Reunion (6 page)

You must change your life
, Rilke, one of her favourite poets had written, and Ava had taken him at his word. In steady and sometimes reluctant increments she had transformed herself from an hereditary shopgirl with a confined future to a university student and woman of the world. Everything she had hoped for had eventuated: university in Melbourne and then Oxford, a long, loving marriage, friends, travel, excitements and the only career she had ever wanted. And it had all started here.

‘My university,' she thought, as she entered the campus and made her way towards the union building. ‘My university,' she had thought all those years ago when first she entered here as a student.

It was early March and very hot her first day of university. She had entered by the same gate she had used today, and had lingered at the edge of the quadrangle in front of the union building. She remembered so clearly the moment with its surprising realisation: home was familiar and yet she had been burdened with self-consciousness, while here, where everything was new, she was brimming with comfortable anonymity. As she stood in the swelling heat on her first day of university, she realised that this levity, this ravishment, was happiness.

She had walked to the campus alone, better to stamp the experience on herself. The heat for once had not bothered her, softened as it was by the old European trees. The air, she remembered, was juiced with fresh-mown grass. She had strolled towards the union building, past the university bookshop packed with students, all the buildings so massive and solid, weighted by age and accumulated knowledge, or so she
liked to think, and such a contrast to the squalid portable classrooms of her high school. She passed from the heat of the day into the cool of the law faculty cloisters and there found herself in as foreign a place as any of Europe's ancient universities. Overhead were Gothic spines, the slabs of stone beneath her feet were worn smoothly concave, her sandals slapped with an other-worldly echo. Yet foreign as it was, she knew she belonged here, in these cloisters, at this university, surrounded by people she wanted to know, and all of them intellectuals – how she loved the subversive curl of that word. This university would truly be her Alma Mater, and a far more bounteous mother than the one biology had allocated to her.

 

You must change your life
.

Some people pull themselves up by the bootstraps, Ava had used her brains. Every step of the way the emerging Ava had been forced to hack away at the life she had inherited. By the time she began university, she had shed everything from her background except her name.

Ava. After Ava Gardner, whom Meryl Bryant had glimpsed during the filming of
On the Beach
, an event that had marked a high point in an otherwise flaccid life. When Meryl found she was pregnant, it was ordained that if the baby were a girl she would be called Ava. The choice of name was Meryl's single attempt to love her daughter. But while language can deceive, cajole, distort, convince, disguise, seduce, a single word, a single name cannot produce miracles.

Hollywood Ava might easily have overshadowed Australian Ava, but instead, the circumstances of young Ava's naming persuaded her that deep down her mother really did love her, and it fuelled the driving passion of her childhood: to extract
that love. Later, when she realised there was no love and no effort of hers could conjure it up, the circumstances of her naming shaped Ava's desire to escape. Ava Gardner had famously described Melbourne as an ideal place to make a film about the end of the world. She had been desperate to leave, so too was her Australian namesake.

During the stiff pallid years of childhood, Ava had no conception of her future and this frightened her, but she was drawn to the idea of destiny and allowed her imagination to play through a range of attractive futures. What remained indisputable was that like the ugly duckling she had been plopped into the wrong pool. As for the right pool, the right family, it was not so easy to define; indeed, as the years passed and her mother's indifference became evermore entrenched, Ava had a sense she was not made for any family. Or perhaps it was more fundamental: she simply was not suited to childhood.

It took Ava most of her youth to learn that no matter how well behaved you are and no matter how helpful, if your mother has decided she doesn't want you it is well-nigh impossible to change her mind. Meryl Bryant never actually said Ava had wrecked her life but she made it clear she believed this to be the case. She insisted she would have managed with only one child, particularly as Timmy was such a love. But this second child, this Ava, who would never have been conceived if not for an alcohol-soaked mistake after a party when she and Bob had tumbled into bed together, this child she was carrying when Bob walked out never to return, this child made life an impossible burden.

