But she had such limited control of him. Alone, she asked, as so many times before, for what reason had she married her husband, and concluded, as always, she needed him to keep her company as she stood on the edge of life.

When Spiro returned he did not answer. He was walking with his strong rubbery step.

‘But were they in? What did you find?’ she persisted in the sighing lift.

‘They were in bed,’ he said.

‘Still!’ she cried. ‘You don’t mean to say they hadn’t finished the siesta?’

‘I guess they hadn’t begun.’

Then Maro Hajistavrou hated – was it her husband? was it the Alexious? – in any case, she hated.

‘Some people are like animals!’ she gasped; it was so hateful.

‘The hour won’t always wait, neither for human beings,’ Spiro Hajistavros said.

Mrs Hajistavrou tried, briefly, discreetly, to calculate whether in all the history of their relationship the hour had not waited for her husband.

When the lift released them it was the hour of gold. Hymettus was purest red gold. The columns of the Parthenon glittered with openly revealed veins. Only the goddess was absent. Mrs Hajistavrou, who was walking with those quick, controlled steps, looking for the cab which would not come to carry them away, was submitted to Greece as never before. But she would not, would not allow herself to disintegrate. She closed her eyes against present and past. How glad she was, really, to be in a position to look forward to America. Even the distress of the Atlantic flight, the constriction, anxiety, the pills which would not work, struck her as desirable, and to walk at last inside their own apartment door, to discover whether she had been dreaming, or whether her india-rubber tree had died.

Down at the Dump

‘Hi!’

He called from out of the house, and she went on chopping in the yard. Her right arm swung, firm still, muscular, though parts of her were beginning to sag. She swung with her right, and her left arm hung free. She chipped at the log, left right. She was expert with the axe.

Because you had to be. You couldn’t expect all that much from a man.

‘Hi!’ It was Wal Whalley calling again from out of the home.

He came to the door then, in that dirty old baseball cap he had shook off the Yankee disposals. Still a fairly appetizing male, though his belly had begun to push against the belt.

‘Puttin’ on yer act?’ he asked, easing the singlet under his armpits; easy was policy at Whalleys’ place.

‘’Ere!’ she protested. ‘Waddaya make me out ter be? A lump of wood?’

Her eyes were of that blazing blue, her skin that of a brown peach. But whenever she smiled, something would happen, her mouth opening on watery sockets and the jags of brown, rotting stumps.

‘A woman likes to be addressed,’ she said.

No one had ever heard Wal address his wife by her first name. Nobody had ever heard her name, though it was printed in the electoral roll. It was, in fact, Isba.