Reunion (8 page)

Love is astonishingly immune to learning from experience. As Jack appeared unable to extricate himself from Ava, so it seemed Ava could not extricate herself from Fleur. Months might pass when the two women had nothing to do with each other. Ava would be hard at work in Oxford or travelling the world's literary circuit, and Fleur would be hard at work in London and, as Ava would eventually discover, conducting a string of affairs. Then, inexplicably, a shift would occur, sometimes in Fleur, sometimes in Ava, a switch turned on, a tautness, an awareness, and one of them would seek the other out. They would always meet on the neutral ground of a café, where wrapped in eagerness and good intentions they would swap stories of their time apart. But even before the coffee was finished and the neglected food whisked away, the sizzling would have started again. And from there it was just a brief span before they were clawing at each other in a fume of emotions turned up to the level of pain.

It was a love impossible to reject and impossible to maintain. As a means of protection, Ava would retract the boundaries of her relationship with Fleur, inadvertently concentrating the emotions and raising the intensity. Obsessive loves are never cool and neither are they open to cool reason. Just like Jack's love for Ava. So many similarities but with two crucial differences. Despite the tumult with Fleur, despite the frequent bruisings and the sharp cut of the separations, Ava produced four new novels in seven years; far from Fleur hindering her work,
Ava believed she was essential to it. In contrast, Jack's writing and research dwindled and then stopped altogether as Ava came to occupy more of his time. In fact, all his other passions waned. There used to be other women, many other women, but there was little beyond sex with them and after a while he rearranged his sexual needs to minimise potential complications. By the time he returned to Melbourne to take up the NOGA fellowship, what intimate ties Jack had outside his relationship with Ava occurred mostly in cyberspace.

And the other crucial difference? Ava had Harry. Rather than focus on the affair with Fleur, Jack would have done better to study her marriage. But he preferred not to look.

Husbands and wives make pacts with each other, shared commitments about how they will conduct their relationship. They also make pacts with themselves as to what they will tolerate in their partner's behaviour. The shared pacts and the private ones can be the same, but in the rocky terrain of most marriages there are disparities. So it happens that in a marriage in which both partners have committed to fidelity but one embarks on affairs, the marriage does not break down during the first affair, nor the second. But the third spells the end for the faithful partner, even if it was nothing more than a drunken fuck with someone never to be seen again. The personal limit has been crossed. If Fleur had lasted another year, another two, would Harry have stuck by Ava? Would his personal limit have been crossed?

The important issue, and Jack was well aware of this, was not whether Harry would have tolerated another year of Fleur but the fact there was not another year to tolerate. It was Harry who made sure of it with the move back to Australia.

There had been yet another separation from Fleur, but different this time, for Fleur had put a stop to the affair. She had met
someone else, she said, and while this had happened many times during her relationship with Ava, she intended to be faithful this time.
Faithful in a way she never was with me
, Ava wrote to Jack in one of her many sad, aggrieved letters. Harry had been toying with the idea that would become NOGA, and with Ava shredding in distress he decided it was time to act. It took a surprisingly short three months to finalise NOGA on paper and bring it to the attention of the right funding bodies; a further two months and Harry and Ava were on their way home to Australia. Harry had acted to ensure his limits were not stretched any further.

It would be easy to conclude that Harry loved Ava sufficiently to withstand any amount of humiliation, or even that he lacked the usual complement of pride. But Harry was equipped with pride in abundance, that much was perfectly clear even to Jack. Just seeing him here at this function, strutting around with his ‘captains of industry' and his ‘people who make things happen', Harry was king and no one could doubt it. And this was not simply a quality acquired in his middle years: the very fact he set his sights on Ava in the first place, a prize by anyone's reckoning and the only prize as far as Jack was concerned, showed how highly he had always regarded himself.

Harry's voice sounded over the clamour. He had mounted a podium, and with a microphone in hand he was calling for attention. The hush was immediate, the people waited for direction. He asked them to make their way into the auditorium and instantly they began to move. Harry Guerin was in control – as he had always been.

