‘And my cats?’ she would inquire. ‘Have my cats eaten?’

‘The cats have eaten,’ Anthoula would answer, sweet, but stern.

She did not add: They have eaten my foot.

Because Anthoula knew that, even though she might put the boot into Kyria Alexiou’s cats, it was really a soft felt slipper.

So Kyria Alexiou was most relieved. She kissed her husband with a great smack.

‘I know you will never forget, Anthoula. One must cherish one’s cats,’ Kyria Alexiou insisted. ‘They are almost,’ she said, ‘human beings.’

‘This Ronron,’ Anthoula said, ‘this ugly, spotted whore has had her kittens in the blankets.’

Spiro Hajistavros was a different man in control of the second Cadillac. He could have driven head on at far more ominous situations than the Alexious presented. Or did the Alexious present a situation after all?

‘Bravo the Americans!’ Kikitsa Alexiou cried. ‘Is this the Prophet Elias already?’

Kikitsa lolled. She was dressed pour le sport, in a leather jacket, and a little hat with a breast-feather in crimson. My college hat, Kikitsa explained. It was a joke.

Hajistavros frowned and drove.

‘Spiro hates to be disturbed,’ his wife was forced finally to call.

For, on the drive to Sounion, the couples were separated to the extent that Kikitsa sat with Spiro in front, Maro and Aleko were disposed of behind.

The car ran so smoothly it put the distance to shame. We shall be there too soon, Maro thought almost with horror.

‘Our poor Greece!’ Kikitsa sighed. ‘Our rundown, delapidated, little, cosmic mess! How I love you! Long live Hellas!’

Aleko Alexiou looked out of the window. Always when his wife exasperated him most he looked out of the window, and dilated his nostrils, as though the mucus inside them had turned bad. Otherwise Alexiou was pretty comfortable. His thighs had adapted themselves to the shape and motion of the well-up-holstered car. After all, he had been born to ease, even if greatness, poverty, and the Party had ended by taking possession of him.

‘This is Phaneromeni,’ Kikitsa said. ‘It was not the Germans, but the Black Reaction who marched two-thirds of the inhabitants out of the village and shot them in a field. Tell them, Aleko. It is quite a story.’

‘Oh,’ he complained, ‘the story is far too long.’

He sat dilating his nostrils as if by numbers.

‘It is all that,’ Kikitsa agreed. ‘It is the story of the Black Reaction.’

Aleko looked over his shoulder. If he had been wearing a hat he would have pulled it down about his ears. Except in the abstract, his affiliations embarrassed Alexiou.

Maro, too, was embarrassed. She did not doubt that she was the Black Reaction. She looked at her ankles, slim and silken, and wondered how she had ever conceived the character of Kikitsa Andragora. The lost radiance transferred itself to a landscape seldom far from the ideal.

The heat had lifted from Attica. Autumn hung a swag of gold from the poles of the horizon. If the car had pulled up, all knew that the silence would have been too much for them, the ground too hard under the olive trees. So they drove on, and nostalgia grated on their minds, like a withered olive grating and turning between the cheek and an earthy pillow.