The High Places: Stories

Mycenae

What a terrible thing at a time like this: to own a house, and the trees around it. Janet sat rigid in her narrow seat. The plane lifted from the city and her house fell away, consumed by the other houses. Janet worried about her own particular garden and her emptied refrigerator and her lamps that had been timed to come on automatically at six.

‘Is six too early? Too obviously a timer, do you think?’ asked Murray. Janet was disturbed by this marital clairvoyance, and this was a new feeling, very recent. It had to do, she thought, with seeing the Andersons again. She took Murray’s hand and together the Dwyers leaned toward the small window and watched as the horizon lost authority. When the attendants came with trolleys they would know they were safe, but until then they held hands as they tilted into the sky.

During the flight Janet allowed herself to remember her fear of the Andersons. She had forgotten this fear — or placed it aside — during the flurry of preparation. There had been an efficient period of To Do lists and of telling people, coyly, that they were ‘meeting old friends in Greece’. Now, necessarily idle on the plane, Janet recalled the Andersons’ sophistication; the decisiveness of their actions, which had always been without tremor or negotiation; the fact of their being American, which placed them at the centre of the world. Suspended above the revolving deserts of the Middle East, she feared the Andersons, who were from ‘good families’, however that might be understood — this was clear because they used to mention expensive New England schools and exotic family holidays. Or Amy Anderson mentioned these things on behalf of herself and Eric with an air of begrudging tenderness, as if obliged to give up a shameful but pleasant secret, and this fascinated Janet, who’d grown up in an asbestos house owned by the Australian government.

Murray would never say he feared the Andersons, though in his anxious way that’s what he meant by ‘Is six too early?’ And Janet worried about him coming into daily contact with a man like Eric Anderson — what that might do to her husband’s self-esteem, given that Eric, since they’d met him, had gone on to an illustrious academic career and Murray’s contribution had been so small, though very solid. And to be seeing them again in Greece of all countries, in an old place that mattered, among the ancient terrors of history. The best thing was to be afraid along with Murray, to retain that sense of unity; later they could rally, once they’d been reassured by the goodness of Greek food and the number of people who spoke English. So Janet nurtured her fear over peanuts and warm washcloths, and pressed her leg against Murray’s, and together they watched the same in-flight movies and walked up and down the night-time aisles of the plane in their compression socks, treading softly over the slipped blankets of other passengers.

In this way they flew to Greece, as if that were an easy thing to do: to board a plane in Sydney, spend a few hours in Hong Kong and then in London, and finally to arrive in Athens. They stepped out of the airport terminal and were surrounded by offers of help and information; they’d expected this and made their way to the official taxi rank with resolute faces. Murray held a piece of paper with the address of their apartment on it in Greek letters; he handed this over to the taxi driver like a man entrusted with the delivery of a sacred object. The driver understood. The apartment was, it seemed, a real place in a real city.

The apartment had been Amy’s idea. Both couples would find one and spend the week as if they really lived in Athens. They would be neighbours, they would cook experimentally with market vegetables, they would carry keys and not hotel swipe cards. Here were some vacation rental websites Amy had looked at. Here was the apartment the Andersons were booking, a large white space with a roof terrace. Amy was sure Janet could find something similar nearby. Janet was less sure. She preferred the idea of a hotel. The apartments on Amy’s websites were too expensive, or unavailable. Her son Damian offered to help. This wonderful trip to Greece, said Damian. He’d talked her into it. Damian was an experienced traveller — he’d been to places like Lebanon and Cuba — and he would help them. Now he worked for a law firm in London, and they would visit him after Athens. They would visit Damian in London and take him to the town Murray and Janet had lived in all those years ago, when Murray was a graduate student and they were newly married. They had met the Andersons in those days, in that town.

