Reunion (3 page)

A heated discussion about the best bars in Melbourne started up; even Connie, home for less than twenty-four hours, joined in. Jack left them to their wine lists and tapas and gazed through the glass doors across the lighted courtyard to the old stables that had so captivated Ava when first she looked over the place. There was nothing special about the house, she had written at the time, but the stables were a writer's dream. Her study was on the upper storey, while below, and according to Ava, bursting with his computer equipment and his various collections, was Harry's home office. Even at work they were only metres apart. And no one to blame but himself. Yet all those years ago when he introduced Harry to Ava, he had thought only to please her.

It had happened about twelve months after they arrived in Oxford. Helen and Ava had moved out of college into a flat. In an attempt to rescue home-cooked food and lively conversation from extinction, they decided to revive the Oxford tradition of Sunday brunch. Good conversation required virtuoso conversationalists and many hours passed before the four of them – Connie had not yet left Oxford – settled on the guests. Then they turned their attention to the food. Their attachment to home-cooking owed more to Sebastian's luncheons in
Brideshead Revisited
than anything from direct experience, so it was not surprising they nominated originality as the key to success. With a double gas ring, a mini-fridge, neither oven nor grill, limited crockery and cutlery and extremely limited funds, originality was in greater abundance than anything else. It was Helen who finally arrived at the solution: a cheese fondue. It would meet the budget, it would be unique in the experience of their guests, and it was an ideal meal for conversation.

Fondues had been out of fashion for quite some time. Jack eventually found a fondue set tossed in with a herd of crock-pots in one of Oxford's second-hand shops; only the recipe book was missing. He should have left it to Ava and Helen to consult the cookery books at Blackwell's; instead he produced Harry.

He had met Harry in the Eastern Art and Archaeology section at the Ashmolean Museum. The two had got to talking over the Islamic utensils where Harry said he was looking for early forms of the corkscrew. He told Jack that he collected corkscrews and barbed wire, and it might have finished there, except he also mentioned his interest in cheese. Jack, already attuned to supplying as many of Ava's needs as possible, immediately suggested he and Harry leave Byzantium and adjourn for coffee. Within ten minutes, Jack was convinced that this odd, guileless man was the answer to Ava and Helen's fondue problems. So he made the introductions.

Harry provided an excellent recipe as well as the gruyère and emmental for the first fondue brunch. And that's where it should have ended. But he also turned up to the event uninvited, and once arrived he never left – apparently his plan all along. Years after Jack left Oxford, Ava revealed that the meeting at the Ashmolean had been no accident. Harry had long
wanted to meet her, and having devised, considered and ultimately abandoned several strategies to bring about an introduction, he had seized on her friendship with Jack. As for the earliest forms of the corkscrew, they dated to the nineteenth century: no corkscrews in Byzantium and Harry knew it. Harry was never the guileless innocent Jack had taken him to be. Then as now, Jack reluctantly conceded, Harry was a man with a profound self-interest and a will of iron to service it.

 

There comes a time in a life of intense and enduring emotion that it secretes a sort of chloroform. To break the pattern is to wake up under the anaesthetic and it is terrifying. Jack's love was under threat as he sat in Harry and Ava's home watching their perfect duet. She passed food, he poured wine; she went for another bottle, he uncorked it; he called her ‘Davey', she called him ‘Oak'. And all those fond nudges and casual caresses as they went about their hostly duties. And a shorthand communication of gestures and eye movements, with words used so sparingly they might be grains of caviar.

What about me? Jack was thinking. What about me? as he watched the two of them so easy together.

Sex was partly to blame. Never had he been able to imagine Ava and Harry in bed together – not simply because he didn't want to put Harry where he himself had so briefly been, rather he could not imagine the pale and flaccid Harry Guerin pumping his seed into anyone. Yet within weeks of the fondue brunch, Helen had reported that Harry was an overnight fixture at the flat.

Jack had been incredulous. ‘Surely not for sex.'

‘The walls are thin, Jack, paper thin. And believe me, they're not discussing Shakespeare.'

