She spoke tremblingly.

‘And yet you are not cold.’

She blushed, or it was the pomegranate flower reflected in her cheek.

‘Oh, leave me! Who knows what I am? I don’t!’ She sounded to herself as though she were positively shouting.

But he touched her. He had small, rather compelling hands.

The young couple were married from the house in Frankish Street, and almost before the design of the bonbonnières had ceased to delight the guests, the bridegroom was summoned by the cousin at Konya.

Constantia wrote: ‘What are you doing down there, Yanko, amongst all those Turks? And the Russian you mention. I dislike parties gentlemen give for gentlemen. At times there is something secretive about the behaviour of men.’

She wrote: ‘Will you not send for me? I do not mind dirt, flies, Turks, boredom – it could hardly be boredom! I shall organize our lives. I shall bring the nicest of the five tea-sets we received at our wedding. If you will send for me! I have my eye on the stuff for curtains. Oh, Yanko, I can no longer sleep! I You won’t write, excepting about the wretched carpets!’

When the weather grew cooler he came and fetched her, and at the lokanda where they changed horses, she threw back her veil and announced: ‘I can smell camels!’ with such distaste he wondered whether her feelings for him would survive.

Later, a moon in an autumn sky provoked her to remark: ‘Do you see that moon? Such a splinter, such a little icicle of a moon!’

She would hold his head in her arms, as though it no longer belonged to him, as though she intended to protect it from the whole world, and might succeed, excepting from herself. By morning light they would glance sideways at each other’s mouths for the bruises they suspected a third person might discover. Whole evenings they used to listen to dust and voices the length of their pot-holed provincial street, yet he no longer feared they might find themselves in the position of couples at separate tables, reading the label on the wine-bottle, and moulding bread. Instead they moulded silences, they became familiar with each other’s uncommunicated thoughts.

After this existence at Konya, life in Smyrna tended, they found, to float them apart. It was not so much the business trips, which took him to Athens, Alexandria, sometimes Marseilles – if anything they were closer then, by correspondence – rather it was their social obligations, which required them to shine each in an individual orbit. So they found themselves noticing each other across other people’s rooms, a face which each had thought to possess, but which had in fact remained public property. In these circumstances he admired her for her figure and her jewels, while she re-assessed with a twinge the merits which flatterers claimed to discover in her husband.

Sometimes it even happened they danced together, ironically, in the houses of acquaintances.

Whether she ever took a lover he did not care to conjecture. She, on the other hand, accepted her husband’s mistresses, on the grounds that convention allowed for some degree of dishonesty in a man. Besides, she said, he will never leave me.