Reunion (32 page)

Ava smiled and nodded.

Helen lowered her gaze and stood shaking her head through a long silence. ‘I can't believe you're asking me this, Ava,' she said at last. ‘I couldn't take – steal – materials from the lab.' There was neither sadness nor apology in her voice, if anything she sounded affronted. ‘If I were discovered taking restricted substances, taking them illegally, my career would be finished. And even if I could get away with it, I wouldn't do it. It's entirely at odds with my professional ethics.'

With her comprehension not reliable these days, Ava did not at first trust what she was hearing. But Helen quickly dispelled any doubt.

‘I couldn't steal poisons for you,' she said. ‘It'd be professional suicide. I'm sorry, Ava,' and she put her arms around her. ‘I hate what's happening to you and I'd do anything to help, but not this.'

Ava could understand Harry and Jack: they couldn't assist because they loved her too much. But Helen refused to help because she loved science too much. She shook herself out of Helen's embrace. She was alone, entirely alone.

3.

When winter finally arrived it did so with a fanfare from Antarctica. July was cold and August was freezing, but the
crisp icy days Ava had always loved had come too late. Harry bought her pots of cyclamen bursting with bright, beautiful flowers. Too late, she thought, too late, and left them to die. Two weeks passed until she could bear it no longer, the long slender stems drooping over the sides of the pots, the flowers shrivelling into morbid stickiness. She watered the plants, she fed them, she hovered over them and protected them, and all the while she longed for someone to do the same for her.

She was making plans slowly, but then everything was slow these days. And while she made her plans she had her consolations. Several times a day she would slip into her semi-conscious limbo state, so safe and silent and trustworthy. And she gave herself over to Harry, who looked after her lovingly and efficiently. He was working at home a good deal more in order to care for her and his ministrations helped them both.

And art was another of her consolations.

‘If I were to have collected anything,' she said to Jack at a recent exhibition of contemporary Australian art, ‘it would have been paintings.'

They were standing in front of a small canvas, a shadowy cityscape of tall straight-edged buildings and what looked like a double-storey freeway ramp on one side. ‘And look there,' she said, pointing to the window of one of the buildings. In the painted gloom was a human figure watching the scene beyond the window.

‘That's me these days. Silently watching.'

And Jack was her final consolation. Three mornings a week he turned up just before ten as Harry was about to leave for the office. He relayed the latest gossip, he read to her from the newspaper, he told her stories she did not always remember from their shared past. When the weather was fine they would
go for a walk, sometimes they went out for an early lunch; often they visited galleries and once a week he arrived with food and cooked the evening meal for her and Harry.

Jack these days had a future far more lavish than his past. As well as his essays, he was writing shorter articles on a range of topics: refugees and race riots, political leadership and personal expediency, the compromises of democracy, the threat to creativity in today's cultural climate. The pleasures of regular completions, he told Ava, were so much greater than the fanfare every few years that accompanied a book.

Even his Islam specialty had taken a new direction following a forum where he had shared the stage with a young Australian-born Muslim. This woman, a lawyer, had later contacted him with the suggestion of a series of public conversations. ‘Not that you Western liberals have done much for us,' she had been quick to add. But a male and a female, a Muslim and a Jew, would, she believed, lend distinctive and interesting flavours to their intellectual positions. But it was what they shared, she said, their liberal, moderate stance, that would prove to be their greatest strength. ‘Where we discuss and argue, where we employ reason and compromise, those with more extreme views would simply attack each other – if, that is, they were to talk at all.'

The first of the discussions had attracted a large and diverse audience – although not Harry, Jack told Ava. ‘It seems I'm still not producing the work he and NOGA expect of me.' Ava ignored the comment as she had always ignored these asides about her husband. Two more discussions were planned with the woman lawyer and a follow-up series of articles under their joint authorship.

And Jack was playing his guitar again.

‘I'm so pleased about your music,' Ava said one day as they sat at the kitchen bench eating a sandwich lunch.

He smiled. ‘Words and music, two of my great loves.'

And welling up from goodness knows where in her brain: ‘The two great imperishables.'

‘You truly believe that the best of words and music endure?' Jack asked. And when she nodded, ‘And you want that for your own work?'

She took her time to put the words together properly. ‘It's what any writer would want,' she said finally. ‘I'll be gone, but my books will live on.'

It was Ava's suggestion he bring his guitar when he came to visit. His playing and singing were restful, she said, but at the same time she felt her senses were exercised.

