Reunion (17 page)

If a single factor were to highlight the sorry demise of the humanities in academe, it was in the allocation of university space; even twilight disciplines like his own comparative religion once occupied a significant strip of prime university real estate. But not any more. The New Zealand job put an end to any doubts: the modern university does not suit him, nor does he suit the modern university.

Down the corridor Harry Guerin is building his empire; a couple of kilometres away Ava is cavorting with Fleur on the russet stone of Federation Square; Jack finds himself clamped in the vice of his own conflicts. As the screws tighten, he feels the inescapable squeeze of a life gone wrong.

1.

Second novels have a bad reputation and deservedly so. After a positive reception to a first book, many writers cave in to an unjustifiable attachment to the novel they wrote prior to the first published one. Rejected several times over, this manuscript has been lying untouched but not forgotten in a dark corner of the house. As the clamour over the first novel subsides, the author, still warm from the experience and perhaps overly influenced by a good press, reaches for the earlier unpublished manuscript. That the lame novel of a writer's apprenticeship might suddenly in a new day find its legs, belongs in the realm of miracles or shady nostalgia. And while publishers should know better, given that the marketplace is crowded and new authors appear thick and fast, the chance to cement a reputation with a quick follow-up novel is hard to resist.

So there's the second novel which is really a first-novel apprenticeship, and sometimes there is no second novel at all. Through some perverse artistic alchemy, a highly successful first book transmogrifies into a straitjacket. Three, five, eight
years pass and the author of the acclaimed
X of the Y
fails to produce the eagerly awaited follow-up work. With the expectation that the second novel will be better than the first, failure fattens and the straitjacket becomes a second skin.

Ava did not experience a second-novel problem of either type. As she completed the later drafts of her first novel,
Rock Father
, she was already jotting down ideas for the next one.

Rock Father
itself had started in the way of wish fulfilment, a story of the father Ava would have chosen to fill the hole left by the father fate had assigned her. But ideal fathers, she quickly discovered, do not make for interesting writing nor, for that matter, interesting reading. The man who finally appeared in the pages of the novel was a walking disaster, whose good looks and easy charm attracted a ready supply of people to disappoint. He had not one, but two failed families, and a serious drinking problem; he also had an inexplicable and magical connection with owls. Ava had assumed owls to be a northern hemisphere phenomenon (all those hootings in the great nineteenth-century novels and quite a few in Enid Blyton's too). But she discovered that Australia –
Rock Father
is her only novel to be set wholly in Australia – has ten indigenous owls among which are some of the most handsome of the species. Harry, a relatively new arrival at this stage, immediately started an owl collection for her. But the figures he produced in glass, pottery, wood and textiles, sometimes as many as three a week, failed to captivate. What did appeal was Harry's motivation in buying them, and what kept her silent until they moved to a flat without display space was her gratitude for such love.

Rock Father
entered the world, the owl collection grew, and Ava sifted through her ideas for her second novel. Eventually
she settled on
The Universal Fool
, in which a woman, despite reason and common sense, follows her heart step by inexorable step to the final tragedy. The heart, Ava believed, had received a far too generous press; it was an unreliable judge and, as she would show in
The Universal Fool,
not to be trusted. The characters, the locations, the underlying themes and the general tone of the book were all different from those in
Rock Father
, but the idea for the new novel was spawned by the earlier one.

The Universal Fool
was almost universally praised. ‘Rare for a second novel'. ‘Accomplished and mature'. ‘Wise and sad'. One reviewer quoted Yeats: ‘Bryant knows the “terrible gift of intimacy”, another compared her favourably to Henry James. Ava was surprised and pleased, but also superstitious. So when the one killer review appeared, written by an embittered poet and fortunately published in an out-of-the-way corner of the world of letters, she felt the artistic scales were back in balance. Everything augured well for novel number three.

She read, she daydreamed, she made notes, she went for long walks and she was rushed with ideas, just as she had been following
Rock Father
. But the ideas fizzled out long before she found her stride. Not knowing what else to do she pressed on, cutting back on the walks and the daydreaming and forcing herself to turn her jottings into something more substantial. As drivel became not just her primary mode of expression but her only mode, and the search for words became a blind and desperate grabbing, the heart, so badly done by in her second novel became lethargic and sad.

