Reunion (15 page)

She slowed up as she approached Blackwell's, glanced in through the glass, hesitated, and then entered the main bookshop – no heart to explore, just a place to warm up, to expend thirty minutes of a day of painfully sluggish minutes. She walked downstairs, she walked back up again. She touched covers and spines, she flicked through pages, she watched the shoppers. Some were alone, others were in pairs, all had purpose. She browsed through an out-sized book on the Sahara – better that inhospitable landscape, she found herself thinking, than inhospitable Oxford. She lingered until the lingering itself was an added irritation and headed for the door. As she left the shop she checked her watch: only twenty-three minutes had passed. Twenty-three measly minutes.

There were at least three hours before nightfall. And after that? Two years of counting off each malnourished minute. The prospect was unbearable. For so long, this place, this Oxford, had been the apotheosis of desire; how could she have so miscalculated? In the past she had not always known where her choices would lead, but she had trusted herself to make them. Now she was doubting all the decisions, some going back to childhood, which had led inexorably to this moment, this situation, this Oxford.

The wind had gathered strength, it was freezing outside. People were hurrying between warm places, only Ava was loitering. She glanced at the posters on doorways and in shop
windows, an overlapping jumble of advertisements for sports, talks, clubs, concerts – Oxford's rich lode on display yet out of reach of her pathetic grasp – and was about to head back to college when her attention was caught by a small roneoed flyer, not particularly distinctive but for a slightly skewed, grainy image of a fat laughing woman's face in the lower right corner. Ava stood in the chill and gazed at it, acknowledging a flutter of interest. The pamphlet was advertising an exhibition of self-portraits and she took down the details. Back in her room, a map showed the gallery to be located in a village a good hour's ride away. With little reason to view the exhibition, but every reason to escape Oxford, she collected her bike and set off.

Ten minutes later and the Oxford of the university was behind her. The streets were wider here and lined with proper houses, at first in rows, then free-standing; another ten minutes and she was in the country. She followed the road as it curved through meadows and pastures, past clumps of rickety trees and the huddled buildings of farms. She clung to the shoulder of the road to avoid the black ice, and swerved back onto the bitumen to miss the boggy patches. The sky was thickly white, her eyes bleary with cold and concentration; at one point she dismounted to stamp the sensation back into her feet.

If there was any sense remaining to her, she would cancel this mad adventure and return to Oxford. But to what? Her solitary room? A dingy café? An under-heated library populated by strangers? Better to remain in the freezing wind, riding treacherous roads, heading towards an exhibition that under normal conditions she would not venture a block out of her way to see.

She reached the village in just under an hour. It was an English storybook place with a few shops, a cluster of cottages, and, at the far end, an old house set in a straggle of garden. This was the gallery. She chained her bike against the fence and entered the building, helping herself to a pamphlet from a pile near the door. She appeared to be the only visitor, and the first time in months she had felt her solitary state as anything other than punishing. The rooms were small, and with the low lighting and deep shadows they might have been soaked in varnish. A good backdrop for old masters, she found herself thinking, not that there were any here.

The self-portraits were the work of local amateurs. Each was displayed alongside a photograph of the artist, a layout which seemed unnecessarily cruel to an aspiring talent. The artists had attempted to reproduce the figure in the photograph accurately, photographically in fact, and in all of them were failures of scale, perspective or both. The one exception was the fat laughing face used on the exhibition poster – not a painting but a drawing in oil pastels and by far the best of the exhibits. The accompanying photograph depicted the artist as a dour, forbidding figure clad in grey. It was a full-length, front-on photograph while the pastel was head and shoulders only. Such discrepancy between the two depictions could only be deliberate, Ava decided, given the evident skill of the artist. And in the nature of the discrepancy she saw mystery, possibility, conflicting desires, and in that knowing, laughing face, trickery too. Ava checked the details of the artist in the pamphlet: ‘Anonymous'.

‘Touché,' she said aloud.

Apart from the fat woman there was little of interest; Ava moved quickly through the exhibition until she reached a larger
room at the back of the cottage. Here were prints and photographs of self-portraits by well-known nineteenth-and twentieth-century artists, all men incidentally, unlike the exhibits in the other rooms, which were mostly women. There was Matisse depicted very much as the painter squire, and a childlike pencil drawing of Paul Klee as an oriental thinker. Edward Hopper had produced a figure out of an Edward Hopper painting, Picasso had painted a cubist Picasso, and Modigliani was long and slender like one of his women. Dali presented himself in liquid surrealism and Escher was seen through a play of optics. Hung closely together in a blatant display of either irony or ignorance were Francis Bacon depicted as a swirling, distorted Bacon, and Andrew Wyeth palely poised within a pale Wyeth interior. Kokoschka, one of Ava's favourite artists, had been incomprehensibly cruel in his ‘Portrait of a “Degenerate Artist”'.

We keep our true selves closed, Ava found herself thinking. And in the absurdity of some of these images, the very act of self-presentation seemed to be mocked. How many of the painters were laughing as they worked? And it occurred to her that these artists might have deliberately chosen self-portraiture in order to retreat from the public eye in simultaneous acts of self-conjuring and disguise. Like writers use fiction. Like Ava, herself, had chosen fiction.

How, she wondered, might her friends depict themselves? Rather than the brilliant scholar whom most people saw, Jack, with his gropings for perfection and his major talent for disappointment, might opt for a quixotic man on a mule – and claim the mule as being truer to his character. And Helen would probably choose an absurdist image, a grasshopper perhaps, propped before saucepan-shaped test tubes and Petri dishes heaped with oranges, all six limbs
busy at once. As for herself, all spark and passion as far as everyone else was concerned, she would settle for a set of brightly painted
matryoshka
dolls, diminishing to ever-smaller figures, the very last one tinier than a thimble and painted a featureless white.

