‘If you ask me,’ Spiro Hajistavros said, ‘we did a crazy thing setting out before the food had settled in our stomachs. You’ve gotta take the climate into account.’

Then he berped. His wife did not let herself hear it, for she did not want to feel humiliated.

‘Yes, sir!’ Spiro said, and berped, and plodded.

‘It’s our climate, isn’t it?’ Maro Hajistavrou found her voice.

‘Sure, but you forget,’ Spiro said.

He was one of those who cling to their adopted language until forced out of it. Success had not come to him in Greek.

‘And my friends. I believe you begrudge me my friendship for Kikitsa Alexiou,’ Maro complained.

‘What would I have against you and this Mrs Alexiou being friends?’ her husband asked. ‘Sure you’re friends. Old friends. So old they forgot to come and meet you at the airport.’

Maro Hajistavrou might have cried, only then she would have arrived looking a sight.

‘Oh, but Kikitsa was always such a lovely person! The prettiest thing. Smart as paint. I can’t tell you. She had bronze hair. And always so lively. And legs. Greek women have thick legs on the whole.’

Spiro grunted.

Maro wondered whether he had kept mistresses. For the moment she did not altogether care. As she climbed the hill in his footsteps, she could not see her husband’s face, only the cropped lines of his rather thick, bull’s neck, and the wings of his too perfect, silver hair. She thought she hated what she saw. It was what she had needed, though, and married, and even loved at times.

There is nothing in this man to which one can object, her Aunt Cecaumenou had decided already so many years ago. In that exquisitely reasonable voice the ‘nothing’ suggested ‘everything’. It is not the restaurants, the Aunt Cecaumenou had concluded, and her niece was more than ever reminded of an icon, restored admittedly by Schiaparelli; no girl in her right mind would turn up her nose at a chain of restaurants in seven cities, and the man himself is by any standards honest, it is only that his food is, well so horribly indifferent.

Maro Mauroleondos, thin and brittle even as a girl, had married Spiro Hajistavros almost twenty years ago. In their progress through a series of increasingly desirable apartments the Hajistavri had grown together like two luxurious indoor plants. Different in habit and variety they relied upon each other for support; he for the thorny traditions of her class which she brought to bear on daily life, she for the succulence on which her parasitic nature fed. On recognizing the value of her find, Maro Mauroleondos would have risked any aunt’s overt opposition. If she had hesitated at the time, it was for imagining what her friend, Kikitsa Andragora, undoubtedly would think and say.

Now, as the Hajistavri continued plodding through present dust, negotiating the cracks in the paving, skirting the corpse of a piebald cat, Hajistavros turned to spit.

‘Athens nineteen-forty-nine!’