‘He is so kind, he has brought us some mezedakia,’¹ Sissy was saying.

They began, in fact, to notice Sotos had returned, with plates. There were olives. There were dolmadakia² out of a tin.

‘Food is of so little importance,’ Sissy said, ‘its necessity becomes humiliating.’

Poppy was afraid that Basil, she was afraid for Sissy, that she might begin one of her clever conversations. Basil hated Sissy when she talked about the sado-masochism of the Greeks.

But Sissy took the plate as though she were about to consecrate.

‘You like dolmadakia,’ Sissy ordained.

‘Ach, dolmadakia!’ Poppy cried, and was again a girl. ‘I adore dolmadakia!’

She did not look at Basil for confirmation of her silliness – she had heard that with her own ears – as she smelled the smell of, as she anticipated the distinctive, the metallic, the almost bad taste of dolmadakia out of a tin.

‘The plate was my mother’s,’ Sissy told, against the chink of her mother’s rings. ‘Do you remember, Poppy? In Smyrna?’

Then Poppy Pantzopoulos and Sissy Kamara were staring together at the plate, not so much at its ingenious ugliness – for it was in the shape of a double eagle ringed with snakes of writhing gold – they were drawn, rather, beyond the excrescences and cavities and the little parcels of dolmadakia scattered in moist, toppling heaps, to contemplate what might have been a common lover whom time and distance now allowed them to share with diminished bitterness.

Poppy Pantzopoulous had remembered the drawing-room on Frankish Street, the summer stealing through iron shutters, by stealth of light and grace of jasmine, to flirt with the neo-Byzantine plate. Which the old woman had brought in.

‘Here are a few kourabiedes,’³ said old Vangelio. ‘Specially for Poppaki. Who is so good.’

‘I am not good,’ said Poppy Pesmazoglou, who had called to see her friend, and who was irritated besides by the sentimental deference of old family servants.

‘But you are good. I can see,’ Vangelio insisted with that rather cloying, sweet smile.

‘I am not! I am not!’ Poppy insisted, almost shrieked.

Vangelio had cracked hands, usually stained by the vegetables with which she was still allowed to help. She was so old and useless, though.

‘Do you like kourabiedes?’ Sissy Kamara asked.

She had come in. The feathers of her hair had fitted out her head in a cap of inky light.

‘Oh, I adore kourabiedes!’ Poppy Pesmazoglou replied, and giggled.

‘You are not afraid of moustaches then.’

For already the two girls wore the white down of powdered sugar. Again Poppy giggled, and wiped off her ridiculous moustache. She would have liked to do or say something people might remember. But had never succeeded. She paid morning calls, and feared that no one noticed when she went.

‘I shall tell you something,’ Sissy Kamara said as they sipped at the soumada⁴ Vangelio had left.

Poppy Pesmazoglou could not wait to hear.

‘I am writing a novel in the first person.’