Reunion (16 page)

Anyone who has enjoyed an intense written relationship is well acquainted with the impact of words that are read rather than spoken. In the silence of a room, with all stops pulled out on imagination, emotions swirl like magma below a charged earth. You feel the fire and the erotic plumes, you spark with possibilities, and it begins even before you open the latest instalment, when you collect the mail and recognise her letter. You know her handwriting, the way she prints your name and address, the way she underscores the area code, you know her scrawl of sender details on the back, you can see her fingerprints, her signature as it were, all over the envelope. You feel the quickening of your heart, the thump of anticipation as you take the mail inside. You sort through the letters, you leave hers till last. Then you make yourself a fresh cup of coffee, sit in a favourite chair, open her letter and read, once, twice, three times, the burn of just you and Ava together and nothing to
intrude on your secret and highly charged tryst. And during the writing and the reading and the re-readings, and all the times in between as you shop and cook and clean, as you sit out the tedium of dried-out colleagues and plodding students, you not only relive your love, you make it and remake it and embed it in a world that seems both miraculous and tangible. There is nothing to compare with the clandestine enclave of letters.

But now that Jack could see her whenever he wanted, the enclave had broken its borders. It was not that he loved her any less, he doubted that were possible, but the dynamic of his love baulked at its usual functions. The disorientation was at times unbearable, as if he had lost the coordinates to his very existence – much like his parents must have felt when they quit the Party. They had been quick to find other causes, other groups, but Jack didn't want to leave his Ava; he was hanging on for dear life.

A new book would help, but he couldn't write. Good causes would help, but he lacked his parents' commitment. He told himself the situation would pass, that in time his love would find its season again. But despite these assurances he knew something fundamental was changing. Something that had for so long been thoroughly known, thoroughly secure and unquestionably reliable, was losing its form and its footing.

Ava was not similarly disturbed. She rang him often, proposing lunches, drinks, walks, gallery visits – ‘Not Harry's thing at all' – but after two of these occasions Jack was determined to find excuses. Indeed, the very first time alone with her was sufficient to reveal how things really were.

She had invited him to her place for lunch. He was nervous, excited, it was as if his whole past had been rolling forward to
this moment. He had dressed with care, mindful of colours and styles she had always liked. He selected two books to lend her, he copied out a poem by Yehuda Amichai – they often included poems in their letters – and after a short search he had triumphed with a giant-sized version of her favourite chocolate bar.

The failure of the chocolate bar turned out to be emblematic of the occasion. She had taken it with a vague ‘Why on earth are you giving me this?' expression, and when he reminded her, she had smiled and said it was very thoughtful of him but she hadn't eaten chocolate in years. Why didn't you tell me? he had blurted out. And when she replied that it didn't seem important in the scheme of things, he wondered what else she had kept from him.

The meeting was stiff with unfamiliarity. Ava drank green tea and not the strong black coffee she had introduced him to. Espresso was
de rigueur
among the existentialists, the eighteen-year-old Ava had told him, implying that no other consideration, including that of taste, was relevant. So Jack had persevered until he could drink his coffee no other way. But now she had swapped to green tea. What intellectual ever drank green tea? he wanted to ask. And the books he had chosen missed the mark too. One of them was a biography of the Strachey family. ‘It looks interesting,' she said as she flipped through, ‘but I haven't read the Bloomsburies for years.' She handed the book back to him. ‘Perhaps another time,' she said vaguely. She loved the poem, but it's not difficult to keep track of poetry tastes in letters.