Jack refused to accept that aspect of their relationship lasted very long, and when in her letters Ava clearly referred to her bedroom as a separate space from Harry's, Jack found the proof he needed to relegate Harry to a marital twilight zone, a sexual no-man's land. But when he eliminated sex from the marriage, he tossed out all other intimacy as well.

There was no avoiding it now.

He tried to screen Harry out, to focus only on Ava, but she was strange to him. He did not doubt the truth of his Ava, the Ava of his thoughts and imaginings, nor did he doubt the reality of the woman who sat so close he could reach out and touch her. It was more that the two realities were fundamentally different, like the United States is different from Tanzania. As he tried to scramble out of his confusion, he found himself wondering how it might be to live without this love. He felt the possibility like a man losing his footing high above an abyss, a moment of doubt, a moment of falling, a mere flicker and then it was gone.

So make an effort, he told himself. There was a pause in the conversation while Ava passed around a platter of food.

‘I was reading an article the other day,' he began, ‘in which metaphor was described as the wild child of language.'

‘These are delicious,' Connie said, indicating some pastries. ‘What's in them?'

While Harry provided the recipe, Jack prepared his comments about metaphor, but he had no opportunity to speak. After the first recipe came another, then another; even Helen who never cooked was listening. And after recipes came a discussion of cars.

‘I can recommend a 1980 Volvo,' Helen said to Connie.

From cars they moved on to television, specifically a television series on contemporary philosophy and social life to be
hosted by Connie, a multinational production that after years of planning was finally looking as if it might receive the go-ahead.

‘There's every reason now to be optimistic,' Harry said, slapping Connie on the back. ‘After all, who better than you to make sense of these times?' – as if Harry would know anything about it. Although Connie, Jack noticed, didn't object.

The focus switched to Helen. She said the NOGA fellowship had come at just the right time for her. She needed a break from her usual schedule to take stock of recent trends. ‘Scientists don't control the applications of their work any more.'

‘They never did,' Connie said quickly.

Helen looked annoyed. She was, she said, enough of an idealist to believe he was wrong.

Jack, who already knew something of her predicament, reached out and put a hand on her arm. ‘Not much room for idealism in today's scientific world.'

She shook him off. ‘I think you're both wrong. Times have changed and we scientists need to change too. For a start, we need to ask more questions of the funding bodies.'

‘So what's the problem?' Ava asked.

Helen removed her glasses and dangled them between her fingers. She took a moment to collect her thoughts, then settled her gaze on Ava.

‘In research you put your mind to a task,' she began. ‘Your vision is narrowed by the particular problem you're exploring. The way ahead is clear.' Her hand rocked the glasses in a gentle pendulum. ‘While you're working on your problem it becomes the whole picture, and your goals, as against the goals others might see in your work, are the only ones that matter.
But they're not.' Her hand stilled, the glasses wilted. ‘It's not a simple matter of me and my bugs any more. It's not just about me and my science.'

Food-borne diseases, formerly the domain of scientists, epidemiologists and hygienists, were now of serious interest to politicians and the military.

‘Bioterrorism.' Helen shook her head slowly. ‘My work is being used for bioterrorism. It's unbelievable.' And she really looked as if she could not believe it.

‘What happened about eliminating shigella infections from refugee camps?' Ava asked.

‘For some years now, a good deal of scientific research has been funded through military-related companies or the military itself.' Helen sounded defeated. ‘Even research into vaccines is funded by the military.'

‘Including shigella?' Jack knew a shigella vaccine was the end-point of Helen's work.

‘Yes, including shigella.' Helen replaced her glasses, she looked to be on the verge of tears. ‘These funding bodies have insisted on complex ownership practices regarding any new science produced. Scientists rarely predict all the applications of their research,' and now her face relaxed into a smile, ‘which has led to some amazing and unexpected discoveries. But under the present funding arrangements, my research could easily be channelled into work on biological weapons.' She shrugged, ‘I'm faced with some difficult decisions.'

