‘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 Cornwalclass="underline" 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.