‘Ba,’ cried Kyria Alexiou, ‘what else can a creature do?’

The two other ladies cried a little for their poor burnt one, who was herself dry of tears.

She put bowls of milk and fish for her cats, there amongst the trees, and stumps, for during the Occupation some of the pines had fallen to the axe. While the cats preened and arched, and with their claws drew resin from the scaly bark, and curled in the sand and wiry grass. Though their box was lined with wool.

From the marble ramparts Kyria Alexiou watched the life which had slipped away from her. She watched her cats coming and going, coming and going. Or going. Or going.

Hairy was the first, who had never been interested. Hairy sidled by daylight in amongst the rose tomatoes, and was not seen afterwards. It was Ronron who let out a shriek by night. (How could she fail to identify her own cats, even at a distance, and under cover of darkness?) Ronron was never seen again. But Apricock, her most insolent, he remained, licking and rubbing, looking, or turned to stone upon a bed of needles.

She would go down and talk to her cat, in the long clear accents of tragedy. Though the cat himself would not be coaxed into playing a positive part. And once drew blood from her breast, causing in her a certain melancholy satisfaction.

‘Even the cats are Greek,’ Kyria Alexiou told herself.

When on a morning of rain Anthoula announced:

‘There is a little white poutana of a cat. So lovely. So nice. Rubbing against the side of the box. Her little nose so pink.’

Kyria Alexiou rushed down.

‘My Apricockle! My Apricock!’

The two cats were watching each other. Head to head. Their identical positions were as severe as stone.

Kyria Alexiou came and went Her movements were quite distracted now.

‘What is it, Kikitsa?’ her husband asked later in the day.

She had heard his key, of course, but was not to be influenced, neither by the silk bow-tie, nor the pressed suit of imported tweed. Kyrios Alexiou would sit tossing his ankle. The cooler seasons were in his favour, and this one in particular.

‘You have grown thinner, Kikitsa,’ he remarked.

Then she had clapped her hands to her cheeks. She had, she thought, the look of a starved, a flattening cat. Her eyes were larger than before.

So she ran down quickly at dusk. She took the dish of mullet’s heads, in death still exquisitely coralline.

‘Ver-i-kok-ko!’ she called. ‘My Apricock!’

But without heart.

The orange cat was standing on a stump from which the resinous blood had run. He suddenly leaped, into space.

‘The white whore! The white devil!’ Kyria Alexiou cried.

‘It is her, the poor burnt one, who should have our sympathy.’ Old Anthoula had come up behind through the screening trees. ‘Who will bleed, but the woman? It is in her nature!’

Certainly the orange tom’s teeth appeared to be fastened in the nape of white fur. His tail thrashing the dead-coloured grass.