As she eats, she watches the woman teach her daughter how to lay tables. First there is the white paper tablecloth, which you fold down sharply around the edges. Then there are the red napkins with the knives and forks on top. Then there are the salt and pepper shakers. And finally there is the slim vase holding the single plastic carnation. The girl, who cannot be more than ten, watches very seriously. She does her table right first time. ‘Brava!’ her mother says. ‘Fantastico!’

*

There seemed to be a long silence then, a long silence in which nobody spoke. Her chin was on the toilet seat. She was sitting on her feet, which were numb. It was so silent she thought the boys had gone, and she felt strangely disappointed, as if there had been something to save of the night, as if she had wasted her chance.

But then she heard the rumble of a drawer being opened – they were looking through her clothes – and Nikos called out to her, ‘Where is your friend?’

They did not want her after all. They wanted Jane. Of course of course of course.

‘Sixteen,’ Claire told the water in the toilet. ‘Next door.’

Her favourite day had involved no boys at all. They got in the car and drove across the isthmus, past the port, to a stable in the arable north. Jane’s parents settled themselves down in the sun and ordered wine, while a bossy young woman emerged from the farmhouse to squeeze the two girls into rubber riding boots and velvet-covered hard hats, then led them through the yard, which reeked of horse.

Claire stood, her head strangely cool inside the dome of the hat, even as the sun beat her shoulders red, and watched as the woman fetched a heavy mare for her to ride. The mare walked over to Claire with some reluctance, looked sideways at her from one huge eye, then shoved her with a flat cheek. Claire staggered back, surprised, but the woman said, ‘No. Push back. She’s testing.’ Claire pushed on the mare’s hot neck. Nothing happened. ‘Good,’ the woman said.

They set off at a walk down the farm track and out through the gates, and then came two hours of adjusting her rhythms to the rhythms of the horse, her rolling gait, her reluctant trot, her stopping to eat or shit, in which she forgot the usual shape of her own thoughts. She was able to brush the tops of the grasses sailing past, to see over stone walls into scrubby gardens. She was able to watch Jane on her horse in front, nervously straight-backed, bouncing in the saddle, with no feeling in the world but love.

‘I was here when I was fifteen,’ she tells the Englishwoman at the taverna. ‘Me and my friend, we hung around with this boy, Kostas. Maybe you know him—’

The woman laughs. ‘I know about twenty Kostases.’