‘Whenever the meltemi blew,’ he heard Philippides murmur.

It blew through the over-furnished rooms. The over-stuffed furniture was sown with grey grit of pumice, while Constantia Philippides walked through the greyer rooms, to control, to control.

‘Aglaia? Kyria Assimina!’ she called, unable to control lives or shutters. ‘They are banging!’ She complained, and the wind added a stridency to her voice. ‘Two women,’ she shrieked, ‘and not a thought between you, unless I actually put one in your heads. Quick! Help me! My nails are breaking!’

And the two servants came running in their slippers to avert disaster, Kyria Assimina, who would grow resentful, and the girl from Lemnos.

‘Aglaia is strong,’ Mrs Philippides used to tell her husband. ‘She is an ox.’

He might be eating cherries, and would not reply, but slip the stones into the palm of his hand in a way which made her bite her lips.

‘But good.’ Mrs Philippides sighed.

The strong, yet gentle, brown girl was so good at controlling the rusty old catches of the hateful old Chios shutters. Mrs Philippides was glad she had brought her, because often her husband was absent in Alexandria or Marseilles.

Sometimes, when he was present, and they were sitting together at evening, he with his foreign newspapers, and she had laid out a game of patience, they would fall back on English, that legacy of governesses and childhood.

‘As much as anything I bought Aglaia for company,’ Mrs Philippides once remarked.

‘Bought?’ He laughed.

‘Brought!’ she corrected, noticeably angry, and repeated: ‘Brought! Brought!’

So he did not pursue a matter which drew him closer to their maid.

‘Shall I brush your hair, kyria?’ the girl would ask on gentler mornings.

Constantia enjoyed that. Aglaia’s stroke, strong but gentle. Constantia Philippides sat in a wrapper, reading the grandfather’s books, the poems of Heredia and Leconte de Lisle, the letters of Paul-Louis Courier; she read Ivanhoe. In her husband’s absence she was often bored, bored.

She would get up and walk through her empty house. Oh, she loved him – even if he did not love her – nobody ever really loves.

‘Do you understand how he can love the Devil?’ Constantia overheard.

‘It was Kyri Assimina. Then Mrs Philippides overheard the silence. Which was Aglaia’s.

The Devil!’ muttered Kyria Assimina.

Once Kyria Assimina had screamed: ‘If she’s not the Devil, who else is she? The Empress of Byzantium?’

Kyria Assimina stuck a chamber-pot on her head. Mrs Philippides had to remark: ‘Such a disgusting habit! I am surprised at you, Kyria Assimina – a person of some refinement.’

When the glass got broken, one of the Russian tea-glasses, which were so precious for a certain reason, Mrs Philippides had rushed, certainly, at Aglaia, and slapped her face. But in those days girls expected it So Aglaia was silent as before.

‘My God! Thank you, Aglaia!’ Mrs Philippides overheard.

‘I would have shrieked, I know,’ Kyria Assimina confessed. ‘The silly old ugly glasses! As if there weren’t plenty left. She has given me nerves. She makes things fall out of my hand.’