The Painter’s Sons

(i.m. D.H.L.)

Thorpe Lindley was the foreign painter on Antidauros. The houses on this small Greek island had been uniform, cubed, white since long before memory. They were clustered around the circular harbour, and began to climb the steep white rocky hill behind. The landscape was bleached by the summer heat, the scrubby grass and rocks remaining drained of colour even in winter. The people of the island had always gone with their sweethearts up the hill to sit among briars and wildflowers, to embrace and to notice the view. When they had married their sweethearts, their use for a view came to an end, and they rarely climbed the hill.

But some time in the early 1970s, new houses started to be built on the island. Rich men from Athens discovered it and, finding it unspoilt, decided to begin the work of spoiling it. They built four or five luxurious villas with fine views of the harbour and the sea, from far above. When they arrived, they first agreed to be transported up the hill by the villagers’ donkeys, but in time roads were built, and a taxi firm with one driver started to find it worth his while in the summer months, when he was not working as a waiter in the taverna. After the rich Athenian men, the locals began to build new houses for the tourists who would come. They discovered that houses, if lived in but left unfinished, were not taxable. So the tourists, when they came, had to look harder for the island as it had been, unspoilt. Much of the hillside came to be covered with ugly brown square blocks, iron rods stiffly poking into the sky and rusting from the square-topped surface of the roof.

To suit the sense of the picturesque that the tourists sought, first coming from Greece, then from France, Germany and England, it was necessary to encourage a painter, a foreign one. A painter might become rich quickly on more established islands, but here that was all in the future. The painter who came was there for the peace, and money, perhaps, might come much later on. The studio and school of art was a large single-room building, finished and painted white, surrounded by purple-flowering oleander bushes on the edge of the island’s single town, and in spring by wildflowers. The painter had tried to plant ivy against the toilet that stood behind the building, perhaps to hide it, or maybe to remind people of where he came from – it looked very strange on that Greek island, and was much discussed when it started to grow and cover the little kiosk. A hundred metres away was the house that the painter and his family lived in: square, bulky, white, but without rusting metal rods shooting up from the roof.

Thorpe Lindley had come to Antidauros at the age of twenty-seven. He had been a painter in London, taking occasional work teaching for schools and trying to make his name as a painter. His wife believed in him: she worked as the personal assistant to the editor of a political journal, and they managed to live on what they made. She was confident that things would work out for them, as the daughter of a prosperous estate agent who had turned against all that materialistic shit. He was the son of an office cleaner and a clerk in an undertaker’s office, who were awed by their clever son making it through grammar school, and were no more worried when he went to art school to become a painter than if he had gone to law school to become a solicitor. He was not confident that things would work out for them. His art had been pencil studies of nudes, then Graham Sutherland, then Bacon, then Jackson Pollock, and now it had been simplified into blocks of floating colour, given texture on the canvas. He had become fascinated by Mark Rothko, with whom his wife said he was in a dialogue. Sometimes he sold a painting, but in London, he had no dealer. They talked the matter through and came to Antidauros to live more cheaply, more honestly, and to introduce the innocent people of the island and those who visited to new currents in art.

The people of the island and almost all of the holidaymakers showed no interest in Thorpe Lindley’s paintings. Few of them could see why anyone should set up in front of a handsome Cycladic view and then paint a vast canvas, three feet by nine, consisting of a black rectangle floating over a very dark green ground, and nothing else. They lived for a year on Mrs Lindley’s parents. Then they talked the matter over, and Thorpe Lindley worked for two or three months in the spring, before the holidaymakers came, on neat, careful, well-executed paintings of the harbour. Bundles of moulded frames arrived for the painter, and sheets of hardboard matting. He had already learnt how to stretch canvas over wooden supports. With the help of the ironmonger in the back-streets by the harbour, he now learnt to frame his own pictures. The picturesque views of Antidauros harbour, brightly coloured and firmly outlined with a touch of English pop art, sold well. He despised what he did, but continued to do it. Towards the end of the summer, he found himself teaching two Greek ladies on holiday, widows of Thessaloniki merchants. They struggled through his Greek and their English to suggest to him that he might place an advert, early in the spring, in the Greek national newspaper, and one of them kindly wrote the correct wording in a language he was only slowly learning. He placed an advert there, and also in an English newspaper, with similar wording. It was good that only after all this happened did Thorpe learn that the two Greek ladies were supporters of the Colonels, and he kept this information from his wife. The next year there were plenty of students, and he painted his large abstract slowly, in the interim times.

His wife accepted the position that nobody, yet, wanted anything to do with advanced thinking about art. She went about the village pale, intense, furious, explaining to anyone that her husband’s art was not to be identified with the little paintings he sold to make money. He was at work on a great project, she explained to the old fishermen of the town and the rich visitors from Athens, making no distinction between them. The old fishermen had no interest in different schools of art and the rich visitors from Athens knew and mostly ridiculed abstract painting, so she grew angry. After some months, she learnt that it was better to confine her anger to the family house, and not to vent it in front of strangers, who would first be shocked, then laugh at her loss of dignity. She had too little to do, and raged in misery and disgust, only ever saying at the end of it that it would all be so much worse in England, horrible and stupid as the Greeks were, or could be.

The children were conspicuous on the island. They were English, and could be nothing else. They had shocks of blond hair, white-blond, like the first stab of the sun in the morning, and quickly their skin grew dark in the summer until their eyes and hair and lips were paler than their cheeks. Still they did not look healthy, but thin-faced, uncertain, withdrawn. They were more at home with each other than with the other children of the island, who were entered into and withdrawn from the school according to how much their fathers needed them in the family business, on board a fishing boat, to help out at a taverna or unloading a ferry’s wares. The Lindley children never missed a day, and walked down the hill to the little school in procession, splash of white-blond after splash of white-blond, their hair cut by their mother to save money. For a long time, there was another Lindley child every two or three years, until there were six. Then it stopped. The two eldest were boys. Oak Lindley was short and pugnacious, with a look of a fight about to start and a wrong about to be put right. Thyme Lindley, the second boy, was fearful-looking, fretting as he walked, his fingers fluttering about his bag, opening and shutting it as he checked that the books he needed were still there. The others walked behind them, silent or murmuring. It was cause for comment in the village how very quiet the English children were. But whether it was a Lindley quiet or an English quiet, it was a quiet that had no calm in it, only some sort of fear, and it was felt to be unnatural that children all their days made no scream or yell to break the morning.

After the passage of some years, Oak Lindley returned to the island and set up in a small office mending broken computers, under the business name of OKIT, and an internet café with six computers, his father’s unsold pictures on the walls and offering English cakes, with sultanas and carrots, made by his mother. He lived in a small flat upstairs. His café, which was popular with tourists in the summer and had steady unemployed regulars most of the winter, had a sign outside reading δρυς. ‘Drys’ was his name in Greek, but few people knew that; they thought of him as O-uark, a sound and not a meaning word. There were no oak trees on the island and the islanders thought of the name of his café as ordinarily fanciful. Thyme, who still lived in the bedroom he had shared with Oak, made a little money teaching yoga to tourists and to students at his father’s painting school. He charged 250 drachmas a lesson. Yoga was a skill he had learnt from a visiting teacher who, in addition to yoga, taught tai chi and meditation. She had spent the summer on Antidauros, ten years before. Thyme dreaded a customer who was already experienced in the art.

One day in late May, Thorpe shut up the studio and walked down through the town towards the harbour. He passed his son Oak’s internet café. Oak was sitting inside, talking to his brother Thyme, two blond boys of different shape and size, their family resemblance seeming only to be made by their shared colouring. They were twenty-three and twenty years old. They did not see their father go past. Thorpe had seen the ship approaching from far away. It was the weekly cargo ship, and he was sure that it would be bringing him a supply of canvas, paper, stretchers and framing material, as well as paint, brushes and other important stuff, for himself and for the pupils who would start arriving in June. An assistant was arriving in two weeks from England, a rich boy who would pay him for the privilege of painting around him all summer, and of learning how to stretch canvas and mount frames. It was a biannual delivery, sent by the suppliers in Thessaloniki, that had once filled him with delight and anticipation, and now gave him feelings of dread and age. He knew as he walked towards the docking ship that he would feel, on opening the ordered cargo, the coagulating presence of a hundred inept views of the same stretch of land and sky from his pupils, the same ten pop-art-flavoured views of the island that he would paint this month and sell, and not the masterpiece that he had known he had in him and still heard his wife urge him towards. He painted somewhat in the manner of Willem de Kooning, these days. Even people he had spent time with had sometimes observed that his art of that sort was like the art on the side of subway trains, was influenced by graffiti. But it did not sell.

At the dockyard, he signed for the tea-chest-sized cargo, and asked Marina if her son could drive it up to the studio that afternoon. It was the best time of year. The wildflowers on the island were still rich and abundant, and the sea was fresh. When he had first come to the island, he had found the abundant spread, up on the hill, of flowering broom, of purple borage, nasturtiums, anemones, daisies, wild irises among the smell of sage, rosemary and lavender, intoxicating. Now he liked this time of year because it was warm, but there were few tourists yet, and the town had painted itself. It presented itself fresh and brilliant, white and blue, to the arriving visitor, preparing to make a go of it.

His name was called, an unfamiliar voice, not Greek or English. He shaded his eyes and looked on the terrace of the harbour-side café, Leonidas, and saw a waving female figure, ruddy and plump. He recognized her. She was a Swiss woman, a German speaker, a regular visitor at this time of year. She had been coming to Antidauros for at least twenty years, and greeted Thorpe as if he were an old friend. Next to her was a frail, gaunt man, shrunk into his grey flesh. Thorpe remembered that she came every year with her husband; she looked much as she had for the last year or two, but this man, surely, looked very much older and frailer than he had. Thorpe greeted them heartily enough, not remembering their names or anything about them. He did remember, however, that they had a son who was perhaps in his early twenties.

‘It is so pleasant to come back to Antidauros,’ the woman said. ‘We look forward to our holiday almost as soon as Christmas is over and done with. We always have. Herbert, my husband, he always says to me, Maria, Maria, it will be here before you know it and over before you know it.’

It was tactful of the woman to mention their names so casually. Thorpe did not believe that he would have remembered them unassisted. He had never liked or admired this pair, any more than any of the other regular visitors to the island. They came every year, but their clothes were exactly as they had been twenty years ago, the clothes of a comfortable Swiss-German pair of shopkeepers on a Sunday trip to the lake. The woman’s bright floral dress in orange and red, her vividly artificial tights and white slingback shoes corseted an abundant flesh that would be wobbling red and sore, her shoulders streaked with yogurt by the end of the holiday. The old man’s blue shorts and cheerful Hawaiian shirt were loose on him; his white socks and brown sandals, polished to a shine, were those of any other descending Teuton this year or any other. Thorpe reminded himself that these people kept the island going, and it was his responsibility to be pleasant to them, as much as any other resident of Antidauros.

