All the abuse she had suffered had hardly damaged the sheen of her shining white skin, fashioned from the best Parian marble. Three or four small dents in the smooth line of her shoulders served only to give her a vulnerability that made her seem almost human, but the imperious set of the rest of her body, commanding mortals to watch in awe, tinged with desire, was pure goddess.

Her other arm lay along the back of the couch, supporting her long neck below a perfect oval face, straight nose and eyes looking not at the viewer but slightly to one side. The smile that had lit up the face through the centuries was confidently seductive. A swan-like neck and perfect shoulders led the eye down to her gloriously naked breasts, the sexy whisper of a pot belly, with an immaculately carved linen cloth, clinging and almost transparent, even though it was made of stone, covering her most private parts.

She was the goddess Aphrodite almost brought to living flesh, although this Aphrodite had lived for thousands of years, her smile inviting and delighting generations of worshippers and admirers.

‘Isn’t she amazing?’ said Nell in a hushed tone, almost as if she were in church.

‘She’s all goddess, isn’t she?’ Moira replied. ‘Wouldn’t it be great to go round seducing mortal men and having fun starting wars?’

They all looked at her. ‘Moira, I didn’t know about this secret desire to go round creating sexual havoc!’ laughed Dora.

‘Come on, Dora, it’s exactly what you do!’ Moira countered. ‘Why else would you wear all those body-con dresses made for eighteen-year-olds on the pull at the disco?’

‘For a start,’ Dora replied grandly, ‘my dresses are made by Azzedine Alaïa, and they are strictly for grown women.’

‘Because only grown women could afford them,’ put in Penny with a grin.

‘True, they are expensive,’ Dora conceded. ‘But wear one of those and you could seduce anyone on the planet.’

‘Even an old guy, too weak to put up a fight,’ pointed out Moira naughtily.

‘If you mean Karl –’ Dora glanced across the square, and found he was watching her rather than the statue – ‘I assure you, there’s plenty of life left in him yet.’

Moira was about to reply when a figure shot out of the cafe and flung herself into Dora’s arms.

‘Thank you, thank you, thank you, you have brought back the goddess!’ She clasped Dora’s hand and kissed it reverently. ‘She will bless you forever more!’

‘And what about the people who really found her – Stelios, Karl and Nikos . . .’ reminded Moira.

‘And me,’ added Nell sternly. ‘And Demetria, and an eighty-three-year-old superman called Andreas. And Andreas’s fellow fishermen, names unknown.’

But Ariadne still stared adoringly at Dora. ‘I have a question to ask.’ She hesitated, blushing and suddenly tongue-tied.

‘What is it?’ Dora asked gently.