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company. And that has never changed. I remember how, when you had too much wine, affection poured out from you to me. It just added to the excitement of my sexual excesses with you. Your obedience and loyalty, your courageous will to please me were always what made me want to be more gentle and more generous to you. It gave me so much pleasure to spend days on end teaching you languages, to swim in the sea, to appreciate everything beautiful and people and what makes them create those things. And the joy behind every sexual door we nudged open. You were perfect material to mold into the extraordinary woman that you are now.”
    He took her in his arms and kissed her with great passion. Even as she slipped into the kiss with her body and her soul, her own inner promptings were telling her, ‘Be cautious, Humayun. Once before you thought you and Rashid were growing together, were as one, building up a full relationship to be shared only by the two of you. For all the attention that he paid you then it was just a seduction. The same as for any newcomer in his life. You may not have known that then, because you were underhis spell, enchanted with a prince who took you, body and mind. But you must know it now.’
    But imaginary voices of caution go unheard in moments of lust and love, even if they speak for a real love that is pure and honest, such as she was experiencing for the first time in her life with Moses. Moses. He simply vanished from her mind. She eased her arms around Rashid’s neck and returned his kiss, and together they slipped back in time.
    When the car had left them, hand in hand they walked around the crescent-shaped port of Xania. A few foreigners they had once known there and remained still welcomed them warmly.
    “They were wonderful times, those old days, when we were young and innocent,” Rashid said to Liz Cordell, a big-shouldered giant of a woman they had known well when she was in her late thirties. A quiet, sensible, hardworking illustrator of children’s books, she was part of the incestuous group of expatriates who lived in and around the old port. They clung together, dined, and gossiped madly together. They both dished and defended one another according to how they felt on a given day. Critical and protective of one another was their way of survival in the small egocentric, creative circle. She had been kind to everyone and very much liked by the people of Crete. In her little car she used to bump across country roads, over the mountains to every village where she made friends and sketches.
    “Yes, wonderful. One moment you and Humayun were part of our lives, and then you were gone. We all wondered what happened to you. But the press filled us in with the adventures of one jet-setting Turkish playboy. We thought you might return one day.”
    Rashid insisted that she stop and share a bottle of wine in one of the cafés. She stopped but chose beer, and so the three of them drank beer. It was such a throwback, that courtesy of drinking only what one of the group could afford, a habit they all had cultivated in the old days, with money in inconstant supply among them. But, if one ofthem had sold a book or a painting, then there was wine — whiskey even, for a long book, a large canvas.
    It was true he had abandoned them and, worse, forgotten them, never given them a thought. Suddenly they were all there in his mind, and he was curious as to what had happened to them.
    “I was thrilled in those days to be part of the group. I liked so much the way you all lived. No one was ever offended if some of us preferred our own company and wanted to dine alone. That when invitations were issued to dine in one of our houses, no one was ever vexed if he was excluded. Personal privacy was all-important to each of us and we all respected that, and yet remained solidly a clan of friends.
    “There was just one exception, that English playwright and his French wife with the two children, who very rarely joined