Ava's childhood was a shabby affair for both mother and daughter. When the mother was too cold or the home too hostile, Ava would escape to the streets. But there's nowhere to
take your confusions and disappointments in the suburbs, no hiding places where you can dream of a better life, no crowded streets in which to lose yourself, no warm nooks in which to read without disturbance. A civic centre that included a library was built when Ava was ten and this supplied a welcome bolt hole, but the suburban streets always condemned her just as much as her family. She did not dare complain, after all, she was fed and clothed, she had a roof over her head, she received gifts for her birthday and at Christmas. But her mother and brother resented her, and despite her efforts to be useful to them, they were not interested in her help, they were not interested in her.

Ava knew that come sixteen her mother expected her to leave school and start work. Other bright girls opted for nursing with its learning on the job and accommodation in the nurses' home. But just as Ava could not see herself as the shopgirl her mother had been, neither could she see herself as a nurse, not even as a means to an end. And the end? To live overseas and be a writer. She needed to finish school and she needed to find a way of paying her mother rent and board while she did. The way she chose would have led many people to condemn her if they'd ever found out, although she always knew they would have condemned Stephen a great deal more.

She kept Stephen secret and she kept her ambitions secret, for to reveal them, she believed, would spoil them. But even with a major ambition finally realised, the start of university and the happiest day of her life, she was aware of a drag on her heart as natural and permanent as the heartbeat itself: that she would grab her mother's affection without a moment's hesitation should it ever be offered. She would observe mothers smoothing their child's hair or wiping a smudge from a young
cheek. She would see them rolling up their child's sleeves before play or reaching for a small hand before crossing a street. She would notice all these small motherly gestures that no one notices because they are so small and normal, and could not ever remember her own mother doing such things for her. But she missed them, and she wanted her mother still. She nursed this irrational desire like a punch-drunk fighter who still believes the title will be his; it was her burden and it refused to be wished away.

That first day of university she had arrived early, and with ample time to enrol she had wandered through the campus before returning to the quad outside the union building and a grassy patch in the shade of one of the old trees. The heat was filtered by a light breeze; she shuffled against the bark until she found a smooth hollow, then rummaged in her bag for her copy of Rilke – this was a day deserving of ritual – and opened the book to ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo'. She lit a cigarette, and hidden behind her sunglasses she recited the poem silently by heart.

You must change your life.

And so she had. With a hefty swag of unrequited longing and sufficient knock-backs for a lifetime, she intended to pack up her past and shove it out of sight. Don't be a masochist, reason insisted in her sweet firm voice, just turn your back and walk away; that R.D. Laing and David Cooper had announced the death of the family reinforced her decision. Life with her family had been like an interminable stay at a railway station, waiting for that special train to whisk her home. It would never come, it was never going to come. And should she ever be tempted to linger a little longer, there was the final evidence: Meryl had gone shopping the day her daughter left home, she had not even said a proper goodbye.

Nostalgia and love fertilise childhood's attractions, Ava reminded herself, and she had recourse to neither. She would leave childhood behind and stream into the future without the sting of disapproval to slow her down.

She leafed through to Rilke's
First Duino Elegy
and read the familiar words. Every angel
is
terrifying – Rilke hit the jackpot there. Hide, reveal, do whatever seems best but always take the plunge. Ava longed for angels, though she was quite prepared to take the devils as well. And at that moment, right on cue, Stephen appeared from the union building. She watched him stroll towards her, watched his deliberate slowness, his careful nonchalance, the delicate stretch of his own pleasure. Stephen, her own angel–devil. As he drew closer, his greying hair lifting in the breeze, his large frame slightly stooped and, yes, endearing, it occurred to her that freedom, like ambition, always requires some degree of secrecy. Stephen had spelled freedom to her, he still did, and while there was a price to pay it had always struck her as a bargain.

