Poppy was breathless, with admiration, and the sudden rush of scentiness out of her cold glass.

‘It is about a flying officer,’ Sissy Kamara confided, ‘who crashes behind the lines, and is taken prisoner by the Turks.’

‘Oh but Sissy, how do you know?’

‘One knows.’ Sissy sighed. ‘I shall be perfectly confidential. On the second of the month I expect to visit the Front. To distribute comforts.’

‘How is it possible?’ Poppy Pesmazoglou gulped soumada. Her admiration was too intense.

‘Between ourselves,’ Sissy said, ‘Pouris has arranged it. We shall drive to K—, where we shall find horses and mules waiting to take us across the mountains. It will be so good for the troops’ morale.’

Poppy Pesmazoglou realized she was slopping soumada out of her glass. She was suffocating in orange-flowers as she wiped the sweet stickiness.

‘But does your mother?’ Poppy asked.

‘Mother is too exhausted,’ said Sissy. ‘It is the influx of metropolitan Greeks!’

Then the two girls laughed together, for they had been set apart in the shuttered drawing-room on Frankish Street, in an Anatolian reality, on which certainly no Greek, not even a war which armies of men were fighting out, might possibly intrude.

And all the time – how many years? – Sissy Kamara sat holding the few dolmades on the ugly neo-Byzantine plate.

‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ Sissy Kamara asked.

‘It is beautiful!’ Poppy Pantzopoulos agreed.

Each knew that she was watched by her husband, but that neither of the men would dare intrude on the slightly immoral relationship the past must allow them to enjoy a few moments more.

‘Do you know that that plate,’ said Sissy Kamara putting it down with solemnity, ‘is almost the only material possession I succeeded in rescuing at the time of the Catastrophe. And I might not have brought that if Vangelio hadn’t wrapped it. You remember poor old Vangelio – my uncle’s wet-nurse?’

Poppy nodded, and looked down, as she did for anyone who had died.

‘If Vangelio had not wrapped the plate, and practically put it into my hands, after the Turks had set fire to the town.’

Then Sotos Louloudis, Sissy Kamara’s husband, ventured to remark, to whisper rather: ‘I took the veal, Sissy.’

‘My God, did it burn?’

‘No, but it was drying up.’

‘My God,’ said Sissy Kamara, ‘doesn’t veal dry up! Not only behind one’s back, but under one’s nose!’

‘I watched it, Sissy,’ said Sissy’s husband. ‘It is not, I think, what you would call dry.’

Poppy Pantzopoulos got up before she had been asked, knowing Basil’s contempt for humility in a man. She said, in the little voice which was hers from girlhood, and which sometimes she made even smaller:

‘I am sure Sissy’s veal will taste delicious.’

It sounded, she heard, so ridiculous, yet Sotos smiled in sympathy.

It was afterwards, when they had gone inside, and Sotos was doing things for the dinner, that Sissy Kamara, who had sat down, began to talk about the sado-masochism of the Greeks, and Poppy, without looking at Basil, wished that Sissy would not.