‘Don’t you indulge?’ asked Alexiou out of a yawn.

‘Such a long time. We had forgotten,’ Maro murmured, looking for the step.

‘But you shall see!’ Kikitsa screamed and followed. ‘My Apricockle is not like this. It is the summer. And my darling husband. We shall all be the better for autumn.’

Hajistavros looked back to where the Alexious stood propping each other in the doorway. Mrs Alexiou was indolently paddling a hand in her husband’s unresisting flesh.

Then the Americans began to go down, down, down, concentrating on their toes. They were both suffering from the physical impact which rocks those who return to Greece.

The Alexious were so happy. Kikitsa Alexiou saw to that. When necessary she would button up his pants; life, it seemed, was heavier for men to bear. Her own constitution was excellent. Had she not almost literally carried off Aleko from a series of day-beds and deck-chairs? Nor could anyone deny that Kyria Alexiou was strong-minded. If she yielded, it was to mollify. At least, that was how she saw it – and how she told others that it was.

Some of her acquaintances laughed at Kyria Alexiou’s cats. But everyone is in need of something in addition to another human being. For she had her husband, of course. Some people kept their religion, or collected gold sovereigns, or cultivated sensuality, But Kyria Alexiou needed cats: there was Hairy, who had never appeared interested, and Ronron – was she beginning again? – and the arrogant Apricock. Sometimes the latter would turn and scratch, quite lightly, though unmistakably, as she held him in her arms, as she made yet another attempt to possess. Then Kyria Alexiou would have found it difficult to explain to any third person the efficacy, or even the reality, of possession.

But there was seldom that third person, for the simple reason the Alexious were not in need of one. Certainly there were the Party members, but that was different, in other surroundings. For naturally Alexiou was a member of the Party. How, otherwise, could he have claimed to be an intellectual? So Alexiou sat in the Party rooms, drinking the little cups of coffee, and his wife, who might have grown jealous, was not, because her breeding and the dictates of chic convinced Kyria Alexiou that truth could only flower in their country after some kind of, well, metamorphosis – to call it by a comfortingly abstract, Greek word. So, she accepted curfews, and travel permits, not to mention his forced absence on the Island. Not even when Alexiou paid the Official Visit together with other chosen members, was Kyria Alexiou more than incidentally put out. Did she not always have her cats? And when Aleko returned, with the fountain pen they had given him, and the Astrakhan cap which he wore on winter occasions, in spite of the seam which ate into his forehead, she was delighted for him.

Sometimes joy and thankfulness for the almost miraculous fact of their union would boil over, and she would begin to prowl about the roof, as though to give expression to the tumult of her feelings. At dusk, after the purples had fled out of Athens, leaving its white cubes a grey rubble of extinct gas-fires, or on the browner, brooding nights of August, when the burnt fields had invaded the streets, and a wind was blowing out of Africa, then it would sound as though Kyria Alexiou on her platform was particularly aware, yet unable to communicate. As she prowled, and hummed in little bursts. As she leaned out over the parapet addressing anyone who might hear.