‘I hope your painting is going well,’ the woman confided, leaning forward. ‘I was so looking forward to seeing you before much longer. You see,’ she patted her husband’s hand, ‘you see, I wanted to ask you if you could do one thing for me. It is, if you like, a commission.’

‘Well, that’s always a welcome suggestion,’ Thorpe said.

‘My husband wants to have his portrait painted,’ the woman said. ‘And I said, let us ask Mr Lindley of Antidauros. I must explain.’ She hurried on, seeing, perhaps, Thorpe’s unwillingness in his eyes. He never painted portraits for exactly this reason. It required sitting in a room, facing another human being, and perhaps even engaging in conversation with them. Thorpe believed that if the suggestion ever arose, it would arise from the people he already spent enough time with, the rich holidaymakers, the wealthy of Hamburg and Lyon, here on the island for two weeks, and full of unreasonable demands. He started to shake his head. The woman could buy one of the landscapes he had left over from last year.

But she went on swiftly: ‘It has never happened before, this desire to have Herbert painted,’ she said. ‘And now it is our last chance. You see, Mr Lindley, Herbert is ill, and is not expected to last until the end of the year.’

‘I am so sorry to hear that,’ Thorpe said. The old man, fleshless, sunken, now began almost to grin, to nod in a slow, satisfied manner. Thorpe could not remember if he understood English, or if this conversation was being carried out in the safe knowledge that anything could be said in front of him. He remembered nothing of this pair except their bold appearance, and that they had a son. ‘It’s an honour even to be asked,’ he said in the end.

But there was something about that response that dissatisfied the woman, and she shook her head sharply. ‘Money would be no object,’ she said firmly. ‘You could name your price, Mr Lindley.’

‘And your son?’ Thorpe said, revolted. ‘Is he with you?’

‘Florian is not with us this year,’ she said. ‘He has just started a new job and he found it impossible to ask for leave. He is the new junior manager of a branch of Starbucks in Solothurn, a beautiful city, not so very far from us, a hundred and fifty kilometres away, and he visits us every week. How kind of you to ask after him!’

‘I see,’ Thorpe said. In his mind he shrank from this family and its deeds. But he needed money: he perpetually needed money. And even the mother of a man who spread American filth and called it coffee could supply him with money for good deeds. He wondered how much he could charge for how little.

‘Won’t you join us,’ the woman said. ‘Join us in our morning drink. It is a little too late for breakfast, but we like to enjoy ourselves on holiday. It would be as our guest, of course,’ she went on expansively. Thorpe had not noticed that the pair of them were drinking, as very old Greek men sometimes used to, glasses of ouzo, although it was only ten thirty in the morning. The father took up his glass, half empty, and in the vacant café, looking out over the sun and the sea, finished it in one gulp.

‘That is kind of you,’ Thorpe said, with some distaste. ‘But I have some work I need to do before lunch. I would be happy to work on a portrait of your husband, and honoured. Perhaps he would like to come up to the studio tomorrow morning. Would that suit you?’

‘What do you think of charging?’ the woman said, her eyes wet and hungry.

Thorpe assessed her. She was probably not immensely rich; she was of the class of persons that had little reason to spend on ordinary things, and on the rare occasions, like a holiday, when opportunities arose, she must enjoy splashing around the small margins of her income. He thought about what he could get away with, and named a sum. She lowered her eyes to her ouzo, her handbag, clutched in her hands, red-varnished. It was more than she had thought. She had never dealt with a proper painter before, she confided. But then she gathered strength, and said that this was important, and she agreed. Her son would transfer the deposit from Solothurn. This would happen in the next day or two days.

He told the story to his wife and children, over lunch that day. His wife shook her head when she learnt that their son was the junior manager of a branch of Starbucks. ‘Do they not have coffee of their own in Switzerland?’ she said. ‘I think it’s rather well known to be extremely good. The Germans! They know all about coffee. And now the Americans, they come with their shops, selling slightly flavoured foaming milk, calling it coffee, and driving everyone who knows about coffee out of business. The minds of these people – their children working for scum like that. I would be ashamed to know anyone who worked for Starbucks, I truly would. My God, what does your son do – he’s the junior manager of a branch of Starbucks. These people.’

‘The son seemed reasonable,’ Thorpe said. ‘He had an odd name. He was called – he was called Florian. I think I remember him.’

‘I remember a Swiss boy called Florian,’ Thyme said. ‘He was nice. He’s been coming here for years. I remember him being our age.’

‘The father is going to die, his wife said,’ Thorpe said.

‘One final trip,’ Rose Lindley said. ‘They are so deluded, these people. They think that they come to a place once a year for two weeks, even for twenty years, and they think anyone remembers them. It’s only their lives that are so drab, back home, with their son working for Starbucks and— What did they do?’

‘God knows,’ Thorpe said. ‘But they made some money at it. She’s asked me to paint a portrait of her husband before he dies. He’s not expected to last more than six months. This is their last chance.’

‘Don’t they have artists in – where was it? – Solothurn? No. That was just where their son was living. Where are they?’

‘I forget. I’m the artist who came to mind. They’ve offered me a good sum of money. I’ll paint what portrait I can in the next ten days, then they’ll pay me five thousand euros. It isn’t a bad deal.’

‘You should have asked for ten,’ Rose said. But she was pleased. Five thousand euros, and the guaranteed payment that the student painter was going to make for staying with them the whole summer. If they could only guarantee selling eight paintings to tourists this summer, and if nobody dropped out of the painting courses, they would be all right for the winter.

‘Why didn’t Florian come with them?’ Oak said. ‘He was nice. I don’t care if he is the manager of Starbucks.’

‘Junior manager,’ Rose said. ‘I think she must have meant deputy manager. He won’t have been able to get holiday. They work them to the bone, those people, for nothing, just a degrading gruelling job for ten hours, having to smile at people constantly and going home with the stink of boiling milk in your nostrils.’

‘Is it just the mother and the father, then?’ Thyme said.

The next morning, the two Swiss arrived at the studio exactly at nine thirty, as Thorpe had asked. They came up the hill in the taxi driven by Marina’s son, and Thorpe could hear them fussing about in a curious, yawping, golloping language outside. He had arranged the studio for a sitting, with an old armchair to one side where the light was good, and hung a tatty old purple shawl of Rose’s against the wall behind the chair.

‘Here we are,’ he said heartily, as they came in. The old man was in a plain shirt today, and a thin red bow tie; his wife was still in her shiny, floral, polyester holiday garb. Thorpe explained where he should sit, and his plan to sketch today with charcoal and to get to work on the canvas tomorrow. He explained soberly that sitting for a portrait was much more tiring than might be imagined, and that he would not ask the old man to sit for more than an hour without a break, and not more than two hours a day in total.

‘Should Herbert sit here now?’ the wife said.

Thorpe suggested that the wife should go, and come back in two and a half hours. He liked the idea that he would not have to talk to his sitter at all. She hesitated, perhaps wondering how he would explain anything necessary to the sitter, but after a moment gurgled some explanation to him, and left with a little wave.

The sitter focused sharply. He had seemed vague, led about like a pet spaniel, unsure, but he had made his own life and had run everything in his house and business for decades. He had his own purpose. Now he sat and focused sharply on the man who was to paint him before he died. But he had not sat for a portrait before, and it was as if he were posing in front of a camera. He produced a strong grin, as big and stretched as he could manage. Thorpe looked. It was a terrifying grin. Under the thin stretched skin, the broad yellow Swiss teeth were pulled back as if in agony. The grin revealed the skull beneath. If there was any joy in this grin, it had disappeared years ago. But it was how a man pictured himself in his portrait. Today there was no need for the man to hold any facial expression at all. Thorpe had painted few portraits in his life, but he knew that the thing you did was to block out the relationships of parts of the body, to form a structure, and only then to move on from charcoal on paper to the portrait on canvas. Then there would be time to discourage the grin.

The assistant from England arrived at the end of the following week. He was a boy called Charlie who had been on one of the painting courses, a year before. But he had proved himself too good to fit in with the ladies and amateurs who wanted to learn how to sketch on a Greek hillside. He was a student at an art college, and had taken Thorpe’s course only because he wanted to get away, to paint in the sun. He had shown an interest in Thorpe’s abstract painting; he had sat with Thorpe and Rose outside on the terrace, arguing about de Kooning and Twombly, late into the night. The painting school had not been the right place for him. He was limp, affected, timid in manner, Thyme said decisively, and he had seen how the people of the village stared after him as he walked through the town with his elaborate moustache, wearing a blue-and-white-striped Edwardian one-piece bathing costume and Roman sandals. But he scared off the women on the painting course that week with his work and his confidence with a brush. He was, it had emerged, rich. His father was something in the City, he said, with a flourish, and had provided Thorpe with a joke. ‘Art schools,’ he said, ‘are the downwardly mobile section of higher education. Taking the sons of commodity brokers and introducing them to a way of life in which they’ll find it impossible to make a living.’ Rose had laughed with the others – Charlie, too, had let out his feminine giggle, high-pitched and quickly covered with the back of his hand. She had said when they were alone that Charlie was the real thing, that he had, like Thorpe, a vocation. She felt, however, there was a way to use Charlie’s trust fund, and go on using it. When he had written suggesting that what he needed was more than a week, Thorpe had invited him to come and stay as his apprentice – a word in inverted commas, an old-fashioned word that neither of them would feel they would have committed to – and learn through osmosis, by working alongside, by making frames and helping Rose out with the books.

Oak couldn’t remember him. In his internet café, he paid little attention to his father’s pupils. They were all middle-aged women. Sometimes, when things were quiet, Oak and Thyme would sit and discuss handsome men of the town, or handsome men who had come on holiday to the island. They had both told their parents that they preferred men to women, years ago. Rose had made a point of saying that it was a tragedy that both her sons, the eldest children, were gay. But she said it as a joke, raising the back of her hand to her forehead as she spoke, to parody the intense melodrama with which such things were responded to in the past. In reality she welcomed it. She felt that no man would take Oak or Thyme away from her, that a relationship with a man would always be a secondary thing. Oak had had a relationship lasting two years with a boy from the village, the son of the post office, a dark, glowering boy with an early moustache. They had been seventeen and eighteen, and it had been a secret from his parents, but not from Oak’s, who had invited Nikolaos to supper whenever he wanted, and cherished him. After two years it had come to an end and Oak still came up the hill to eat supper with his mother. Thyme was more shy. If he had had a relationship, his mother did not know about it. She felt and said that he deserved to be happy.

Rose had half remembered the assistant called Charlie. She saw him getting off the ferry and waved energetically. She realized that she had remembered, above all, the moustache he had worn the summer before. She had hung on to that moustache when reading his letters; it was the moustache of a Victorian strong man in a circus, curled and immense, and she had constructed a strong man about him. The moustache was gone this year, and instead there was an apologetic small person, Greek-dark but as small as a fifteen-year-old, coming towards her with a valise and a suitcase on wheels. The Disappointment held out his hand, and Rose, making the best of it, embraced him. His narrow little chest, like a tubercular child’s, inflated beneath her strong arms. He would do very well for Thyme, who had not done very well on his own behalf. She felt this with certainty, and with some amusement.