Damian found something not very close, but not so very far away from the Andersons’ apartment: a student sublet with too many stairs, crowded with plastic furniture. It was cheaper than it needed to be, but it was something and it was somewhere; it was their apartment in Greece. And Damian had spent time finding it. And the relief Janet felt, despite the furniture and the view of TV aerials, countered, briefly, almost all of her disquiet. Murray sent a deposit. Then came an email of apology from Amy: their apartment had fallen through, last-minute, a shame, hotel after all, so disappointing. Here was the hotel address — the website — the tasteful lobby — the Acropolis view. The computer screen gave Athens to Janet and Murray, and they peered at it from the safety of their house in Sydney. They saw the white buildings, cement towers among the hills, the brown smudge low in the sky, the many roads, the temple high above. A sensation of having made a terrible mistake, of having sunk into something disastrous. But they would survive this city. In their apartment.

‘We’ll save on breakfast with our own kitchen,’ said Murray. ‘Make tea of a night.’

And Janet was reassured; they both were. When they entered the apartment — finally, having crossed the world to find themselves in it — they both looked for a kettle among the furniture. There it sat by the stove. It restored their confidence. They carried their suitcases into the small bedroom and lay on the student bed. Their limbs pressed into the sheets as if they were made of metal. Janet wanted to phone Damian at once but they fell irresistibly asleep, and when they woke later that afternoon it was time to meet the Andersons at their hotel.

Janet was worried she wouldn’t recognise Amy. But of course she recognised Amy, who cried out, ‘It can’t be!’ and advanced across the lobby with a look of delighted surprise on her face, as if their meeting were accidental. Amy wore slim white pants and a navy shirt with its jaunty collar turned up. She gathered Janet against her ribs. Eric’s great height still gave him an air of magnificent remoteness; the grey of his hair only amplified the effect. When he bent low to kiss Janet, she felt there was something exaggerated about the slow hinging of his body to reach the level of her cheek. She refused, at first, to stand on her toes to meet his approaching face, but capitulated in the end.

‘Welcome to Greece,’ said Eric. He said it with great seriousness, with a kind of weighty pride, as if he personally had prepared Greece, with effort but with no complaint, and with no particular thought for their pleasure; but he would share it with them anyway. Janet realised she was being uncharitable. She smiled apologetically at him. The Andersons had been in the country about five hours longer than they had.

‘Welcome!’ echoed Amy. ‘How was the flight? Such a long way!’

‘It’s just good to be here,’ said Janet. Amy was still holding her hand.

‘Isn’t it amazing to think: forty years, and here we are!’

Forty years ago, Murray had been completing his chemistry PhD and had, in a state of constant anxiety, crashed their small car three times. He and Janet were exhausted by England, by its complicated rules and the constant worry about where they would live next and how they would pay for it. Reflecting on that time, Janet saw herself eating toast and carrying shopping bags through rain almost continually, as if there had never been a summer (but there had been — three and a half of them, each glorious). They lived in a little college flat, and next door: Eric and Amy, not yet married, Eric a year ahead in his PhD and a philosopher, Amy on a Fulbright; they had painted their walls red without asking the college’s permission. Amy invited them in one afternoon, fed them tiny pickles and gin, and after this had befriended Janet in a confiding, collegiate way, lending her books, giving advice. They had little in common and were very intimate, and their men were forced to befriend each other.

Eric was famous for refusing to engage in small talk. At parties he used to sit in the most comfortable chair, holding a glass that was always refilled for him, quietly, unasked, as if he were actually asleep, when in fact he was reading; finally, later in the night, he would materialise in the centre of a group and begin to talk with an irresistible urgency about Kant or sex or Nixon or Freud. This used to fill Janet with fury. She complained to Murray that no one liked small talk, but only Eric Anderson felt he was above it. It’s sociopathic, she said, it’s intolerable. But Eric’s behaviour was not only tolerated, it was admired. Among their college acquaintances, Eric was always referred to, reverently, as a genius. No further explanation was offered or required. Alongside lively Amy, who danced and smoked, Eric seemed taintless and incorruptible; strange, then, that he should choose Amy, and apparently love her.

