Thou didst blossom in the courts of the Lord as a fruitful olive tree, O holy Martyr Sophia; in thy contest thou didst offer to Christ the sweet fruit of thy womb, Love, Hope and Faith. With them intercede for us all.

*

They flew home in silence, Jane’s parents exchanging glances of amusement at their daughter’s excess. They knew she had been drinking the night before. That was all they knew. Back in England, Claire accompanied Jane to the clinic to obtain the necessary pill. She read dog-eared magazines in the waiting room, until Jane emerged, red with indignation. ‘Condescending bitch.’

‘Was she awful? What did she say?’

‘Come on, before we see someone.’

‘Do we need to go to Boots?’

‘I’ve got it.’ She clutched the foil packet in her hand. ‘Let’s get a Coke and get this over with.’

They went to McDonald’s. They shredded the wrappers from their straws. Then Jane said she felt funny, she was going home.

Each time they went to town that summer, Jane brought a new friend, then another, girls who smudged their eyes and smoked. Claire began to hear about excursions after they happened: a trip to the cinema, to the indoor shopping centre. When school started, Jane had bobbed her hair. The new friends pretended Claire didn’t exist; they surrounded Jane, shielded her. When Claire approached her in the queue for lunch one day, Jane said, ‘God, Claire, what do you want?’

Claire flinched, but did not retreat.

‘Stop – following me – around. You’re like feeding on my life.’

‘I’m worried about you.’

‘She’s worried about me?’ Jane laughed. ‘She doesn’t even know what happened!’ The friends laughed too. Did they? Claire couldn’t tell. She was desperate to have this conversation alone, to draw Jane back, but everyone was listening now.

‘She thinks I didn’t like it,’ Jane said. ‘She can’t imagine a girl that would.’

*

She forgets herself in Athens, where she and Demetra have three days together, endless thick coffee in small white cups, hours of walking, wine late at night; she forgets herself until the final afternoon, when they try to enter a catacomb but find the studded doors are shut. ‘Siesta,’ Demetra says.

Outside the doors, in a sunken courtyard, two trees burst silently from the flagstones, their boles painted white. Beneath the trees are altars, shallow brass basins full of water and shale, in which several tall thin earwax-coloured candles are burning. One basin is waist-high, the other level with Claire’s chest. This one, Demetra says, is for devotions to the dead, and this one, the higher, for the saints.