Nor would he. They loved each other.

They rode, sometimes together, more often with company, through the olive groves above Bournova. From the chestnut mare he had bought her for a birthday she would look back to locate her husband yet again. But without appearing to. Then when she had caught the sheen of leather, of leggings as they lagged amongst the rougher black of olive trunks, she was free to turn once more, to discuss literature, with the Frenchman, the Italian, and the Pole. So languid on her burnished horse as her glove flicked at flies. Of the three men she favoured the Frenchman, because his insincerity enabled her to feel secure.

It was Nétillard who carried her down to the road the morning she was thrown.

‘I hate you to see me like this,’ Constantia Philippides complained to no one in particular. ‘So grotesque. But then one is, in almost all situations where reality intrudes.’

She was suffering a good deal, more so when she lost the child for which they had both been hoping.

She set about convincing him. She said: ‘Yanko, this isn’t our last chance.’

But it might have been.

At least they had their décor, the house in rose-coloured marble along the Quay, through which, when the doors were folded back, the breeze careened out of the blue blaze of the Aegean. Strangers observing the kyrioi through the grille envied them their perfection.

At first it was impossible to believe their personal lives could be reduced by a shuffle of history, which is what happened, momentarily at least, on the deck of the destroyer, after the sack of their city. Because it had been personally theirs, which was now burning by bursts, and in long, funnelling socks of smoke, and reflections of slow, oily light. As he ran looking for that other part of him which was lost, he gashed his shin on a companionway. But did not know. Calling her name. None of that rabble of sufferers-wet, dry, singed, bleeding, deformed by the agony of their first historic situation – none of them knew any more, as they stood in their fashionable rags and watched their city burn. At least they had succeeded in bribing their way on board the French destroyer. But for what purpose? Certainly a small man, running amongst them, pushing, in dishevelled English herringbone, could not rally them back to reality by repetition of a name. In a boater, too, the brim chewed like a biscuit. Constantia he called, Constantia! As he pushed and pummelled, the eyes of others turned in his direction only slowly, and a certain figure, blacker, more ponderous, more respectable than the rest, detached itself, and punched the distraught gentleman, perhaps unable to endure the irony of constancy.

Philippides, as he struggled and burrowed, scarcely paused to reason why Kykkotis – was it? a chemist, was he? – had attacked him on the iron deck of that vessel of doubtful mercy. In later years he preferred not to remember the incident at all. But at the time, when it was so important to focus, all his attention was needed to climb the rope ladder again, to steady her body on the rope web, inside the bubble of hostile air. Before they were so unaccountably parted.