‘Thorpe’s busy still with a commission,’ Rose said, as they dragged up the hill – Marina’s son’s taxi was only for students, not for apprentices, she had decided. ‘It’s a portrait.’

‘That’s a new development,’ Charlie said. ‘I don’t remember him doing portraits before.’

‘Oh, he’s done portraits before,’ Rose said. ‘He painted one of me when we first met. He doesn’t do them often. This one was supposed to be finished by now. It’s a holidaymaker who just decided out of the blue that he wanted his portrait painted, and since he was here for two weeks, Thorpe said yes. And charged him five thousand euros,’ she went on, deciding that the Disappointment might as well hear about everything, if he was hoping to learn about the life of a painter.

‘When is he going?’

‘Well, that’s the thing,’ Rose said. ‘He was supposed to go last Friday, but announced that Thorpe shouldn’t hurry, that he’d put his flight off for ten days, and could put it off for ten days more. It should have been done by now. But I think it’s nearly finished. You might like to talk to Thorpe about it now the piece is nearly done.’

‘I look forward to seeing Thorpe’s new pieces,’ Charlie said, pausing for a moment and letting his suitcase rest on the ground. He mopped his brow, speaking formally but breathlessly. He had caught that word, piece, from Thorpe last summer and had caught it again just now from Rose. It gave the products of painting a new dignity, an intellectual substance, a suggestion of white cube buildings in Mayfair, galleries of art, and not the white cubes rented out to holidaymakers on Antidauros. Rose used it again.

‘Yes, I think it’s a strong piece,’ she said casually. What a Disappointment, she said to herself. But he would do for Thyme, this summer. She was proud of her generosity.

She took Charlie to the house first, where he could wash himself and change. His shirt was dark-stained. For a moment she thought that somehow water had been poured over him. He did not seem capable of doing anything as physical as sweating, and he gave off no odour. He would be living in Thyme’s room this summer, Rose explained. Thyme would move down to share his brother’s flat over the internet café, but had not cleared out all of his stuff. Rose apologized for this as she showed Charlie the room, saying that Thyme was a lazy little sod, but a charmer, and he would get the rest of his stuff out later that day. She was pleased at this accident, or Thyme’s lack of organization. She saw that it was a way to introduce Charlie and Thyme again to each other in intimate circumstances, and after that, they would easily move to the next stage. Charlie hardly looked around, although the drawers in Thyme’s room were open, spilling clouds of the clean white underwear he hardly ever wore, and on the shelf were dusty trophies from inter-island chess matches, on the shelf the disco CDs she had encouraged him in and which he never played. It came to her that Charlie, last summer, had struck her as no kind of observer. Did a painter need to be a talented observer? She did not know, but Charlie was not one. His paintings might have been produced with his back to any kind of sight of interest, in a cell or before a blank wall. It was more than that: she remembered, and she thought now of how Charlie could be taken to see something of interest, and give the strong impression of boredom, of not seeing, of wanting only to project himself into the space and talk about what was already inside his head.

He was a bore with only the normal powers of perception, not an artist’s perception. She remembered those long conversations at night that had engaged and interested Thorpe so much. Not her. They had been abstract, philosophical, nothing to do with the world. When he talked about the tactile, or about sensuous textures of paint, or about the quality of light in this part of the world, it was with no engagement with facts, and was not the product of observation. She had listened to him moving little chess pieces of abstract values about the field of conversation, and for him the phrase ‘quality of light’ had the same abstract value as the word ‘similitude’ or ‘ontology’. He could not say what colour the quality of light possessed, or endowed. And his body, his physical presence, in his clean, short-sleeved blue-checked shirt, bought after hardly a glance in a high-street emporium, his odourless and insubstantial, thin-calved, elbowing body, was barely present. No wonder she had only remembered the moustache and the high-pitched, feminine, apologetic and shameful giggle. He had never looked at the quality of light before bringing out the term; he had not inhabited, fully, his body before sponging it and placing it in different clothes. She allowed herself to think this. He was a Disappointment and he would do very well for Thyme. She allowed herself to think that the most concrete thing about Charlie might be his money, of which he had a lot.

They went over to the studio, where Thorpe was in the last stages of the portrait of the Swiss shopkeeper. Rose had not seen it: she preferred to keep out of Thorpe’s way when he was working on a piece, and she did not especially want to see the result of this. A shopkeeper whose son was the deputy manager of a Starbucks. She opened the door of the studio, saying, ‘Look, it’s Charlie.’ What struck her with alarm was not the painting, which she would not look at, but the expression on the face of the sitter. Why was he pulling his face back like that, to show his teeth? The look of strained terror in his face, the bones underneath the yellow skin, the sockets of bone holding the yellow bits of jelly he had for eyes. Behind the easel the sitter’s wife rose up from her chair, smiling more gently to greet Rose; a fat woman in a dress from six summers ago, surely hot in here with her orange tan tights on. The sitter did not move. Thorpe set his paintbrush down and shook Charlie’s hand. The sitter’s wife offered hers to Rose, who, after a moment, took it and shook.

‘We are very pleased with the progress of the painting,’ the wife said. ‘It looks so like Herbert. I wish we had done this when Herbert was in good health, but this is so like him.’

Rose looked. Thorpe had rendered with absolute accuracy the grin of a skull the sitter was performing; the yellow eyes were blurred as if with terror and, with some careful precision, the blotches and patches of the sitter’s yellow skin had been accounted for. Behind him the purple shawl she had always loved and had missed only the other day was rendered in great slashes of brush, and given a gory red tinge. Blood had been pouring down the wall behind this poor sitter, and the terror and rictus of his expression said that he knew it.

But it was as if nobody else could see the painting for what it was. Charlie had been led over by Thorpe, and after they had stood there for a moment, Charlie said, ‘It’s a very strong piece, Thorpe,’ and started talking about the quality of light.

‘It should be finished tomorrow,’ Thorpe said. ‘I thought I would leave the backdrop like that, those fat brushstrokes. I like those painterly gestures.’

‘It reminds me a little of Francis Bacon,’ Rose said, out of devilment. She knew that you did not say to a painter that his work resembled the work of some other painter, particularly one whose work (she believed) had been grown out of. But Thorpe was not taking this commission seriously. It did not bear on his own, proper, work, which was nothing but pure Thorpe. She felt dizzy, alone, windswept, about to plunge into the depths without any kind of support, and that she must say what she meant before the abyss swallowed her. She would never see this man again, tight-pulled in his skull’s grin, and the painting, too, would disappear onto the wall of a house in Switzerland where she would never go. Perhaps at some point the deputy manager of a Starbucks in a provincial Swiss town would look at it, and see that it was too strong a rendering of his father dying, and destroy it. These people were capable of anything.

When the taxi pulled up outside, Oak got out. He had caught a lift with Marina’s son, knowing that he was ordered every day for twelve thirty, and handed the taxi over to a stiffly bowing sitter and his fat, smiling wife. His brother Thyme had forgotten, he explained, his toothbrush and razor, still sitting on his dressing-table in the bedroom. Did Charlie mind if he went to collect it?

‘I don’t know why Thyme couldn’t come himself,’ Rose said, filled with rage. Her purpose was being frustrated.

‘He’s looking after the café,’ Oak said. ‘And I thought I’d come up to say hello to Charlie.’

He smiled, not a rictus like Herbert, but a warm smile, the head tipped on one side, all pugnacity gone. For a moment Charlie did not smile back before remembering where he was, and who Oak was.

‘I think I might have put a lot of stuff in a drawer,’ Charlie said. ‘I didn’t know anyone was going to need it. It might be easiest if I come up and help you find your brother’s stuff.’

‘Yes, go on, that would be quickest,’ Rose said. ‘And do you want to eat lunch up here or go down into the village? Thorpe won’t need you to start work today. Go off and have a nice afternoon on the beach.’

That afternoon, Oak sat with Charlie on the terrace of the taverna on the corner beyond his café, Drys. He went with Charlie into the kitchen and, after discussing the food with Marina, selected lunch for his guest. Charlie pushed it round his plate, hardly eating anything. He said that he rarely ate anything at lunchtime. Oak persuaded him to drink a glass of wine, however. They made themselves conspicuous then, and afterwards, as they walked down through the village towards the chain of beaches that stretched out towards the southern tip of the island. At one point, as they were passing a house on the outskirts of the town, a Greek man stood on the upper terrace of a half-finished house and called down to them. Oak rattled back something, scowling. The man went inside, banging the shutters and laughing in a sour way. When Charlie asked what had passed between them, Oak said it was nothing, that he paid no attention to what these people said. The man had been one of the brothers of Nikolaos, one of the ones who had told him to stop bothering his brother. He kept the post office, a minor inconvenience. Nikolaos had a fiancée now. They would be very happy together.

All over the town, the villagers saw Oak walking to the beach with Charlie, or having lunch with him, or walking back from the beach, and afterwards they said to each other, ‘That English boy, the faggot, he’s got himself a boyfriend. You never saw such a little drip and a pansy as the boyfriend. They should be very happy together.’

But the next day, or the day after that, Oak and Charlie and Thorpe and Rose, all together, went down to the harbour, Thorpe in his one jacket and Rose in a clean ironed white dress with her hair up. Thorpe walked with his wife holding his arm, and in front of them, Oak and Charlie, also arm in arm. Thorpe and Rose said good evening to everyone, smiling and nodding. The villagers afterwards said it was the funniest thing they ever saw, the English painter and his wife treating her faggot son and his new pansy boyfriend like an engaged couple to be paraded. But they said good evening back, even complimenting the new pansy when he managed to say kali spera, and somebody afterwards said that the new pansy was a millionaire. That English boy knew what he was doing, and his mother, too. Somebody said that the person who had let it be known about the millions was the English boy’s brother, who was supposed to be a faggot as well.

They had dinner after their walk along the harbour-side. Oak smiled tightly, as his father offered Charlie a glass from a bottle of the taverna’s most expensive wine. Charlie accepted, but hardly drank, and when they suggested that they order some grilled octopus, Charlie said he would prefer something very plain.

‘There’s nothing plainer than ordinary grilled fish,’ Oak said, astonished.

‘It wouldn’t suit me,’ Charlie said. ‘But order it and I’ll eat some salad, and perhaps a little rice.’

‘Are you having some problems?’ Rose said. ‘You shouldn’t be drinking wine if you are.’

‘No, nothing in particular,’ Charlie said. ‘I suffer from intestinal problems, though. I have to be careful what I eat. I don’t think I can eat octopus.’

‘Try a little,’ Oak said. ‘You never know until you try it. You don’t want to be one of those English people, complaining about the food swimming in oil, asking for fish fingers for their kiddies.’

