‘Tea!’ Philippides sighed. ‘It is one of the few remaining pleasures. Everybody dies, you know.’

Respecting his host’s abstraction, the guest began to help himself. His fingers, he saw, bungling the sugar, were swollen and tufted. A presence of girls in embroidered dresses had made them clumsy.

‘If you gave me time, I would tell you about my wife,’ Philippides confided. ‘Constantia. A passionate, a difficult woman. But worth the suffering involved.’

He laughed with a slight inward tremor.

‘The best hater I have ever known. How she got to hate these!’ he said, tapping his glass.

‘Oh?’ Malliakas murmured.

He felt drowsily, willingly enchanted, listening, scenting the past, and the omnipresent smell of mildew, as he sipped tea from a bluish cup.

‘Yes. You have only a cup,’ Philippides noticed. ‘Because this is the last of the glasses. Of the twelve I bought from the Russian who was leaving Konya. Which my wife brought with us in the destroyer, in a cardboard box. I will tell you everything if you give me time.’

‘Then I shall give you it!’ said Malliakas, who suddenly, sincerely, wanted to.

For the visitor realized by now it was most important that all the fragments should fall into place, even more important that he should await the return of Mrs Philippides.

‘Oh, but it is not always possible to give. With the best will it is not possible,’ Philippides remembered. ‘There was the gipsy. Did I mention? That was in Chios. After we escaped. The gipsy promised to tell me my fortune, and Constantia was furious because it hadn’t happened to her.’

The old man began to laugh enormously.

‘And did she tell?’ asked Malliakas in the thick voice listeners develop.

‘In the end. The gipsy said: “First you must pull a hair from your chest, and I shall take it, and dance, bare in front and bare behind, amongst the rocks at Ayia Moni.”’

Malliakas was listening to his own breathing.

‘Did you?’ he asked.

‘In the end,’ Philippides said. ‘It was not easy. Because, as you see, I am rather smooth.’

Through a conglomeration of woollen garments he began to scratch at his old chest. While smiling for the past.

‘And what did the gipsy say?’

‘She said,’ said Philippides – ‘I was drinking tea at the time, out of one of these glasses – she said: “You will live,” she said, “till the last of the twelve glasses breaks.”’

‘Well now,’ Malliakas prepared to indulge this amiable, aged child, ‘you have lived! Just as the gipsy prophesied.’

‘I wonder,’ Philippides considered quietly, ‘or whether one dies before one’s time.’ But quickly added in lighter tone: ‘Constantia was so angry when it happened. She said it was a lot of nonsense, that the gypsy must have known about the twelve Russian glasses from Kyria Assimina, who was stupid, and a babbler, and who had broken two of her most valuable dishes. Whether Constantia was right, or not, in all her charges, Kyria Assimina was a breaker. She broke, I think, four of the glasses before she was got rid of.’