Harry said her NOGA fellowship was ideal for just this purpose. ‘And don't forget, there's plenty of help around. Just let me know if there's anything or anyone you need.'

Harry then turned to Jack, cocking his head in such a way that the light bounced off his baldness.

‘These troubled times have brought you back into the swim,' he said.

There are bald heads that are classical domes which concentrate the thoughts, others are globes of worldliness. Harry's baldness, Jack decided, was not of either kind. His head lacked hair and the skull thus bared lacked those interesting mounds that suggest wisdom and experience. Harry's head was big. His skull was naked. A numbskull, Jack thought, and stifled a laugh.

‘Well, Jack, what do you say about your new popularity?' Harry's voice was raised.

And Jack's humour evaporated. It was as if Harry were conducting the evening, conducting them all. Jack looked across at Ava. She was watching her husband with a smile on her face, gazing at him with unambiguous pride. This new Harry had an unnerving confidence entirely lacking in his younger self. This new Harry, it seemed to Jack, was accustomed to running the show.

4.

Jack was home by eleven. His flat was empty, the evening was empty, his life, if not yet empty, was draining fast. He poured himself a glass of wine and stood at the window, staring into the blackness. From the road outside came the swish of cars speeding people home to families and conversation and someone to sleep with. He stared at the glass until his own image forced itself into consciousness, then abruptly he turned away.

He had chosen the permanent glitter of the remembered past over an increasingly parsimonious present, but now he
was wondering if it was nothing more than the comfortable familiarity of the past that made it so attractive. Like nostalgia, that B-grade emotion. For everything about tonight had disappointed: the conversation, the humour, his best and oldest friends.

He refilled his glass and wandered into his study. This room, little changed from his university days, used to be his bedroom; this place where he now lived, was where he grew up; this flat used to be his parents' flat. Around the time he had left for New Zealand, his parents had moved down to Tasmania. Unsure whether they wanted to start again in a new place, they had rented out the flat. But several years later, drawn by what they described as the only truly radical community in Australia and the only location with a civilised climate, they decided to move to Tasmania permanently. In the same week that they put the flat on the market, the NOGA fellowship was offered to Jack. The flat was withdrawn from sale and Jack moved in. He bought some furniture, he stocked the kitchen drawers and cupboards, otherwise everything remained much as it was when he was growing up.

There was a flyer on his study wall advertising an anti-apartheid demonstration and next to it a ‘Sisterhood is Powerful' poster; above his desk was a picture of a blood-coloured mushroom cloud and the caption ‘One Nuclear Bomb Can Ruin Your Whole Day'. An old school tie hanging from the door handle was pinned with badges: ‘When this button melts we are in a nuclear accident'; ‘Seen one nuclear war you've seen them all'; ‘Who killed Karen Silkwood?'. If he were to flip through his notebooks and diaries of his university days, he would find references to debates, lectures, seminars, radical theatre, late-night readings, seasons of European films, and discussions with
an astonishing array of people. There was something intrinsically wonderful about those days when he and the others first met. Such a contrast with the bullish ordinariness of tonight.

Whenever Jack looked back to his university experience and compared it with today's student life, so much seemed to have changed – even friendship itself. Without computers and mobile phones, face-to-face communication ruled the day. He, Ava and Helen had started talking before their first classes, they talked between classes, they talked over lunch in the cafeteria. They talked at the pub in the evening, they talked as they ate supper, they talked long into the night. They trawled through hundreds of ideas across a multitude of subjects. He learned very quickly he would need to get over his shyness if he was to belong to this group; and similarly, a scientist like Helen had to read energetically outside her discipline to be a fully-fledged member.

And there was so much to read. Books were constantly passing between them: Sartre, de Beauvoir, Adorno and Barthes, Ginsberg, Rilke, Rimbaud, Plath, Orwell, Woolf. Lawrence Durrell's
Alexandria Quartet
assumed iconic status, as did Canetti's
Auto da Fé
. In the early hours of the morning alone in his room, Jack would find himself reading not only for his classes and assignments but for conversations in the days ahead.