And here he is, smiling and greeting her – and uneasy; she senses his nervousness as he meets her in this public place. He refuses the invitation to join her on the grass: forty-something university staff are wary of grass-sitting with students fresh out of school. Yet still he lingers.

He indicates her Rilke. ‘One of the first books I gave you.'

She opens to the dedication: Stephen's name crossed through with a single stroke and written beneath in his neat familiar script:
For Ava, from my library to yours
. It was an early gift; later he would never have been so careless as to leave his full name. But then later there was more to be careful about.

In the unaccustomed awkwardness between them, Ava finds herself searching for words. Usually there's so much to talk
about: books, politics, theatre – he has taken her to the theatre many times – films, people in the news; she can discuss anything with this man who might have stepped out of a book he is so different from other adults she has known. And he looks after her, properly cares for her, not like her mother, and certainly not like her terminally absent father.

He is talking, his voice is low, and instead of his usual eloquence punctured with sharp questions he plies her with platitudes about her first day at university – he actually refers to ‘the first day of the rest of your life'. And she knows he is wanting reassurance, but he won't ask; Stephen is strong but the nature of their relationship makes her stronger. So his questions remain unspoken while they make idle chat about enrolment procedures and signing up for the best tutorials. The wind picks up; he bends down and brushes a stray wisp of hair from her cheek. Quickly he retracts his hand. And a short time later, with nothing left to say, he walks away. He looks old, she thinks, as she watches him enter the crowd. He
is
old.

During the past three years with Stephen, she has delved into literature and history and philosophy. During the next four years at university she will amass experience and acquire wisdom. Already she has written several stories, enough to know that in fiction she can be most of all herself, a fluid self, a restless and knowing self, a self cloaked in magnificent disguise. She will find her own way as she always has done. She will go where the hard flame burns. She will be fearless, and she will write.

 

Twenty-five years later, her Alma Mater was still proving to be bountiful, with a non-teaching fellowship, library privileges, and a well-equipped office. Very little had changed at this end of
campus – some landscaping, more places to sit, a bank and post office in the approach to the quadrangle, but it was very different inside the union building. No longer the messy cafeterias smelling of chips and boiled peas, no longer the trestle tables packed with students shouting to be heard over the general clamour, the union had been taken over by commercial food outlets and resembled a miniature food hall. Formerly the hub of the university, this place with its efficient renovations was now almost deserted, and hovering in the sedate space an echo of something lost. Ava found the nearest exit and hurried outside.

She walked past mostly familiar buildings and soon her face was prickling with warmth. There was a gorgeous pull on her thighs, she sprang from stride to stride in her cushiony shoes, she removed her hat and shoved it in her pocket and pushed herself forward in one of those floating moments when all which makes a responsible, civilised human being is legitimately switched off – like in meditation, or listening to music, or playing pinball, or the third drink alone. Harry had at last found a job he loved, her best friends were just a phone call away, and the weight of Fleur was finally shifting. Now she would start working again.

Ever since she and Harry had returned to Australia, she had struggled to hold Fleur locked in memory, but despite her efforts there had been a steady oozing through the cracks. She knew that the end of the affair had been a good thing, but it was good in an abstract moral sense, just as the affair itself had been bad in the same abstract moral sense; but neither the affair nor its ending had settled calmly in the far-from-abstract beat of her heart. She had tried to be disciplined – she truly wanted to forget. The early years of passion and pleasure could not be revisited, the cards and letters could not be
reread, the box filled with all those silly treasures lovers keep could not be opened. Because of the pain, all of the good – and there had been so much good – had been put in storage along with the rest. Throw it all out, Ava had told herself when she was packing up the house in Oxford, throw this stuff out. But she couldn't. Not the letters nor mementoes, and not her own diaries with their predilection for misery, pages of detailed yet incredulous accounts of Fleur's neglect, pages more of her own pathetic crawlings – no humiliation was too much to keep Fleur in her life. All these welts and wails were as impossible to read now as the love letters which had preceded them.