‘Sissy Kamara rang,’ Poppy Pantzopoulos decided at last to mention to her husband.

Basil made that little noise.

‘She’s invited us – I must say I was rather touched – because, she says, she wants to talk about old times.’

‘Anatolian Nights!’ She recognized Bazil’s cutting-edge. ‘None of you Smyrna breed can resist the opportunity to wallow.’

‘I am not to blame for my origins, am I?’

‘Not,’ he agreed, ‘for your origins. But.’

Basil touched his black pearl, the one he always wore in his tie. He had grown so flawless he could afford to forget his original grain of Piraeus sand. Every morning he put on his trousers still warm from the pressing-board. Every morning he walked to the Bank, just to make certain of his figure. Those not his equals in precision were inclined to consider Basil cold, but his wife was convinced that the observances had brought him the Kolonaki Branch.

‘But,’ he said, and bored with his fingers, ‘you are responsible for accepting the evening at Sissy Kamara’s. You could have avoided something each of us is bound to regret.’

‘Oh!’ she cried. ‘You are unjust! As if poor Sissy! You can attack me! I know what I am. But Sissy is such a brilliant woman.’

‘So we are told,’ Basil said.

Often Poppy Pantzopoulos refused to forgive her husband’s still perfect profile until she found it on her pillow.

‘Well, there are the poems,’ she offered.

‘Printed so privately nobody has read them.’

‘There was the epic poem,’ Poppy Pantzopoulos mumbled on.

On occasions her mind became the victim of her plumpy body.

‘There was the epic poem.’ Basil sighed. ‘On a theme nobody can remember. Which Sissy Kamara declaimed. On a mountainside. To a group of women, most of them by now dead.’

All their life together Poppy Pantzopoulos had refused to admit that her husband’s opinion of women, even those he used, might embrace herself.

‘Well,’ she apologized, ‘there was her other work. There was the weaving. She organized Greek Peasant Crafts at a time when nobody – nobody nice – took any interest in such things. And persevered almost unassisted. At the expense of her health. Because everyone knows Sissy Kamara is not strong.’

‘Sissy Kamara is one of those with a talent for bullying others into works for which she takes the credit.’

‘Oh, you are so very wrong! Not to say wicked! I cannot deny Sissy is forceful. But where would she be without her forcefulness? Considering all she has to bear. Not only her poor health, but reduced means, and that husband.’

‘Certainly,’ said Basil, ‘one wonders how she came to marry Sotos.’

‘For that matter,’ answered Poppy, ‘one wonders why most people married the husbands or wives they have got.’

Basil did not have to look. He knew she knew. She knew he had married her for her Aunt Danae’s house in Ploutarchou and Uncle Stepho’s Euboean estate. She knew about Hariklia, and Phroso, and possibly Smaragda Thiraiou. But she was not bitter, because she loved him.