The High Places by Fiona McFarlane Page A

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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.

 
    Man and Bird
    In the hour of his humiliation, Reverend Adams still wore his hat: a black bowler that sat upright on