Reunion (14 page)

Connie was hard to stop so thrilled was he with his idea. And so, too, was the director, although it would benefit from some scripting, she said with a laugh. When a few minutes later Connie joined Jack and the others for a short break, he told them the notion had only just occurred to him. They moved into the foyer of the library, but with a clear sky and a bright sun outside they continued through the doors to the colonnade, and there amid the bluestone and columns and the newly washed air of early spring they found an alcove out of the wind. Helen lit up and Connie regaled them with his new thought.

‘How bizarre,' he said, ‘that the modern sensibility with all its tools and information and its unabashed adoration of all things youthful might lock us into a world that resembles the evanescent, unconnected experiences of dementia.'

Connie was fascinated by his idea, although how it would stand up to scrutiny he did not know. But for now, the wonder he felt was written across his face; just watching him, Jack felt inspired.

Luke, who had gathered with a group of people to watch two galahs pecking the grass in front of the building – galahs in the city! – now broke away from them and made his way towards the colonnade. As he approached, Connie put aside his new idea and returned to the issue of access to knowledge.

‘So, what do you think of my three populations, Luke?'

‘You haven't convinced me. In fact, I can't imagine anyone under twenty agreeing with you.' He raised a hand against Connie's interruption. ‘Let someone toss us a question, doesn't matter what, and I bet I have the answer before you.'

‘But what if there is no single answer?' Connie said. ‘What if the answer is more in the way of analysis?'

Luke shrugged. ‘Whatever it is, I'll find it before you do.' And he wandered back to the galahs.

His mother watched him, a smile on her face. Connie, almost as if the exchange with Luke had not occurred, turned to Ava. ‘All of your novels play around with memory. So what do you think? Can events, ideas, can thoughts of any sort lodge into retrievable memory without conscious deliberation or reflection or just a moment of acknowledgment that something has happened. If, for example, you pass a fancy building and do not notice it, if you do nothing to register it, can it later be recalled?'

Jack wanted to suggest hypnosis but had no opportunity as Connie linked his arm with Ava's and led her down the colonnade. Just before they were out of earshot he heard Connie refer to a character from Ava's fourth novel, a girl with a prodigious memory. ‘Now where did she come from?'

‘They're so alike,' Helen said to Jack, a smile lingering faintly as she watched them striding up and down the colonnade. ‘Easy to see why we love them.'

Jack, too, was watching them, tall white-haired Connie and lush golden-haired Ava streaming through the electric air. At other times Jack would have seen only Ava, but now he was gripped by them both.

2.

The metaphors which attached to Connie and Ava were of a set. They were the sun around which revolved the planets; the star which exerted the strongest magnetic force; they were the strelitzia and anthurium of flowers, the leopard and whale of animals. Exotic and mythic, powerful and essential that's what they were, and while Helen and Jack were aware of frailties in both, they were equally aware their frailties would never hold them back.

In every aspect of life Connie moved into the future; through his work, Connie actually forged the future. And similarly with Ava. Every one of her achievements had taken her further from the shopgirl of her birthright. Even during her most tempestuous times, both Helen and Jack believed Ava had it all.

True empathy is a rare thing; most people are unable to imagine what it is to be someone else and many would actually prefer not to know. Jack and Helen expected to see Ava at the centre of every group, and so they did. They expected to see her working well and effectively, and so she was. She might
appear a little tired, she might be quieter than usual, but this was no reason to worry because Ava Bryant always knew what she needed and where she was going.

So it could happen that when they moved to Oxford, Jack and Helen met with Ava every day and did not notice she was falling apart. But falling apart she was. Ava did not recognise the person she had become and had no notion of how to right herself. For years, she had imagined Oxford as a student paradise, an essential stopover on her way to the future. And yet here she was, arrived at last, and the place was incomprehensibly hostile. She had to force herself out of bed, down to breakfast, force herself to meet Helen and Jack, force herself to carry on as if nothing was wrong. And while she was a better performer than most, as the weeks passed into months she found herself with less and less energy for any sort of pretence. Yet through it all, the others failed to notice because they would not allow the possibility that Ava Bryant might ever be foundering.

