Reunion (9 page)

You can't turn yourself into someone else, particularly not at his age, and surely better to acknowledge his limitations and cater for them rather than allow them to run roughshod over those he cared about. Linda said that everyone had to compromise in relationships, but he had reached his limit. He needed to make some hard decisions, and he needed to make them now, otherwise he would be faced with ending his marriage after Linda and the boys arrived in Melbourne.

And he needed time to explore this thing with Sara. Just thinking about her caused a gripping in his abdomen. He had met her only three weeks ago in Brisbane. A Melbourne girl, she was researching her PhD in an archive up there, not philosophy but a topic located in some arcane outpost of post-colonial studies. When he was ready to leave on his lecture tour, to his delight so was she. ‘On the road with Connie' was how she described it. Twenty-four-year-old Sara, who twenty-four hours after they met was groping him under the table as they sat in a
restaurant with a group from the university discussing the widening communications gap between the first and third worlds. Yes, there was definitely more of Sara to explore.

And for the first time in decades his closest friends were in the same city. Ava, Jack and Helen, the three he had always relied upon for wise counsel, how he wanted them to be impressed, how he needed them to tell him how good he was. He stepped forward again and looked around the wings. Ava and Jack were in the front; Helen, as usual, must be running late.

Jack was leaning towards Ava, but then Jack had been blindly leaning towards Ava ever since they first met. How much he had missed of life, the only one whom they had designated a genius, a man who had produced no new work for years, who lived in the same flat in which he had grown up, who had stripped his life back to the white clatter of bones. Even the revival of his career would not by itself loosen his fixation on Ava.

And Ava herself. It occurred to Connie that as a young woman she had revealed many of the same qualities which now attracted him to Sara. He had not made the connection before. Ava at eighteen stretched across the rug in his office, the lush hair in a lovely tangle about her face, the unbuttoned blouse, the perfect white breasts, her jeans knotted around her ankles. Nearly thirty years ago but still so clear. The shabby maroon rug, the floor hard against his elbows and knees, and while a large age difference and student status had never stopped him before, with Ava – he did not know why – it seemed courteous, responsible too, to express a certain caution.

‘We can't take it back once it's done,' he remembered saying.

Her knowing look, the half-smile and her reply, he had
forgotten none of it: ‘Enough with the pre-coital clichés,' she had said, hooking her hand around his neck and pulling him down.

Sara had done much the same three weeks ago.

It was all too simple to suggest he was using Sara to hold on to his own youth; Sara would be viewed as a catch by most men. Something more fundamental was happening. If anyone had asked him as a twenty-year-old whether there would be a time when he was not reliant on other people's good opinion, he would have responded with a confident, ‘Of course.' From the stand-point of youth, maturity always seemed so secure, so worry free. And yet here he was in sight of sixty and requiring approbation as much as ever. Even as he drew his last breaths he would probably be wanting reassurance that he was dying in the best possible way, the most intellectually rigorous way, dying with humour rather than cynicism, with grace rather than fear, with dignity not resentment.

There was a burst of applause. The steel magnate had finished and Harry assumed the podium again. Jack was still hard up against Ava. If anyone was holding on to youth it was Jack. Nothing was simple any more, Connie was thinking as he stepped out on stage, but unlike Jack, he, at least, had plenty to show for his years.

4.

Connie strolled across the stage to the podium. He arranged his notes on the lectern, he raised his head slowly, he looked out at the auditorium and he smiled. Ava glanced along the row and saw people smiling back. Connie had not said a word
yet already he had captured the audience. For the next thirty minutes he would give his usual compelling performance, the crowd would remain transfixed, and Jack would lean heavily against her and probably not hear a word.

Poor Jack, what a waste he had made of his life, although Ava no longer blamed herself. For years she had felt responsible, not simply for that night on the beach which began their month-long affair, but for his having fallen in love with her in the first place. And blaming herself she had tried to dissuade him. She had sent him books about the Bloomsburies and the Beats –
Friends like us
,
minus the hot-housing and the drugs
. She made sure he knew about her lovers, about Fleur above all; she shielded him from none of her faults. And Harry, she tried to make Jack understand why she loved her husband and why he was
beyond any doubt
the right man for her. Ava did everything she could to persuade Jack out of his love until the week she received not one but two thick letters from him – interesting and entertaining as were all his letters but each more than four thousand words long. Two letters in a week which added up to ten per cent of an average novel. And finally it dawned on her that not only did Jack want to keep his love for her, his grip on it was welded tight. As for that night on the beach, he was already in love with her; the consummation, she came to realise, made no difference. Jack was proof that memory is a safer country than any other.

Yet she knew why she had succumbed. Jack was all attraction in those first days, and what flaws were apparent, like his shyness and his fastidiousness, she ascribed to sensitivity. He loved poetry, all her own favourites – Rilke, Baudelaire, Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Auden, as well as Yeats, Coleridge and Keats – and history, they shared his ancient and her
European and a swag of other worlds in between. And his parents were unlike any parents she had ever met, not just their foreignness and their activism, but the way they loved their son – they called him darling – and that they welcomed his friends to their home. And he was so good-looking, the lapis blue eyes, the thick black curls, the slight, well-proportioned body, and he was her own age. And he talked like other people wrote, in beautiful sequences of cut and polished words, the first person she had ever known to do this. Soon after they met she asked if English was his first language. It was, he said, before adding that he had read rather a lot, and indeed there were the occasional mispronunciations common to people whose greatest exposure to words was on the page. And he played the guitar, not the numbed strumming over a handful of chords typical of most eighteen-year-olds, but like a proper musician.