The Athenian Amy was a trim, ingenious woman, a walker in the early mornings, a subtle rearranger of hair, a gatherer of people, and a maker of plans. Observant. The first to admit her ignorance — ‘I know nothing whatsoever about Greece!’ — and the first to master it. Within hours of her arrival she could direct taxi drivers, expertly manage her currency, and give a number of personally observed examples of the civility of the Greeks, their candour and charm. She had been, in England, a large girl, well made, with blond limbs and hair. There was a ripe blaze upon her. Now she was thin in what Janet thought of as an American way: hard-won. Janet admired it. She admired the smooth shellac of Amy’s adult hair. During the week in Athens it made her, for some reason, ashamed of her persistent desire to browse among the cheap ceramics of the tourist shops in Plaka, to shop for plates and bracelets rather than take a dusty tour of the Agora. In Amy’s presence she became a shy glancer in mirrors — glances accompanied by brave smiles and the rubbing together of lips. She and Murray walked behind Amy and Eric through the Greek streets, and they smiled a great deal. They walked hand in hand until they noticed the Andersons didn’t. They never voiced strong opinions on where to eat or what to see, except that Janet wanted to go to Mycenae.

When Amy had contacted her with this Greek idea, Janet recalled a National Geographic article she’d once read about Mycenae, ancient home of kings. It had stayed with her for years: the death masks made of gold, the old name ‘Agamemnon’, the gate carved with two lions. When she looked up the magazine — Murray kept them all in yellow rows — it was just as she remembered it. There were the death masks with their precise eyebrows, there was the grey-green valley, and the ruins on the hill. She showed Murray, knowing it would interest him: he liked the layers of things, the way they fitted together. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘it was already a tourist destination in Roman times.’ She liked to think of the warriors buried in the old grave circles, sleeping for centuries with their gold faces, and of Agamemnon setting out for Troy. Janet checked the distances involved and found it was possible to make the trip from Athens in a day; she suggested this day trip to the Andersons.

‘I did hear it was just a hill with rocks on it,’ said Amy. Clearly she hadn’t factored Mycenae into her itinerary; she must be polite to Janet, but it would occupy a whole precious day. ‘I guess we could hire a car and driver. The hotel could organise it. I don’t like that phrase “day trip”, do you? It sounds so artificially lively. A minivan might be better. Then we’ll have room to stretch our legs.’ She looked pointedly at long-legged Eric, as if to emphasise the efforts she was making to preserve his dignity.

‘It was just an idea,’ said Janet, who knew she was being shrill and deferential. ‘We’re happy to go along with anything.’

But Murray cleared his throat and said, ‘You’ve wanted to see it, haven’t you, for some time?’

So Mycenae was decided upon as a special favour to Janet. Amy arranged it, just as she made the other plans. All week she led them through the streets of Athens with the enthusiastic gait of a tour operator; she was a sort of Hellenic shepherd. Eric co-operated with her silently until he noticed something that interested him. Then they stood and watched him be interested in it. He seemed oblivious to their waiting. When he was finished he stirred himself a little, a bear in spring, and they all moved forward again, the Dwyers wearing their accommodating smiles. Alone, Murray and Janet would have fussed about where to eat and when to withdraw money. They had done this in towns across Australia and England. Here in Greece they withdrew sums in the early mornings so as not to inconvenience the Andersons, and they allowed Amy to lead them into any café she liked the look of. There was one in Plaka she particularly favoured, a small place with tables on the street; she enjoyed watching the crowds of people as they took the sloping road up to the Acropolis, and observing their faces as they returned. The tourists made respectful space for these tables, looking at them longingly as they made their way up the hot hill, and they collapsed onto the café chairs in relieved exhaustion, crying out for cool drinks, as they descended. Amy never ordered cool drinks. She ordered coffee for herself and for Eric, but the Dwyers sipped at Cokes.

The Dwyers were both too large for the chairs at the café in Plaka — they teetered, with the chairs, on the cobblestones — but Janet was relieved to be sitting down, however precariously. She was made uneasy by the marble pavements of Athens, over which she slipped in the soft soles of her comfortable shoes. The Parthenon was humourless above them; it meant too much. It was almost offensive. Janet felt that it was wasteful not to look at it while she had the opportunity; at the same time, it exhausted her. She could find nothing human about it — nothing like Mycenae’s shining masks.

