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my more than troubled, my dotty 68-year-old child. Again eyes which are as near as anything black, but ready to splinter into hilarity and rages. Vatatzes is protected by malice, madness, the Byzantine armour inherited from his ancestors, and the infallible weapon with which he overcomes his chief adversary’s last resistance.
    I have often wondered what sexual solace my parents were able to offer each other. This matter of tense when speaking of parents: as far as I know mine aren’t dead, yet almost always I speak of them as though they were. They seemed indestructible; it was their child who died, one of the premature suicides.
    When I said he need not change me, Father re-latched the shutter, and managed a smile. The night-light made the smile dip and shudder on his long face. Then, incredibly, he bent and, whether by accident, kissed me on the mouth. It seemed to me I was drawn up into the drooping moustache, as though inside some great brooding loving spider without being the spider’s prey; if anything, I was the spinner of threads trying to entangle him more irrevocably than his tentative sortie into loving could ever bind me.
    Then the moment broke. He tiptoed out, lapped in and dislocated by the elongating light, and I fell back blissful on my bed of piss which the two of us had agreed to ignore.
    This morning was so bland I brought the table out on the terrace at the back without asking Angelos whether I should. He accepted without comment. Too much on his mind, I suspected: Byzantium, Nicaea, our Visitor of the evening before. As he sat behind hiscigarette smoke, under the trellis which is already fuzzing with green, on his face that expression of irony which so often foreshadows cruelty, I wondered whether he hadn’t shared what was either my fantasy or my dream.
    To sidetrack my suspicion I launched into the kind of banal remark one makes in the cause of self-protection. ‘Isn’t it a lovely morning here on the terrace?’
    No reply. I sit watching his pointed teeth, the quiver of a veined eyelid, a slight trembling of the hand holding the cigarette.
    â€˜Well—-isn’t it?’ My chest begins to pout inside my morning-gown, which normally would have gratified my nakedness, ourselves alone together until the arrival of the recently defected Joséphine Réboa.
    â€˜Nobody,’ he aims it with precision, ‘can talk of loveliness,’ he douses the cigarette in his bowl of unfinished coffee, ‘who has not experienced Smyrna. This,’ he almost screams, ‘this French post-card is nothing! La Côte Morte !’ Laughing, but unbalanced by his laughter, this horrible desiccated wretch, to whom I am committed by fate and orgasm—never love. ‘At this hour we used to sit on the terrace, looking out across the Gulf—our senses drenched with the tones, the scent of stocks at whatever season—the mauve marble of our house on the Prokymea stained with gold—before the blood began to flow …’
    â€˜Oh, come off it!’
    I realise I am trembling with rage. I am nauseated by the cigarette doused in the bowl of half-drunk coffee, roused by the friction of my gown against my skin, drugged by the colours and scents of Smyrna as conjured up by the old magician. (Isn’t this how our relationship works?)
    â€˜The year she made her pilgrimage to Tinos—before the Turk was driven out of Thessaly …’
    â€˜Oh yes, we’re off now—off to the Martyrs’ Stakes, the Orthodox races …’
    â€˜â€¦ I went with her, but only to see they treated her respectfully on the steamer—that they gave her the cabin I’d reserved for AnnaVatatzes—that they did not seat boors at her table in the saloon—and replaced the stained tablecloth. Otherwise, I sat on deck, amongst the peasant women surrounded by their bunches of fowls and bleating kids, the cheeses they were bringing to sell receiving the