The island was far from the largest in the Aegean, but neither was it the smallest. Armed with impeccable references from house-sitting and artfully inflated experience of kitchen work and waiting respectively, they got a job running the café by the communal pool belonging to a complex of villas.
That summer they worked hard, living in the most basic of white-painted two-roomed houses. From the bedroom window they had only a craned-neck glimpse of the sea; but all they had to do was go out and climb to the top of the narrow lane to see the bay spread out before them in all its deep blue glory. They lived cheaply and were saving money. In the off-season, they would be able to travel. To travel lightly, that is. As if leaving no impression behind, but storing up between them a treasure-trove of memories. Ones which in their immediacy were able to keep at bay the sundered chests of family silver and jewellery that each respectively carried within them. They would hop from island to island, from coast to coast, leaving only footprints and the outlines of their bodies in the sands of deserted beaches.
She was front of house, of course, and he worked the kitchen, though once or twice a week they swapped over, for the variety, to keep themselves on their toes, to be sure of the other’s ropes. They had inherited the menu, but over the course of the summer began developing it. She was quick to gauge where the tastes of their customers were not being met. And as long as there was praise and little or no complaint, the company rep left them to it.
In the kitchen he took to wearing shirts that were either exotic, loud, or Hawaiian, and often all three. He said he wore them to keep rather than look cool. It was hot behind the stove, hotter still grilling up the Wednesday evening barbeque. Then more than ever he needed their airiness. She wore shorts to her knee and pure white shirts with sleeves rolled to just beneath the elbows because those made her seem less pale. Between orders she mused on the families arrayed on the loungers around the pool, a not especially broad cross-section of British society. On how each couple interacted with their kids; the ones who got it wrong and the ones who didn’t. She remembered her own mistakes, sprinkled among the larger sense of unconditional love and achievement in having given her children the means to find their own way. Her throat thickened and blood coursed when she dwelt on them. But the mood passed with the work and before long she would be smiling at the boys and girls splashing about in front of her eyes. Usually they were young enough to retain their overarching innocence; it was surprising how even the older ones resisted becoming encrusted with the attitudes of their parents, though often they had the better parts of their characters. Some were self-satisfied, thought themselves better than the couple who waited on them; others were inscrutable, often to the point of arrogance. But as many were plain and simple and straight and you could discern that some at least of their success in life lay behind that. Others still melted with relief on encountering her warmth, and immediately opened up to her. In doing so they exposed nearly as many foibles as the smug and unreadable ones, but they had hearts and usually minds and over the course of a week she would grow fond of them. Set back a little in the kitchen, he saw and heard most of this, and at night they talked about the people they served, compared attitudes with their own, the ones which had brought them here, had led them to want to escape. He almost wanted to say, escape their fates.
But it was hard, being amenable and compliant all day, all week, all summer long. And it was hard, not seeing her own children before her. Sometimes at night she took it out on him. He soaked it up, like a sponge, and wrung it away, without letting the black or yellow bile infect him, without becoming bilious himself. And after raving and crying and sticking pins into herself and him, she would come into his arms and feel his warmth and his stillness and then nothing mattered, everything was fine, and she knew she was where she wanted to be.
It was usually on the Wednesday night, under the cover of darkness and filled with Mythos that the odd man would sidle up to the counter to try his luck. Some expressed surprise that they were a couple; evidently they had not subjected the dynamic of the kitchen to close scrutiny. Nevertheless among these odd men there were those to whom she found herself drawn; found herself wanting. She and her travelling partner, her head chef, had often talked about this. And they established a rule, though perhaps it wasn’t a hard and fast one. If someone wanted to play, they would have to play with them both. That weeded those odd men still further, but three times that summer an arrangement was made, and once it was stuck to. They doubted the man in question would be bringing his family back to the same villa next year; though perhaps he might, because the sex was free and unbridled. And for his hosts, it was a joy to them both because it made fantasy real and threatened nothing.
At summer’s end, on a cooler morning before dawn, they set off on to walk up the island’s highest mountain. At the top they would find an orthodox church. They knew the church would be shut, for it opened only on one day a year, but that gave their climb added curiosity. They would not encounter a soul, at that time of day, this time of year.
The climb was hard and they stopped frequently among the olives and thyme to drink water. At the top of the mountain, having circumnavigated the white-painted church, having attempted to peer in at its windows, having looked down into the depths of the sea and out to distant peaks on other islands, they lay in the shade to one side of the holy building and consummated their feeling for the island on which they now lived and for the life they had made there.
