‘We are a brutal, detestable race,’ said Sissy Kamara, and some of the sauce shot into her lap as she helped herself to the veal Sotos had brought. ‘If we care to admit, we are little better than Turks turned back to front. By the way,’ she added gravely, ‘there is no first course, because I forgot about it, and we are all such old friends I knew nobody would mind.’

Poppy Pantzopoulos did not look at Basil, but heard him shifting his cutlery.

‘To return to what I was saying,’ Sissy Kamara said, ‘put a knife into a Greek’s hand, and he has to use it, more often than not against himself.’

Then Poppy Pantzopoulos heard Basil in his tightest voice: ‘I will not sit, Sissy, and hear myself lumped with all Greeks, to say nothing of the Anatolian loukoumia.’⁵

‘Admittedly,’ said Sissy Kamara, between mouthfuls of her own innocent veal, ‘there are the active and the passive. But at a certain point, any Greek will bare his breast. It is in the heroic tradition,’ she said, and added as though she loved it: ‘the heroic tradition, but in-grown. Like a toe-nail.’

‘The average Greek,’ Basil was shouting, ‘is too busy scratching a living from amongst the rocks, or holding down his job with the Department, to lend himself to your generalizations.’

‘Average!’ screeched Sissy Kamara, with an expression of triumph and a gold bridge. ‘Who is average?’

Poppy Pantzopoulos could not bear it. For perhaps the same reason Sissy’s husband had gone, or scuttled, out. His veal abandoned, his knife and fork. Sotos, Poppy could hear, was somewhere on his wife’s terrace, amongst the unruly pelargoniums. She could hear the infinitely fragile sound of a handful of glasses being gathered up.

‘But Basil,’ Sissy had placed her fingertips upon her breast, in such a very awkward position her elbows looked quite exposed, ‘I would give my soul for Greece. It it my love for all Greeks that opens my eyes to weaknesses.’

‘It is your joy in tortures.’

‘I?’

Poppy too would have protested if she had known how. She should have cried: Oh no Sissy here am I your shield shall turn the most savage blows of truth. Instead she sat looking through the window onto the terrace, her unhappiness less sharp than sensuous. Her fleshy body could have been to blame. Plumpy plump to fat fat. Outside on the terrace Sotos Louloudis stood holding his handful of glasses. Was it a corrosive light, or the shadow of anticipation, which had reduced Sotos further still? He appeared thinner than ever, a hank of sinews, a puzzle of veins.

Then for the second time Poppy Pantzopoulos would have cried out, or perhaps did, and nothing escaped. For Sotos was stooping stooped. As Poppy protested: Only my hands are insensitive enough to bear the plate it cannot break.

But already it had. As it must. As she and Sotos had known several instants in advance.

Poppy Pantzopoulos sat and watched the fragments of the Kamaras’ double eagle whitening the terrace. The spatter of dolmadakia on marble had sounded faintly human, but at once they had lain, even more humanly inert. The bones of Sotos’ behind were carving his trousers cruelly as he bent.