‘Let me see your passport photos,’ said Amy, who was plainly proud of hers.

‘Oh, no!’ cried Janet, reaching into her handbag.

Her passport was so new next to Amy’s. She saw Eric compare them. He turned to Murray, uncharacteristically expansive, and said, ‘Nothing prepares you for the Greek light.’

The Dwyers nodded and smiled. Australia had prepared them for the Greek light. But it was still something different, if familiar: the great, burdened light, the Attic light. They sat among the flowers of the café as if prepared for sacrifice. In her embarrassment, Janet wanted to speak of Damian. It was a struggle not to talk about him too frequently. Into the silence of the table she wanted to say, ‘Damian has a lovely Chinese girlfriend.’ Or, ‘Damian was promoted last year.’ Instead she shifted her glass with her fingertips and noticed with surprise the dirtiness of her nails. She would have liked the café to smell of fish and rosemary, but instead there was the sun on dust, and sunscreen.

‘I had quite an adventure this morning,’ announced Amy, whose meaningful days began hours before anyone else’s. She told of setting out from the hotel at sunrise, of her walk among the early-morning streets and markets, her coffee at a café crowded with workers, her encounter with a man named Christos who wanted to take her to Marathon. She spoke with solemnity of her lone walk, of the café and workers, but her tone altered for the story of Christos: she became amused and worldly.

‘Why Marathon?’ asked Janet.

‘That’s where he lives,’ said Amy, crumbling a floury biscuit between her droll fingers. ‘The man from Marathon.’

Eric stirred his coffee and looked toward the immemorial street.

‘And what did you say to him?’ asked Janet. She felt a small throb of envy. Before the trip, as she brushed up on the Greek dramatists, she worried that she couldn’t possibly do Athens justice, and here she was, tired and hot, with dirt under her nails. But here was Amy, not reading about Greece, but actually living it, and all this from a hotel, not an apartment. And still beautiful enough for a man in a café to ask her to go home with him.

‘I told him I was happily married,’ said Amy, with a brief look at Eric, a brief hand on his mammoth arm, and Eric inclined his head toward her, stirring, stirring his coffee. ‘I said I didn’t trust his intentions. In no uncertain terms.’

‘And what did he say?’ asked Janet. Murray pressed her foot under the table with the firm undersole of his sensible shoe, because they had decided last night, under the sweltering ceiling of their apartment, that they would stop encouraging Amy by asking questions.

Amy pursed her lips and leaned back in her chair in preparation for laughter. ‘He said, “I’m hungry, but I’m not that hungry.”’

And Eric let out a great, unsuspected laugh, a bark of laughter which Murray later described as a guffaw. It drew attention to their table, it silenced Janet, it left Amy adrift in the end of her story about Christos of Marathon. They sat startled among the plants and crockery. Eric tasted his coffee and pushed it away.

Janet all at once regretted every moment of the trip. Murray hated to travel. Damian had talked her into it; she’d talked Murray into it. She was furious with everyone. Travel was ridiculous. The dead plants, the fled cats, the concern at mounting mail. What could someone like her possibly be doing in Greece? The Greek light sped over the streets, the marble pavements tilted. So much marble. Restaurants in car parks, the blue dusk, doves among the stones. Greece was life, Amy said. But the Greeks must water plants and feed cats and answer mail. There were people here who taught high school, just as she had. Where were those people? They were speaking all around her, she supposed, but she couldn’t understand them, and never would.

The light ticked on and the real sun fell. The couples arranged to meet at the hotel for cocktail hour. Janet and Murray, arriving early, drank wine, intimidated by ouzo and carefully aware they were not paying guests. They drank too quickly as they waited for Eric and Amy to appear, and the sight of the Andersons made them drink faster still.

‘I’ll get drinks. A Scotch?’ Murray asked Eric. They were the patient husbands of friendly wives. Their conversation had been reduced to a funny little parody of manliness: liquor and modes of transport and the distances between places. Among the sharp, pointed objects of the male world they sat quietly, and Murray asked again, ‘Scotch, Eric?’

