Basil touched his black pearl.

‘Sotos Louloudis!’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes. With all those family obligations Sissy was forced to marry late, and by then she was too poor, I suppose, to get herself anything better.’

Poppy Pantzopoulos could have cried.

‘But Sotos Louloudis! No one even knows what he does!’

‘Something very discreet, I expect. I have heard he’s some kind of clerk. Or perhaps already was. He appears to stay at home a lot.’

‘But what a man! One can’t think of her as being married to that Sotos. Nobody can. To everyone Sissy is still Sissy Kamara.’

‘That is true,’ Poppy Pantzopoulos had to admit. ‘Because everyone knows that Sissy Kamara of Smyrna...’

‘Oh, dear! There we go! We Anatolians!’

‘Isn’t it late?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ he said, and frowned. ‘It is late.’

She had admired him for his conscientiousness, which perpetually accused her own superficiality. In museums, for instance, he would read the legend under every piece while she sat at the end of the hall and rested her swollen feet.

‘We shall see what we shall see,’ Basil said. ‘Whether Mrs Kamara Louloudis can give us an eatable dinner. At least, until Thursday, we may hope.’

That morning he had not kissed her, and although she was usually restored by ritual, she was glad he had not offered it, knowing that her chin was beyond repair, and that her eyelids wore their black-greasy look.

Then Mr Petrocheilos said: ‘You can’t always tell, but I think it is going to be worse than we expected.’

His breath almost scorched her ear.

‘How frightful!’ Mrs Pantzopoulos replied through a mouthful of instruments, but her words were sucked down by the tube in a stream of ineffectuality.

‘I am a coward,’ she added. ‘The least pain,’ she seemed to scream in opposition to her ear-drums.

And hoped that distortion had prevented the dentist from interpreting.

Sotos Louloudis had come to the door. They must excuse Sissy, he said, or rather suggested, she was in the kitchen attending to things. She had sent away the girl, who was made nervous by guests, which made Sissy nervous in turn. Poppy longed for the power to protect Sotos’ excuse from her own husband’s smile.

In any case, there stood Sotos. He was so thin. There was little to remember of Sotos except his thinness. Certainly not his opinions, which were an echo of the dying fall in other people’s remarks.

He said: ‘Welcome. Will you come with me? Sissy thinks we should sit on the balcony. Will you come out?’

It could only have been Sissy who had arranged the chairs, amongst the jasmine and the pelargoniums, as though for the passengers in a ship. They were so strictly aligned on deck.

‘Will you take a drop of something?’ Sotos asked.

There was, indeed, what remained of a bottle of ouzo.

‘Do you care to smoke a cigarette?’

He did not add: if you have brought one. Basil, of course, had his presentation case. Sotos himself did not smoke. Was it perhaps as a reproach to Sissy, who carried her cigarettes around as though they were her luggage for the journey?