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.