Then Mrs Hajistavrou fled.

Just for a moment, as she fell from sight in the cage of the stuffy little lift, Maro looked back through the grille to where Kikitsa leaned against the frame of her door. The classic folds of the silk dress had been turned to immemorial stone. Maro knew that Kikitsa’s image must last in her mind much longer than the actual, ephemeral image of Kikitsa standing in her doorway. Then the lift continued to sink the traveller in the limbo of the darker building. Light flickered and flackered at passing instants. And the scintillating, fragmentary eyes. And the quirks at the corners of the rather thin, dark lips.

Mrs Hajistavrou was panting like a stringy fowl by the time the lift released her at ground level. She went away panting and gasping, on her thin, brittle legs, in their impeccable American stockings. As other pedestrians passed her she averted her face, in case, by some distasteful chance, the episode she had experienced might flow out of her frightened eyes in identifiably sensuous waves.

‘You are not seeing much of your Hajistavri,’ Aleko Alexiou had to comment.

‘No.’

Kikitsa would sit stroking her forearms as though to discover some still-to-be-experienced sensation.

‘Probably,’ she said, ‘Maro and I have given each other all we had to give.’

Aleko laughed.

His wife did not seem to think it worth the trouble to ask him why.

Aleko Alexiou, normally unconscious of a woman’s contours or the tics of her peculiar mind, noticed that the lines of Kikitsa’s face had been rejuvenated by some process of mentality or light. Once an acquaintance, a coureur de femmes, had pointed out to him on the street a face which he said he knew for certain – it was a famous, international face – had been lifted by surgery. Now it was quite unthinkable, in Athens, that a woman of Kikitsa’s class and mind should have resorted to such an expedient, her husband was complacent enough to believe. It was simply that Kikitsa’s face had undergone a change, the way faces will, by joy, or suffering. Alexiou immediately turned away because he did not wish to think about it. He tried to remember a fact he had culled that morning from a manuscript in the library, and which continued to elude him throughout the evening.

Kikitsa was soon strolling on the terrace. They had eaten, and she drew him out there, slipping her arm through the angle of his. The lisping silk fretted against the rather rough tweed. At first he would have liked to throw her off, but continued strolling, awkwardly easing one of his legs. At least she did not chatter now, or shriek, and he hoped under the blandishment of silence his mind might solve its more pressing problems.

So the Alexious dawdled in the furry darkness.

It had become Kikitsa Alexiou’s practice to pursue a kind of recitative, which soothed extraordinarily, he had to admit, as she made their motion and the passage of time rub upon his senses.