‘Oh, no,’ said Amy. ‘No, he’s just brushed his teeth. So have I. We’ll wait. Wouldn’t go, would it — toothpaste and whiskey?’

‘If for no other reason,’ said Eric. Sombre. Janet looked, and he winked. Don’t wink, thought Janet. You’re not a boy. She was susceptible to winks. They prevented her from feeling overlooked, and notice of this kind caused her heart to flower with gratitude. Made nervous — more nervous — she reached for her empty wine glass, then drew back. A funnel of lamplight fell over Eric and Amy. Janet told Murray she would join him at the bar.

‘What was all that about?’ said Murray. ‘The not drinking?’

‘Yes, what?’

It was about too much, or too little.

‘Do you think he’s…?’

‘Couldn’t be.’

‘What’s he drunk other nights?’

‘Not much. Never what you’d call too much.’

‘The truth, then? Toothpaste?’

‘Don’t they want us paying? Is that it?’

They could only conclude: Don’t worry, not our business. People arrived at the bar later than they had and were served first. The Dwyers tested out their Greek on each other, then ordered haltingly in English. Behind them the music rose in volume and couples began unexpectedly to dance — unexpected to Janet, although she had imagined hotels of this kind and people dancing in them. The lights were lowered on the tables and the dance floor was illuminated. The Andersons were dancing. So the Dwyers hesitated in the semi-darkness. Diminished, utterly, by their fear of the Andersons, who had found Greece — Amy had found Greece — and now moved as if through grape vines and olive groves, over the hard ground toward the mountains. The sea would rise up to meet them; the original sea. The Dwyers waited beyond the lights with extravagant drinks in their hands. They stood foolishly, and they stood without speaking to one another. They were afraid, and they waited.

* * *

You might say Janet had brought the Andersons together, although this wasn’t quite true. They were engaged when the Dwyers first met them, but toward the end of Eric’s PhD Amy considered breaking it off. She’d fallen in love, she confessed to Janet, with someone else, someone whose greatness of character, whose kindness and deep commitment to love were qualities, lacking in Eric, she couldn’t afford to be without. Janet approved of these vague qualities — she recognised them so acutely in Murray that she worried, briefly, that Amy might have fallen in love with her own husband — and disapproving of Eric’s magnificence, she experimentally encouraged her friend to pursue this new man.

‘First I have to leave Eric,’ said Amy. ‘There needs to be a definitive break.’

It was decided they would go away together, Amy and Janet; Amy had finished her Fulbright year and Janet could be spared from work — her teaching credentials weren’t acceptable in England, so she filed records in a doctor’s surgery. Then it became clear that Murray would have to come too, because without Janet he floundered in their dim flat, which felt at this time of year exactly like a sad hotel. Janet had always wanted to go to Cornwall. When they began the drive, with Amy in the back seat, it felt to them all a little like a kidnapping.

This was a bad time to be in Cornwall: early December, the cold days after a flood. Water remained in the low streets of the town in which they rented a small house. The town had gathered itself on the cliffs as if in preparation for a springtime suicide. The houses were narrow and grey, the hills were green, and continual sleet fell over the sea. Amy and Janet ran from their house to the post office, where furniture subsided gently on the spongy floor, so Amy could send a postcard to Eric telling him it was over. They ran home in the wind. They remained inside during a storm that lasted, it seemed, for two days, playing cards and reading novels. Then someone came shaking the door and demanding to be let in.

Janet, afraid of reports to the landlord, opened the door and Eric arrived among them in a gloomy suit. Massive among them, and silent, with an air of inevitability.

‘How did you find me?’ asked Amy, quite calmly, from the couch.

‘The postcard. Then I asked someone at the train station,’ said Eric. ‘You’re the only tourists in town.’

He sat beside Amy on the sofa and rested his head against the wall behind him. It was as if he had run all the way from London, dressed for a funeral. Janet and Murray announced they would go for a walk. It was far too cold to walk. They dressed importantly in boots and hats. Janet imagined herself blown from the cliffs of Cornwall, but Murray held her arm and they struggled to a tearoom. They stayed three hours among the brown wallpaper and granular tablecloths, and when they returned it was as if to Amy’s marital home: Eric, shoeless, spread across the floor, coffee made, and Amy pleased with herself among newspapers.

