‘That’s it!’ the dentist shouted in some triumph. There’s no doubt about it!’

Mr Petrocheilos lowered his great, dreadful nose.

‘It smells, too. It ought to come out.’

‘No! No!’ Mrs Pantzopoulos cried and protested, gripping the chair’s sweating arms. ‘On no account shall I part with a tooth. Whatever the circumstances. Patch it up, Mr Petrocheilos, please. It’s my own. It’s what I was given.’

If necessary change her dentist, but not her tooth. If she could have expressed herself through the mouthful of paraphernalia. Her legs, feeling for a foothold on the metal step, were far too short, fat, flabby, in fact, the Anatolian loukoumia.

Mrs Pantzopoulos closed her eyes.

‘I shall suffer anything,’ she said, ‘short of losing my rotten tooth.’

All the maids had tied up their hair, their island faces, in the kerchiefs they had brought with them into service. They were holding their bundles, waiting in the hall behind the grille for Monsieur Leclerq to take them to the French destroyer.

From time to time the girls asked: ‘My God, will he come, though?’

‘Of course he will come. He has been paid to!’ Poppy Pesmazoglou assured.

Responsibility had thinned her, darkened her, made her stern. There were times when she could not believe in what she saw when she opened her passport. Only her parents, sending telegrams from Lausanne, reminded that she was still their silly, dimpled girl.

‘My God,’ moaned Panayota, ‘Mr Phitilis said they’ve set fire to the town. They’re burning Smyrna.’

‘Do you believe everything?’ it was Miss Pesmazoglou’s duty to ask.

Until it was no more surprising that Monsieur Leclerq did not come to keep a paid promise, or that the party should be setting out for the Quay, the three girls strung out hand to hand, the cook lagging.

Miss Pesmazoglou strode ahead on her suddenly long legs.

And Smyrna was burning. The night had drawn its daggers, a playful chiffon of smoke choked.

Ahhhh, they were crying, or laughing, lowering their heads to run at the distance.

Miss Pesmazoglou ran because the panicky darkness groped at stationary, isolated figures. All was running fire and glass. A horse’s wet bowels flopped out through the traces and over the paving. A hand hung from the doorway of a tram.

‘The dirty Turks!’

The whole darkness heaving with men’s tufted bodies. Men’s nipples winking at the sweat which blinded them. She stripped the streets as never before running in pursuit of a ball. She trod on a face which accepted pressure. Ran.

At the corner of Independence Street the Turk holding the short knife was, she saw, the fig-seller from Konya, so mild, if rather smelly – one never spoke to them of course – weighing out the purple figs on dusty mornings under acacias. Now this elderly Turk appeared to have caught fire. The flames were twisting his seamed face. And Vangelio, the old nurse, Sissy’s uncle’s wetnurse. Vangelio kneeling on the cobbles offered her expression of resigned faith and goodness to the Turk. Her sweet gift of a face wrapped in its white kerchief. To the Turk’s amazing knife.