Chapter 14 What Elena Knows
The morning after the feast, Priya texted me from Chios:
"Elena knows, doesn't she."
I looked at my phone for a long moment. Then I typed back: She speaks better English than me when she wants to.
Priya replied: "Obviously."
I stared at Obviously for a while. I was surrounded by extremely observant people. This was either exactly what I needed or a disaster in progress, and I was finding it increasingly difficult to distinguish between the two.
* * *
I'd learned about the coffee from Priya. But it was Elena who told me about the postcard.
Or rather: it was Elena who told me that she'd seen it, which came to the same thing, because Elena knowing something and Elena keeping it to herself were different categories of the same action, and I was beginning to understand that Elena's silences were generally more informative than other people's speech.
I came in for morning prep on Thursday and Elena was already there, which was always the case.
Theria was doing something with the stockpot.
The cats were conducting their usual assessment of the courtyard perimeter.
The morning was doing the thing it always did, which was arrive on Kaliroi with a particular quality of light — clear and direct, the blue of the sky not yet bleached by heat — that made everything look like it had been arranged by someone who cared very much about presentation.
I put on my apron (pockets: one laminated card on plastics recycling codes; one handwritten list of herbs (not laminated, but precise); one folded note with the names of the island's current table regulars that I had made myself and which had thirteen entries and was slightly dog-eared now).
I tied the strings. I squared my shoulders, which I did before every shift without quite thinking about it any more.
Elena looked at me. She put down what she was holding with the deliberate care of someone who has decided to say something and is allocating appropriate attention to it.
"You had it at the harbour," she said.
I looked at her. "I'm sorry?"
"The first day. When the ferry came." She said this in perfectly calibrated English — not the occasional phrase she deployed for efficiency, but full, clear sentences, the kind I now understood she reserved for things she'd decided to say without ambiguity.
"You were standing at the dock. You had something in your hand.
Small. A card. You were looking at the island. "
I knew what she meant. I knew immediately.
I'd been standing at the rail of the ferry looking at the postcard.
My grandmother's handwriting. The island view on the front — the one taken from the water, the white-cube buildings on the hillside, the harbour, the specific angle of the light that was, as far as I could tell, exactly the same as the actual light right now, as though nothing had changed in the twenty-three years since the postcard had been sent and nothing particularly intended to.
"You could see that from the dock?" I said.
"You were holding it like it was important," she said. "People hold important things in a particular way."
I thought about this. "It was a postcard. My grandmother sent it when I was eight. She — she had been here. On Kaliroi." I paused. "I've been carrying it in my wallet for six years."
Elena was quiet for a moment. Then she said, in the tone of someone stating a thing that is simply true and not open to discussion: "A person who carries a place in their wallet for six years and comes to it alone has already decided."
I opened my mouth to say I hadn't decided anything. I hadn't booked a return ticket but that was — that was just a logistical oversight, a — I was looking at more data, I was being responsible about the data —
"I'll get the tables," I said.
"Yes," said Elena, and picked up what she'd put down, and that was the end of the conversation.
* * *
It was not the end of it in my head. In my head, it continued for approximately four hours.
Because if Elena had seen me at the dock with the postcard, and if Elena had — from that moment, from the first morning, before I'd said a word or broken a single order or dropped a single thing — been giving me better coffee, then what Elena had decided, apparently before I'd had any opportunity to make an impression at all, was something I needed to think about quite carefully.
I dropped a glass of water on table seven. I apologised. The two German tourists at table seven were remarkably kind about this. I went and got paper napkins and cleaned it up and thought: Elena made a decision about me before she knew me.
On what data?
I walked past the kitchen doorway on the way to the specials board and thought: a postcard.
A postcard my grandmother had sent from an island I'd never been to, that I'd kept in my wallet for six years, that I'd been standing at the ferry rail looking at when we came into the harbour on a Monday in early June.
And Elena had looked at the dock and seen — what? Someone who needed to be here? Someone who had already arrived in the most significant sense before the ferry docked?
