrow,’ she replied. ‘No,’ she corrected, quick. ‘Tomorrow.’

‘Then why did you say: after tomorrow?’

‘Because,’ she said simply, ‘I forgot.’

So my sentence was sealed. All the sea sounds of Attica rose to attack me, as I thrust my lips all over again into Titina’s wilted mouth.

‘Good-bye, Titina,’ I said, on the steps of her hotel.

‘Good-bye, Dionysi. Dionysaki!’

She was so tender, so kind.

But I did not say anything else, as I had begun to understand already that such remarks are idiocy.

All the way to Patissia, the dust was thick and heavy on my shoes.

When I got in, my Aunt Calliope, the professor, had arrived from Paris.

‘Our Dionysi!’ cried Aunt Calliope. ‘Almost a man!’

She embraced me quickly, in order to return to politics.

We had never cared for Aunt Calliope, who had made us write essays and things, though her brothers loved her, and would quarrel with her till the white hours over any boring political issue.