Harry tried to smooth her anxieties with special meals and weekends away; he also offered advice. In the past he had stayed well clear of her work, regarding it as her special
domain and well beyond his own expertise, so his sudden involvement actually exacerbated the situation.

Jack's intervention was more effective. ‘You need to fill up,' he said. ‘After two novels in quick succession you've emptied out.'

Jack had returned to Oxford for a six-month study leave. It was his first visit in ten years, since leaving soon after her marriage. He had a new book in mind – he had written to her about it – and hoped to complete the research in the period of his leave. But seeing the state she was in, he put his own work aside in order to ameliorate hers. He took her to the theatre, to galleries and a rally agitating for freedom in Chechnya. He took her to seminars and lectures and a forum on terror after the Tokyo sarin gas attack. Every day he proposed a new activity and she gratefully complied.

Pindar wrote that ‘hope is the old man's muse'. With the bravado of youth and more than a touch of cynicism, Ava had stuck the quote on her study wall when she commenced university. The imagination was its own muse, she believed; high maintenance and addicted to its own surprises it fed off itself; as for hope, it was a branch of illusion she was determined to avoid. But after the barren months of working on the still nonexistent third novel, she changed her mind: the thriving imagination, she decided, was a needy beast. And her own imagination, she was about to discover, needed Fleur Macleish.

 

Dr Fleur Macleish, a London-based specialist in Indian antiquities, was giving a lecture in Oxford as part of Somerville College's occasional lunchtime series. Jack had never heard of her, neither had Ava, but India was always interesting and hadn't Ava said she wanted to set a novel on the subcontinent?

India, Cuba or Kazakhstan, Ava would situate her novel anywhere if she could be assured of its gaining a head of steam.

‘You need to be out and about,' Jack said. ‘You need stimulation.'

When you feel like a nobody – and a writer who is not writing is definitely a nobody – you're tempted by any suggestion that is stamped with authority.

‘I miss you.' She linked her arm through his as the two of them set off for the lecture. ‘I really wish you'd come back to Oxford permanently.'

‘Only while you're between books,' he replied, keeping his gaze hard ahead. ‘Once you begin your next novel, you'll prefer our usual epistolary relationship.'

And she knew he was right, but when the next novel seemed as likely as a trip to the moon she was prepared to change even her most entrenched habits. She said nothing, just squeezed his arm and picked up her pace.

It was a perfect day in late spring and within minutes she stopped to slip off her jacket. With summer just a whisker away she would be complaining soon enough, but after the long winter it was bliss to be out of heavy clothes and feel the sun on her skin.

‘I feel like I've been given a day pass from prison,' she said.

She had prepared a picnic and they stopped at the St Giles' churchyard for lunch. The garden was crowded, but eventually they found a spot on a low brick wall edging a flower bed. They sat close to each other to avoid the shadows from the trees.

She proceeded to tell Jack about a recent phone call with Helen. ‘Most of it was about Luke,' she said. ‘I think Helen's reinventing motherhood.'

‘I think
she
thinks she's reinventing motherhood,' Jack said with a laugh, ‘and given up sleep entirely. She must have written four papers already this year and attended half a dozen conferences.' Jack helped himself to a sandwich. ‘It's lucky Connie lives close enough to look after Luke.'

‘I have the impression Linda does most of the looking after.'

Connie had recently embarked on his third marriage. Ava had met Linda earlier in the year when she and Connie had visited Oxford. ‘I liked her, I liked her a lot.' And added with a bemused smile, ‘Connie says this one's forever. Rather a slippery concept in his lexicon.'

‘And his work?' Jack asked. ‘I expect he had a lot to say about the ongoing horrors in the former Yugoslavia.'

‘Hardly a word, but then I'm convinced Connie's apolitical. He defends his lack of engagement by saying he's more interested in the essentials of being human.' (Connie could argue persuasively for practically any position, and both she and Jack knew it.) ‘But the fact is, after his philosophy, his wives, his children and the stream of girlfriends, Connie has little time left for politics.'

She burrowed into the lunch bag and pulled out a block of chocolate. ‘Do you want some?'

Jack shook his head, and helped himself to another sandwich.

‘What about your parents?' Ava asked. ‘How have they responded to the new Eastern Europe?'

