Reunion (10 page)

There is a scattering of pot-plants on the back verandah and some hanging baskets. This is Ava's garden, target of her lavish attention. Portable yet enduring, she had once said, ‘Like family is supposed to be.' He is shivering from fear more than cold. She looks at him, presses her lips into a shrug, then picks up a poinsettia, loosens the plant from the sides of the pot and pulls it free. There are stones for drainage in the bottom, she tips these out, sifts through them, shakes her head, replaces the stones, slides the plant back on top. She reaches for the next
pot, an azalea in flower; again she loosens the plant, eases it out, examines the stones, carefully replaces the plant.

He knows what is coming, he knows he should protect himself. And now, more than a quarter of a century later, with the thrill of her against his arm, he realises he missed his chance that day so long ago, perhaps his only chance of breaking his love for her. But the fact that he didn't walk away proves he has always wanted to hold on to his love more than he has wanted anything else, perhaps more than he really wanted her.

He does not turn away, he does not leave. He makes himself watch as she picks up a third pot. It is terracotta and heavy, it contains a tall glossy-leafed plant. The pot is wet, it slips from her hands and crashes to the concrete below. Soil and leaf, root and stones litter the cracked cement. He steps down into the mess. The shards of terracotta are sharp on his feet, the gritty earth is nasty between his toes; he feels the stretch of his exposed buttocks as he squats down and sorts through the mess. He finds nine of his stones. He straightens up, the stones are clasped in his fist, and it is then he might have chosen not to love her. The opportunity lasts no longer than a second as he stands naked in the grey air in front of the woman who has treated him and his gift so brutally. And then she moves towards him, opening her coat and pulling him against her. She folds the coat around them both.

‘We have to move on,' she says. ‘We have to move on.'

 

Ava would always regret what she had done with the history stones, but she thought it would save him, that it would drive his love away. That Jack was never a suitable candidate as a lover she should have seen from the beginning. His beliefs would
always condemn real experience as second-rate. No one could ever live up to his standards of perfection. And no matter how many his disappointments or how painful they were, he would cling to his standards like a miser with his stash. If Jack had been any less interesting, any less well read, if that morning on the beach he had not played music which beat so deeply into herself, she would not have so misjudged. For all the reasons she valued him, she should never have made him her lover.

Over the four weeks they were together she was to acquire other more pragmatic reasons. Clean would never be clean enough for Jack, tidy would never be tidy enough, well groomed would never be well groomed enough. Initially she interpreted his peccadillos as a manifestation of an entrenched hostility towards others: setting such high standards that people were bound to fall short. But soon she realised that aspiring to perfection was Jack's clumsy attempt to control an uncontrollable world and that his behaviour was directed entirely at himself. His socks were lined up on a shelf with military precision; his pens and pencils were arranged according to size, colour and type; his filing cabinet was as neat and accessible as a library. And making love – well, there were simply too many variables to accommodate, so, with the exception of that first time on the beach when she had taken him by surprise, their love-making was a disaster.

What Jack lacked, Ava realised later, was that quality of being sexually ardent. For despite his grand passion for her, he skirted the edges of love in much the same way as he would skirt the edges of life. Loving sex would never be his strong suit, but sex without love would see him as something of a maestro. His letters would often include a short polite paragraph, like a biography note, of the latest woman to share his
bed. By the time Ava had received the next letter, the woman had usually been replaced.

In the presence of love, however, Jack was a stickler for getting it right, and his idea of right was drawn from Donne, Rilke, Keats and a large part of Greek mythology. This notion of sex, Ava told him one night during their month together, was as likely as Byron coming back from the dead to grade his performance.

‘Orpheus. If anyone were to judge me, I'd prefer Orpheus.'

She and Jack were sitting in her bed sharing a pre-coital cigarette. It was a night like several others when there would only be pre-coital connection.

‘Orpheus was the perfect lover with music in his soul and love in his heart –'

‘And impatience in his bones.'

Jack shook his head: by looking back, Orpheus might have put an end to life with Eurydice, but his terrible grief hastened his own death. ‘Everlasting love in everlasting afterlife. Looks like the jackpot to me.'

Ava had laughed. ‘Only you could draw such a conclusion from so self-defeating an act.'

Jack was writing his own Orpheus sequence, and an anxious project it was, particularly after Ovid and Shakespeare and, of course, their revered Rilke.

‘I have a draft.' There was a hint of a question in his voice.

At this messy point in their relations, Ava was in no doubt of her preference for the scholar and musician over the lover. She tasted the familiar excitement she associated with his work and asked to hear his Orpheus. And in the years to come, when the only writing Jack seemed to be doing was his letters to her, she would recall the night of his Orpheus. He was the brightest of them all.

