At once its controlling strings whirled into action the melting masses of Kikitsa Alexiou’s waxlike flesh.

‘See?’ she almost spat. ‘He’s coming to us! Wait!’

Revolving and jerking, opening the doors, she worked as though to prepare an entrance down a never-ending corridor. Until she did create something of the necessary illusion. Aleko Alexiou emerged out of his wife’s skilful trompe l’oeil. Slowly he began to fill the room. His head appeared immense, even noble, an Anatolian Beethoven, as Kikitsa flew at him, to support, to present, to rough up the hair just so much.

‘These are the friends, Aleko mou. I told you. The Americans.’

But Aleko Alexiou was still inspired.

‘I am so sorry, I forgot,’ he apologized, and smiled.

But most amiable. In his stringy tie, in his rather crushed linen suit, a little stained, as well as half-open at the fly, Hajistavros could not help noticing.

Massive, but crumbly, Maro saw. Whereas, if his wife could have had him in granite, how she would have polished the brow.

Instead, Kikitsa Alexiou had taken her husband, but literally, by the nose.

‘At least he has a nose!’ she screamed. ‘Heh! You old bignosey thing!’

She had plastered herself upon him, and he was accepting it with such good grace Spiro Hajistavros stepped forward, and offered his hand with the kind of spontaneous and manly firmness which would rouse in Maro a shiver of pleasure on recognizing it once again in her usually imperfect husband.

‘How are you, Mr Alexiou?’ Hajistavros asked quite simply, as though his host had been in business.

But the great man appeared to be groping after something.

And his wife’s mouth, suddenly split from its corners to the jaw, moved as agonizingly as that of a ventriloquist’s dummy as it snapped at words.

‘He is so – he is so -’ Kikitsa clicked.

‘I am so -’ Aleko Alexiou sighed, ‘I am so tired!’

Then he collapsed on a chair. From which he continued smiling and imploring.

‘It is the time of year,’ Kikitsa hurried to explain. ‘But after the heat breaks, when the rain falls at the end of August, the mind is at once refreshed. So much thinking’ – here she fell to boring her own skull with naked finger – ‘takes it out of one. The siesta even, you’ll see, makes all the difference.’

Suddenly everyone had collapsed. They were all sitting on the little, uncomfortable Skyros chairs. Each had realized what it is to be a Greek. A gentle timeless melancholy, lapping and flowing between their islands, had reached one of the more easily accessible shores. Maro remembered certain dusty courtyards aching through the vines with exquisite silence. Spiro’s lips had grown glutinous. The immense warm stone with which sleep had so often erased him in summer was again weighing on him, and he would have accepted for ever, if waking had not promised a scent of crushed pine-needles. As for the Alexious, they had never been expected to forget. They were lolling against each other with professional luxuriance. They were smiling at the Hajistavri from under benevolent lids. In each of four material envelopes, whether the buttered Athenian pastry-cases, or the oiled, the meticulously serviced, American machines, a tormented soul was temporarily blessed. Each of the bodies was wearing for a moment the same, brown Byzantine face.