The night on the beach that had begun their month together, he had played his guitar especially for her. It was three o'clock in the morning and the beach was deserted. A group of them had spent the evening at a folk club where Jack had been performing, and how it happened that she had ended up alone with him on the sand she could no longer recall. But his music she would never forget. He had played the blues, swaying with the music and humming along in an odd rumbling beneath the melody. And she who knew nothing of music was gathered up by those broken rhythms in an experience that went beyond words (she would come to know the same sort of brimming emotion with Rothko's paintings). Jack played his guitar, the waves shuffled to and fro on the shore, there was the gentle rush of late-night cars on the road behind, and it seemed absolutely right to move into his arms. By the
time the sun rose and the traffic had begun in earnest, the moment of perfect harmony had passed. But never for Jack.

Connie stopped for applause. Jack did not move and, not wanting to embarrass him, Ava, too, remained still. The applause subsided and Connie began again. Knowledge used to command authority, he was saying. But in our era, it's been overtaken by information. Connie leaned in towards the audience, his face overwritten with excitement, his hands beating the emphasis. And it was not simply his being a compelling speaker, he was passionate about these ideas and wanted to share his passion. But then Connie exuded passion in most things. Ava would never forget her first philosophy class when he appeared in the doorway of the lecture theatre, his hair wild with heat, face tanned, brown sinewy arms shown off by the sleeveless T-shirt, walked to the lectern, laid out his papers, looked out at the students and told them that the only life worth living was the examined one (she had assumed he was the author of the aphorism until Stephen set her straight) and it was his intention to introduce them to the tools for such an examination.

For a first-year student in 1978, Dr Conrad Lyall, with talent to match his ambition and already well on his way, was exactly the right man to sleep with. Jack, who neither then nor now knew how to look after himself, was not. So six months into her first year of university Ava made a choice. She would always regret starting the affair with Jack, and regretted even more the way she finished it, but without an act both incontrovertible and reprehensible she believed Jack would not stop wanting her. As it happened, the attempt proved futile. Your infatuation was a god-finder, Ted Hughes wrote about Sylvia Plath. Perhaps all infatuations are.

A murmur ran through the audience. Ava had not heard what Connie said and neither it seemed had Jack. They continued to sit motionless, their arms hard up against each other while the people around them again broke into applause. Jack had utterly stilled. He had heard none of Connie's lecture. He was back on that beach with Ava, he was in her arms, he was making love, and afterwards the gift of his history stones, a dozen stones collected from different locations across Europe, fragments of the old world brought to the new by his grandparents, who had passed them on to his father, who had passed them on to him. After the night on the beach he had wanted to give her something special and enduring. His history stones were his most precious possession.

He had placed them in a Petri dish lined with cotton wool. ‘A history of the world in the palm of your hand,' he had said.

Then followed those four weeks of whitely flying, as if all of him, and not just his earthly feelings, had sprouted wings.

He read Rilke constantly during that time because Rilke knew love. But pragmatist that Rilke was, there was always part of him responsive to gravity. Not so Jack. He was in love with Ava Bryant and she was in love with him. Through twenty-nine days of bliss they read, they talked, and he played his music for her. Twenty-nine days of conversation and laughter, of guarding their secret, of special meals and special remembrances. Twenty-nine days of her beautiful face, that bulwark
against boredom. Twenty-nine days against drawing the short straw in life's lottery. Twenty-nine days in which to rewrite metaphor.

This was a time when even his usual anxiety was ringed with bliss. He was anxious something might happen to her, anxious she might decide she didn't love him, anxious that sex be the rapture he knew it was meant to be. He had turned to Baudelaire for guidance, but while the erotic tone and texture were just right, what he really needed was practical direction. He read
The Story of O
, but the men were monsters and the women couldn't possibly enjoy what they were made to do. He read
Lady Chatterley's Lover
, which was thick with words but thin on technique. He even read
Portnoy's Complaint
, but masturbation and Jewish families were familiar territory, while proper sex the Portnoy way was as romantic as a crawl through the gutter.

Such moments aside, he was happy – happier than he had ever been after twenty-nine mornings like that last one, lying in Ava's bed while she slept, her head resting on his shoulder, his hand gliding over the fine corrugation of her ribs, the plunge to her waist, the surge to the full smooth buttocks. Her skin so fine, hardly a blemish, the soft down cushiony under his fingers, her quivering with his light touch. And only later when he realises they will never lie together again does it occur to him that far from love or pleasure or innocuous tickling, she was probably wanting to shake his hand off, peel it – and him – from her body.

She shuffles against him and snuffles in her sleep. (A thousand times has he revisited that morning.) He needs to use the toilet but instructs his body to wait, curls his hand tighter to the lovely hollow of her waist, his fingers acutely sensitive as they
stamp her skin into the memory of his skin. And beyond the glass the sky lightens and the sun enters the room, stencilling the plane tree in the street on to the wall near the bed and moving quickly, too quickly, past the wardrobe to her desk. The sun strikes the Petri dish and throws off a spark. Another ten minutes and it has passed to the pile of paper which he knows to be her philosophy essay.

His gaze shifts back to the Petri dish; out of the sun's glare it is clearly visible. And – he cannot make sense of it – the stones have gone. He can see the dish but his history stones are missing. He raises himself a little higher and searches the surface of her desk. They are nowhere to be seen.

She wakes with his movement. He can't stop himself, he asks about the stones, careful not to say
his
stones. She won't meet his gaze. He wishes he could remain silent, but he can't. He asks again: Where are the history stones? She wrenches herself from his arms, turns to face him, is about to speak, then changes her mind, bolts from the bed, drags on a coat, shoves her bare feet into boots, and clomps out to the small verandah at the rear of the house. He follows naked, not a thought given to the others in the house, only Ava and those stones from history which he gave her.