Fiona McFarlane - The High Places - Stories

‘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.