There were numerous other changes, her slower speech and the careful pauses – suitable for a public interview but not at home with an old friend. Although worst of all was her refusal
to ignore the phone. While she was speaking with someone called Barbara, he found himself wondering how she wrote her letters to him, how much attention she gave to a task that for him was sacred. He would write only at night, a glass of wine beside him, consulting his notebook where he had made jottings during the previous week. He would spend the better part of an evening writing to her, then the following morning he would give the letter a final reading and make last-minute changes, print it off, seal it in the same airmail blue envelopes he had always used, and send it at a post office rather than a kerbside letterbox as there would be less chance of its going astray. A whole ritual. But after enduring ten minutes of inconsequential banter between Ava and Barbara, during which he waited, ignored, on her couch in her living room, he wondered whether Ava had treated their correspondence with the same indifference he was now receiving.

 

By the time Jack left the café he was feeling worse than when he arrived. If not for the lingering disappointment following Connie's pilot he might have passed an hour at the public library, instead he took a stroll through the city lanes and arcades. After thirty minutes, aware that all this time-wasting felt uncomfortably incriminating, he decided to return to the office. He looked around to take his bearings and saw a shop he had never noticed before. In the window was a display of hand-made journals. He stepped closer. Such intricate covers, scenes from old Venice, Japanese pen-and-ink drawings, colourful abstract patterns like the Bargello tapestries his mother used to stitch. And the old-fashioned rough-cut, creamy pages. These books were so elegant, so beautiful, he was tempted to buy one for himself – as if quality tools alone
ever produced anything of worth. Then he thought of Ava; she was never without a notebook.

The woman behind the counter looked up as he entered. She invited him to browse and then returned to a page of figures. Mid-twenties, dark, slender and stylish, Jack would have thought her more suited to a fashion house than a business dedicated to handwriting and hand-crafted paper.

The shop was tiny, ‘delicate' was the word that occurred to him, just a few steps across and a dozen steps deep. There was a free-standing table with a display of paper and cards, and around the walls, arranged on wooden shelving, were the journals. Perhaps it was the lighting, but what might have been musty and oppressive was polished and warm.

With no other customers in the shop, Jack was free to make a systematic search for Ava's notebook. He wrapped himself in the task, so much so that when the phone rang a few minutes later he started at the noise. The girl at the desk answered, and after an initial greeting she switched to Italian. Perhaps she was in the right job after all.

A few minutes more and Jack had selected nine journals of varying size, cover design and paper thickness and arranged them along a narrow bench. While any would be suitable for Ava only one would be best. He stepped back and considered. The illuminated manuscript cover or the blue-green marbled design? A delicate Japanese garden or Venice's Grand Canal? He returned two of the books to the shelves and flipped through the pages of those still in contention. He weighed each in his hands, he compared size and thickness, he retrieved one of those he had replaced – a marbled cover in pinks and golds and far too lovely to discount. Now there were eight possible journals for Ava.

The air in the shop had thickened, sweat snaked beneath his shirt, he blotted his face with his handkerchief. The girl had finished her phone call. His back was turned to her but he was sure she was watching. Choose, he ordered himself, but if the books had magically reconfigured into a lavishly patterned vice he could not have been more paralysed. A minute more and he was defeated. He left the journals scattered across the bench and with gaze averted he rushed from the shop. Decisions about Ava had never been his forté.

He hurried from the lane into Flinders Street and made his way directly to the second-hand bookshop across from the railway station. He stepped through the doorway and immediately his stress dissipated under cover of the stacks. There were half a dozen people in the shop each silently browsing; the woman behind the counter was immersed in a book. He took down volumes at random, read blurbs, flipped through pages, checked for Ava's titles in the fiction area. He moved through philosophy, poetry, history, biography, military, self-help, car maintenance and only when he found himself leafing through a Mandrake comic, a favourite of his eight-year-old self, did he come to his senses. There was little point in lingering any longer.

