Sissy Kamara’s fever had broken. Dew lay amongst the dust. Water gushed from the corners of her eyes. Her face, screwed up in normal circumstances with the ideas she worried, was cracking open.

‘Almost my last possession of importance,’ Sissy laughed, ‘when one had hoped with age to grow less attached when age itself is the arch-disappointer a final orgy of possessiveness of of of a gathering of minor vanities.’

Basil stopped laughing. He who had not looked at himself all the evening would have done so now if he had been able to find a glass.

Sissy Kamara all but supplied him with one.

‘Oh, I shall not deny some of us are well-preserved,’ Sissy laughed and dabbed, ‘and beauty is so often a guarantee there is nothing further to lose.’

Last gasps were battering Poppy Pantzopoulos against the ladder-back of her chair – she had been thrown down that far – when Sotos Louloudis returned.

Sotos sat in his place, and began to cut his cold veal with long, oblique strokes. He ate behind pale lips.

‘It is wrong to be afraid,’ Sissy Kamara subsided, ‘to face old age. I find it more or less normal. Only my arthritic thumb. I have an arthritic thumb, Poppy. It cannot support weights.’

Here Sissy Kamara held up her maimed claw.

‘I am always afraid of dropping things.’ She sighed. ‘My plate! My pretty plate!’

Although she did not want to, Poppy Pantzopoulos watched Sotos’ eyelids twitch, and he looked out from his position right at the end of the tunnel, facing the light, as he would at certain moments. Poppy would have liked to know what Sotos saw. She was glad she had stopped laughing. All by now had stopped.

Poppy said: ‘Aleko Philippides has a theory ocean fish are more nutritious than our Mediterranean ones because of the exercise they are forced to take. He told me at Elly Lambraki’s.’

Saying good-bye the night air makes it easier, less a duty, to feel sorry for whatever has happened.

‘Wrap up well,’ Sissy Kamara advised, standing with her husband in the doorway. ‘The weather is still treacherous.’

Light had solated Sissy and Sotos. They were, in the one case, smaller, in the other thinner, than anybody had ever supposed. Like those of aged dogs, their dry noses, sniffing the air, hoped against scenting desertion behind departure.

When Basil and Poppy Pantzopoulos were seated in their nice car, and had made sure the windows would ventilate without admitting a draught, Basil opened:

‘That was a disgraceful episode, Poppy. Though I have to admit I took part. Laughter is catching. What can one do but follow?’

‘Yes,’ said Poppy Pantzopoulos, turning her head, addressing the corner.

‘Poor Sissy! At least we shall probably not be able to face her again,’ suggested Basil. ‘No,’ said Poppy.

While believing that everything happens again, just as, to some extent, it has happened before.

‘Irrrhhhh!’

The wall had given, and Mr Petrocheilos’ drill had blundered through, straight into the nerve of Mrs Pantzopoulos’ tooth.