Ava too was watching Harry even while Jack's own book was in her hands. She watched her husband at the centre of his own creation and, as much as Jack might wish it otherwise, the absolute centre of her life.

3.

Conrad Lyall was churning in the wings of the auditorium. He was accustomed to nerves before a lecture, the extra adrenalin charged up his performance and he had learned to capitalise on it, but tonight he was more jittery than usual. Melbourne might be located well off the world stage but home always demands more of you. There was family out there, his mother in particular, his ever-supportive mother who from the moment of his birth had set out to make something of her son. Even now, an old woman in her eighties, she would remind him he had been named after the great Joseph Conrad – more a reflection of her own youthful desires to be a novelist, Connie had long believed, than anything she might have observed in her infant son. His sweet, hungry mother who had channelled all her passions into her only child, so that in the patchy night hours when work and mothering were finished, it was a sour whine which dribbled from her pen. She had always been burdened with more aspiration than talent when it concerned her own ambitions, but in the case of her son she had long been convinced he had lived up to his name.

His mother was in the audience, together with old friends and acquaintances. Over drinks he had mingled with former colleagues – they'd certainly be watching his performance tonight – as well as two former students who had done rather well for themselves. There were snipers out there too, Connie knew exactly who they were, academics who had been quick to target him as all charm and artifice twenty years ago and had used the time since to practise their punches. Connie had long been aware that reputation was considerably less sturdy than he would like, but with his career now well established
surely it would take more than a lecture to a home crowd and a few bitter philosophers to topple the cumulative effects of twenty years' work.

And Sara was out there too. He peered around the wings. Sara, ‘it rhymes with tiara', was in the fifth row on the aisle and already on friendly terms with her neighbour. All glossy brown skin in her skimpy black dress, he definitely wanted to impress her.

It was a part of Australian folklore that expatriates only returned home when they were on the wane in the wider more important world. But his star had never been brighter. He had been attracting huge crowds both here and in the States; even the Europeans now acknowledged him. Such suspicion attached to popularity, yet in his own case there was no reason for popularity to condemn him as a lightweight. If there was a problem, and he was unsure whether there was, it lay with the well-known collegiate capacity for envy. For the fact remained that while he might be tired and unduly anxious, and yes, he was very popular, irrespective of what some of his dryer colleagues might think, popularity did not rule out a serious and significant contribution. Dickens had been popular, Russell too, and Einstein had been a celebrity. Not to mention the de Bottons and Shamas of his own age – although he harboured the same doubts about them as he did about himself.

He moved deeper backstage; if he hadn't already had more than enough to drink he would have nipped back into the hall for another glass. He found a small room with table and chairs and settled himself down with his notes. Logic insisted there was no reason to worry: his work was rigorous, it was relevant to these volatile times and it reached a substantial number of people. Moreover, it armed them for the challenges of a
fractured uncertain world far more effectively than turgid papers cobbled together in neglected corridors of academe. And his reception since he had arrived back in Australia could not have been better. His lectures had been well attended, the radio interviews deferential, and talk-back sessions had presented him as revered seer on all matters contemporary; there had been TV spots usually reserved for celebrities, and, to top it all off, there had been exotic Sara – her background was Chilean – to remind him of the man he still was. Of course he wasn't finished yet.