Rose saw that there was a little edge of contempt in the way Oak was addressing Charlie. It was early in their connection for this to make itself plain. She heard herself talking about the English people and their kiddies and the fish fingers, and reflected that if Oak could learn one way of talking from her, he could learn another, too. He should understand that the reason they were able to take Oak and Charlie out for dinner and pay for wine and octopus and some brandy afterwards was that Charlie was staying with them for sixteen weeks, all summer, and paying them twelve hundred euros a week all summer. Charlie was allowed to eat whatever he liked, and Oak should concentrate on being the fundamentally nice person that he probably was.

Towards the end of the summer, Charlie said to Oak, ‘What is it like here, in the winter?’

They were on the beach. Charlie didn’t like to lie in the sun all day; he grew brown easily, but he thought there was a risk of skin cancer for all northern Europeans. He was sitting under a borrowed sun umbrella, wrapped in a beach towel that had been inherited from one of the lady painters. Paris Jolie, it said in large art-nouveau letters, like the Paris Métro, and there were figures of the Eiffel Tower, a pierrot and a Piaf-like person playing the accordion under a starry sky. Oak was lying in the sun, six feet away from Charlie. He was naked; they were on the furthest beach, where no one ever came. By now, at the end of August, he was as brown as he ever got. Not only his hair, but his pubic hair and the hair on his legs were a vivid blond against his dark skin.

‘It’s nice,’ Oak said. ‘It can get very cold, and then you just wrap up warm and put the fire on. Some people shut up and go somewhere else. I like it. There’s not many people around. You’re not going to make very much money from the café, though. It’s only kids from the school and a few grandmothers sending emails to their grandchildren in America. I keep thinking about starting up a computer literacy course. It would be really popular. I’ll be all right this year, though.’

‘I don’t think I want to go,’ Charlie said. ‘I’m supposed to go in three weeks’ time.’

‘It’s two weeks,’ Oak said. ‘I was thinking about it the other day.’

‘I’d have to check,’ Charlie said. ‘It suits me here.’

Oak made no reply. And in a moment Charlie started explaining, with all the foresight and care of the very rich in search of a project, that it would be perfectly possible for him to go on painting here, on this island, that he felt his painting had started to develop. And there were other possibilities. It was very cheap living here. Did Oak realize that, with his mother talking about the cost of living the whole time? You could buy a very nice house, a Venetian mansion, on the island for only three hundred thousand euros. It was nothing – it was a bargain. Of course it would need another hundred thousand spending on it – ‘another hundred K,’ Charlie casually said – to bring the bathrooms and the heating up to scratch, but compared to living in London!

‘Where is this house?’ Oak said casually.

‘On the other side of the island,’ Charlie said. ‘That was what I was doing the other day, when you said I was being mysterious.’

So it was clear to Oak that Charlie would take him to the far side of the island, enough to take him away from Thorpe and Rose, enough to play the English squire. Charlie went on talking from his mummified position in the shade and, merely to amuse himself, Oak allowed himself to lie back, think of scenes from the past, and feel his cock engorge and rise, there on the beach. Charlie went on talking in practical terms, as if the stiff pointing member in its blond thicket was something that might happen to anyone, was hardly worth mentioning or responding to. And what about the internet café, Oak asked finally, strumming his cock, pulling it back and making it go thwack against his tight drum of a brown belly. You could keep that going, Charlie said. Or you could up sticks and start one in Hora. Or best of all you could ask Thyme to run it on a day-to-day basis, and you could just drop in once or twice a week. Pay him a salary. Put him on a regular footing. It’s not the other side of the world. It’s right you should have something to keep you going. Don’t give everything up for my sake. Oak thought of the truffling and snuffling and complaints over the food; about the high-pitched giggle; about having to stop himself thinking of what people were calling after him and – a painful sensation – what would happen when Charlie had learnt enough Greek to understand what they were calling him, too. But it was clear that Oak had succeeded in keeping Charlie on the island, that by next spring they would be moving into a Venetian mansion, the old place in Hora, with what Charlie would call a wet room and what the villagers would wonder at, twenty windows replaced in one go without regard to the expense. When they told Rose, she said she looked forward to them being allowed to marry, once the law changed. She would wear a hat when it happened, she said, mildly laughing.

The next spring, and the year after that, it was clear that everything had changed. Thyme was regarded by everybody as having a job. He woke up in the flat above the internet café, and made himself a cup of coffee before walking down the road to the baker’s to buy a roll. He came back and, before opening the café, went back upstairs and did any small household chores. The half an hour at the beginning of the day was the best time for doing this. There had been some suggestion that he might like to go on living at Rose and Thorpe’s, so Oak could rent out the flat over the café to tourists. But Thyme had said that it would be best to be able to keep an eye on the computers downstairs, in case of burglary. Charlie said sarcastically that he was an expensive burglar alarm, keeping his brother from making money from the holiday trade, and occupying the little flat rent free. Oak had not insisted, however.

Today he went downstairs after sweeping the floor, and switched on all the computers. People would start to dribble in some time late in the morning. He ran the security scan on each of them. He turned on the coffee machine behind the desk. He pulled out the chair he liked to sit on and, sticking his buds in his ears, went to sit on the front pavement while listening to an old Jam record. It had been a violent winter: the storms, of which the summer visitors knew nothing, had torn at the island, battering away until roofs and shutters and tethered boats had been flung loose. All spring, the winds had flung clouds across the bright sky, and the whole island had worked at painting, at nailing down, at renovating and cleaning and making their houses and businesses white and blue and ready for the first visitors.

Oak and Charlie had finished the renovation of their house by the time the storms had come in January. Their house, solid and new-windowed, was a sealed nut against the storm, and they settled in with the luxury of open fires, burning ash logs and coal imported in sacks on the ferry, and the safe alternative of oil-fired central heating. In the summer, the air-conditioning would be powerful, but in January the pair of them sat in the warmth, as of an English suburban house, and listened to Charlie talk about his plans for the pair of them. Oak said it was just perfect, living there; he’d never been so happy, he said. He told his brother, sniggering a little behind his hand, that when the visitors started to come, in the summer, they would turn the Venetian house in Hora into a party house, in the centre of town. The swimming-pool in the back garden hadn’t yet been begun; it was going to be done by the middle of June, Oak thought. He was just going to go and ask all the cute boys on the beach if they’d like to come over; he would select and choose, and the best-looking boys all summer would come and hang out there. It was going to be a blast, Oak said. It was Charlie’s idea. When Thyme thought about Oak and Charlie, his face grew still with the rage he felt against them, against all of them. The shutters in his flat above the internet café rattled and banged all day and all night; he hunched over the single electric fan heater with two sweaters on. Thyme wondered about the power of Charlie, the power the little man had to compel things to happen to his own convenience and to suit his existence. He had had some power over Oak; that power had been enough to uproot him and yet to fix him for ever in the place he had grown up, to set a limit to what Oak could ever achieve or ever become. Oak had gone along with it, hardly thinking about the possibilities of a life without Charlie. Was that power nothing but money? Or was it the power of a will that had stretched out across nations and established itself here? Thyme hunched over his heater and thought, all winter, of how he would have brushed Charlie off indignantly, would have told him that he’d been refusing better offers since he was fourteen, would have told him to get out and put his trousers back on – his face trembled with a smile as he envisaged in detail the first scene between Charlie and Oak. Oak had not told him anything, as he had gone into detail about Nikolaos. Too much rested on Charlie. And Charlie had not come to him. He had come to Oak.

A barrier of efficiency and established relations had arisen between Thyme and his brother, and it was of Oak’s making and Oak’s choice. It was not just the arrangements between proprietor and employee that now existed, but the way a poor, plain brother with no future and no life must be required to look at the dream existence on the other side of the island with wet room and central heating, a Labrador puppy and a vast white leather sofa on which to lounge, barefoot. Oak must look away from so much in establishing this life as the way he wanted to live. Thyme had seen the way he made his gaze busy elsewhere when Charlie started talking about his painting, the festivals of regret and denigration that he could keep up for hours. It was as if he had married a painter even worse than his father, and Oak would look away from all of that, and at his father, looking smiling at a son-in-law who was just like him, but no threat whatsoever. Oak had got rid of his life, and he was glad of it. In the evenings sometimes, if someone was around, Charlie talked about the possibility these days of fathering a child, of fostering, of surrogacy and parenthood for people like them. This, Charlie said, would be an ideal place to bring kids up. Oak knew that he was talking about the island with the village school where they’d hardly learnt to read, where maths had dried up when they were twelve, with the textbooks sometimes thirty or forty years old and one computer, and he looked seraphically into the middle distance as his husband – his new word – talked.

Now Thyme was outside his brother’s internet café, in the sun. The wind had died off completely in the last few days. The sea was still cold, and churning with sand and mud brought up in the past months; it would be June before it had its usual transparency. But the air was warm and still, and Thyme sat outside in the empty street. The very first visitors had been arriving in the last weeks, and soon he would be too busy with tourists writing their emails home to sit on a wooden chair and greet whoever it was walking by. He watched a couple approaching round the narrow bend of the street, looking carefully behind them in case a car might clip them. They came from a more orderly country than this, where the needs of pedestrians had been considered and pavements constructed. He watched them approach, having nothing else to do. They were oddly assorted: an old woman in an old-fashioned sun-dress, brilliant with greens and purples, plump in white patent slingbacks. She clung to the arm of what must be her son, a tall man, a little plump, in a pair of new white knee-length shorts, crisp and brilliant as whitewash, and a blue-checked shirt. To Thyme’s surprise, the man waved at him before saying something to the old woman, who brightened, smiled, raised her own hand. He made a gesture in response. Friendliness towards forgotten holidaymakers meant nothing.

‘I know who you are,’ the woman said, in English with some kind of accent. ‘Your father is Mr Lindley, the painter. I think there are only his children on the island who look as you do. You don’t remember me.’

‘I know I should,’ Thyme said quickly.

‘No, no, no reason,’ the woman said. ‘Your father painted my late husband, not last year but the year before. He was very ill and he wanted to come to Antidauros one last time, and I said to your father that I would like it if he would paint Herbert before he died. And he did and it is wonderful, a wonderful thing to have.’

‘Yes,’ Thyme said. He remembered something of the sort. The son, holding his mother’s arm, looked at him; a gentle, penetrating face, a face that might have come from a time when there was nothing to do but look with mild interest at anything that was going on around it. He was on holiday, and his gesture towards his holiday was that he had not shaved today, or yesterday, or the day before that. It might, too, be too painful: his face was a brilliant red, as were his arms and legs.

‘He was only fifty-five,’ the mother said. ‘That seems old to you, I expect, but fifty-five – it is nothing.’

‘That looks bad,’ Thyme said, pointing at the man’s arms, as if the mother had said nothing. He hadn’t known what to say: his embarrassment found something in the vicinity to offer sympathy with.