Yet she would not have wanted to give up his letters. He wrote about the books he was reading, each of them analysed, interrogated, quoted from and evaluated within the relevant canon. He reported interesting conversations, he wrote vignettes of students and humorous accounts of his colleagues, he told tales of his travels. He sent her drafts of scholarly articles which were never finished to his satisfaction, and idiosyncratic personal essays styled like Roland Barthes's
Mythologies
, again never sent out for publication. In his letters, Ava liked to think he exposed the real Jack, the Jack released from the constrictions of his own exacting standards.

She had always loved him, different from how she loved Harry, different from her exhausting love for Fleur. Although during the worst Fleur times, when it was all whip and torture and no good coming of it, Ava would recall what she had done with Jack's gift of stones, an act so brutal that it should have slaughtered his love. Perhaps someone cannot kill off your love, perhaps only you can finish it off. And perhaps it requires an assault so prolonged that your love simply cannot recover. Like the bare-knuckle boxing match Harry had taken her to – for the spectacle, he had said, and data for the novels to come. It was ghastly; the spectators were out for blood and the referee did nothing to earn his money. For ten, twenty, thirty minutes the two men bashed each other until they were both on their knees still fighting, their faces and bodies bloodied. The crowd was shouting and egging them on, and only when both men were sprawled on the mat in their mingled blood and sweat did the fight finally stop. Perhaps this was what she needed to break from Fleur, and what Jack needed to break from her, some sort of intense and continuous assault.

Then again, perhaps nothing would change Jack's mind about her, like nothing changed hers about Fleur. Love seems to have an innate resilience to reason – at least for people like her and Jack.

The audience was clapping, Connie had finished and Jack was now sitting up straight. Her arm was a mass of painful pricklings as the blood seeped back. Connie was looking down at her and Jack. She raised her arms and applauded more vigorously; so, too, did Jack. And then Harry stood up to thank Connie and to take the opportunity to announce the forthcoming TV series
Travels in Cyberspace
, featuring Conrad Lyall and his work, an ABC–Channel 4 joint production to be shot here and in Europe.

As the audience broke into fresh applause, Ava saw how surprised Connie was, as indeed was she – the previous evening Connie had made it clear there were several more hurdles before the series went ahead. Harry had clearly passed a very fruitful day. Her Harry, and never any danger of losing herself in him, for as much as she loved him, he would always be the more loving one. She disagreed with Auden; she far preferred her position.

1.

Throughout her youth and particularly at the Laconics meetings, Helen had championed science's humanitarian charter. Hers had been a lone voice against the bumper opposition to the scientific enterprise that prevailed at the time. With bulging nuclear stockpiles in East and West, with Three Mile Island in 1979, the Bhopal disaster of 1984 and Chernobyl two years later, with the thalidomide catastrophe and cities choking in asbestos, there were many who wanted to bring the whole enterprise down. And Helen would argue that scientific research and discovery were fundamentally good, that when science turned bad it was driven by people with bad intent. She would vow never to be co-opted, never to put money or might ahead of scientific purity and the benefit of humankind. She would use these terms, romantic as they were, but in those days ideals were not simply accepted, they were expected.

On the day after the NOGA cocktail party, she and Jack met for brunch at a St Kilda café. While waiting for their food, Helen described her recent research. She was shining with her work.

‘All I've ever wanted is to do good science.'

‘Ever the idealist,' Jack said, with a smile.

As she talked about her ambitions – ‘The end of diarrhoeal disease, that's the goal' – Jack was thinking how easily ideals and delusions can stretch across a narrow divide to become one. Or perhaps there is a tainted core to all idealism. He thought of Edward Teller, father of the H-bomb and fierce anti-communist, who conflated his ideals of science and his ideals of democracy not only to justify horrendous weapons but also to bring down a number of his friends. Deluded? An idealist? Both?

‘Do you think Edward Teller was justified in what he did?' Jack asked.

Helen was slathering sour cream on her potato latkes. ‘In a purely scientific sense, of course he was,' as if ‘a purely scientific sense' were ever possible, ‘but taking his politics into account, the man was dangerously deluded.'

And you? Jack wanted to ask. Have you been deluded too? After all, any molecular biologist working today could not fail to be aware of the use of bacteria, including her own shigella, in biological weapons. But Helen would be horrified to be lumped in with Teller, so he kept his thoughts to himself and settled to his cheesecake.

He ate slowly, drawing out each mouthful. Savouring the pleasure, he realised, of this food from the past. It was the taste of childhood, of security. And this café, too, so comfortably familiar it might have been an extension of the Adelson living room when he was growing up. Every Sunday would see him and his parents seated here, Jack at one table eating cake and ice-cream with the children of his parents' friends, while nearby the adults argued how best to change the world.

