‘Apricock,’ Kikitsa continued, ‘he is the mystery cat.’

Aleko Alexiou was staring out to sea. He had allowed wind and sunlight to prepare his head for sacrifice.

‘Take nature,’ Alexiou said.

His hand was helping him extract, or mould, a painfully refractory object

‘Nature is so – so – un-cooperative, ultimately so unreal!’

Then his hand fell, and with it his failure, while the illusory light continued to cascade into a spurious sea.

Spiro was looking and looking, straight then down.

‘I do not say,’ said Kikitsa, ‘that I do not understand. Because with my great experience of cats it is not possible not to understand.’

The tomato-boy sat at their feet picking his nose.

‘But look at this charming, natural boy!’ Kikitsa rejoiced. ‘Has Spiro pressed? Has he clicked, or whatever he does? Are we in the picture?’ she asked, suddenly almost hysterical. ‘Spiro,’ she called, ‘some day will you – as a special favour -will you snap my Apricock?’

Spiro Hajistavros, his wife saw, was compressed. His strong, rather yellow fingers were trembling.

‘Ach, Kikitsa!’ her husband begged. ‘It is too tiring!’

When a cat appeared, low against the ground, rounding the temple’s marble plinth.

‘My God!’ Kikitsa called. ‘A cat!’

The flat grey cat flattened flatter against the marble.

‘Starved!’ Kikitsa Alexiou cried.

‘It is nobody’s cat,’ explained the apathetic boy. ‘It is no good. They do not want it.’

But Kikitsa Alexiou had begun to stalk the cat.

The boy laughed. Her mackintosh had rucked up. Maro Hajistavrou had to admit to Kikitsa’s lumpy calves.

When she returned, empty-armed, Kikitsa Alexiou had broken a nail. Marble had powdered her broad behind.

‘The trouble with Greeks,’ she bemoaned, ‘they are not cat-lovers. They are themselves too egotistical, quarrelsome, lazy, and gluttonous to understand the force of love. That love is something more than pouncing in the dark, or waiting to be pounced on.’

She had laid her arms across her breasts. She might have been preparing to recite some love poems she had composed, of such poignancy she would never be able to get it all out.

‘Poor starving soul! If only you understood!’ she did at least make the attempt. ‘I would feed you on red mullet. And quail.’

The boy was gulping down his laughter.

‘Love,’ she said, and her voice trembled.

Then Alexiou drew in his breath from so far it sounded like an aluminium tape-measure.

‘You are crazy!’ he hissed. ‘Idiotic! Crazy! Let us get into the car, and ask them to drive us home.’

Not that he succeeded in breaking the spell which Kikitsa Alexiou had wilfully laid upon herself.

‘You must not take any notice of Aleko,’ she advised with apparent satisfaction after he had started down the hill. ‘There are times when it is good for him to give way to his temperament.’

So she began to rock and hobble down the slope, carrying her unborn poem, and the form of the escaped, unwanting cat.

‘Did you manage to take the picture?’ Maro Hajistavrou whispered, as she slipped her arm inside her husband’s.