Reunion (39 page)

Minnie asked how long he planned to stay in Melbourne.

‘Just a short time.' His accent was English, his expression grim. This, Minnie decided, was no holiday visit.

That evening Ava had knocked on her door. She would prefer, she said, to keep her friend's visit private. ‘I would prefer you not to mention him to anyone. Ever.'

The urgency of the request was unmistakable. Minnie quickly reassured her: she would tell no one.

‘Who is he?' she had asked.

And Ava, who had talked freely about secret lovers and unsatisfactory parents, would say no more about the stranger than he was her oldest friend.

That evening was the last time Minnie saw Ava alone, but it was different for the Englishman. Minnie observed him with Ava several times during that last week, including the day she died. She saw how solicitous he was, taking her elbow as they
crossed the street, putting his arm around her as they stopped to admire some flowers. And once in the park she glimpsed the two of them sitting on a seat holding hands.

Minnie had searched the crowds at the funeral but this man, the first among her friends, was not there. Nor was he at the pub afterwards. Jack was squirming with the idea of Ava's suicide, yet surely he was grateful she had been saved from what would have been a prolonged and obscene dying.

She turned towards Jack. His face was overlaid with anguish and without thinking she moved closer and put her arm about his shoulders. She felt immediately his sinking against her.

 

They both smelled the smoke at the same time.

‘I think it's coming from Ava's place,' Jack said, standing up.

They ran down the garden path, turning briefly at the gate to look next door. Smoke was billowing into the sky from behind the house.

A terrible premonition of disaster struck Jack: poor Harry who wasn't managing, who hadn't been managing ever since Ava died. ‘I can't imagine a future without her,' Harry had said over and over again.

Jack banged on the front door and when there was no answer he threw himself against it. The lock was solid. He and Minnie ran round to the lane. The courtyard gate was bolted. Smoke was thick in the air.

‘Harry,' shouted Jack. ‘Harry, are you there?'

He heaved against the gate, and just as Minnie was about to hoist herself over the fence, the gate opened and Harry stood before them. His feet were bare, his arms akimbo, he was clad only in filthy singlet and underpants, he reeked of sweat. The hairless skull, the face and neck, his arms and legs, all were
streaked with ash; a lick of soot had extended one side of his moustache. His face was off balance, all of him was off balance.

He looked at Jack. ‘Is it six-thirty already?' And glanced at his watch. ‘I quite lost track of time.'

3.

There was someone else, but then there had always been someone else. Harry scrunches up the telephone bill and shoves it into his pocket. He slams down the lid of Ava's laptop and flees her study. She has poisoned everything; every one of their homes, every holiday they've taken, every special weekend, their picnic meals, their private jokes, their holding hands at the movies, all their rituals. She has poisoned their marriage. Even if it were possible he would not give her a chance to explain. The loving husband who tolerated the string of affairs, who stepped aside for publishers and journalists, who stood in line behind readers and besotted fans, who waited patiently for her to emerge from her latest novel, this loving husband would give her an opportunity to explain. But not Harry Guerin whom she has hurt so convincingly that every breath has become strange.

He strides into her bedroom to the smoothly made bed where he has spent so much time these past thirty-eight days, the bed where she did not kill herself – thinking of him, he believed, she killed herself outside the house. Thinking of him, what a laugh! His wife never thought of him. Perhaps it was this person, this unknown man who considered Harry's feelings when helping Ava decide where to die. And why is he so sure it
was a man? Because except for Fleur it always was a man. And how does he know the man was with her? He just knows he was there, holding her hand and stroking her face, ‘I'm here, I'm here,' uttered over and over in a voice not Harry's own.

The telephone bill is hard against his thigh, he rams it deeper into his pocket, and not realising what he is driven to do until he has already begun he grabs bottles and creams from her dressing table, ornaments from the chest, knickknacks from the side table and hurls them at the bed. Perfumes scatter and rise in an unbearably sweet swill. He goes to the laundry, riffles the cupboards, returns with a full bottle of methylated spirits. He tips it in a tidy stream up and down the bed. Foul and pungent it swallows her scents but not the stench of her wrongdoing. He runs to the shed and returns with a small bag of blood and bone and a bottle of liquid plant food. The plant food stinks of rotten fish, he drips it over the bed, drip drip drip, he is as determined and delicate as a painter. He punctures the bag of blood and bone. The dry plastic bursts, the contents splatter his shoes, manure catches in the weave of his trousers; he swears as he tosses the useless bag on the bed. He removes his shoes and trousers and throws them on the stinking mess too.