‘Excuse me?’ the man said, but politely, asking for an explanation rather than affronted.

‘Your sunburn,’ Thyme said. ‘It must be a bit painful.’

‘Only a little,’ the man said. ‘I went out on the beach yesterday and stayed too long. It was so nice. My mother was sleeping and I did not want to come back early and disturb her. I will give it a rest today and it will be fine tomorrow.’

‘Yoghurt’s the thing,’ Thyme said. ‘Just paint yourself with yoghurt and it should be fine.’

‘Any sort of yoghurt?’ the mother said. ‘Ordinary yoghurt or Greek yoghurt? Which is best?’

Thyme wondered: he did not really know what yoghurt that was not Greek was like, and the yoghurt that could be bought on Antidauros was certainly Greek. He said he thought that anything would do. It was three years now since Florian – the son – had been to Antidauros, the mother went on to explain, but he corrected her and said it had been five years. The last time he had been eighteen, and had gone away with the friend he’d had then, with a backpack, like wander birds; the next year his father had said he would have to pay for himself and he could not pay for himself, so he had stayed at home; the year after he would have come, but he had just started working and he could not have time off; the year after that was last year, and his father had just died, and they had not come at all. ‘For the first time in twenty-three years,’ the mother said, wondering at this upheaval in rhythm, like Christmas being cancelled. ‘For the first time we did not come to Antidauros for our holiday in the spring.’ But now they had come and they would always come from now on. Florian smiled, a smile not quite meant for Thyme but one definitely not meant for his mother. She would be allowed to believe that for this year and perhaps next year too, but Florian was not going to go on holiday for ever with his mother. Thyme liked his kindness, and its limits. He remembered him.

‘You work for Starbucks,’ he said, making an effort to keep his tone neutral. He had probably never heard the name ‘Starbucks’ pronounced in a neutral way, and it needed some care.

‘Yes,’ Florian said. ‘Yes, I do. But how did you know that? Oh, my mother must have told you or your father when they were here two years ago. But you remembered. Why should you remember? Do I seem like the sort of person who has to work for something like Starbucks? Well, I work for Starbucks, and it is a very good company. My mother, she should be proud of me, being a manager for Starbucks. But here I am in Greece, again. And today we are going to sit under the shade, in a café somewhere, and watch boats come and go and we will read our books, all day long.’

‘Remember, yoghurt,’ Thyme said, smiling. ‘And tomorrow you can go back to the beach.’

They went on, down towards the harbour, each holding a book, the mother clutching her tall son’s arm. There were no customers all morning; around noon, Oak telephoned to say that he would be over that evening. Charlie had things to do, so it would just be him. There was a bunch of Charlie’s friends arriving on the ferry that got in at seven and he’d be driving them back, but he’d drop by first. ‘I thought I should warn you,’ Oak said, giggling, ‘I just spoke to Ma and she’s on her way down the hill, she’s probably going to put in an appearance any second now. Just saying.’

Rose was coming down the road, looking cross and hot. ‘She’s here now,’ Thyme said. ‘Got to go. See you later.’

‘You don’t look busy,’ Rose said, kissing him.

‘Done nothing all morning,’ Thyme said. ‘Just chatting with whoever. Those Swiss people are back.’

‘What Swiss people?’

‘Those Swiss people. Pa painted his portrait. It was two years ago, he didn’t think much of them.’

‘Oh, yeah,’ Rose said. ‘I think I remember. Wasn’t he supposed to be dying? What’s he doing coming on holiday?’

‘No, he died all right,’ Thyme said. ‘They were just saying. It was the wife and her son, they’ve come back. They were saying how much they liked and valued their beautiful portrait by Pa in his best vein.’

Thyme pulled what in the family was called a Clement Greenberg face, sanctimonious and art critical. ‘It was a very good portrait,’ Rose said. ‘I remember them now. And the son. Didn’t the son work for McDonald’s? No. Starbucks. Why should I remember that? Useful brain cells are being occupied with that information. He worked for Starbucks. God save us.’

‘He’s nice, Ma,’ Thyme said. ‘He’s called Florian.’

‘I’m being naughty,’ Rose said. ‘We shouldn’t sneer at the people who keep this place on the road. Kali mera,’ she said, as the priest’s wife came past; she nodded, unsmiling, at Rose, ignoring Thyme altogether. ‘Are you coming up for dinner tonight? I think Oak’s coming, and Charlie too.’

‘It’s tomorrow night, Ma,’ Thyme said. ‘Or the night after that.’

That afternoon, Thyme closed the internet café and, instead of sleeping, went down to the beach. He took his towel and a swimsuit, not expecting to use the swimsuit. He didn’t think there would be anyone he knew around. It was too cold for the island boys to go swimming. He walked down through the town, an old pair of his brother’s khaki shorts on, loose on him and needing a tight-cinched belt, and a stained and faded T-shirt advertising a Rolling Stones concert from ten years ago. He went barefoot; the soles of his feet had half an inch of hard, thick skin. If the people of the village looked out and saw him, they would say, ‘There goes that English boy, the other one who’s a faggot, the one who’s not so good-looking.’ He was young-looking, with a pointed chin and a little mouth. If he had to say what might be nice to look at about him, he would have to say his thick blond hair, or perhaps his blue eyes, commented on by every Greek. He was less good-looking than his well-knit, shorter, squarer brother, and yet he knew that his brother was not good-looking at all.

He was thinking of other matters, and his path took him towards the beaches without him thinking about it. The brilliant scarlet-flowered gardens of the town gave way to wildness, and the scattered debris and garbage around the roads was swallowed by wildflowers, great clouds of white and pale pink and palest blue he did not know the names for, and the scent of sage and rosemary and lavender on the hot air rising from the drying earth. The thick fistfuls of blossom – was that what it was, blossom? – were like snow on branches. He wondered what it was like for Florian to wake up in his Swiss winter, and look out of his little wooden window, and see heavy snow poised on the bare branches. Thyme had never seen snow settle, only on television, in films that the Greeks loved. He walked towards the beaches with a regret that surprised him, that Florian would not be there. He had said he would be sitting in the shade today, minding his sunburn with jealous and scrupulous care.

The road that circled the island veered away from the last of the beaches, and to reach them you had to cut across bare land where Pavlos the accountant rented grazing to goatherds. The goats were tearing now at the scrubby juniper bushes and the thyme for which he was named, leaping as Thyme went barefoot through the grass. There was a white chapel, no bigger than a shed, by the head of the last beach. It contained a single icon and could hold no more than two worshippers. It was never used, but somebody painted it yearly. A mulberry tree grew in its shade, staining that side of the chapel with heavy purple. The beach was long and narrow, curving like a bow. There was nobody there but, to Thyme’s surprise, the Swiss woman, sitting underneath an umbrella in a folding chair. She must have brought them with her, along with the beach towel extended at her feet; there were no beach shops or cafés for miles in any direction. A hundred yards out to sea, her son floated on his back, drifting, clutching something over his belly, which must be some kind of flotation device; it was brightly coloured, and must be intended for children. There was some wind in the afternoon; the water in the bay ruffled, and the son was rotating slowly. Thyme waved, and settled himself a hundred paces or so from the Swiss grouping. The sea must be cold; the salt must sting the man Florian’s red-raw skin. Thyme himself was brown by now; he took off his T-shirt and shorts and, after a moment’s consideration, put his swimsuit on. There was a sort of delicacy in him that made him decide that he would not swim until Florian got out: he would not divide the whole bay with Florian if there were only two of them. A curious sort of intimacy, of bold advance or flirtation, arose in their sharing the billions of litres of salt water, and Thyme thought of something he had once been told in school, that the atoms of H2O that filled his glass of water had once passed through Napoleon, through Lord Byron, through Metaxas and Venizelos and King Otto the First. The litres that held Florian’s body would also hold Thyme’s, and he waited until the Swiss might get out before getting in. And yet the Swiss manager of the coffee concession did not acknowledge him and had not noticed him. He swam, he floated, in the sea as if this element offered him a break from his real life, as if the life that he had for the other weeks of the year, the rest of his existence, mattered. His recreation was grave and formal in its celebrations.

The Swiss woman noticed him and waved at him. Thyme went over. She offered him a drink of water from the three unopened bottles underneath her chair – Thyme wondered how she and Florian had managed to get all this stuff to the beach.

‘Florian should not be in the sun,’ she said fondly. ‘I have told him and told him. But he says he is fine.’

‘It can be dangerous,’ Thyme said. ‘When did you get here?’

‘Only three days ago,’ the woman said. ‘We are here for two weeks – I think he has really done too much in his first two days. He was always like that. Because he has the sort of skin that goes brown in the end, after a period of going bright red, he does not remember, and goes into the sun immediately, for hours and hours. My husband was much more sensible, and I know how to handle the sun.’

‘It’s nice to come back to the same place,’ Thyme said.

‘This was always our favourite beach,’ the woman said. ‘It is always so quiet here. No one disturbs you, you can read or you can sleep, you can just sit and look at the sea for hours. Look, Florian, he’s so peaceful lying there in the sea, he’s hardly moved for an hour.’

‘Is he asleep?’

‘Asleep?’ the woman said, alarmed. ‘No, that is unsafe, to fall asleep in the sea. You could easily drown or be swept out to sea.’

‘I’m sorry?’ Thyme said. He didn’t think anyone would be swept out to sea today: there was only a very mild wind, and Florian was only a hundred metres out. Thyme came here often too, and for the same reason: there were few people who made it as far as this, and the four bays that preceded this one were perfect as far as most islanders and visitors were concerned.

‘Do you think he could be asleep?’ the woman said. ‘Please, we should wake him, ask him to come back. Could you swim out to wake him?’

‘I’m sure he’s absolutely fine,’ Thyme said, but in any case he waded out, breaking into his lazy stroke, splashing water about like the village boys. From here, the beach was a thin line of white with a dark shape at the centre of it called Mother; behind her, the far pale hills fell from the skies like a curtain. Out here, there was only Thyme in the sea, and in a moment, the Swiss boy, floating, unconscious, every limb as relaxed as could be, floating like a jellyfish. Thyme stopped where he was, out of his depth, treading water five metres from the floating man. His splashing had not disturbed him, and now he trod water quietly, and looked at him. It was no more than ten seconds before he was almost overwhelmed by a sense of what Florian was, and what his body was. In the sea, there was a density and a lightness of spirit in his body, a conviction in the looseness of limbs that it would do as well to float out to sea, to stay just where it was. Thyme had often been whelmed by a sense of the erotic in a man’s body in the sea, on the beach. It was an ordinary joy of incompleteness to him. You could satisfy it by walking out here and knowing there would be a man to look at and, sometimes, to engage with. This was that and not that. The sensation of incomplete excitement was there in him, but before it had always been an emotion of gazing, of an encounter with an indifferent object that could somehow move and breathe, like an untethered hill. Now the sudden and unheralded sensation he had, treading water at the edges of the vast ocean, was of being embraced in the warmth of another body and another consciousness, as if it were scanning him and taking him in. I must have him, Thyme thought, and corrected himself: he must have me. For the first time he felt himself aware of the desire and possession of another person as of a limitless field or space containing a fluid and the strength and density of that desire; the strength and density of the loose-limbed body floating confidently in the still cold sea made him feel how little he knew. Florian was there; he was asleep or unconscious; he knew nothing about Thyme’s presence within his sphere and still his sphere enveloped, crushed, seized Thyme. He did not know how he could speak if Florian woke up. Like an irrelevant and insignificant detail, Thyme noted that Florian was quite naked. It hardly seemed to matter, and it was out of a habit of assessment and enthusiasm that applied to other men that Thyme now tried to assess the weight and heft, the heavy substance of Florian’s cock and balls. The centre of his power was there and it was somewhere else. Thyme trod water.

