It was so sad, her throat was a gulf in which she might soon drown. Her eyes were threatening. It was so excruciating, Poppy Pantzopoulos had begun to laugh. Or grunt. Or hiss. It was so reckless, so awful. Basil, she would have liked to command – between gulps – you shall not look you are not in need of additional weapons.

But Basil looked, of course. He saw Sotos’ thin behind. He heard the slither of pottery bits.

Sissy Kamara had leant across the table. She was grappling with her tower of hair.

‘Oh, it is brutal,’ she complained, ‘how one’s best intentions are ambushed before they can declare themselves. All my life I have been misinterpreted. And yet I cannot say I really care. I have just that saving faith in my own integrity.’

But Poppy Pantzopoulos could only laugh. It was killing her. And Basil began to laugh too, but in better taste, because drier. It was the twisting of dead palm-leaves on their stems, while Poppy herself was churned, rather, like a sackful of little sucking-pigs let fall on deck by a peasant. Provided something did not give split soon against the kicks.

If Sissy had not yet noticed perhaps it was because she had been sucked too far back. She tortured her already wounded cheeks, and told:

‘The greatest unkindnesses have never made me cry. Because I have always expected them.’

As the spasms of Poppy’s mirth threatened the space in which she had compressed them, she heard Basil’s dry titter twist at its moorings in that cruel wind. Her eyes, no longer hers, were a pair of detached, yet painful eye-balls permanently pinned to a window-pane, beyond which stood Sotos Louloudis, raking together the pieces of Kamaras’ old plate. Gathering the spilt dolmades. Since they had failed to fulfil an intended purpose, the little vine-leaf parcels were growing yellow and obscene. Which rocked Poppy and Basil Pantzopoulos. One remembered that smell of tinned dolmadakia. And laughed.

But Sotos Louloudis straightened up. His wrists were older, longer, thinner.

Then Sissy Kamara noticed, it could have been this, her husband’s age, his grotesque figure accusing all three of them. For she screeched at the window from where she was sitting:

‘What have you done, Sotos? You haven’t broken my lovely plate?’

Sotos had come in. He had made a nest out of his hands in which to carry the sharp fragments, and the soft wet dolmadakia were squeezing oozing between his fingers, to escape.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I broke. The plate.’

Then he went out, into a secret part of the house, walking as though in canvas and rubber, and might in fact always have been thus shod, one had never noticed.

At least the passing of Sotos Louloudis allowed Poppy Pantzopoulos to release the laughter she contained. From heaving she began to wobble, gobbling she felt, most uglily. Basil, who was drier and a man, rocked and tottered.

‘But my plate!’ screeched Sissy, before she too began to laugh. ‘My eagle!’ Sissy laughed. ‘I was so fond of him! And you go and drop drop of all things my lovely eagle!’