Eric lay on the floor the way a marble statue sits indifferently on grass. His suit jacket steamed over the radiator. Janet felt herself redden with worry. Was everything settled? Would he stay the night? Should she ask? She didn’t ask. He stayed the night in the tiny house, in Amy’s bed, which struck loudly against the wall between them and the Dwyers. Janet and Murray giggled into their pillows, they clutched each other with the silly primness of the newly married. Amy and Eric’s bed rocked, their own bed shook; all the beds in the riotous house. Murray’s mouth fell against his wife’s and she pulled away, smiling.

‘They’ll hear,’ she said.

They buried themselves in the pillows again. Then crept to the floor. There was a rug that smelled of shoes.

‘Bring down the quilt,’ said Murray.

The quilt over the rug; the Dwyers over the quilt. The Andersons next door, rocking. Only not yet the Andersons — they were married two months later.

‘Aren’t we happy?’ said Janet, rolling on the rug, and they were.

Late in the night she walked through the dark house checking the security of windows and doors, the safety of stoves and electrical cords, afraid that her great happiness might be taken away from her by divine accident. Amy, also walking the house, moving silently on felted feet, met Janet filling a glass of water at the sink. The water poured slowly and quietly, and Janet held one finger in the glass so she could tell when it neared the top.

‘Sorry,’ said Amy.

‘For what?’ asked Janet. She had felt all afternoon that Amy had something to apologise for, although she couldn’t have defined it. But at this moment, her finger bent into the glass, she was certain that none of them need apologise to each other ever again.

‘For creeping up on you in the dark.’

‘I’m just getting a drink,’ said Janet, and the water touched her fingertip. She let it fill the glass and moved her hand so it flooded over her wrist. She felt as if her intimacy with Murray, the privacy of her love and happiness, had expanded so that it now encompassed Amy and Eric. Her happiness pushed against her chest. If she could preserve this, somehow: the town pressing round her, the floodwater soaking into the post office carpets, the bedrooms of the house hanging over her head, with men in them. She felt the security of a house. The water ran into the sink and she turned off the tap.

Amy stood by the kitchen table.

‘Janet,’ she said, ‘you won’t tell Eric about the other one, will you? The man I mentioned?’

‘Of course not. Is everything all right?’ Janet shook her wet fingers.

‘Everything is perfect,’ Amy answered. It seemed that it was. The windows and doors were locked. The men slept on in the house.

* * *

Athens gave Janet unexpected allergies and she fumbled continually with sodden tissues — too thin, they clung to her fingers. She laughed, embarrassed, and brought attention to herself. Amy walked into the hot, quiet hour of the day and returned with a box of smooth handkerchiefs, scalloped in blue.

‘How clever,’ said Janet. ‘I’d never have thought.’

‘You’re the suffering kind,’ said Amy — not true, surely? — ‘who won’t put others out.’ Possibly true, and Janet had never felt so guilty. She was shy behind her quaint handkerchiefs. Money was offered and refused. They were all up on the roof terrace of Amy’s hotel. Husbands lay on lounges behind them, Eric with the newspaper, Murray asleep, hands clasped over his ribs, a midday saint.

‘Hasn’t it been forever?’ said Amy, as if they’d just encountered each other in a supermarket. Forever might have been eight months. ‘Hard to imagine. So many years since Cornwall. Remember Cornwall?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Janet.

‘Cornwall was wonderful. Lately it’s all I think about. Remember that adorable little house? And drinking sherry from those tiny glasses?’

‘The sherry,’ said Janet. She didn’t remember the sherry.

‘Remember how cold it was? And the coin-operated heating? How worried we were that we’d run out of coins?’ Amy sat with her chin in her hands, and her head was older, thinner, than it had been in Cornwall. ‘You have to wonder what would have happened without Cornwall. Marriage is like that, isn’t it,’ she said. ‘It reaches a point.’

Janet was unsure what point Amy’s marriage might have reached.

