‘The Catastrophe,’ my Aunt Calliope had reached the shouting stage, ‘was the result of public apathy in one of the most backward countries of the world.’

My Uncle Stepho was shouting back.

‘Hand it over to you and your progressive intellectuals, and we might as well, all, decent people, anyway, cut our throats!’ bellowed Uncle Stepho, Vice-President of our Whole Bank.

‘But let us stick to the Catastrophe!’

‘The Generals were to blame!’ screamed my Uncle Constantine.

‘All Royalists! Royalists!’

Aunt Calliope was beating with her fists.

‘What can one expect of effete Republicans? Nothing further!’

‘Do not blame the Republicans!’ Aunt Ourania dared anyone.

‘The Royalists have not yet proved themselves.’

Aunt Calliope started to cackle unmercifully.

‘Better the Devil,’ thought Constantine.

Aunt Ourania frowned.

‘Still, Kosta,’ she suggested, very gravely, in the voice she adopted for all soothing purposes, ‘you must admit that when blood flows our poor Greece is regenerated.’

My Aunt Thalia, who had been crying, went to the piano. She began to play a piece I remembered. Sweet and sticky, the music flowed from under her always rather tentative hands.

The music gummed the voices up.

Then my Aunt Calliope remarked:

‘Guess whom I saw?’

Nobody did.

‘That little thing, that Titina Stavridi, to whom you were all so kind in the old days at Schutz.’

‘Living in Athens?’ asked Aunt Ourania, though the answer must remain unimportant.

‘Not a bit of it,’ Aunt Calliope said. ‘I have run into her before. Oh, yes, several times. In Paris.’ Here Aunt Calliope laughed. ‘A proper little thing! A little whore!’

It was obvious from her expression that Aunt Ourania was taking it upon herself to expiate the sins of the world, while Aunt Thalia forced the music. How it flowed, past the uncles and out of the room, all along the passages of our shrunken apartment, which seldom nowadays lost its smell of pasta. The intolerable Schumann pursued me as far as my own room, and farther.

Outside, the lilac-bushes were turned solid in the moonlight. The white music of that dusty night was frozen in the parks and gardens. As I leaned out of the window, and held up my throat to receive the knife, nothing happened. Only my Aunt Thalia continued playing Schumann, and I realized that my extended throat was itself a stiff sword.

Miss Slattery and her Demon Lover

He stood holding the door just so far. A chain on it too.

‘This,’ she said, ‘is Better Sales Pty. Ltd.’ Turning to a fresh page. ‘Market research,’ she explained. ‘We want you to help us, and hope, indirectly, to help you.’

She moistened her mouth, easing a threat into an ethical compromise, technique pushed to the point where almost everyone was convinced. Only for herself the page on her pad would glare drearily blank.

Oh dear, do not be difficult, she would have said for choice to some old continental number whose afternoon sleep she had ruined.

‘Faht do you vornt?’ he asked.