Routine

By the third day it had settled into something resembling a life. Martin rose at seven, when the light was still pale and the harbour below the villa was making its small purposeful noises — the knock of wood on wood, a motor turning over, one man calling to another in Greek across the water. He made coffee on the two-ring hob and took it out to the terrace and sat with it until Diane appeared, which was usually another forty minutes. She slept deeply and without apparent difficulty, a gift he had always found faintly enviable and had never mentioned.

The mornings were theirs separately. He walked. The island was small enough that every route eventually returned to the harbour, so he varied the approach rather than the destination — up through the old town one day, along the coast path the next, once out to the ruined chapel on the eastern headland where the ground was dry and crumbling and the sea on both sides was an improbable shade of blue, still and flat in the windless morning. He did not think very much on these walks, which was their point. He looked at things. A cat on a step. The particular orange of a fishing net drying against a white wall. He had discovered in his fifties that a certain quality of attention — sustained, purposeless, directed outward — produced something close to peace, and he had arranged his life accordingly.

Diane spent the mornings reading on the terrace or walking in the other direction, toward the small church at the edge of the upper town whose Byzantine frescoes she had examined their first year with a professional intensity and now revisited with the quieter pleasure of familiarity. She did not ask him to come. He did not offer. This too was part of the arrangement.

Leonard they saw in the afternoons. He had taken to appearing at the harbour around three, when the light began to change and the fishermen had finished their work and were mending nets or simply sitting, and he would be there when Martin came down, already in conversation with someone or studying his phone with theatrical dissatisfaction. They walked, or sat at the one café that remained open — run by a woman named Eleni whose coffee was poor and whose company was sufficient — and Leonard talked, and Martin listened, and occasionally they exchanged the kind of remark that passed for insight among people who were comfortable enough to consider that a substitute for effort.

"I think I may actually write something this time," Leonard said one afternoon. He said this each year.

"What kind of thing?"

"Something small. An essay, maybe. About place. About what happens when a place runs out of meaning for you and you keep going back anyway." He gestured vaguely at the harbour, the boats, the clock tower reading the wrong time. "This."

"That sounds more like a diary entry."

Leonard laughed. He took the observation as it was intended — affectionately — and did not pursue the essay further. He rarely did. Martin had long since understood that for Leonard the idea of the work and the work itself occupied the same space, which was why neither quite existed.

The evenings were always Kostas's. There was nowhere else that warranted the word dinner, and besides it had become the structure around which the day organised itself, the fixed point. They arrived at seven or seven-thirty. Kostas brought wine without being asked. The menu did not change substantially, which was fine — the octopus, the grilled fish, the lamb on Wednesdays, a dessert of honey and walnuts that Diane always ordered and never finished.

Yusuf worked every evening. Martin had begun to notice the specific economy of his movements — the way he cleared a table in one trip rather than two, the way he carried four glasses in each hand without looking at them, the way he positioned himself in the room to be accessible without being present. It was a skilled performance of invisibility. Martin recognised it as such without quite being able to say how.

On the fourth evening Diane spoke to him. She had dropped her fork and he had appeared at her elbow before she had time to reach for it herself, a clean fork already in his hand.

"Thank you," she said. And then, because she was Diane and incapable of leaving it there: "How long have you been on the island?"

A pause of one beat. "Since August," he said. His English was precise, slightly formal, learned from books rather than conversation.

"And before?"

"Bodrum. Before that, other places."

He said it without elaboration, and she received it without pressing further, which surprised Martin slightly — she was usually persistent. Something in Yusuf's manner discouraged the next question without refusing it. He collected the dropped fork and was gone.

"Bodrum," Leonard said. "That's Turkey."

"Yes," Diane said.

"So he came across." Leonard said it neutrally, a statement of geography. He poured more wine.

Martin looked toward the kitchen. The serving hatch was a rectangle of yellow light, and Yusuf's back was visible at the sink, the same posture as always, shoulders slightly forward, head down.

"He speaks well," Martin said.

"Kostas says he works well," Leonard said. "Better than anyone he's had."

"What does Kostas know about him?"

Leonard looked at him with mild curiosity, as though the question were slightly more specific than the occasion warranted. "Not much, I imagine. He doesn't seem the type to offer information about himself."

This was true, and also, Martin thought, probably wise. He let it go. The conversation moved to other things — the German couples departing the next day, the question of whether the weather would hold, a restaurant in Athens that Leonard had heard was worth a detour. Martin listened and ate and drank with his usual precision and at nine-thirty they walked back up through the town, Leonard peeling off at his rented room above the pharmacy, Martin and Diane climbing the last of the steps to the villa in the familiar companionable quiet.

She was asleep by ten-thirty. He sat on the terrace for a while with the last of a bottle of wine he had opened and not wanted to finish alone. The night was very clear. Somewhere down in the lower town a door opened and closed and he heard footsteps on stone — quick, light, purposeful — and then nothing. A cat appeared on top of the wall and regarded him and disappeared. The cargo ships moved along the horizon as they had the night before, as they would the night after, indifferent to whether he was watching.

He was not an unhappy man. He wanted to be sure of this. He sat with it for a moment in the way he had recently learned to sit with things — not pushing, not resolving — and found it to be, on balance, true. Not happy. But not unhappy. The distinction held.

He went inside and rinsed his glass and went to bed.