I thought about my grandmother. She'd died when I was young, so she didn't know the world I'd built — the consulting firm, the careful career, Dominic with his convincing certainties and his very detailed lies.
She'd sent the postcard when I was eight: A place to be found when you're ready.
Like she'd known, years before I did, that I was going to need somewhere specific to find.
I delivered the specials board information to table nine with perhaps more focus than required. The couple at table nine looked slightly alarmed. I modulated.
* * *
Nikos came by at lunchtime.
He appeared at the courtyard gate with the slightly cautious energy of someone who has been told he is allowed to visit his mother's taverna but must not exert himself, and was doing his best to comply with the first condition while finding the second extremely trying.
He was shorter than Lex — rounder, warmer, with the sort of face that had probably always looked like it was about to tell you something enjoyable.
He sat at a table and Elena brought him coffee and they spoke in rapid Greek and I went about my work.
But at some point I had a question. A genuine logistical question about the supplier rotation for the fresh fish, which had been adjusted since Monday in a way I didn't fully understand and which had implications for the Friday order.
I went to Nikos.
"Excuse me," I said. "I'm sorry to interrupt—"
"Margot!" He said my name with the pleasure of a man for whom names are important things. "Of course. What do you need?"
"I have a question about the fish supply rotation. The adjustment on Monday — do you know if that's a permanent change or a temporary one while the regular supplier is—"
"Ah," he said, delighted. "Sit. Sit. I'll explain the whole thing."
I sat. He explained the whole thing — not briefly, but with enormous warmth, and with two small detours (one into the history of the particular fishing family that supplied them, going back forty years; one into the question of whether mackerel was undervalued as a table fish, which I found surprisingly compelling).
Elena brought me coffee. I had not asked for it. It was the good coffee.
After twenty minutes, I knew exactly what I needed to know about the fish supply rotation, and also knew a great deal about the Anagnostopoulos family's relationship with the harbour over three generations, and also had been asked three careful questions about where I was from and what I'd done in London, which Nikos asked the way people ask when they already know and are checking the room temperature.
"You ask for things very rarely," Nikos said, when we'd finished. "I noticed."
"I'm still learning the systems," I said.
"You understand the systems," he said. "You're being careful about what you claim to know."
I looked at him. The directness surprised me. He had his son's absolute flatness of assessment, but delivered warm rather than spare. "I suppose I am."
"It's a good instinct," he said. "Here. We have a saying: the island teaches, but only if you don't arrive already knowing everything."
I thought about this. "And if you arrive thinking you already know?"
"The island corrects you," he said. "Usually with a cork."
I looked at him. He smiled with every part of his face. I laughed — a proper laugh, surprised out of me — and he laughed too, and Elena, passing through, gave us both a look that said she'd known this would happen and found it entirely satisfactory.
I thanked him for his time. He waved this off in the way of someone for whom time spent in good conversation was not a thing one thanked people for.
I went back to work with the specific warmth of having asked for help and had it given without qualification.
I had not done that in quite some time.
* * *
Priya's text came through at four o'clock, between services:
"What did Elena say?"
I typed back: "A person who carries a place in their wallet for six years and comes to it alone has already decided."
A long pause. Then: "That's a complete sentence."
I know.
"You know what it means."
I looked at the phone. Then out at the courtyard, where the afternoon light was doing its thing on the harbour water, the boats, the cats going about their impenetrable business.
I'm looking at more data, I typed.
Priya replied with a single character. Not a word. Not a punctuation mark. Just: "."
A full stop.
Which, I thought, staring at it for rather longer than necessary, was exactly right.
* * *
At the end of the evening service, Lex was in the kitchen closing up. I had finished the front-of-house reset and was collecting my things. There was that particular end-of-service stillness that I'd come to find — not peaceful, exactly, but purposeful. Everything done. The day properly finished.
"Nikos," I said, at the kitchen doorway.
He turned. He had a cloth in his hands, wiping down the counter.