I must tell you, incidentally, Aglaia broke one of the glasses. I slapped her. She did not cry. I have often wondered whether that girl is altogether without feeling, but have come to the conclusion she is too considerate to allow herself such a luxury. I think I value her, Yanko, almost more than anything. And may never tell her. How embarrassed we should both be! But she broke the glass – and now there are only two, of all those you bought from the Russian at Konya. Of all the casualties we have experienced these are without a doubt the worst. On losing anything so solid, so unbreakable, one suffers quite a physical shock...

Such a shock that Mrs Philippides had taken to her bed. He found her there on his return.

‘It is nothing,’ she said. ‘Or nothing more serious than a migraine.’

But her voice had dried out, and raised itself only with an effort.

‘Well,’ she told, ‘nothing happened while you were away. Excepting the glass. The wretched old Russian glass which broke.’

They laughed together for what had happened, and he touched her lightly, not intimately, but in the way he had seen doctors. She was glad he did not contemplate a greater intimacy.

Soon Mrs Philippides was up and about. She was walking on the terrace in her dressing-gown, watering the brittle pelargoniums, to say nothing of the gardenia, which heaved its heavy heads into the late summer air.

‘It is too heavy, the perfume,’ Constantia complained. ‘I must get rid of it.’ She paused. ‘Give it away, Yanko mou, to one of your smart lady friends.’

Although she took pains to turn it into a joke, it was implied that she would face facts, with tolerance, even sympathy.

For he was still dapper, in his English suits and clipped moustache. Sometimes she would take the nail-scissors and snip at one or two of the hairs which showed at his nostrils.

‘To make you more attractive,’ she explained, ‘to your smart lady partners at bridge.’

He used to arrive back late from the bridge occasions she shunned, and she would call to him from the terrace, until he came and sat at the end of the wicker day-bed on which she had been lying. Perhaps it was then that she possessed him most completely.

‘Who was there?’ she used to ask.

Though she did not care to know, nor he to remember.

He felt agreeably tired, while she would rise refreshed, and walk, almost stride, in a sound of imperious loose silk, amongst the plants of the terrace which evening had revived. Constantia still wore her hair piled high. Because it suited her. And as she moved, the light from the city or the moon would strike her face, breaking its form into a glittering mosaic, fragmentary, but immemorial.

‘Now that I am thin and ugly,’ she used to say and pause.

But they both knew she was not. She was the work of art which only passion can create, on the many evenings of late summer added up to make a life.