Helen put her fork down. ‘The last time I was here was with your parents. Years ago.' And she smiled. ‘Our farewell dinner before we left for Oxford.'

During their undergraduate years, Helen and Ava had often visited the Adelson home. Jack's mother was an atrocious cook – not that it mattered, they said, for they came for the family, not the food. It was a compliment of such lofty proportions that Jack kept silent about any difficulties associated with ex-communist Jewish parents from Central Europe with little money and loads of social conscience who believed that action was the best policy no matter what the circumstances. On the night of the farewell dinner they had been prepared for one of his mother's meals; instead she proposed her favourite restaurant.

‘I ordered latkes then,' Helen said.

‘You always ordered latkes when we came here.' Jack was laughing. ‘And you still do. I'm convinced there's only a small number of meals you can hold in your anti-epicurean brain.'

She laughed too. ‘It simplifies the business of staying alive.'

Just like ideals, Jack was thinking. You could aspire to be like Einstein or Arendt or Segovia, you could aspire to be an honourable person. But you would never know if you had attained the ultimate in being honourable or indeed the quintessence of Einstein, Arendt or Segovia. Ideals are like mirages, Jack decided, they provide direction and they keep you moving; but if the light changes and your ideals are revealed as delusions you would be literally stopped in your tracks. No wonder Helen was floundering now.

A flock of noisy newcomers entered the café, the boys with long hair and drooping jeans, the girls with plunging necklines and bulging breasts, all of them talking with exaggerated emphasis as they made their way to the tables at the back.

‘They sound so banal,' Jack said, nodding towards the group.

Helen was watching them too. They were a little older than Luke and to her mind just a normal bunch of kids. ‘You need to spend more time around young people.'

Helen was probably right. These days kids struck him as being from a different species, and as if to guard his own values and beliefs he sensed a certain hostility towards them. He would eavesdrop on their conversations, everyone talking breathlessly in an American-infected sing-song, so excited over a new personal trainer, a website for free music downloads, the knock-out cocktails at Club G, the best strategy to use on eBay.

‘I'm a dinosaur,' he said, sinking a fork into his cheesecake. And then added, ‘I never thought anything this side of eighty would feel so old.'

The young people had dragged two tables together in the back section of the restaurant. One of the girls was standing on a chair displaying a pair of multi-coloured boots, the others were admiring them as if they were the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Everything seemed pushed to an extreme these days, Jack was thinking, either turned up very high or mere background murmur. And nothing was relative any more: getting a new job was in the same category as getting new shoes, and losing an iPod much the same as losing a friend.

‘They seem to be managing the unexamined life extremely well,' Jack said, indicating the young people.

Helen smiled. ‘You sound envious.'

Not knowing whether he was, he gave a noncommittal grunt and changed the subject. ‘So what happened with Harry last night?'

Helen took her time to answer. ‘Unlike you,' she began, ‘I made an effort with Harry. With his corkscrews and computers,
all his bizarre collections, he struck me as an eccentric and I've always made allowances for eccentrics.' She paused for a mouthful. ‘And then there was Ava – I was prepared to like him because of her.'

‘You're wrong about Harry.' Jack spoke more loudly than he intended. ‘Eccentrics are imaginative, but Harry's the sort of person who can listen to Shakespeare and hear only rhyme and metre. Whole pools of meaning dry up in the glare of his type of appreciation. Harry has the mind, the soul, the ear of an engineer. His heart exists solely to pump the blood around his body.'

Helen stopped him with a hand on his arm. ‘Ava's been married to Harry for decades. He's her anchor, Jack, and whether you like it or not, he's permanent.' She gave his arm a squeeze before pulling away. ‘Ava might well choose the dance steps but Harry chooses the ballroom and he always has. Ava needs him, from the beginning she needed him, but I –' and a smile flickered over her face as if the idea had only just occurred to her, ‘but I don't.

‘In fact,' she continued, ‘it's people like Harry I'm desperate to escape. Men in suits who dole out money to scientists like me for projects that they, the suits, deem important.' She stabbed at a piece of latke. ‘I've no intention of staying the term of the fellowship with Harry's precious NOGA. But I'll leave in my own good time.' She waved the impaled food through the air as if to ward off any opposition. ‘Meanwhile I'll do the work I choose and Harry be damned.' With that, she popped the food in her mouth.

Across the table Jack was thinking how wonderful it would be to possess her confidence. Just this morning he'd taken a phone interview, an early current affairs program on commercial radio before the weekend sport took hold. He had been
questioned about Indonesia and Islam, just a skimming of the surface and well within his competence, but because Islam in the Asia–Pacific was not his primary specialty he felt as if he were speaking under false pretences. Even when he was treated as an acknowledged expert, even when he experienced that comforting buffer between himself and others which admiration and expertise construct, he could never know the confidence which Helen applied so naturally.