‘Why don’t we take a walk, just the two of us?’ said Amy.

Janet was tired. ‘What a good idea,’ she said.

‘We’re going for a walk,’ Amy told Eric. He nodded behind his newspaper. Murray looked so defenceless, asleep on his lounge, that Janet hated to leave him. She and Amy walked out into the exhausted afternoon.

‘You know where I’ll take you,’ said Amy, ‘I’ll take you to that café I was in yesterday morning. Now, if I can just remember how to find it.’

She remembered how to find it; it was only around the corner. It was a very ordinary café, and there were racks of postcards among the outdoor tables, where tourists sat drinking Cokes. Janet had pictured something else. She looked at it from across the street, disappointed.

‘Is this where you met Christos of Marathon?’

Amy was unexpectedly anxious. ‘Oh god, I don’t know what you’re going to say,’ she said. ‘I’m just going to be up front with you. I need a favour.’

‘Of course,’ said Janet, imagining a small loan, imagining confidences about Eric.

‘I need to borrow your apartment for a few hours this afternoon.’

‘Oh,’ said Janet. They were walking toward the café, and a man, a little younger than they were, stood up from a table when he saw them. Everything was so predetermined; it was embarrassing. Amy introduced them. They all stood there, embarrassed, and perhaps Christos was the most discomfited of all. He was the kind of man Amy used to see in England and say to Janet, ‘Look at the quality of his shirt!’ Janet never noticed the quality of any man’s shirt. She thought Christos had a pleasant face, a face you enjoyed looking at; it seemed so sensibly arranged. She went to pass her key to Amy, who turned away, suddenly fastidious, checking for something in her handbag, so Janet handed the key to Christos instead. Then he stepped away toward the road, discreetly.

‘Do you know where it is?’ Janet asked Amy.

‘I have the address. Christos knows how to get there. You must think I’m really something.’

‘No, no,’ said Janet.

‘I shouldn’t have brought you out. You should be locked up in an air-conditioned room, taking care of your nose.’

‘I’m fine,’ said Janet.

Amy’s face creased into a shape of exaggerated concern. Janet waved her blue-scalloped handkerchief, a little flag.

‘I’m fine,’ she repeated.

‘See you here at four,’ said Amy, and then she was gone and Christos was gone, and there was Athens. Janet couldn’t go home, or to the hotel. There were no men to meet in a café. She walked to Plaka, carefully, over the marble. Her nose ran. The streets were full of stores selling blue and white and yellow ceramics. She bought three heavy platters, then worried about how to get them home.

* * *

The minivan drew up to the hotel with the look of a bashful turtle. It was a generous vehicle, with room for many passengers, and Janet felt conspicuous as they drove away in it, as if the four of them had been abandoned by a crowd of friends and left to the Fates and to Mycenae. She felt a particular anxiety because today was her doing. Why had she suggested Mycenae? The night before, she’d pulled the National Geographic article from her suitcase. She was hesitant to sit on any surface; every object in the apartment was suspicious to her, although there were no clues to betray the afternoon’s activities. The photographs of Mycenae showed blank and barren hills and a spread of vaguely room-shaped rubble.

‘Let’s call it off,’ said Janet. And tried not to picture Amy and Christos in the bed.

‘No,’ said Murray, rubbing his weary feet. ‘She can’t have everything her way. This is the one thing you wanted to do, and we’re doing it.’ He was bold and aggrieved when they were alone; they also held hands in the apartment, as if to make up for their separation during the day. Janet was grateful, but she didn’t tell him about Christos. How else to protect him?

So here they were in a bus, air-conditioned, on their way to Mycenae. They left Athens very early because of the weather — it was going to be the hottest day. Murray, anticipating the heat, had frozen bottles of water overnight.

‘Couldn’t do this in a hotel,’ he said, with some satisfaction.

Now the bottles were sweating cold liquid, staining their laps but still too frozen to drink, while Amy and Eric sipped at the bottles provided by the driver.

‘You know, I’m excited about this,’ said Amy, inclining her attentive head toward the window. Eric sat in the front with the driver, and didn’t turn to look at her. No one else spoke, but Janet cooed a little, like a pigeon.