Their inability to see what was happening was intensified by Oxford itself. Helen and Jack saturated themselves in Oxford and it in turn saturated them. Life seemed looser, more elastic when released from the demands and scrutiny of home. Jack said it was like being immersed in a grand symphony. Postgraduate study was less demanding than any of them had expected, with a manageable volume of work and very few people to please. Ava, searching for explanations for her mood could not find them in the pressures of work. In fact, she would have coped better if she were busier. It took more than a month before she managed to meet her supervisor, a well-known scholar with a specialty in the Romantic poets, a moon-faced, chinless man with inflamed gums and pungent body odour, a man hard to equate with the swashbuckling fervour of
his publications. Ava made increasingly desperate efforts to set up a regular meeting with him. In the end his rejection – for that's how she interpreted it – seemed to add to Oxford's condemnation of her. She told the others she had the best of him in his books, and while she would entertain them with mimicry of him, she would observe herself in these performances with a black and sinking horror.

She had expected Oxford to inspire that same marvellous exhilaration she had felt when she started university in Melbourne. Yet as her misery thickened she began to question not only her earlier experience but her very capacity for exhilaration. She'd always had to plan so carefully for her rewards and pay upfront for most of them too, she wondered if what she had previously interpreted as exhilaration might simply be relief that, having planned and paid, the reward had duly appeared. Although in those early days at Oxford she would have settled for something considerably less lavish than exhilaration.

Everyone in Oxford was intelligent, or rather everyone she was likely to meet, so being bright could not protect her as it had in the past. As for the sons and daughters of the ruling class who went up to Oxford on the steel tracks of family tradition rather than intellectual capacity, they were unlikely to pursue friendships with Australians, who, Ava quickly discovered, registered rather poorly on the colonial scale. Although most colonials, no matter what their other credentials, were not highly regarded, so the scholarships which she, Jack and Helen had assumed would be their tickets to Oxford acceptance had little effect other than locating them in the colonial underclass.

Whether he was accepted or not was of little concern to Jack. His self-consciousness slithered away as he soused himself in life away from home. He worked at the library, he met with
Ava and Helen, he was adopted by a group of Zimbabweans (he joked he was their token white), he had a regular spot at a popular folk club. And for hours at a time he would walk the streets of Oxford, a bristly figure hunched in his jacket, nodding and chortling to himself. So unmonitored was he, he would find himself lost, a curiously liberating experience for a man accustomed to following maps in practically every aspect of his life.

Jack fell under Oxford's well-documented spell. The romance of the cobbled lanes and walkways, the towers and spires, the massive blocks of Oxford stone, the pubs spiced with ancient spillages, high street shops from the Middle Ages spruiking the latest in modern trinkets, the ornate wedding cake of the Radcliffe Camera, Magdalen's gargoyles, the quarterjacks on Carfax Tower striking the quarter-hours: he loved all of Oxford's wonders and oddities.

‘I feel a different person here,' he said to Ava. ‘I feel new.'

He took his long walks even during the brittle, truly frigid cold that is Oxford's special province in winter and would return to his room hours later where his musings would collect into short bitey nuggets of a thousand words or so on topics as diverse as ‘Hair Dye and Ronald Reagan's Foreign Policy', ‘Deceptive Sentimentality: the Demonising of Lindy Chamberlain', ‘The Lunacy of Humane Murder: Death Sentence by Lethal Injection'. Helen and Ava said he should try to have them published. But despite the plethora of Oxford periodicals, none wanted his articles, so he proposed instead that they start their own magazine, a monthly publication known as
AA
, its full title,
Antipodeans Abroad
, being as alluring as hemlock for most Oxonians. The magazine would feature his essays, Ava's stories, a Modern Alchemy column with scientific news and anecdotes from Helen, together with poetry and fiction drawn from the
broader student body – a quota not difficult to fill, Jack said, given that nearly everyone at Oxford seemed to be writing poetry or a novel.

The inaugural issue of
AA
came out at the end of their first year, long after Ava had returned to her old self. They managed to produce three more issues, more quarterly than monthly, and what meagre sales they made barely covered the cost of the Spanish plonk which nourished the magazine's production.
AA
was pronounced by Jack a magnificent failure.

