But Kikitsa was too obsessed to notice.

‘The roof,’ she told Aleko on returning, ‘is the most splendid of all roofs.’

The roof was all-important, for was not practically the whole of life spent prowling on a roof, peering at windows, following the coloured slides which light imposed in rotation on the Attic coast, calling to, pouncing on, fondling cats?

‘It will be perfect for the cats,’ she told her husband.

‘It will be an extravagance,’ he said. ‘Also, perhaps, an embarrassment’

He was, she knew, thinking of the Party.

‘Dearest Aleko,’ she said, ‘you owe it to your eminence.’

And took his head, as though she intended to smooth fur.

‘We are the ones who have preached,’ he said.

‘Ba,’ she answered, ‘we shall preach all the better when we have experienced freedom.’

She knew it was outrageous, shamefully unorthodox. Of course her origins were raising their head, nor did she regret it.

And Aleko was perhaps a little drunker for temptation. His rather grey skin had coloured along the cheek-bones, his lips had opened in which she put the mere tip of her expert tongue.

‘There,’ she said, and knew for certain.

From then on Kikitsa Alexiou could not cover quick enough all the ground that had to be covered. She was ever running. To the furniture removers, long before their time, to the electrician, or the seamstress, to Kyr Leon Zimbal, the Jew of Odos Ispanias, who had promised to make her a strong wooden box in which to transport her cats.

‘There will be many other uses,’ she decided, ‘to which we can put our cats’ box.’

The possessive pronoun in the plural would issue from her mouth uniting her even more closely with the husband to whom she was devoted.

When Aleko Alexiou announced, leaning against a wall for support – it was a night in January, she would remember:

‘There shall be no cats, Kikitsa.’

His wife did not reply, because reply was not possible. The room was straining round them. Outside, rain had begun to slash at the terrace.

Then Alexiou had to make an effort to justify himself.

‘I am drenched with cats!’ he shouted.

He went out into the bathroom, skidding on a sliver of cat-shit, which should have reinforced his argument, only it didn’t.

Kikitsa Alexiou had continued standing in the room even after realizing she must move from there eventually.

As it happened, the wooden box which Kyr Leon Zimbal had already begun was used for a practical purpose. Anthoula had consulted with Kyra Photini, the caretaker at the new flats, and a plan of kinds was formed. Opposite the block was a diminished wood of dusty pine-trees, and a piece of land to which families, not yet altogether urban, no longer quite peasant, came on Sunday afternoons to cultivate a sprawl of tomatoes and rows of struggling vines. There in the wood, on the edge of this surviving vineyard, Anthoula and the caretaker decided the kyria should set up her cat-hutch. Already amongst the trees there was a black goat on a chain.