There was calling coming from the beach. It was the Swiss man’s mother. Thyme had had no idea she was still there. He splashed at Florian, with no result, then swam towards him, almost feeling the waves of pressure and loose personal confidence around Florian’s floating personality, and with a sense of daring reached out one arm and shook Florian’s shoulder. It was not a very safe thing to do. Florian woke, his arms flailed and he swallowed water. Thyme had gripped Florian’s shoulder, but he almost immediately righted himself and, like Thyme, sank and trod water. He took a handful of water, snorted it up his nose and out again, splashed it all over his face in a strong and decisive way. He grinned at Thyme as if he had expected nothing else. To be taken into Florian’s arms would not be to be overpowered, but to have a sense of your place in his world, and Thyme shut his eyes to remind himself that he knew nothing about this man, saying to himself that he was just another good-looking tourist. But he was not good-looking in any way that Thyme could understand or would be able to explain. It was that density and the radiant lightheartedness. In a moment Florian lightly punched Thyme on the shoulder, as if they had known each other for years, as if that annual holiday of the Swiss man on a Greek beach, from early childhood, could be said to amount to knowing each other for years. ‘I shouldn’t be here,’ Florian said. ‘I should be in the shade. I thought you would come out this afternoon.’

‘Your mother,’ Thyme said, ‘thought – you were asleep – thought it was – dangerous – so I came out to wake – you up. Aren’t you cold?’

‘The lake at home is colder in August,’ Florian said. ‘Come on and we will swim back to the beach. Come and sit with us.’

But they swam together, treading water, and grinning at each other, and by the time they had drifted slowly towards the beach and Florian had got out, kneeling on the sand, puffing, pushing himself up, the mother underneath the umbrella had herself gone to sleep. ‘Don’t disturb her,’ Florian said, shaking himself, naked, like a large Swiss dog. ‘She’ll wake up in her own time.’

‘It must be strange,’ Thyme said, seizing Florian’s towel and rubbing himself, ‘being here without your father for the first time.’

‘We have a task to carry out,’ Florian said. He did not seem to be answering Thyme, but in a minute he said, ‘My mother, she talked to my father before he died, and he said that he wanted his ashes to be here. We didn’t come last year because it was too soon, but this year, she said to me, Florian, we need to go to Antidauros, to empty your father – empty your father? That does not seem correct.’

‘Scatter your father’s ashes,’ Thyme said. ‘I think that’s what you say.’

‘Scatter – scatter? – your father’s ashes. I see. Yes. But she wants to do this, and she said first, Oh, not today, we can’t do it on the first day, then not again after that, and she has not said anything about it today. I think she is scared to do it. Or something like that.’

‘You probably need to take charge,’ Thyme said. ‘Where are you going to do it?’

Well, Florian said, that was the problem. There was no particular place they had decided on, and it seemed wrong to deposit the ashes in the town on the streets, outside the taverna, or on the beach, or in the sea, or … Well, they had not decided. It was difficult. For Thyme it was not difficult, and he knew where they should go. The hills that rose behind the village looked steep, but could be quite easily walked in a morning, and at the top of the hill, Dauros could be seen across the strait, and beyond that Naxos in the looming, swimming Aegean air, like a whale surfacing. Up there it was peaceful, and up there were wind and flowers. Thyme liked to go up there. And before he knew it he had agreed to walk with Florian and his mother the next morning, to wait while they perhaps read a poem, and Florian should open the lid of the box, and let his father scatter – scatter? – on the wind.

‘It would be good if you came,’ Florian said. ‘My mother – she appreciates very much the portrait of your father, the picture of my father. She often shows it to visitors and tells them it was how my father was. You can help us to a good place on the mountain.’

It was five o’ clock. Thyme had to go. The mother’s mind had been penetrated by her son’s voice. The afternoon wind had subsided towards a still warmth: the beginnings of the evening. She woke, her mouth opening and smacking with thick saliva, like a much older woman, and in a moment composed herself, smiled at the English boy without saying anything. He dressed slowly, looking all the time at Florian. They seemed to be staying a while longer. He wondered if he should offer to help them carry their beach possessions back – the towels, blue umbrella, chair.

Oak was there at the café, and had opened it up. He was sitting behind the desk, tapping away. There were no customers, and he carried on, paying no attention to Thyme as he came in until Thyme dropped his wet towel on the desk.

‘Where’ve you been?’ Oak said flatly.

‘It was so quiet,’ Thyme said. ‘There was no one in all morning, so I went down the beach. I was with Florian.’

‘Who’s that?’ Oak said.

‘That Swiss boy,’ Thyme said. ‘You remember.’

‘Oh, yeah,’ Oak said, but absently. ‘There’s those friends of Charlie arriving in a bit. I’ve been getting the house ready. It’s a nightmare.’

‘It’ll be fine,’ Thyme said.

‘Charlie says one of them’s a real interior-design queen,’ Oak said. ‘He’s been wandering round for days getting the curtains to hang just so. And an arrangement of pebbles on a white marble plate and – oh, you don’t want to know. He’s done no painting for about a month.’

‘Yeah, that’s what you do when you stay with a friend,’ Thyme said. ‘Say straight off, Charlie, I’m sorry, but I can’t sleep somewhere where the curtains are hanging so badly. And those pebbles, the way they’re arranged – it’s an insult to your guests. You’re mental.’

‘Well, Charlie’s friends might say exactly that,’ Oak said. ‘I’m nervous, to be honest. They haven’t met me, apart from one of them called Henry who was in Paris when we went. They’re coming to inspect me and inspect the house about equally. I thought Charlie was going to start going through what I was going to wear for the next ten days when he’d finished rearranging the willow branches in the vase. He had a sort of look, but I think I’m OK.’

Thyme giggled and Oak, in a way, joined in; since Oak, these days, only ever wore cream linen shirts and white linen trousers, with a cotton jumper in blue or cream for cold days, it was hard to see what Charlie could object to.

‘Close the café tomorrow and come over for lunch,’ Oak said. ‘I could do with a hand. That’s another thing – trying to make something that looks Greek and typical and seasonal and all that crap that Charlie doesn’t mind eating. It’s a challenge, I don’t mind telling you.’

‘I’ll do my best,’ Thyme said. ‘I promised Florian I’d spend the morning with him. He’s got something he needs to do tomorrow morning.’ But then it occurred to Thyme that he had made no arrangements with Florian, and Florian had not seemed to think it at all necessary. They could only be staying at one of three hotels in the village; perhaps he was just expected to come and find them.

‘Florian,’ Oak said, in a superior, Charlie-like way. ‘Remind me.’

‘He’s that Swiss boy,’ Thyme said. ‘I spent the afternoon with him. And his mum.’

‘Oh, his mum,’ Oak said.

‘He’s really nice,’ Thyme said. ‘Pa painted his father’s portrait a couple of years ago. He was dying.’

‘Oh, yeah, the Germans,’ Oak said. ‘I remember. Pa kept going on about how awful they were. I don’t remember a son – just a husband and a wife, and the painting they went off with. It would have given me nightmares.’

‘Well, there’s a son,’ Thyme said. ‘He’s here now. He works as a manager of Starbucks in Switzerland. Swiss, not German. He’s really nice.’ Something made him insist on this. There was no reason to insist on Florian’s job, but he knew the thing that would specify Florian for his brother, as for all his family, and that was the possibility of open contempt. He offered the possibility to Oak.

‘Oh, the deputy manager of Starbucks,’ Oak said. ‘I remember now, and Ma going on and on about it. She does go on,’ he finished languidly, and the contempt in his voice covered his mother, and Starbucks, and the Swiss manager of the concession that he had no recollection of ever having met.

‘He’s the manager, these days,’ Thyme said blandly. ‘He’s been promoted in the meantime. He’s like me, managing Drys, except that he’s got some staff, and a pension plan, and he’s not employed by his brother in a shop named after his brother, or anything.’

A bold single howl filled the air of the evening; a huge trumpet, echoing and resounding, playing its single note over water, and Oak stood up.

‘That’s the ferry coming in now,’ Oak said. ‘So fuck off. I’ll see you tomorrow, about lunchtime.’

They were at the first hotel he went to in the morning, and finishing their breakfast. It was the cleanest of the three hotels in town. In a rough period between patches of profit, Ma had worked as the receptionist, trying out her O-level German and A-level French on the customers, struggling through Greek with the handymen. She’d quite enjoyed it, she said. But afterwards she always said, when they were a bit hard up, ‘We haven’t got to the point where I’m going to have to work at the Aphrodite, I’m pleased to say.’ It was an efficient and well-run hotel, the Aphrodite, at the hands of Mr Matsoukas or, these days, his shipshape daughter Anna; the hotel was painted white top to bottom every other year, and the beds renewed. There was talk of her installing a cocktail bar, even a swimming-pool; Anna Matsoukas said it would appeal to the better sort of holidaymaker. Florian and his mother were sitting outside on the terrace underneath a bougainvillaea, eating yoghurt and honey: the mother was drinking Greek coffee but, Thyme noticed, Florian was stubbornly drinking something that looked like instant. They greeted him as if they had had an appointment and he was slightly but forgivably late. After offering him a coffee, the three left. The mother patted her canvas bag, in which there was something hard and metallic that clinked. It was the container of the man’s ashes. The single road out of the village that went up the hill was quickly steep, and Florian and Thyme soon found themselves a hundred metres in front of Florian’s mother. They waited; Florian wordlessly put his hand out and took the bag from his mother, and they started to walk again. By the time they were out of the village, and past the last of the unfinished villas, rusting steel rods running across the roof, they were ahead of his mother again. They looked back, and she waved in an encouraging style. She would catch up, Florian said, and Thyme pointed out that there was only one road and it went to only one place, the top of the hill.

It was quite a hot day already, and Florian pulled off his shirt. His skin was not so brilliantly red as yesterday, but still burnt and painful-looking. After the beginning of the hill, he was sweating. There was a gust of animal odour when he pulled his shirt off. Thyme was seized by desire, and by a desire that was not just lust, but a feeling of magnetism, as if he were being pulled towards the weight and substance of this body. The world had disappeared for him. He had to turn away.

