Arrival

The ferry from Rhodes took four hours and Martin slept for most of them, his jacket folded beneath his head, his face turned away from the other passengers. Diane sat opposite and read. She was three-quarters through a novel she had not mentioned and would not mention, and when the island appeared — a low grey-green shape in the October haze, like something a child had pressed into the water with one thumb — she looked up at it for a moment and then looked back at her page.

They had done this before. Four times now, in four consecutive Octobers, and the ritual had acquired the quality of all rituals: a slightly compulsory comfort, a pleasure that had ceased to surprise. Martin had found the island the way certain men of his age and circumstance find things — through a friend of a friend, a good dinner in London, a careless recommendation that lodged itself and refused to leave. The first year he had come alone, or nearly alone, meaning with someone who was not Diane. The second year he had brought Diane, and it had been, he thought, the best week of their early years together. After that it had simply continued.

The port was small enough to take in at a glance: a curve of whitewashed buildings, a clock tower that told the wrong time, three fishing boats and a pleasure craft someone had neglected at the end of the dock. In summer, he had been told, there were day-trippers from the larger islands. In October there was none of that. The tavernas along the waterfront had their chairs stacked. One of them — Kostas's — had not. Its lights were on in the low afternoon sun, which was not an invitation so much as a fact.

A man with a van took their luggage. He did not speak but nodded in the direction of the upper town with the confident economy of someone who has ferried the same visitors to the same places for twenty years, which he had. The streets were narrow and already in shadow. From somewhere came the smell of woodsmoke and something frying — not unpleasant, anchoring. Diane walked beside Martin without speaking. She had put her book away and was looking at things with the expression she used in galleries: attentive, slightly withheld.

The villa was as he remembered it. The owner's cousin, a woman in her fifties who introduced herself each time as though they had not met, handed over the keys with the formality of a transaction conducted between strangers, which in all the ways that mattered it was. The terrace looked south. The bougainvillea had gone over but the vine was still thick above the table, yellowing at the edges in the cold.

"It's smaller than I remembered," Diane said. She was standing in the main room with her coat still on.

"It always is."

She went to open the shutters. The light came in flat and extraordinary, the particular light of the Aegean in autumn, which had no warmth in it but was luminous in a way that made every object — a jug, a chair, the white wall — look briefly significant. Martin watched her stand in it. She was still a handsome woman. He noticed this the way one notices a feature of a landscape one has driven past many times: accurately, without urgency.

They walked down to Kostas's at seven. The evening had turned cold quickly in the way of the islands once the sun dropped. There were four tables occupied inside, which was more than Martin had expected. Three German couples whom he recognised faintly from previous years, or perhaps from the ferry, or perhaps simply from the general category of people who came to places like this at this time of year. And Leonard.

Leonard was at the table in the corner with a carafe of the house red and a plate of something finished. He raised a hand when he saw Martin — a broad, proprietary wave, as though he were welcoming them to his own establishment — and Martin felt the small particular fatigue that Leonard always produced in him, alongside, it had to be said, a genuine pleasure. They had met here three years ago. They emailed occasionally. He was, Martin supposed, a friend, in the attenuated sense that word acquires across a certain latitude of life.

"You look terrible," Leonard said, standing to embrace Diane with a warmth that she received gracefully. "Both of you. The ferry?"

"The ferry," Martin agreed.

"Sit. I'll get Kostas." He looked well himself — tanned, slightly heavy, the look of a man who had been eating and drinking without interruption for several weeks. "I've been here since the third. You have so much to catch up on. Nothing has happened. It's been perfect."

Kostas came from the kitchen with the unhurried pace of a man who has decided that the difference between prompt and slow is a matter of other people's priorities. He shook Martin's hand and nodded at Diane and said something about the ferry being late and put a carafe on the table without being asked.

"He has a new boy," Leonard said, once Kostas had returned to the kitchen. "Turkish, I think. Or possibly Syrian. Washes up, does the tables. Very quiet."

Martin looked toward the kitchen. Through the serving hatch he could see the back of a man at the sink, moving with the efficient stillness of someone long practised in the specific art of not being noticed. Young, or youngish. Dark-haired. He turned once to collect something from the counter and Martin saw his face briefly — fine-featured, watchful — before he turned back to the sink.

"Where does he sleep?" Diane asked.

"No idea," Leonard said. "Kostas's perhaps. Or the back of somewhere." He poured the wine. "Does it matter?"

It was said without malice. Leonard was not a cruel man. The question was genuine, which was, Martin thought, its own kind of answer.

The food came. The octopus was good, charred at the edges, tender in the way that required patience. The wine was what it always was. Leonard talked about a book he was not writing and a woman he was not seeing and a property in Vermont he was not sure he should sell, and Martin listened with the practised attention of a man accustomed to other people's unresolved lives. Diane asked questions. She was better at Leonard than Martin was — more genuinely curious, or better at performing curiosity, which in social life amounted to the same thing.

At some point the man from the kitchen came out to clear a table. He moved among the chairs with a quietness that was not servility — it was more deliberate than that, more considered. He collected the plates without sound and went back through the kitchen door without looking at any of them.

"What's his name?" Martin said.

Leonard looked up. "Yusuf, I think. Or something like it. Why?"

"No reason," Martin said.

He drank his wine. The evening continued. Outside the wind had come up off the water, and the sign above the door swung once and settled. It was the first of October and the island had given itself back to the people who actually lived here, and Martin was — he chose the word deliberately, privately — content. Not happy, precisely. But content. The distinction had come to seem important to him somewhere in the middle of his fifties, the way certain distinctions do: as consolation, as honesty, as both at once.

They walked back up through the dark streets at ten. Diane took his arm without comment. Above the town the stars were dense and cold and the lights of a cargo ship moved along the horizon with the slow patience of something that had no interest in arriving.