‘Oh, I don’t ask you to!’ She hurried to defend her weakness, which by now he took for granted.

‘But if it is a matter of your health.’

‘It is my age,’ she replied, composing her mouth. ‘I know women of my age are a traditional joke, but that doesn’t alter the situation.’

He put his hand over hers, with the gesture she almost couldn’t bear, wanting to take his hand, withering as it was, and lock it up in her bosom for ever. Where all things keep fresh.

It was not her indifferent health, although that played its part. There were the many other reasons: there was the gritty house in which the shutters banged, and which the light from the lighthouse the other side of the mole would gash open at night, there were the deep ruts of the island roads, there was the long mountain in grey pumice, there were the evenings in which ladies sat spooning up jam from saucers and thinking of the hand-bags they must order from Athens. Oh, the long, sighing Chios evenings, in which moisture fell without watering. Worst of all, Mrs Philippides could have felt, there was her husband’s fate, which might be escaped somewhere else.

So, instead of a hand-bag, Constantia Philippides ordered them a new life. Her mouth quivered with success, in the silver-backed looking-glass, with its lovers’ knots and irises.

‘But you mustn’t look,’ she protested, putting the mirror down when he had swum up over her shoulder. ‘Don’t you know that a woman’s face in .the looking-glass is more private than in actual life?’

What was her actual life? he wondered. Confusion had cracked her voice. The place under her left eye had begun its twitching. He loved her for the mysteries they had solved together, still more deeply for those he could never help her solve.

After that they went away in the little steamer, which all the town always met, hoping for something it never brought.

The Philippides went to Athens, to the apartment at the foot of Lycavitos. As an address it was not all that unfashionable, though it could have been better. In any case, Mrs Philippides had withdrawn more or less from the society of those she might have been expected to cultivate for pleasure.

‘I am too content,’ she said in defending her attitude, ‘too selfish, if you like, to bother.’

She spoke with such conviction she might have been expecting someone to take her up on it. But her husband never reacted. And the servant was the servant.

Mrs Philippides had resigned herself to being alone while her husband was away on those business trips to Mediterranean ports. He suspected she was happiest after he had gone. Distance, or so it seemed in her letters, allowed her mind to rest.

Dearest Yanko (she once wrote)

Whenever you are away I am able to re-live the past without any of the interferences – none of those jagged incidents which continue to strew the present! You may say: What about the jagged incidents of the past? Well, one is no longer cut by them.