‘My God!’ she would murmur. ‘Kaymenes! How unfortunate that, where one of us exists, a second has almost always been created. Otherwise it would be unbearable.’

The perspiration streamed out of Kyria Alexiou’s porous skin.

Or she would lean out over the parapet, and call back to her husband, who would almost certainly be in bed:

‘Aleko? They are at it! Those Kolokithopouli! Po-po-po! Quelle horreur! You can hear, Aleko, I swear you can hear the springs!’

Kyria Alexiou would prowl and hum.

‘Zing zing!’ she would hiss and laugh.

Her slippers went slit slat across the still overheated tiles.

Or again, she would lean out over the parapet, and call back:

‘Plumpy thing! You should see, Aleko. A real Turk’s delight!’

But the Kyrios Alexiou had turned out the light. The summer nights exhausted him.

Sometimes, however, and at last, he might appear in the doorway, his greatness gone, a grey shape in pyjama pants. He would call back:

‘Ach, Kikitsa! Come to bed! People will say you are a maniac!’

‘What is mania?’ Kyria Alexiou would shout. ‘Life is mania?’

It made her laugh.

‘Trumpeting over the rooftops like the radio!’ her husband complained.

‘It is all good popular Greek,’ she grumbled.

‘Come to bed, Kikitsa,’ he coaxed. ‘Act a little sensibly!’

Then she grew very quiet and meek.

‘Yes, husband mou,’ she said ‘I cannot act sensibly, because I am not sensible in any way, but will come to bed if you wish it.’

At once she was a little obedient girl with a bow in her hair. Kyria Alexiou almost toddled.

‘Rouli, rouli, rouli mou!’ she cooed and drooled when they were arranged.

The disorder of her hair appeared the damper, the streakier for the drizzled light from the electric bulb. They lay in bed. The Kyrios Alexiou would sweat quite desperately on being touched by the tips of his wife’s abandoned hair.

‘Ach, Kikitsa!’ he complained. ‘I am exhausted!’

‘Yes, my darling husband,’ she agreed.

Then, when they were extinguished, she would encircle him instead as though he had been a cat. Her moist skin would lap at his. But after she had fallen, into sleep, and the bottomless depths of her affection, he would extricate himself from the cat’s-cradle of anatomy to which he had been subjected. It was only that he felt so tired, not that he did not love her. In fact, gratitude would carry him so far as to free her from the suffocating curtain of her own hair, as she lay sleeping, while there was no possibility that his gratitude might be returned.

The drive to Sounion had not yet taken place, for no very adequate reason, except that one week Maro Hajistavrou had felt off colour, suffering from that migraine of hers. As the agreement remained unfulfilled, her husband finally remarked on it.

‘What about these friends of yours, these Alexious you were bellyaching to see? How come we haven’t taken them for some of the rides you promised?’