‘What are you going to do?’ Florian said. His expression could not be read, behind the sunglasses.

‘I’m supposed to go to my brother’s for lunch,’ Thyme said. ‘But it doesn’t really matter. He just wants me to help out with some guests and probably with the cooking, too.’

There was a puzzled pause. ‘I really meant – what are you going to do generally?’ Florian said. ‘Are you working here as a summer job? What comes after that?’

‘It’s my brother’s shop,’ Thyme said. ‘He can’t be here every day so I look after it for him. What did your mother do with the painting of your father? Is it on the wall at home?’

Florian laughed. ‘Of course it is on the wall – where did you think she would put it? She likes it. It’s the first thing she shows anyone. She talks about my father a lot and about Antidauros. They liked this island a lot, you know. Me …’ He shook his head.

‘You don’t like it so much,’ Thyme said.

‘It is a painting by your father,’ Florian said.

‘I don’t care,’ Thyme said. ‘I hate some of his paintings and I don’t have any opinion about almost all the others. I can’t even remember seeing that. I remember him working on it. He kept talking about it, about whether he should start up a portrait business. He’s like that – he does one thing and then he thinks he can make his fortune. He was like that the year he managed to grow beans in the patch behind the studio.’

‘But he didn’t start a business painting portraits.’

‘He’s back where he started now,’ Thyme said. ‘Views of the harbour and teaching people and his own stuff in the winter or in the evenings in the summer, sometimes.’

‘I don’t know,’ Florian said. ‘The painting – it looks like my father, but towards the end, he looks very old and very ill. I sometimes think your father was making, not a joke, but a comment on someone he decided he did not like. What is this hill called, this hill we’re going up?’

‘I don’t know,’ Thyme said. They had climbed out of the town. The sea was expansive and a rich blue beneath them. A donkey in the field by the road swished its tail, taking no notice of them. Thyme felt that he should know the name of the hill, and also the field, and perhaps even the donkey. Everything had a name, but not on this island; it was all how things could be accounted for – the hill, the town, the beach, the road. ‘I don’t know what it’s called.’

‘You don’t paint,’ Florian said.

‘No,’ Thyme said. ‘No one taught us. My elder brother, my father started to teach him when he was five, but he lost patience and Oak didn’t have any interest. So then he didn’t teach any of us.’

‘That is so strange,’ Florian said. ‘Your father not wanting his children to do what he does.’

‘It wasn’t really that he didn’t want it,’ Thyme said. ‘It was more that we weren’t really interested and it just didn’t happen. We had some kind of art lessons at the school, but it was really the music teacher showing us slides of Velázquez and talking about them. My pa was always too busy, and he wouldn’t want little kids messing about with his easel and palette, or whatever.’

‘But it didn’t happen,’ Florian said. It was as if he had made his mind up about something. ‘Your father – does he want to be famous? I think maybe he wants to have children so they can be his fans, his admirers, and then he can win in life. You know, I never see any of you reading a book, never. So what are you going to do in your life?’

‘I don’t know,’ Thyme said. He could have said that they read books, but against this man there was no resistance.

‘The café, the internet café,’ Florian said. ‘Why is it called Drys? Does it mean something?’

‘It’s my brother’s name,’ Thyme said. ‘My brother’s name in Greek, I mean. Drys is an oak tree. It was his idea. My brother, Oak, I mean. It’s a nice name for a café. I don’t think anyone’s ever asked why it was called that before. You’re the first.’

‘And why is he called Oak? Is that a name in English?’

‘I don’t really know,’ Thyme said. ‘We all have strange names. My parents just thought of them as we came.’

‘Drys. I see. You have to do something,’ Florian said. ‘You grow up here, you want to be artistic. Your father is artistic, your mother is artistic, and so everyone thinks you will be artistic. But what is it that you can do on this island? It is very nice for two weeks each year. But to live here, to grow up here, to grow old here, to stay here. And you do not belong. You are English, they all know that. You speak Greek but you are always the son of the painter, the English painter.’

‘What do you do?’ Thyme said. He meant in general, what ought a person do in response to this fact of parentage? But Florian took it for the ordinary, the polite question.

‘I am managing a coffee shop in Solothurn, which is a town in Switzerland. And it is very nice, a very good job. I like it. I arrive before seven, and the shop opens at seven thirty. We make coffees of very many sorts. People like them. And there are cakes and sandwiches, snacks, and similar things. If you make and sell things that people like, and you understand what it is that they like, then your job is satisfying. I am satisfied with my job. I have learnt a lot working for a multinational company, and one day I am going to go to work for a different multinational company, for more money, in a larger town. There is nothing so wrong with that. My father managed to be proud of me before he died.’

There was nothing to say to that, except what Thyme’s mother would have said. She had supplied him with responses when a person explained what they did for a living, and the responses were polite, and noncommittal, and spiritually prophylactic; they allowed no contamination of the upper world by commerce, or the words deputy manager, and they did it with politeness and an empty sneer. The way they would respond when the person was out of the room was not so polite. They would talk about them and dwell on the words deputy manager, like ore that might contain gold, turning them over and over with laughter and scrupulous consideration. The upper world would remain uncontaminated. But as Thyme walked, silently, by the side of this man, the density of his physical presence a proof of his decency, and of the life that was opening up before him, that upper world had never been so empty. What was there in his mother’s words, his mother’s manners, the way of life his father had chosen and – Florian was right – had jealously guarded from his children? The island was beautiful. He could see that. He had never looked at it and never let it fall into his mind other than as the place where he lived. But today he was looking at it and finding it beautiful, with the eyes of a visitor who would soon leave it, and the beauty of the place was a guarantee of its emptiness. There was nothing to say in response to Florian, explaining his work. His mother and father had supplied him with no means of responding and finally he said merely, ‘That sounds really nice,’ inadequately and bathetically. Florian looked at him with amusement. They fell into silence.

At the top of the hill, you could see so far. They scrambled off the road, and up onto what should have been the final tussock but there was another one, and they scrambled up that, to find themselves on what, really, was the peak of the hill. It was a small, flat stretch of sand and stone. In one direction, there was the village; in the other, there was the small settlement where his brother and Charlie had settled. Beyond that, the sea, not framed by land and land’s requirements, but all around them, like an element. It was so blue; more blue than, even, the sky. Down in the village, the air had been nearly still, but up here, the wind was marked and warm. There was the sound, far off, of a motorbike. The smells of the island, of the undergrowth and of wild herbs growing, were all around them. Florian put his arm round Thyme’s shoulders. It was as if he had been doing it for ever. Thyme felt heroic, like a poster of sporting deeds, up there on the top of the hill, but also on the verge of a loss of control. Next to Florian, he was dissolved, cloudlike, insubstantial, and from the top of the hill he could roll or melt or float away. Florian’s arm was a tether on his lightness. He felt that. They stood there for a long time. He could not understand it when a woman came into view. Nobody came up here, and certainly no tourist. Then he remembered it was the mother of Florian, and what they were here to do.

Florian lowered his arm from Thyme, and, taking the shirt from his waistband, put it on. Perhaps he understood that it was a solemn moment. Thyme knew he should walk away and leave the man with his mother to say goodbye, but he simply could not, and he stood there while the mother spoke in German, musically, almost flirtatiously, to her son. He took a folded piece of paper from the pocket of his cargo shorts, and opened it.

‘This is a poem that my father liked,’ he said to Thyme. ‘He wanted it to be read before we emptied – before we scatter – his ashes. It is very nice. But I am going to read it in German.’

Florian started to read, soberly, without much expression. Ich denke dein/wenn mir der Sonne schimmer/Vom Meere strahlt. His tone was that of a man not used to poetry, with not much display of poetry in him, but who knew that poetry had its place in the world, and would treat it with respect. Thyme understood nothing of what he heard, but he could hear it was a poem, with rhymes, and he could see that Florian’s voice went through it with the music of his accent, a song that belonged to its place of birth and not of this particular invention. He was not embarrassed in the slightest. His mother touched his arm, her two fingers touching his sore forearm, like a shy child, trying to attract attention. Her eyes shone. The poem came to an end, and, like a coda, Florian said, ‘Mama?’ and, leaning down, passed her the casket from her bag. It was an anonymous object, cylindrical in polished steel.

‘Zusammen,’ the mother said. Thyme understood nothing, but together Florian and his mother unscrewed the lid of the casket, and together they shook it into the air. Thyme feared that the winds would blow the ashes back into their faces, but Florian had thought of that. They were standing at exactly the right point, facing the right direction, and the ashes blew away from them, into the air and towards the sea. Thyme was part of this farewell, and it was his farewell too. He felt that.

They had almost reached the hotel when Florian said, ‘I’m very burnt. I feel so sore. Mama dressed me with yoghurt last night, but I need some more.’

‘She probably wants to rest now,’ Thyme said, and they said goodbye to Florian’s mother until dinner time. It was three o’clock. There was no point in going to Oak’s for lunch. He would face that fury later, or perhaps not face it at all. He went with Florian through the lobby of the hotel. Anna Matsoukas was behind the desk. She looked up at him, a disapproving presence with a tight-drawn, almost military bun, tapping the lid of her biro on the volume of bookings. He said nothing to her, but just went on with Florian, up the stairs, along the corridor, into his room. Florian went to the little fridge, and took out a tub of yoghurt, unopened. With two or three gestures, unembarrassed and even mechanical, he pulled his shirt over his head, unbuckled his belt and dropped his shorts, kicking his sandals off. Thyme took the tub of yoghurt, and, opening it, scooped out handfuls of the stuff. Florian’s skin was sore and red, but to Thyme smooth and beautiful. He painted Florian’s back, and his hands, as they went over him, lost any sense of separateness. He felt as if he was dissolving into Florian, the sunburnt rough skin and the relaxed play of muscles. There was in Thyme an impersonal lust as he moved over Florian, a hot blaze in the eyes, but also something unique that he felt was like love. The thick neck with its folds and the little ears, sticking out and, on top, encrusted with burn scars; his hands went, laden with yoghurt, over Florian’s face. He could feel the eyes shut, the mouth pursed; gently, he swivelled Florian, and painted his chest. The collarbone, the shoulder seemed loose and relaxed; it was hard to think that Florian was in pain from his burns. Thyme’s hands went over chest and arms, stomach, Florian’s burnt cock and balls, his thighs, calves and even his feet, though his feet were brown and not sore. Florian sat and let him do it. At some point he said, musingly, Ich denke dein. After that, there were no words spoken between them. He was smooth and painted and cured of his pain by Thyme. He could do this for Florian as Florian could do something for him. In the evening they went up together to see the painter and his wife in their house on the hill.