Notwithstanding their being Australians, Helen and Jack believed that Oxford would judge them on their merits. And besides, Oxford slotted so neatly into the continuing narratives of their lives that they experienced almost from the beginning a strong sense of belonging. Helen had long planned to study and work overseas. Her ties with home were neatly sustained by a weekly aerogramme to her parents, and what loyalties she valued were to the friends who had left home with her. She had found in Oxford the science of her dreams. She would walk around town as if on hallowed turf, citing what discoveries had been made in which buildings, and what discoveries were happening now. Just by being there, she said, she was a part of history.

Jack's situation left him just as happy, although more than a little surprised. If not for Helen and Ava, he would have remained in Australia close to his family for his postgraduate work. As it was, his parents were intending to visit at the end of the Michaelmas term and he was already planning their itinerary. He wanted them to see his Oxford life: the Bodleian with its six million volumes, including some of the oldest books and manuscripts in existence; the desk where he worked in overcoat and hat, and no, he didn't mind the cold.
He would show them the fakes in the Ashmolean – they'd be amused by those – and give them a tour of Oxford's chapels and churches to fire them up about conflicts between church wealth and Christian charity. And together they would travel up to London to visit Highgate and the buxom bust of Karl Marx, and Panizzi's round reading room at the British Library where he would point out Marx's favourite seat and show them some of his papers, although he had recently discovered, to his surprise, that most were held in the Netherlands. He was thrilled about their visit – as was Ava. Anyone from the familiar past was welcome, she only wished someone would make the journey especially to see her. But the only person she had was Stephen and she didn't want to ask him.

Throughout those early months, Ava felt constrained by the triple stigma of being Australian, being an Australian from the wrong background, and being an Australian without ties to home. It was like being stranded on a sheet of clear glass with nothing but blackness beneath. The college rules made no sense; privacy was impossible; the other students had already formed cliques, and while she joked about her supervisor, in truth she was desperate to see him, desperate to know whether the books she was reading were the right books and the papers she was writing had any merit. The food was appalling, the weather inhospitable, and the price of escape, whether a cinema ticket or the return train fare to London, exorbitant.

In despair she wrote to Stephen, a long letter rather than the postcard platitudes she had sent him on her arrival. She filled page after page, confiding in him as she would no one else, and at the letter's end she asked him to ring her. She didn't care that there was only one very public phone on her floor at
the college, she was so desperate to speak to him she would have taken his call anywhere. And such luck, the first since her arrival, the day he rang the college had emptied out for a bank holiday long weekend. She blurted out her woes; pressing the phone against her ear and herself into a corner, she told him everything. He soothed and reassured; she was not to worry about money, he said, she was not to worry about anything, and of course he would ring her again, he would ring as often as she wanted.

Every Monday morning thereafter would see her by the phone waiting for his familiar voice, his reassurances that she was not alone, that he loved her and would always care for her, that he was not so far away, nor was she so far away, and most important of all, that no one would make her stay in Oxford. ‘You can come home whenever you want. But give it a little longer,' he said at the end of the first month. Give it a little longer, he said during the second month. Give it a little longer, he was still saying at the beginning of the third.

The turning point came unexpectedly as turning points often do. It was a Friday towards the end of the Michaelmas term. Helen and Jack, together with a couple of Jack's new friends, had gone up to London for yet another farewell party for two more Zimbabweans returning home. Ava had invented a pressing paper, but in truth their high spirits just made her feel more inadequate. She did, in fact, dabble at her desk in order to consume some time, and then might have gone to a film but there was nothing she could bear to see. The only free lunchtime concert featured a contemporary concerto for tuba and glockenspiel, suggesting the program director was in as desperate straits as was she, so she walked down to Magdalen Chapel on the off-chance that one of the
organists was practising. It was quiet within, nonetheless she settled into a pew hoping the churchy tranquillity would soothe her, but the stillness scratched her raddled nerves, the cold too, so she returned to the street and made her way back towards college. With nothing better to do, she would sleep the afternoon away.