‘When you play,' she said, ‘I'm reminded there's still some of my old self left.'

Often she would toss off these references to what was happening to her, and Jack would never know how to respond. Not even in his private thoughts could he consider the course of this illness, although looking at her it was easy to forget she was sick. She was still the most beautiful woman he knew. She did not look particularly tired, she did not look particularly pale, she was thinner, but her loosely flowing clothes helped camouflage this. When he questioned her weight loss, she said it would be masochistic to feed what was fast being wrecked.

So much time the two of them spent alone, and with all the sharp yearnings soft now like an old comforter, Jack found himself properly enjoying her company. She called herself a half-strength person and would refer to the old Ava as the real Ava – ‘not this ruin', yet he was seeing her more fully than ever before. It was as if the two of them had finally settled into each
other. And yet he knew how much she was suffering. She hated what she was becoming, she hated what was left. Even when she spoke like Ava of old she felt no pleasure.

‘A sentence or two in the old mould just grinds in the losses more harshly,' she said. ‘I'm taunted by my used-to-be self.'

For him it was all too easy to forget what was happening to her, and then something would wrench him back.

‘Read me your latest article,' she said one morning.

What she really meant was: Read it to me, Jack, because I can't manage it myself.

He recalled her question of several months ago, whether he could help a sick friend end her life. He tried not to think how he would answer now. He hoped she would not ask.

1.

Ava had always been attached to weather, not simply as background to the movements of a day but as connective tissue to mood, and today was perfect – early spring, cool with a white sun and a crisp wind. Standing at the long window of her study she gazed down at the courtyard, observing it as one might a masterpiece. Leaves still yellow from last autumn lay in an impressionistic spotting on the dark garden beds. Along the shady boundary her azaleas all in flower were soft like a Renoir. Scattered across the paving were pots of colour, polyanthus and cinerarias just starting to bloom, and Harry's cyclamens still going strong. She observed the scene with a pleasing appreciation as if she had all the time in the world. Rituals seemed appropriate at a time like this.

For some inexplicable reason it had to be done right, inexplicable because she was an atheist, although an increasingly shoddy one. With the passage of years she had found it impossible to ignore those unheralded blood-flushing intrusions of a presence or presences beyond earshot of rationality. That she was about to discover the truth brought her no satisfaction: it
was a ridiculously high price to prove a belief. Yet the conviction it had to be done right remained, not in the sense of pulling it off, she was sure she would, but observing a certain form, a certain reverence for the life that had been filched from her. The right room, her desk and papers, her books, the cool weather, her old cashmere jumper, even the right view. The last view of life – it sounded so melodramatic, but perhaps everything about death has a touch of melodrama, even the fading of a nonagenarian in bed, the shutting down of ancient organs, the lengthening pauses between breaths, the tiny splutters, the sudden stillness, the absolute end.

Through the years and several different Oxford dwellings Ava had always set up home in her study, each study arranged identically despite the rooms being larger or smaller, flanked by many windows or few, hot rooms, cold rooms, silent or noisy. Always there was her desk and chair, the stack of three drawers, her books installed in their usual configuration, the filing cabinet, the chipped mug she used as a pen holder, the same photos on display, the corkboard muffled with old notes, the mask from Venice, a stone frog the origin of which she had now forgotten.

And in a similar way she experienced home in her garden. Sometimes the garden had been just a cluster of pots or a window box, once there was the full regalia including a lawn, and these past few years this small courtyard garden. She wondered what would happen here after she was gone. Harry was no gardener, and besides, the house was too big for one person. Who might live here next? And would they preserve her garden? As a legacy there would be her books, yet the garden as an expression of self was a legacy too, an inexorably pleasurable one.

‘Inexorably pleasurable.' She repeated the phrase aloud. How odd it sounded. And repeated it again and again until all she heard was a collection of sounds divorced from any meaning.

She turned away from the window as if that would remove the confusion, her poor brain struggling in the disease's oily spill. For years she had pondered the notion of meaning without language; now she knew all about it but lacked the words to explain it.

There were times when she really could not believe what was happening and it would take a doctor's appointment or the withered stump of a once-thriving recollection, or a book open but making no sense to confront her with the hard facts: she was losing her mind, there would be no repeal, she had a job to do. But mostly she had stayed on track, driven by a robust and unmerciful terror. She'd had to labour through each stage alone, making lists to fill in for her crippled memory and discarding them when each item had been crossed off. She laboured secretly and to be honest, resentfully, for she should not have to do this alone. But the major resentment was always of the thing itself: she should not have to do this at all.

