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.
Man and Bird
In the hour of his humiliation, Reverend Adams still wore his hat: a black bowler that sat upright on his narrow head, like a fortified town on a hilltop. His clerical shirt was also black, and his single-breasted jacket (all three buttons firmly fastened), and his trousers and shoes, but all in slightly different shades, which gave him a regrettably scruffy look, simultaneously prismatic and funereal. The parish had great hopes for him at first. He’d had excellent theological training, came with good references, and was moreover unmarried, which stirred the ashes of many a virgin breast; and so, in the beginning, when he entered his new congregation, it was as a bridegroom into a rose garden.
His appearance was promising. The slope of his nose, echoed in the angle of his chin, gave an impression of profound endurance. There was a suggestion of sculpture in the marble-like whiteness of his skin. Yes, he was prim and pallid, in excellent health, with well-made ears, and in his battered blacks he presented a respectable, even slightly romantic figure. Also, he was kindly. He walked with an incongruous maritime swell that might, in another man, have passed for a swagger, and was careful in the maintenance of a small yellow car that he rarely drove faster than seventy kilometres an hour. He spoke in long, dignified sentences, rich in clauses, reminiscent of a veterans’ parade on a memorial holiday, and as he delivered his sermons he had a tendency to rise to the tip of his toes, so that finally he appeared to be levitating behind the pulpit. This was disconcerting, but forgivable. He also caused a minor stir early on when he removed two ancient trees from the churchyard because, he said, they interfered with the grass.
What worried people most of all was his parrot.
It was fitting that a man of Reverend Adams’s calling should have acquired few objects on his way through the world, but why should one of them be a parrot? An entirely white parrot too, as if it had once been red and yellow and green and blue but was now in some kind of Chinese mourning, except for the sulphur crest on the back of its head. Every member of the congregation can still recall, with perfect clarity, the appearance of that prodigious bird: the stiff crinoline of its feathers, the Pentecostal lick of yellow flame on its head, the tiny eyes and wormy claws, that grey, awful beak. When it fixed you with its enigmatic eye, it suggested nothing so much as the sorrowful ghost of a parrot, but you were aware, nevertheless, that it was not above a kind of solemn cheekiness. And when the parishioners saw man and bird together, they were reminded of certain ordinary dining rooms on whose walls fantastic wallpaper repeated bamboo and nightingales. It unnerved them to think of Reverend Adams and the parrot, alone together, eating their bachelor meals.
As Reverend Adams settled into his position, the congregation developed the opinion that he talked too much about death, and with the wrong emphasis. The way he described it, it was as if the arrival in Heaven, the longed-for meeting with God, would be about as melancholy as you might imagine the reunion of a father and son in a railway station, under artificial light. Eternity seemed less glorious, then; it seemed a cheerless thickening of time, rather than a new expanse. And so Reverend Adams was given to understand, by certain older and well-respected members of his congregation, that his flock had begun to pray for him, that he might receive insight into the mysteries of Heaven and the inheritance awaiting him there.
Reverend Adams withdrew to his rectory, troubled by this rebuke; trouble drawn into the furrows of his brackish brow, which he mopped with a handkerchief he kept stuffed in the pocket of his black trousers. But that night, as he slept, he dreamed of Heaven. It was a sleep so close to sleeplessness that when he woke he was able to recall every detail of his dream of paradise: the river that flowed with dull silver, the endless walls of the City of God, the streets paved with gold, and the holy clamour of the passionate elect, who worshipped God day and night without ceasing. He was led through this vision by a strange figure, half bird, half human — an archangel, he assumed — with white feathers and a tongue of fire on the back of its head. There was a quality to the light which was, it seemed to him, something like an old photograph, taken at night, in which white becomes silver and every other colour a shade of blue. This dream left him both elated and bereft — he felt he’d been born into entirely the wrong tradition to take advantage of it, and so, in his sermons, he skirted its great thicket and made instead for the sparser grove in which he’d been trained.
Nevertheless, the slight oddness of his person increased, imperceptibly at first, but more obviously toward the end of that year. He began to pause mid-sermon as if made curious by what he’d just said. Yes, it was as if his beliefs were surprising to him; he appeared to be baffled by their mysterious survival. He resembled his parrot most uncannily at these moments because he was so like a bird suddenly given the power to understand its own speech.
Of course, even this might have been tolerated if his behaviour hadn’t become stranger still. He took to carrying his parrot everywhere with him, perched on the back of his right hand. The bird sidled on his hand. It stepped to the left and stepped to the right. There was no distracting it from its great love: Reverend Adams. It had eyes only for him. And the Reverend, in turn, would gaze at the bird in respectful consultation, as if waiting for some message. This was not a particularly talented parrot, the kind that can repeat whole sentences, the kind suggestive of a soul; it only made strange stops and clicks with its plump bird tongue, bobbing up and down as if kneeling to pray or to take communion, its head cocked to one side. Stop, and click; warble, click; and stop. Even the stoutest of the Reverend’s suitors withdrew at the sight of him waiting for his parrot, and turned their hopes elsewhere.