It was a balmy spring day with a few puffs of cloud in a blue sky and he made his way down to the river. He had not been here since Harry's cocktail party months before. There was activity at the boat sheds on the opposite bank, and on the Yarra itself three coxed crews of eight. The voices of the coxes cut the air with authority, and the brawny rowers did exactly as they were told. If only life were so easy, Jack was thinking, someone to provide the instructions while you just listened and obeyed. Although a trade-off would be required. How many
restrictions, for example, would one be willing to tolerate for the comfort of authority, or indeed the authority of an authority? His thoughts turned to his parents, whose belief in the socialist utopia was so strong that even when Tito was vilified and Yugoslavia expelled from the Cominform, even when government ministers in Bulgaria and Hungary were tried in the flimsiest of show-trials and subsequently executed, after so many events that showed the Soviet leadership to be brutal and corrupt, his parents still managed to produce explanations, increasingly far-fetched it must be said, that would preserve not only the communist struggle for a fairer world but Soviet authority as well. At what point, Jack wondered, did a belief in an ideology become so total, so intractable, that it transformed into an allegiance to the authority of the ideology?

It was an interesting idea, and of relevance, he realised, to radical Islam. Perhaps he might write an essay on the topic – and immediately he recoiled from the thought. He hurried away from the rowers and their unison stroking and strode back towards Federation Square. He paced himself hard, his stomach settled, the rabble in his brain quieted, he felt the familiar pull on his right hip as he stepped out strongly, and the stretch across his back as he swung his arms: thirty minutes of this, he thought, as he bounded up the steps to the square, and he would be ready to return to the office. When suddenly he saw her.

Ava.

Across the earthy stone, past workers on their lunch break and mothers with babies, past buskers and survey takers, charity collectors and tourists with cameras, he saw her, unmistakably Ava, in a waft of green and blue swirls, sitting alone at an outdoor café. Ava alone and waiting for him.

A thousand times in his imagination has he crafted just this scene: a city square, a busy street, a famous church, a gallery, and he comes upon Ava and she will turn and see him and show by her delight she has been waiting for him, that at last she is ready to pick up where they left off after their month together. He starts forward, zigzagging through the lunchtime crowd, seeing only Ava sitting at a café table now sixty metres away, now fifty, now forty, and if he hadn't tripped over a knapsack cast to the side of a kissing couple, what a fool he would have made of himself.

Of course Ava's not waiting for him.

A woman emerges from the indoor area of the café. She makes her way to Ava's table and takes the seat across from her. Her back is turned towards Jack. The two women are talking, then Ava laughs and points at something. The woman twists around and Jack sees her clearly. The cap of black hair, the dark skin, the kohl-rimmed eyes, the angular features. It's Fleur. Fleur Macleish, here in Australia. Fleur still with Ava nearly three years after she quit her life.
Forever
, Ava had written to Jack at the time.
Fleur has left me forever
. Ava swore she never wanted to see Fleur again.

Enough said of the determination of a lover injured before journey's end.

You can will anything in solitude. You can make the world stop on its axis, you can put life on Mars, you can even make someone fall in love with you. What a traitor real life can be. For it is Fleur. Who else but Fleur? Ava is talking with her and laughing, she's waving her hand at the buildings beyond the square. Let me show you my city, she is saying, drawing Fleur back into her life.

 

Twenty minutes later and Jack is back at the office, stunned and beaten. He doesn't bother to turn on his computer; whatever thoughts spluttered to life before he saw Ava are now well and truly extinguished.

Where to now Fleur is back?

He wants to leap forward to a time when this is all over or back to a time he knows well; he wants to be anywhere but here. But where is he to go? Some casual work down in Tasmania close to his parents? Teaching at a country school? Library work? He gazes around his grand office with its opulent space and spectacular views, and while he could be satisfied with far less, he also knows that after his last job there are limits to what he can tolerate.

Just a few months ago his office was a squat, nondescript cell with a meagre, non-opening window beyond which was a red-brick wall dribbled with pigeon droppings. Rather than plush-pile carpet and paintings by up-and-coming artists there was hard-wearing beige lino on the floor, beige plastic paint on the walls, beige acoustic tiles on the ceiling and harsh fluorescent lighting. His office was one of several boxes on a floor that comprised the entire humanities department of the university.