The heat was worse at Mycenae. Janet saw with dismay that it was a hill with rocks on it. She said to herself, Agamemnon. Agamemnon. They abandoned the cool of the minivan and began to ascend. They could stay in the shade of the walls until they passed under the Lion Gate, but after that there would only be the sun.

Eric walked kingly among the stones. The heat was similarly dignified. It lay impersonally over them all. It filled Janet’s lungs and pressed against her face whenever she stirred her head. And Eric walked unmoved among the stones. Janet watched him, and she watched as Murray picked his faltering way among the shaded rocks. He struck her as elderly, without being exactly old, and she felt an additional fondness for his vulnerable head. His bottle of ice rattled against his hip as he walked. Dizzy, she sat on a low wall and looked to see if Murray, ascending the slope — soon he would be completely exposed to the light — might turn to find her. He didn’t. He passed with determination, with his trim calves and ankle socks, beyond the reach of the shade and out into the heat’s flat plain.

‘Come on, you!’ cried Amy.

But Janet couldn’t bear to look at Amy.

She waved and smiled and watched them all disappear under the Lion Gate. There was dust at her feet and strange birds flew overhead, and the rocks she sat on had been shaped and set in this place so long ago they may as well have occurred naturally. Then Mycenae seemed to her a growth, rather than a construction. It had nothing at all to do with human life. All of Greece seemed that way: as if some other species — the gods — had lived here carelessly, then abandoned it. And she could only crawl about on it, take some photographs, go home.

A man in uniform called out and she understood that it was forbidden to sit on the stones. That seemed right to her, so she stood. She wanted to apologise to someone, but the only person she saw when she passed under the Lion Gate was Eric. He was standing on the edge of the slope with his right hand shading his eyes, his right hand pressed against his great American head, and in this stance his Viking ancestors were so visible, sailing the North Sea in their longboats, that the whole country of Greece became the frigid ocean and there was nothing to do but hurry into the boat with Eric, who would captain it so surely.

Janet stood beside him and read aloud from a small sign: ‘Grave Circle A.’ Grave Circle A was a ring of stones laid out beneath them. Archaeologists had pulled the men and gold from it many years ago. Eric didn’t even look at it; he stared across the valley. Janet realised that she had never really been alone with him before. She might say to him, Your wife slept with another man in my apartment yesterday afternoon. With Christos of Marathon, who was hungry after all. She might say, Your wife fell in love with another man in England.

Eric said, ‘Nothing prepares you for the light.’

It was impossible to pity a man like this. He was a god, really — remote and ineffectual. He belonged in this kind of place, in the ruins of something he’d fought for and won. But she noticed his hands were shaking.

‘I’ve finished my water,’ he said.

Then he fell. He dropped the way a jacket does, slipping off a coathanger: an elegant draping subsidence. Soundless, and although he collapsed on himself at first, he then rolled out across Janet’s feet, so that by the time people came she’d fallen too and couldn’t quite understand how to get up. Murray ran toward her, curiously nimble. Eric lay heavily across her legs, but Murray moved him without difficulty, lifting her out and away and to her feet. She was dazed by the sun and the dust, by Eric’s mournful face and upturned hands; painted clouds above, rocks below, and doves among the stones. The view over blank hills that were green without being green, the constant haze at the horizon. Janet thought of this later as the failure of a man, the great, impossible end of Eric, although Eric didn’t actually end but woke drearily, halfway to Athens, in the back of the van with spit dried at the corners of his mouth. It was only sunstroke. He was thirsty, his head ached, and he cried a little — Murray and Janet heard him cry in the seat behind them. His head lay in Amy’s lap and she stroked and soothed him.

‘Shhh,’ she said. ‘Shhh.’

Janet sat beside Murray. They held hands. Greece took place outside the windows of the van. She rested her head on Murray’s shoulder and said, ‘It’s far too hot. We never should have come.’ But she was glad they had.

In Sydney, it was six o’clock. The lamps came on in the Dwyers’ house, all at once, in the empty windows.