His own expectations had always been the hardest to satisfy – a quality he shared with his friends, although his situation was different from theirs in that no one would ever question the seriousness of their work. Helen was stamped with the imprimatur of serious science; Jack's choice of a corner of comparative religion so obscure that he had been forced to work in universities equally remote was of little consequence now he had been resurrected as the background expert of choice on Islam and the new terrorism, and Ava had been treated seriously from the publication of her first novel. Only Connie's work was questioned. His last two books, both exploring communication, power and the fall of knowledge, had received what was, even in the desperately hopeful view of the author, a muted reception. No one had actually criticised him, no one had labelled him lightweight, but the reviews were without muscle and the reviewers themselves seemed lightweight. He suspected that among his more serious colleagues he was thought to have sold out, while others believed he had peaked with
God and the Webmaster
. Yet by his own reckoning he had plenty of good years left. And even if
God and the Webmaster
remained his best-known book, he
wouldn't be the first writer of renown with a long career and high output in which one book dominated. He recalled Joseph Heller's response when asked whether he was disappointed he had never written a novel to surpass
Catch-22
. With such a book, Heller had replied, is there any need to better it?

Was
God and the Webmaster
Conrad Lyall's
Catch-22
? The barb in the question did not escape him. He truly believed there would be other books, better books, but with expectation such a powerful shaper of opinion he needed other people to think the best was in front of him too – all other people: his friends and family, the strangers who came to listen to him, the readers of his books, even envious back-stabbing philosophers. He wondered whether Ava with her stellar career was still vulnerable to public opinion and decided to ask her. A moment later he knew he would not: there was something unpalatable about a man who desired the good opinion of everyone, including those he neither liked nor admired himself.

Connie collected his notes and made his way back to the wings. The auditorium was vibrant with hundreds of voices. Harry came up behind him. ‘Ready?' he asked. And before Connie could reply, ‘You know this is a crucial part of our campaign,' – it wasn't a question – ‘and we're relying on you.' With a nod in the direction of the audience, he added, ‘There's a lot of money out there.' And after a matey pat on Connie's back, he walked out on stage.

The silence was immediate.

Harry began by welcoming the guests ‘to this auspicious occasion', then he provided a brief history of NOGA and an account of ‘its already substantial achievements'. He singled out the NOGA Energy Forum – ‘the most up-to-date information bank on energy research and development across the globe',
and also the leading role taken by NOGA in monitoring new developments in bioweapons, mentioning Helen by name. Connie was listening in spite of himself. Far from rambling as used to be his way, Harry showed himself to be a succinct and witty speaker who knew exactly how to hold an audience and exactly when to stop. After some remarks about the Network's plans for the next triennium, he introduced the chairperson of a steel corporation that was one of NOGA's main backers. Sir Richard Treat, with thick greying hair and pin-stripes over a softening girth was, Connie decided, a perfect fit for his knighthood. As his voice boomed through the hall, Connie made a final check of his notes, while a technician grubby with stubble attached a body microphone and repeated his instructions from the earlier sound check. When he was finished he patted Connie on the backside and wished him luck.

What on earth was that? Connie wondered. A come-on? An over-the-line familiarity? An accident? An insult? He might well be the contemporary soothsayer, but he simply could not read the gesture.

He shuffled his weight to ease the ache in his knees and tightened his stomach muscles to reduce the press of his belt. Before he had left America he had been sufficiently concerned about his health to have a medical check-up, but whatever was infecting his spirits wasn't revealed in medical tests. A temporary malaise was the most likely explanation. After all, as Oscar Wilde once said – or was it Somerset Maugham? – only the mediocre man is always at his best. Exercise might help, and he made a note in his organiser to investigate the sports centre at the university. And he needed to deal with the Linda problem.

A decade with the same woman was a record for him, and for the first five years he had been almost monogamous. He
should never have married again. Two failed marriages were proof enough that for a man like him only short-term relationships were advisable, two or three years at most, with insufficient time for the issue of children to arise. Not that he didn't love Laurie and Oscar, nor for that matter Hugh, now twenty-five, and the twins almost sixteen – another note not to forget their birthday – but at five and four Laurie and Oscar were exhausting. It was impossible to work when they were home, and none of the nannies was as effective as their mother in maintaining discipline. The situation would be much improved if Linda had not insisted on returning to her practice. But as she was quick to remind him, anaesthetists earned considerably more than philosophers, so if either of them were to give up work to look after the children it should be him.