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spray from their vomit. This was my pilgrimage from Smyrna to Tinos. On arrival I sit waiting for my sainted wife at a café on the paralia— because my faith, or lack of it, will not allow me to go up to the church with her.’
    â€˜Masochist, Angelos!’
    I am enraged, always, at the sight of the saintly Anna’s face, herself a walking candle lighting candles in the dark church. I reach for my lover’s hand, past the broken crusts, past the used cups. I disturb the surface of cold café au lait in which the cigarette has disintegrated. When I have locked his fingers in mine, we sinners sticky with half-dried semen sit and watch as she kisses her own reflection in the glass protecting the jewelled icon from sinners, germs, and thieves.
    Then I lean forward, I cannot restrain my impulse, I kiss the hand I am holding, and we are bobbing like two helpless corks on the tide of our emotions.
    â€˜At breakfast, E.!’
    I bow my head. I am exposed from my divided breast, past the slope on which my navel is embossed, as far as the muslin folds of my lap.
    â€˜Why are you crying, Eudoxia?’
    â€˜Fuck it—I’m not! Being emotional isn’t necessarily crying, is it? If I weren’t emotional, you’d call me a cold fish—or worse still, an Anglo-Saxon. Of all the insulting names you call me, that is seldom one of them.’
    We sit laughing, legs entangled under the table, his old bony kneecaps eating into me, neither of us aware that this will be the Day of the Second Coming of Our Lady Mrs E. Boyd Golson.
    All day long the dream of my Father kept recurring. In a series of waking dreams I found myself adding details to it.
    Mummy came in. I was lying vaguely telling the rosary of dreams and thoughts while sucking the forbidden lolly I had hidden underthe pillow. She rattatted on my bedroom door, only as a joke, because she barged straight in. I thought at first she must have wanted to catch me at something, but soon realised this was the last thing in her head, she was too exhilarated, so excited it did not even occur to her that she was the one who might be caught out. She was dressed in a pair of check pants and a coat which could have belonged to my father. Certainly the waistcoat of crumpled points was his, though she hadn’t been able to commandeer the watch-chain. She was wearing a hat, its brim pulled low, which I recognised as a Sewell Sweatfree Felt. Chugging along in the rear was Joanie Golson, her bosom expiring in palest blue charmeuse.
    Mummy announced, ‘We are going out, darling. If there’s anything you want, Daddy’ll be here, reading through some—legal stuff.’ She gulped down what was turning into a hiccup.
    Though the shutters were closed, and only a feeble glimmer from the night-light swimming in its saucer, a green moon could have been presiding over a painted scene. Its most incredible detail was that Mummy had corked on a moustache: the perspiration had worked its way to the surface and was winking through this corked band, while behind Mrs Judge Twyborn, Mrs Boyd Golson glugged and panted, her charmeuse melons parting and rejoining, parting and rejoining.
    Having done their duty by Eadie’s tiresome child, the couple left, and I began drowsing and waking, drowsing again, to the tune of Joanie’s globular breasts.
    Though Mrs Golson re-appeared regularly at the Twyborns’, she was on my list of avoidables from the night of the corked moustache until she sprang upon us yesterday.
    There was nothing to disturb this afternoon’s siesta: Byzantium might never have begun falling apart, figments became the reality parents and lovers like to believe they have created. Could one dismiss as figment Eadie’s emissary Joan Golson rising through the dusk in her green motor the other side of the garden wall?
    Later this evening, under a resonant sky, Angelos proposed to make music. We did, too.
    We launched into the