‘It's almost as if the collapse of the Soviet Union has vindicated communism for them – or what they refer to as
pure
communism.' Jack was smiling. ‘With each new piece of evidence about Soviet brutality and corruption, my parents are vociferous in their condemnation of Soviet communism while holding fast to their old workers unite values.'

‘And China? Cuba? North Korea? How do they explain them?'

‘Ever the revolutionaries, they'd do away with nation states altogether. It's still the “Internationale” forever.'

Jack leaned forward and brushed an insect from her hair. ‘Saved you from a midge,' he said, before returning to his parents. ‘They're extremely wary of all these nation states that have popped up in Eastern Europe. They worry the new freedoms don't blend easily with old grievances. And “ethnic cleansing”, such an appalling euphemism, they simply can't understand why more people aren't protesting.'

His parents had recently been appointed Australian representatives for an international group agitating for UN-controlled dismantling of ageing Soviet warheads. ‘They'll be waving banners and signing petitions until the moment their hearts give out,' he said.

Jack's face bore that same warmth and pleasure you see whenever people speak about loved family. Ava envied him. She would never forget showing him Philip Larkin's ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad' –
High Windows
had not long been published, and Stephen had given her a copy. It was hard to know which had shocked him more, the sentiment or the obscenity.

‘Do you think there are any words left with shock value,' she now asked as they started up the Woodstock Road.

Jack thought for a moment, then shook his head. ‘No, not even cunt.'

She was quick to disagree. ‘Responses to that word separate the girls from the boys, and probably one of the last remaining differences between us.'

Single words aside though, she believed that shock and
surprise were alive in language as much as ever. ‘In the
creative
use of language,' she said, and let loose a stream of quotes from contemporary poetry – Thom Gunn's ‘scheduled miracle', Ted Hughes' ‘Letting time moan its amnesia/Through telegraph wires', Bruce Beaver's ‘creaking house, shrinking under/the brute back-hander of the southerly/buster.'

‘This is language at its most astonishing,' she said.

Jack joined in – ‘Gwen Harwood's palms “like feather dusters”, Dorothy Porter's kisses “like smashed glass”' – rummaging his memory for startling language.

They were both still quoting when they reached Somerville.

‘There's no equal to your poetic soul,' she said, as they entered the college grounds.

 

People like to think that significant loves will announce themselves, that the first glimpse, the first handshake, the first words will be life-changing experiences. In the case of Fleur's initial effect on Ava everything about it was ordinary. There were about thirty-five people gathered for the lecture. Ava greeted a couple of members of the college, but with the lecture about to begin she and Jack quickly found seats. Fleur Macleish, an old Somervillian and part of Somerville's Indian connection, was introduced with little ceremony.

‘Dr Macleish's reputation speaks for itself,' the principal said.

Fleur Macleish cut a striking figure, pale dark skin of the northern rather than southern Indian kind, arched cheekbones, carved jaw, slender neck. The sculpted face was accentuated by the closely cropped black hair. She was dressed in Western clothes – trousers, shirt and blowsy scarf in a riot of pinks and reds and a startling contrast with the drab colours then in
vogue. Fleur Macleish was an arresting figure, but Oxford was full of arresting figures. What was remarkable was the shock of the Scottish accent. Ava checked the biographical notes: Indian mother (herself an old Somervillian) and Scottish father, and settled back to listen.

It may have been the lyrical voice, it may have been the unaccustomed heat, it may have been the smooth comfort of Jack against her, but before long Ava lapsed into her own thoughts, nothing significant nor, she realised at the end of the lecture, enduring, for she could not say what had passed through her mind. As for Fleur Macleish's lecture, it had not even scraped the surface of consciousness. It was only when the applause had finished and people were preparing to leave that it suddenly came to her: Stephen, she had been thinking of Stephen, and a fillip of embarrassment, for it was not Stephen telling her about books or taking her to the theatre. While Fleur Macleish had been giving her lecture Ava had been back at Stephen's flat, in his bed and cradled against his naked body, the greying tufts of hair about his nipples, the rise of his stomach, and that crease where his abdomen ended just above the pubic hair. She now knew it as the shape of a mature man, but not all those years ago when his was the first male body she had seen. She had liked that quiet time after the sex, Stephen stroking the length of her back, and nothing required of her at all.