Rose had had a difficult day. The twins had come home from school crying. Rose knew perfectly well what it was but, in their ten-year-old way, the twins liked to get their story straight before one of them was allowed to tell their mother. Rose had carried on around the kitchen, putting things straight, chopping onions for the dinner tonight – she was making stifado in a big pot, whatever bloody Charlie might have to say about it. In the end, Thistle had come to her, her sister Borage standing behind silently, reproachful, and had said that they never wanted to go back to that school. People there were horrible, they stole your things and they tore up your books and they were going to throw you in the sea and watch you drown. Rose had heard it all before. It was part of growing up on the island, and probably anywhere else at all. It had happened to Oak and it had happened to Thyme, and they were more obvious targets; it had happened to Rosalys and to Juniper. They had all come through it OK. It was probably character-forming. Rose said, ‘Oh dear,’ from time to time, hardly listening to Borage’s explanation, apparently worked out in detail, of how they could be educated at home from books and never have to go to that horrible school ever again. If she listened she knew she would grow exasperated with just one more thing.

Because this was a time and a day when she could hardly bear to engage with any of it. The bookings for the school were thin to the point of non-existence this year. The Germans who normally came with such largesse were gone. They had heard what the ordinary Greeks thought of their chancellor, and they did not want to be made to feel unwelcome in a country. It wasn’t helpful for Thorpe to say that he didn’t know what the country was that would make them feel welcome, before saying, brilliantly, ‘Germany, probably.’ The fact remained that they weren’t coming. It was last year when someone else had said to Rose that Greece used to be lovely and cheap, but now … It was true, she supposed. It wasn’t just the Germans that weren’t coming; there were few bookings of any sort. The people who complained about Greece being too expensive hadn’t thought that people who lived here would find it expensive too, and more expensive if their main source of money decided on a whim to take it away. If she only had five minutes with those people complaining about the expense, she’d bring it home to them.

But Thorpe didn’t seem to be taking anything at all seriously. That day, she was supposed to be cooking and preparing an immense stifado. Oak and Charlie had some posh friends from England staying with them in the Winter Palace, as she’d christened their house in Hora. For some reason, Oak had said that they’d bring them over for dinner. She resigned herself to being seen as the picturesque bohemian living up the hill on a Greek island in a muddle of green and purple skirts. She knew that one of them would be certain to ask if they had any dope. Thorpe had said he would help, but had disappeared after breakfast to the studio. He hadn’t been seen since. Around three in the afternoon, just after Oak had phoned to ask in a rage where the bloody hell Thyme was, she’d gone over to see if he wanted anything to eat. She had found him at work in front of an immense canvas, smearing and slashing. The canvas was wild, she had to admit that, but it was one of his winter canvases. It was the sort of thing he worked at when there was no pressure on him. In the store room, there were thirty or forty winter canvases, all exhibited, all unsold. She had asked him, as politely as she knew how, whether the saleable views had all been done by now. The visitors would be here soon, and would want to start buying.

But Thorpe had said, quite crossly, that he understood where he was going wrong now, that his real painting couldn’t be produced in the gaps between commercial work. The commercial work had got into the bones of his work, the painting he’d only been playing at. He needed to walk away from views, from realistic portraits, from chocolate box, from the quality of light. If he did nothing else but this, he said, gesturing at the huge Twombly exercise, then in a month or two, his work was going to lose that taint. It would get somewhere. He could feel—

She left the studio, slamming the door, in case he said that he could feel greatness in him. How they were supposed to live through this summer and next winter without any saleable art to sell – with hardly any students for the art school. They were going to have to move, the lot of them, into the flat over the top of Oak’s internet café, or back to England to live with her old mum. She just could not see it. ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ she said now to the twins, still going on about the terrible things that were going to happen to them. ‘Just shut up.’ She devoted all the energy in her body to the vegetables beneath the blade of her knife.

It was then that the door opened, and Thyme came in. Behind him was a man she didn’t recognize, and she gave what must have been a tired smile.

‘You’re in trouble,’ she said. ‘You were supposed to go over and help Oak out with lunch for eight.’

‘This is Florian,’ Thyme said, making a gesture to bring the man into the kitchen. He was dark, and startlingly red in colour. His face and arms were streaked with some kind of lotion; his eyes an intense blue. She looked at him: there was something familiar about him.

‘Are you hoping to get invited to dinner?’ Rose said. ‘There’s fourteen of us, but I expect we can squeeze two more in, if you don’t mind sitting on garden chairs. It’ll be a squash.’

‘No,’ Thyme said. ‘We’re not staying. We’re going to have dinner with Florian’s mother.’

‘That’s nice,’ Rose said. ‘Are you here on holiday?’

‘In a way,’ Florian said. ‘But now it doesn’t seem so much like it.’

She let this go. She had had enough of enquiring into other people’s lives. He had a German accent, and she felt at least pleased that not every German had decided they couldn’t risk the collapsed state for a holiday, that they would be targets for hatred because of Frau Merkel. They would still come, after all.

‘I want to take Thyme away,’ Florian said.

‘Well, he’s a grown man,’ Rose said. ‘Take him off. Show him a good time. It’s nothing to do with me. I’ll see him when you bring him back and hear about the whole thing. What is it – Mykonos?’

‘No, Ma,’ Thyme said. ‘You don’t understand. I’m going away. I’m going with Florian to Switzerland, to Solothurn. I want to be with him. I can’t stay here knowing that Florian is in another country.’

Rose stopped what she was doing. The twins were sitting underneath the table. She wished they would go away. They had a knack of understanding whenever something important was going to happen, and staying very still and listening. The man was looking levelly at her, with a gaze not hostile or even unfriendly, but one that was made of some tensile, resistant, flexible material. She felt the power of his gaze; she looked away, at her son. But there she did feel some hostility.

‘I know who you are now,’ she said, but not looking at him. ‘You’re the deputy manager of a branch of Starbucks.’

‘That’s nearly correct,’ the man said. ‘But a little out of date.’

‘That sounds wonderful,’ Rose said, now jeering openly. ‘It won’t last. Thyme, you don’t know what you’re doing. There’s no way that you could settle down with someone like this. After the way of life you’re used to, watching someone put on a little badge, watching them go over the accounts, watching them—’

‘It’s fine, Ma,’ Thyme said. ‘It’s going to be absolutely fine.’

‘We’ve brought you up to think and be yourself,’ she said. The door to the kitchen opened. Thorpe came in, standing there with something like shyness. She remembered the awful things she had said to him, an hour or two before. ‘Have you heard this?’ she said to Thorpe. ‘Thyme’s going to run off with a deputy manager of Starbucks. You want to listen to this.’

‘We don’t know how to do anything,’ Thyme said, ignoring his father. ‘We don’t know anything about art, even, except that de Kooning is God and Stanley Spencer is the devil. And the only time I ever saw a painting by either of them was that one time we went to England and we had a day in London. And that was only so that Pa could talk loudly in a gallery and impress lots of people. I’m sorry, Pa. We don’t know anything. I can’t remember the last time I read a book. I couldn’t write a letter in Greek without worrying that I was saying something you’d only say to kids on the street. I don’t know anything. And what am I going to do? You know what Charlie is going to make Oak do? He’s going to adopt a baby, get one made by paying a surrogate. A baby – two babies, three expensive little babies in that house, puking over the white sofas. It’s all going to be so expensive. How are they going to manage? I’m going to go over there and do it all, be a nanny, a brother and a nanny, with my stuff in the spare room upstairs. That’s what those friends are here for – they’re not friends, they’re people who are taking Charlie and Oak through the whole process. What is my life going to be?’

‘You’re a free spirit, Thyme,’ Rose said. She was as solemn as she knew how to be. It was a sentence she produced on high occasions, when her children complained of bullying, of people who were richer or cleverer or more beautiful than them. She had used it three times this week, to Borage, to Juniper, when she was saying that she wished she lived in a house as nice as Charlie’s only without Charlie in it. She said it now to Thyme, with a solemn intonation: ‘You can’t go to Switzerland, get a job in a Starbucks and expect it to suit you. It just isn’t going to work. How on earth are you going to live?’

‘The minimum wage in Switzerland—’ the sunburnt man began, but Rose interrupted.

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ she said. ‘We’re not talking about money. Money is just—’

‘I think we’re going to go,’ Thyme said. ‘I don’t have so much to take with me. I’m just going to go when Florian goes. You see, Ma, the thing is, I love him. I love him. I don’t know why.’

‘I’ve never heard of you before,’ Rose said. ‘Never, never, never. And my sons tell me everything. When was this? When is this supposed to have happened?’

The man looked at Rose, and it seemed to her that he looked at her with calm interest, as if he wanted to know what her response to an event would be.

‘It is the case, what Thyme says,’ he said. ‘I love him. It happened and it is still happening. He has to be with me and now my home is with Thyme. We are here to explain and to say goodbye.’

‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to say,’ Rose said, but then she went too far. ‘What are people going to say here, when they hear that the son of the painter, the one who brought real art, real values to this place, he’s gone off and he’s living with someone who works in a branch of Starbucks? How are we going to tell anyone that? You can’t be happy, Thyme. Tell him, Thorpe.’

‘That’s what you’ve always said,’ Thyme said. ‘You can’t be happy. All of you. We’re going to go now, Ma. I’ll come and say goodbye before we go.’

Thorpe gave a small, feeble smile, a whipped child hoping to placate his tormentor. They went, watched by the bullied twins, huddled underneath the table that seated fourteen and would stretch to sixteen. Their brother and the Swiss man left, and found themselves negotiating the door with the other brother, Oak, and Charlie, trying to come in. They were with some people they didn’t know. Where the hell were you? Oak was saying, but Thyme said something short, dismissive, and was gone. They saw Charlie, a little man, rich and tiny, a pathetic, ill-fed scrap, looking about him as if he had never seen anything so awful as their kitchen, and turning to his rich friends, who were coming for dinner, with a shrug and a face. Their mother said they were early. Oak said they thought they’d come early and see the paintings, too. And then it all kicked off.

‘I didn’t know how it was going to be,’ Thyme said.

‘It was fine,’ Florian said. They were walking down the hill.

‘Are you sore? Your skin?’

‘It’s better. Your mother—’

‘Forget about it. She’ll tell Pa. They’ll be a long way away soon.’

‘Are you sure?’

Thyme laughed, incredulously, drolly. ‘When can we go?’

‘We’ve got a flight from Naxos. Come on the same flight.’

‘They fill up, those flights,’ Thyme said. ‘If I can’t fly with you, what then?’

‘We’ll get a ferry to Athens,’ Florian said. ‘There are flights all day long from Athens to Zürich. There’s a train from Zürich to Solothurn. It’s easy. Do you want to come to Solothurn with me?’

‘It must be beautiful,’ Thyme said.

‘I don’t know,’ Florian said. ‘I’ve stopped seeing it. It’s just where I live now. I suppose it’s nice.’

‘All right,’ Thyme said. ‘Let’s go tomorrow to Solothurn.’