Spiro was too furious to answer.

So Maro got inside the car beside her husband and, for the return journey allowed the Alexious to have the back.

The sea was purpler than before.

‘Aleko will write something very nice about it all. You will see,’ Kikitsa promised rapturously.

Glancing in the driver’s mirror, Maro could see that Kikitsa would gather up the pieces of her crumbly genius, and at least for herself, fit them together again.

Not long after that the call of business made it necessary for the Hajistavri to return to New York. Probably they saw the Alexious again, on the other hand there may not have been time. A hasty packing. And about that period Aleko Alexiou fell temporarily ill. In any case, Maro was so glad to be returning to all that material superfluity which had become her substitute for life. Whether Spiro felt the same way, she never thought to ask, for she suspected an absence of education might have prevented him from understanding, or at least, from answering. Not that she was critical. She no longer expected so much of anybody, herself included.

In a little over two years the Hajistavri returned. Their reasons for boycotting Greece throughout their earlier married life no longer seemed valid. Sometimes now they laughed together at the expense of their friends the Alexious.

‘Perhaps Kikitsa’s Aleko will have ripened,’ Maro Hajistavrou would venture.

For Kikitsa and she corresponded infrequently now.

‘He’s been waiting for the Party word,’ Spiro would suggest.

‘Do you believe Aleko is a genuine red?’

‘A washed-out pink. Aleko is so very, very tired.’

As their plane bumped around above the airport Maro Hajistavrou peered out and saw Hymettus. Because it was spring, that rather forbidding, morose ridge was greening over from its mauves and browns. It is still ugly, she told herself, but fascinating, unavoidable, something of me was hatched on it.

‘Did we bring presents for the Alexious?’ Spiro asked, as they sat there those last moments, holding their lumped-together coats and furs.

‘No,’ said Maro. ‘I thought about it.’

Again their friends were not at the airport to meet them, but this time Mrs Hajistavrou did not resent, because she no longer expected it.

When they had settled in, Maro decided she was strong enough to visit Kikitsa. A spasm of guilt drove her. This time she went there on her own. She even mounted the Kolonaki hill with very little thought for her heart.

‘Alexious?’ replied that small, unpleasant old caretaker who insisted on addressing in English. ‘Gone. Gone. Too much money. Very changed. The rich forget,’ the caretaker accused.

After he had run inside, and returned with an address dashed across a corner of paper, Maro took a taxi, and was driven to a block on what was now the outskirts of the city. Fields still straggled round the marble towers, but already she could smell Athenian dust competing against the scent of stocks.

A woman with an exceptionally large behind and an apparently approving smile answered yes, Alexious lived in an apartment on the roof.