The disease had invaded her like termites; she touched, tasted and smelled the useless dust of decaying cortex. And while she was more scared than she had ever been in her life, scared of killing herself, scared she might bungle it, she was adamantly not afraid of death itself. She had always believed that death was as fundamental to being human as birth and maturation. It should have made the act of killing herself easier, but nothing made it any easier.

She sat down at her desk and checked her last list. All the items were ticked off, she tore the paper up and threw it in the bin. She had been nagged by those common sayings, the need
‘to settle your affairs', ‘to put your house in order'; she expected she had used such expressions herself. But death fills the whole screen, or rather the act of ending life does. Such intervention into the natural course of things demands all your logic, all your attention; suddenly she was required to sky-dive, she who had never cared for heights. It was too much to expect she would put her affairs in order as well.

She cleared a space on her desk and lined up her three pens parallel but not touching, her three fountain pens marking the three major journeys of her life. On the left, the full-bodied, red-orange Parker Duofold from Stephen, nearly eighty years old and still her favourite – a graduation gift, Harry believed, from one of her high school teachers; in the middle, the silver modernity of Fleur's Lamy; and on the right, the elegant black and gold Waterman from Harry.

He had been so happy when she asked him for a fountain pen. It was her first birthday back in Australia, Fleur was in England; the past, so he believed, had finally been relegated to the past. And how hard she had tried to work with his pen. But despite its elegance it was never as smooth nor as comfortable as Stephen's Big Red. As for Fleur's Lamy, like Fleur herself, it had never been a good fit. Eventually she returned to Stephen's pen, although she kept the truth from Harry.

Gifts come bursting with attachments. Harry's Waterman was bigger with hopes and expectations than ever could be squeezed inside the cap and barrel of a pen. Yet when she settled on Stephen's pen she was choosing an object not a person. A writer's tools are few, you use whatever helps the work. With Stephen's pen there was an ease of flow, a lovely stretch of sinew as she wrote, the wrist seamless with hand and arm and not the stiffened pivot it became with Harry's pen.
And there was the weight of history in Stephen's Duofold, the engraving on the barrel, JES 1928, in Old English lettering and a queer privilege to use this pen that had belonged to John Edgar Smith or Jane Elizabeth Scott or the more exotic Jacqueline Eve Slonim. A writer uses whatever works best and it is quite separate from the character of the giver. For Stephen was never more comfortable than Harry, although, like the pen, his advantages had endured. Her life would have been very different without him.

Ms Bryant could put passion into growing potatoes
.

The sentence fell into her mind. A reviewer? A publisher's grab? Where on earth had it come from? And why now?

Ava put the Lamy in a drawer. Stephen's pen she slipped into its felt pouch and placed on the shelf containing her favourite books. She took a sheet of paper and using his Waterman she wrote to Harry. It took just a moment – no noble world-worn insights, no humorous asides putting death in its place; she had finished her deliberations long ago and now just wanted it over.

She shuffled through the stack of envelopes she and Harry had collected from hotels around the world and settled on one from Paris, the small family-owned hotel on the Left Bank where they had spent their honeymoon and to which they had returned many times since. One of their special places, it was off the tourist track but so perfectly located that with a precarious leaning from the tiny wrought-iron balcony of their room they could see the flying buttresses of Notre Dame.

She propped the letter against her computer where Harry couldn't miss it. She had cleaned out her email and computer files weeks ago just in case she lost the ability. As it happened it had not been necessary, but the disease was so sly, so
well-armed with dirty tricks, she felt she had to be prepared. She had always rejected anthropomorphism but it didn't matter now. This disease was a terrorist, a monster, a psychopath. This disease was a murderer.

She checked her watch, half past ten, still plenty of time for a leisurely amble to the end and no possibility Harry would return early. He had a day of meetings following his ten o'clock session with the therapist – the same man who had been assigned to them when the disease had first been recognised. ‘To help you get through this,' he had said at the first and only session Ava attended.

‘Seems to me the disease will take me through with or without your help,' Ava had remarked.

The counsellor had countered with a speech about adjustment issues. But Ava was still functioning well enough to argue that adjustment to a degenerative condition seemed to be an exercise in futility. ‘You make your adjustment only to discover the horse has bolted, or the drama has shifted, or the whole bloody landscape has changed.' She paused to swallow her distress before adding, ‘Choose your own metaphor.'

