Two sunloungers have blown through the glass wall that separated the terrace from the restaurant. She steps through the hole, minding her legs, into cavernous, echoing shade. This is where they sat every morning for pots of Greek yoghurt and honey, in the evening for moussaka, kalamari, ice cream. The tables and chairs and long service trestles are gone now, and the folding stage where the singer or comedian or balalaika-player once stood. The red parquet floor is strewn with bits of glass and splinters. After the performance, the furniture would be stacked away for people to dance. Free-standing disco lights flashed on either side of the stage, weak splashes of red and blue on the faces of wrinkled ladies, emergency lights on the surface of the sea.

Pistis, Elpis, Agape. She looked up the story in the guidebook on the boat. All of them were killed by Hadrian’s soldiers, one by one, in chronological order.

*

In the corner of the restaurant is the bar where Kostas shook cocktails and flicked the caps off bottles of Mythos. It is painted green on the customer side, raw plywood on the reverse. The fridges and the optics are gone. Claire presses her toe into the ringed indentation left on the floor by a bar stool’s fixture. She remembers climbing carefully on to those high leatherette seats, the poles wobbling in their brackets. How afraid she had been of looking like a fool.

Kostas was the owner’s youngest son. He worked in the restaurant at night. He had a deep tan and a deep voice, but he was only twenty, and his chest was reassuringly naked where it showed at the neck of his shirt. On the second night, he presented Jane with a virgin cocktail from the bar – tequila sunrise without the tequila. Jane’s parents chose to be amused by this rather than concerned, and Claire thought she might admire Jane for that, for having such parents, more than for having the cocktail itself.

After his shift, Kostas did not simply go home, like an English waiter would. He stuck around. He liked to smoke outside on the terrace. Jane and Claire met him there. How regular it seemed, for just a week’s routine. Jane accepted the pure white cigarettes he drew with his lips from their packet. ‘You don’t smoke?’ he said to Claire. ‘Everybody smokes in Greece.’ Much of his talk consisted of explaining to the girls what it was like to be Greek: ‘There are no jobs but also no McDonalds’, or ‘We close up and sleep for the afternoon’, or ‘When we argue, we argue about parking our cars.’

Jane laughed every time Kostas offered Claire a cigarette. Maybe that was why he kept doing it. Eventually Jane said, ‘It won’t work. She’s good. My parents think she’s a good influence on me.’ It hung in the air with the smoke.

*