She made him do this, she who always had someone else.

He walks to her clothes chest, steadies himself before opening the top drawer. A gust of her lily-of-the-valley perfume is quickly swallowed by the stench from the bed. He yanks on the drawer, carries it through the living room to the courtyard. He tips bras, knickers, socks and singlets onto the paving. He nudges the pile with his bare foot. This last man of hers, he knew these private clothes. And at the end did he lift her jumper, did he lay his trespassing hand on her breast? Did this
stranger do what her husband did not, a man she never put first?

He returns to her bedroom for the second drawer. It lurches against the door-frame and grazes his hand. Out in the courtyard he tips jumpers to the ground, comes back inside for the third and fourth drawers. Then to her cupboard. He tears clothes from hangers and flings them onto the pile, makes several trips back and forth until the cupboard is empty. The paving has disappeared beneath his wife's clothes, all her pretty colours twisting in the dust.

Up the stairs to her study. And now he stares at the patch of floor, now he sees her lying there with someone else alongside, someone touching her, murmuring last words of comfort and love – her husband's words if she had given him the chance. He walks across the room, he takes three smallish steps from her head to her feet. He turns around. Three small steps from her feet to her head. He marches the length of her body. He tramples her from head to toe.

Next her papers. Letters, notes, cards, jottings, short stories, beginnings of novels, essay drafts, newspaper articles, all the personal papers destined for the Bryant archive at the State Library he hurls out her study window. The breeze has dropped and the papers fall tidily to the courtyard below. In bundle after bundle, his wife's paper life falls without sound onto the cushion of clothes. He grabs her laptop and yanks it free from its extensions. Why should he waste any more of his life on his wife's betrayals? He doesn't want to track this SW down; he just wants to destroy the bastard. He tucks the laptop under one arm and the manuscript of her final novel under the other – Ava's last betrayal along with her last novel, it's a tidy symmetry – and descends to the courtyard. He puts the
computer to one side and walks over to the empty spa tub. He fans the pages of the novel and then lets go. The manuscript falls with a resounding slap. He stands on the rim looking down at his wife's last work, the familiar typescript riddled with the familiar handwriting.

Into the kitchen he goes for her special tapers from the Bloomsbury whisky shop. There are seventeen left and he intends to use the lot. Back outside he grabs the garden rake, scrapes aside some papers and rummages among her clothes until he finds two of her filmy shirts. He picks them up with the tines of the rake and shakes them into the tub. He selects some underwear and summery trousers in the same way. Carefully, he doesn't want to injure himself, he steps down to the bench inside the tub and reaches for a page of her last novel. He twists it into a candle and lights it. The paper flares and he touches it to other pages in the tub. The paper burns, the shirts curl and shrivel, he watches them disintegrate in the flames. To and from the tub he walks, adding clothes and paper in an easy rhythm, and when there is a thick bed of ashes he tosses in her computer. He adds more paper, he adds more clothes. The breeze strengthens, it lifts the smoke from the courtyard. Harry breathes easily, he feeds the flames. He burns all he has left of his wife.

 

‘Is it six-thirty already?' And turning to Minnie, ‘Are you joining us for dinner?' It was not an invitation. Minnie leaned in close to Jack as if to speak, then gave his hand a squeeze and left them alone.

Jack stared beyond Harry to the courtyard matted with paper and Ava's clothes. Flames reared in the hot tub.

‘Have you gone quite mad?'

Harry shook his head. ‘Not at all. Just tidying up. Moving on.'

There was no reading his face, not a flicker of emotion. Wary and watchful, Jack followed him into the house. Harry pointed to a bottle of wine on the sideboard. ‘Help yourself while I clean up.'

When Harry reappeared he had returned to his old self, dressed in his usual dark trousers, pale blue shirt and lace-up brogues; the fringe of hair below the shining pate was wet and smooth; he had shaved. He poured himself a drink and sat in one of the armchairs. He was absolutely calm. But Jack knew this was a mood not to be trusted. He had traced the terrible smell to Ava's bedroom. Poor Harry had descended into a grief-fuelled vandalism.

