‘Will you tell me what you were musing upon, now?’ said Stephen. ‘It must have been rarely pleasant.’ ‘I was thinking about marriage,’ said Jack, ‘and the garden that goes with it.’ ‘Must you have a garden when you are married?’ cried Stephen. ‘I was not aware.’

Like all Hindu ceremonies he had seen, this appeared to be going forward with great excitement, great good humour, and a total lack of organisation.

Lovers who had been procrastinating got married immediately, and longstanding couples in unsatisfactory marriages looked at one another in wonder at such a waste of years and immediately got divorced.

The officers who were wafting this enormous treasure across the ocean in their leisurely East-India fashion were well rewarded for doing so; this pleased them, because, among other things, it allowed them to be magnificently hospitable; and they were the most hospitable souls afloat. No sooner had Captain Muffit, the commodore, made out the frigate’s tall mainmast in the light of dawn, than he sent for his chief steward, his head Chinese and his head Indian cook; and signals broke out aboard the Lushington: the one to the Surprise, Request honour of captain’s and officers’ company to dinner, the other to the convoy, All ships: pretty young female passengers required dine frigate’s officers. Repeat young. Repeat pretty.

Iannis’ secret desire was to become a harpoon, as soon as he was old enough. These ‘kamakia’ were the young Greek boys who lived on a diet of perpetual sex, entertaining the unchaperoned and romantic foreign girls who arrived on the island in search of true love and multiple orgasms in the arms of any latter-day Adonis who agreed to sweep them off their feet. They considered themselves so indispensable to the tourist industry that there was even talk of forming a union to represent their interests. Charmingly and chivalrously they doled out beautiful memories and broken hearts, waiting at the airport after one girl had flown out in order to acquire another as she flew in. They hung about on their mopeds in fallow times, discussing the sexual hierarchy of merit amongst the different nationalities. Italian girls were best, and English girls were useless unless inebriated. German girls were technicians, Spanish girls uncontrollable and melodramatic, and French girls were so vain that you had to pretend to be in love with them from the very first. Iannis used to inspect his diminutive rod with its unpredictable and painful erections, and wonder if he would ever have an orgasm, whatever that was, and whether and when his particular harpoon would waken from its humid dreams and grow.