The Decision

He woke at six with the decision already made, which told him it had been made in the night, without him.

He lay still for a moment and examined it. It had the quality of things that have been arrived at by a part of the mind that does not consult the rest — settled, load-bearing, not quite his. He could feel its edges. He did not try to move it.

Diane slept. He dressed in the dark and took his jacket from the hook by the door and went out to the terrace. The sky was the particular deep blue of early morning before the light begins in earnest, and the harbour below was still, one lamp burning at the end of the dock casting a long yellow line across the water. He put his hand into the inside pocket of his jacket and took out the folded piece of paper and looked at it. Leonard's handwriting, large and looping, a Greek mobile number in two groups of digits. He had looked at it, he realised, without quite meaning to. He folded it again and put it back.

He made coffee and sat with it and worked through the reasoning, because the reasoning deserved to be done properly even if the conclusion was already fixed.

He did not know who the man was. This was the first thing. He had Leonard's account, which was Kostas's account, which was secondhand at two removes and may have been partial, or coloured, or simply wrong in its implications. Official in the way of private money — but that could mean many things. A lawyer representing a family. A creditor pursuing a debt. It did not necessarily mean danger of the kind his mind had been constructing. He had been treating his own anxiety as evidence, which was not rigorous.

He did not know what Yusuf had done. This was the second thing, and he allowed himself to think it plainly for the first time: he did not know this man. He had watched him carry plates and clear tables for two weeks and had attributed to him, on the basis of nothing more than a watchful face and a precise manner, a particular kind of innocence. But people in circumstances like Yusuf's — crossing borders without papers, making themselves useful in other people's kitchens, cultivating invisibility as a survival skill — were not always innocent. He had no idea what he was being asked, implicitly, to protect.

He drank his coffee. The sky had begun to lighten at the edges, a pale grey seeping in from the east. Below, the lamp at the end of the dock was already less visible.

The third thing was this: there was nothing concrete he could do. He had a phone number he had not called and did not intend to call, but neither did he have a way to help Yusuf that was within his actual power. He was not a lawyer. He had no connections on the island, no authority, no leverage. He could say something — but say what, to whom, to what end? He had already said the wrong thing, or the reflexive thing, which had the same result. If Yusuf had wanted to speak plainly he could have spoken plainly. He had not. He had offered Martin an opening wrapped in ambiguity and Martin had declined it and that exchange was now finished.

He thought about this for a while. He thought about the number in his pocket, and Kostas's silence, and Leonard's careful redistribution of the weight, and Yusuf's face in the candlelight receiving the words I don't know who you mean with an expression that was not surprise and was not quite its opposite either — something older than both, the expression of a man who has made his own calculations and knows which way they tend to come out.

He could still go to Kostas. He could go this morning, before anyone was awake, and say that the man should not be called, that Yusuf should be warned, that something should be done. But Kostas had already not called. Kostas had his own calculus and had reached his own conclusions and would not welcome Martin's conscience arriving at his kitchen door before seven.

He could find Yusuf himself. But Yusuf had approached him and he had refused the approach, and going back to unmake that refusal would require Martin to explain why he had made it, which he could not do without also explaining things about himself he preferred not to examine in company.

The light was coming properly now, the blue becoming grey, the harbour resolving itself out of the dark. A fishing boat was moving slowly out past the headland, its engine a low pulse across the water. Martin watched it go.

What he could do was nothing, which was also, he understood, a doing. He had known this for several days. He was choosing, now, to know it in a way that was complete — to look at it without the mitigation of uncertainty, without the scaffold of maybe and probably and these things tend to resolve themselves. To know it, and to fold it away, and to go inside and rinse his cup and wait for Diane to wake and suggest, when she did, that they might hire the caïque for the day, take a picnic out to the small island to the south that they had meant to visit every year and never had. It was the kind of thing you did in the last days. It was the kind of thing that afterwards you remembered as having been very good.

He did all of this.

The caïque was old and smelled of brine and the engine knocked irregularly but the man who hired it to them — not Kostas's Yusuf, a different man, older, weathered, entirely without interest in them — knew the water and brought them around the headland in forty minutes to a cove so quiet it felt withheld from the world. They ate their picnic on a flat rock above the waterline. Diane had brought a bottle of white wine and two glasses wrapped in a cloth, which he found touching without being able to say why. They talked about nothing that mattered, which was, he thought, its own kind of gift.

On the way back the light was doing its late-afternoon thing — merciless, extraordinary, making everything look like the last of something — and Diane trailed one hand in the water and the island appeared ahead of them, compact and white against the hills, and Martin looked at it with the clean eyes of a man who has resolved something and put it away.

That night he slept without difficulty. In the morning he was himself again.