The photographs of Ava were missing from the mantelpiece, all her ornaments were gone, even the Tiki he had sent her from New Zealand was no longer hanging on the wall. Harry had worked hard to clear his wife out. The poor man must be mad with grief.

‘Did you know?' Harry's accusing voice entered the silence.

‘Know what?'

‘There was someone else.' Harry spoke in the same soft accusing voice. ‘At the end there was someone else.'

Of all Harry might have said, Jack would never have anticipated this. He did not hesitate. ‘There wasn't, Harry, there was no one else.' And then remembering, ‘You don't mean Fleur? That visit she made months ago?'

Harry was dismissive: of course he didn't mean Fleur. ‘No, this someone else was a man.' He looked hard at Jack. ‘You really didn't know?'

Jack shook his head. And if there had been, he was sure Ava would have told him. ‘You're upset Harry. It's been terrible for you, but there was no one else.'

Harry remained silent. It was immaterial now whether Jack knew. It was immaterial who this last man was; they could all choke on their secrets for all he cared.

‘I finished the introduction to her first novel today,' Jack said, in an attempt to change the subject.

Harry snorted. ‘You've wasted your time.'

 

There was no meal that night. Jack fought Harry, he fought him on every front. But Harry was intransigent: there would be no new editions, no seventh novel, no sifting though her unpublished writings for a posthumous collection of shorter pieces. There would be no profiles on Ava, no documentaries, and when the outstanding film options on her novels expired they would not be renewed.

 

Over the next several weeks Jack tried to change Harry's mind. He tried reason, he tried pleading, he absolutely refused to countenance that Ava had someone else at the end.

‘You were the centre of her life, Harry. Others came and went, but the only love that lasted was for you.'

Harry would not be persuaded. ‘Her future for my past. It's a fair deal.'

Jack sought Connie's help, but Connie accused him of over-reacting – ‘Your habitual response, incidentally, when it concerns Ava,' he said. ‘Harry's upset, he's grieving. He'll come to his senses.'

Connie hadn't seen Harry wild and filthy and burning up Ava's life. Jack ignored Connie's needling of him and begged him to speak to Harry. But Connie refused.

‘I have to get my priorities straight,' he said to Jack about a month after the fire. As they talked, Connie was walking
through his house gathering up clothes, books and other paraphernalia and dropping them into open cartons.

Connie was returning to America. Linda still insisted their marriage was over, but he had detected a softening in her attitude, or so he had told Jack. Jack was sceptical, but Connie hoped with a desire that surprised him that his marriage was salvageable. He had changed – nothing he wanted to discuss with Jack, he doubted that he could, it was a change that rendered him strange to himself. He had tried to attach it to the specific case of Sara. But while her theft of his TV show counted among the worst of betrayals he was not unhappy to see her go.

The woman he wanted was Linda. And even more surprising, he wanted to be settled. He wanted to know he and Linda would be together next year and the year after and the year after that. And if he projected himself a decade ahead, as much as it shocked him, he still wanted to be with Linda. In truth he would also like to maintain the girlfriends, but he realised it was either Linda or the girlfriends. And even if both had been possible, there had been another disturbing change: his spirit was as willing as ever for the affairs, his body too, but a certain lightness of temperament was required to live as he had lived. Now his old temperament felt stretched and threadbare. It simply did not satisfy any more.

Two weeks ago he had written to Linda. He had written by hand, not just for the added pith of a proper letter, but emails were too easy to skim and delete. He acknowledged all she had put up with over the years. And he apologised. It was not just a generalised ‘I'm sorry'; he apologised for his neglect, for his affairs, for demeaning her and their marriage, for taking advantage of her, for not being a more reliable and responsible father and a half a dozen more transgressions. He finished the
letter with a statement of his love,
a declaration of my love
was how he expressed it. And when he returned home from the post office he booked his flight to the US – not because he was so confident Linda would take him back, but to allow for face-to-face persuasion should his letter fail. A few days ago she had sent a brief email acknowledging receipt of his letter. By return email he told her he was coming home. Last night he received another email: she was prepared to talk. He immediately arranged to see her at the end of the week.