The counsellor had then moved on to grief and anger issues, but Ava had never unpicked herself in front of a stranger and was not about to start. In fact she didn't want to unburden herself to anyone, all she wanted at that particular time was knowledge. So after the first meeting she opted for the library and the internet and left the counsellor to Harry.

After she was gone, Ava suspected Harry would continue his sessions, he and the therapist passing a weekly hour together in the rich swirl of life's offerings. And how it irked her. The future was like fiction, so she had always thought, a ream of blank pages waiting to be filled. The books changed,
the scenery changed, the characters in life and fiction changed, but whether teetering on the brink of a new novel or a new city or a new relationship she would experience wonder. Not to have a future. It was the greatest of her resentments.

She left her study and crossed the courtyard to the house. She tucked her hair into a clasp, applied fresh lipstick and went to the toilet. For the last wash of her hands she used a small tablet of pure lavender soap, there was no point in saving it any longer. Finally she dabbed on some Je Reviens, not out of any macabre irony but because she liked the scent. Then she took a last walk through the house.

For weeks she had been rehearsing this last hour, for not knowing what else the disease would destroy she had to be sure she could do what was required. And again she was struck by how unfair it was that of all the wounds to shut her down this disease had fed on her words. If there was a God, he was a cruel bastard, or given the play of her life, a vengeful one. But then happiness is always part angel and part debt-collector.

Had she faced death courageously? Not particularly, although courage did not really figure in this. But anger did, and an envy sharp as thorns, and a sense of deprivation that caught like a vice. And she would find herself arguing with something or someone: What have I done, to deserve this? What right have you to mete this out to me? Bloody death and far too soon, bloody disease without a cure. For if the lesions, now quite clear on the scans, had occurred in her breast or uterus or lung or liver, if they had occurred practically anywhere but in her brain, she would have fought and won and lived for years to come.

She was told by one expert, who seemed to know everything except how to cure her, that anger was bad for her. These
doctors with all their advice were useless. And the one thing they can do they refuse. ‘I'm trained to save lives,' the neurologist said when she asked him to save her from a long and protracted dying. And how could she lecture him about the invisible seam connecting life to death, how life is more than a simple drawing of breath, how life without the capacity to remember is no life at all? How could she explain this with her language in tatters and the doctor so self-righteous in all his damned ignorance?

She collects Valium, water, a glass and her favourite single malt and returns to the study. She takes from the bottom drawer of her filing cabinet a plastic bag with an elastic collar – not her choice, but what else is available when barbiturates are not? She positions herself on the carpet near the window and swallows fifty milligrams of Valium with a glass of well-diluted Cardhu, enough of both to put her out but not so much to make her sick. She takes in a last view of her garden. It shimmers through the glass. Her head is light her whole body is levitating. She opens her collected Eliot to
Prufrock
and reads or recites or remembers – whatever she is doing it is sweetly comforting – and nestles into the yellow fog. What will her life be measured in? Why did Eliot choose coffee spoons not teaspoons? And pulls the plastic bag over her head. She checks the pillow – no time, eyelids closing, impossible to stay awake, such relief to sink back, the sound of her own breathing, and rustling, a rustling of trees, trees in her study and sinking into the pillow down and down.

And suddenly she's awake. She's tearing at the plastic, she's tearing it from her face. She defies the Valium, she defies the scotch, she defies the desire to die. She's tearing at the plastic. Can't help herself. Her body rears up, it's fighting carbon
dioxide. The bag is in her hands, she shoves it in the drawer, she grabs the note and shoves that in the drawer too. No one must know, no one must suspect. She drags herself to her feet, she drags herself down the stairs, she drags herself across the courtyard into the house. She staggers past the couch, she staggers past Harry's room, at last she reaches her own bedroom. And even as she is falling asleep she is furious at being reduced to a plastic bag over her head, furious at her failure to bring it off, furious at having to cover her tracks. There's no privacy when you're ill. And there's no bloody justice.

2.

There's a mysterious, not-quite-conscious dynamic that develops between people in a close and long marriage. Exaggerated gestures, twitchy eye contact, a particular choice of words that would be irrelevant to other people are significant to a partner. And there was something about Ava this morning that is haunting Harry, just a scraping at the edge of consciousness while he was at his counselling session but far stronger now.