‘So what happened with Harry last night?' he asked again in a deliberate shift to safer ground. ‘Why's he so concerned about your work?' And, as a private afterthought: how does he know so much about your work?

Helen put her fork down and pushed her plate aside. ‘Have you heard of dual-use research?'

Jack shook his head. ‘But I expect it refers to the same piece of research having two different applications.'

‘Exactly. What I'm working towards, as against what other people might want me to do, is to bring about immunity to shigella, all the shigellas.' And anticipating his question: ‘There are four major types. In the course of my research, quite a complicated process I should add, I need to create a new organism.'

‘So you're playing God?'

‘But doing a far better job,' she said, smiling. ‘If God were a scientist I'd find him a great deal more credible.'

She took a pen from her bag and drew a few snake-like marks on a serviette – ‘The shigella chromosomes,' she said, pointing to them. ‘And they don't occur in pairs as they do in human cells so every gene counts.' She looked up at Jack. ‘I like that about bacteria. In fact, I like everything about bacteria. And I like shigella most of all.' She returned to her squiggles. ‘The deeper we travel into the molecular structure of shigella the more likely
we are to find its virulence mechanism, or rather mechanisms – the same, I'm convinced, for all the shigellas.'

She continued to explain her work, and Jack marvelled as he listened, he marvelled at
her
. You associate major scientific advances with the likes of Macfarlane Burnet, with Fleming and Florey, or Helen's own idol, Barbara McClintock, people of almost mythological status known the world over. And here was Helen convinced she would eventually have the solution to one of the major causes of diarrhoeal disease. His old friend Helen who had got stoned with him, swum naked with him, who now sat across a table in a restaurant she knew only because of him. Hard to equate the worldly scientist with the far more domestic friend.

‘Now over here,' Helen drew another squiggle, ‘we have a harmless
E. coli
.'

Jack pulled his attention into line. ‘I'm surprised there are harmless
E-coli
.'

‘There are lots of them, a good many we know about and others we're bound to discover. All told, there are hundreds of strains of
E. coli
and they've been the target of extensive study. This means their genetic make-up is largely known and it makes them ideal for my type of research. My aim is to find shigella's virulence genes, separate them from the rest of the organism, then splice them into a harmless
E. coli
and if all goes according to plan, cause a specific antibody response. And from there,' she smiled wryly, ‘it's only about forty more steps before we have an effective vaccine.'

‘So what's the problem? Where's the dual research?'

‘When I splice the shigella genetic material into a harmless
E. coli
, I could create a nasty new
E. coli
.' She shrugged. ‘I already have.'

‘And people want to make use of these new bugs?'

‘At this very moment, an organism I've created is being tested for toxicity and durability. And the testing's happening in my own lab. My own lab where I'm supposed to be in charge.'

‘And this dual research spinning off from your own, has it got much muscle?'

‘Of the steroid-enhanced variety,' she said grimly. ‘Of course, this sort of work isn't new. We know that during the Cold War the Soviets tampered with anthrax and created a much more virulent form.' (Jack couldn't help but wonder about this ‘we'.) ‘And we know there are stockpiles of bacteria lying around in the former USSR. What we don't know is where they are and the exact organisms involved. But I guarantee there's enough to kill the entire population of the planet several times over and all of it could fit in an area the size of your kitchen.'

She leaned forward, her eyes bright behind her glasses. ‘We humans are cream puffs when compared with bacteria.'

Power, politics, weapon stockpiles. ‘Are you very important?' Jack asked.

She nodded and shrugged. ‘I suppose so, but not primarily for the work that matters to me.'

‘And Harry?'

‘Harry, like a lot of powerful people, is far more interested in the bioweapons applications of my research than the shigella vaccine. A new organism for which there's no treatment, produced for targeted delivery to recalcitrant populations,' she raised her eyebrows. ‘For certain groups, it's like winning the lottery.'

This powerful Harry whom Helen was talking about and he, himself, had observed at the NOGA cocktail party, when
exactly had he emerged? Jack simply could not get a grip on the new Harry Guerin.

He looked across the table at Helen. ‘So who funds your current research?'

‘The US military – but it's not as you might think. Bioweapons aside, a shigella vaccine is in the military's interest. Soldiers in the field, even those on the side of right and might, are susceptible to shigella infections.'

‘Although surely less so these days with food security so tight.'

Helen let out a derisive snort. ‘Food supply to the military is now contracted out to private suppliers,' she said. ‘Political favours are not unknown. And even if the company is competent, its main purpose is to turn a decent-sized profit. Cut some of the invisible corners – like food sourcing, like quality control – and the profits go up.'