She peered at the sadness in the Francis Bacon, the doubt in a rare Ruskin, and the startled, illuminated face of Munch. No matter what the emotional resonance, there was a swagger to these works, as if the artist were saying:
This is how I choose to present myself. And whether you want to believe it or not won't make a scrap of difference to me.

And wasn't this the way she had always lived?

When she rode back into Oxford, it was as if layers of hardened mud had been washed away. Suddenly her mind was back in top gear. She must check out the self-portraits at the National Portrait Gallery; at last she could see how to structure her paper on Coleridge; she would write on Jane Austen's feminism for her thesis. And she would unpack her novel so assiduously avoided since arriving in Oxford. She had left Melbourne behind, Stephen too, and while she had not left her friends, it was in the writing of this novel where her creative and always portable self found a home. How foolish she had been to neglect it.

It was after four and the street lights were coming on. Oxford looked old and golden. She was ravenous, but first to the post office and a card to Stephen to let him know she was on the mend. Then to a café where she ordered a toasted sandwich and a hot chocolate. The sandwich arrived oozing butter and cheese, and the hot chocolate came with bobbing marshmallows. She pushed up her sleeves in the fuggy air and settled hungrily to the food. Her future was back.

 

Six months later,
Rock Father
was accepted for publication. Another four months and Ava had met Harry; with him at her side the way ahead looked clear and calm.

The others never knew how close she had come to falling.

Friendships become swaddled in invisible protective layers and nothing short of a cataclysmic blow can break through to the inevitable stress points beneath. If Ava, or indeed any of the friends were to lose their footing now, would the others notice?

As Jack stood in the colonnade of the State Library alongside Helen watching Connie and Ava tossing ideas between them, far from thinking any of them was in trouble, he felt something of the same excitement as when first they met, that same sense of a future opening up. Connie would get his TV series, Ava would publish another brilliant novel, he would write a new book, and Helen would find her shigella vaccine – all of them with careers on the rise and all of them together again. Their friendship was as strong as ever. They just needed to make more of an effort.

He turned to Helen to float the idea of reinstating the Laconics Society when one of the TV crew appeared and herded them back inside. They crowded through the library entrance, a jostle of elbows and shoulders, the four of them laughing and talking all at once.

The production assistant was smiling at them. ‘If ever we do a program on friendship,' she said, ‘would you be the stars?'

NOGA's first location was a single office in a nondescript university building equipped with an administrative officer, a computer, a photocopier and telephone conferencing facilities. Two and a half years later it occupied an entire upper floor of a new glass and metal tower on the edge of the city. Jack's office, one of three Visiting Member's Studies (or, in the NOGA predilection for prescriptive acronyms, a ViMS), was marginally smaller than his entire flat. Another of the offices had been allocated to Helen but she spent most of her time at the laboratory, while Connie's area, even larger than Jack's and with a corner location, adjoined Harry's suite. Such grand premises had only become possible, Harry told Jack, when the building's owner-developer had been invited on to the NOGA board. This had paved the way, Harry had lowered his voice, ‘for special commercial arrangements'.

The walls were hung with contemporary paintings, all by up-and-coming artists according to Harry, and highly rated on investment scales; the floor was carpeted in a velvety blue plush, the furniture was an elegance of timber and pale leather,
Jack's desk was solid Tasmanian blackwood. An entire wall of his office comprised floor-to-ceiling glass with a panoramic view of the southern half of the city. Jack would stand by these windows twenty-seven storeys in the sky, the fingertips of his left hand in a steadying pose against the glass, relishing the vaguely thrilling vertigo.

He had moved into this office the week following the reunion, and on the very first day had dragged one of the armchairs across to the wall of windows. In the intervening months he had spent hours – accumulated days – staring through the glass. Sometimes he saw only shapes and colours, as if the city were a huge abstract mosaic; other times he would latch on to familiar sites like the Botanic Gardens, the Shrine, and the neo-classical piles of town halls from Collingwood to Caulfield. He would trace the major thoroughfares to the bay, to the eastern hills, to the docks and loading yards in the west. And the slender spine of the Westgate Bridge, where one blustery night long ago, he and Ava had walked hand in hand across one side and back down the other, oblivious to the lumbering traffic, the fumes, the plain ordinariness of life outside their spectacular selves.

He was expected to work in this room and he had made an effort. The NOGA fellowship had brought him a rush of consultancies, mainly to business groups, although people from the media regularly contacted him for comment and background material, and increasingly there had been inquiries from political figures as well. But the work he most wanted was to write a new book. He was convinced that the best way of explaining the complex persuasions of contemporary Islam was by returning to the Islam of its golden age. You can't understand Islam's trajectory, in particular its response to
the post-Enlightenment world, he would say in interviews and focus sessions, without a thorough knowledge of its history. And most particularly, you can't ignore Islam's own perspective of this history. This was not what people wanted to hear, nor was it what publishers wanted to publish. They preferred instead the frisson of their own fear, the safety of clear-cut blame, and the sensational explosions of boys and girls giving up their young lives to defeat the infidels. With today's spectaculars, the past did not stand a chance.

Ever alert to modernity's special deals, Luke was critical of Jack's attachment to the past. ‘And it's not just your work,' he said. ‘You act as if everything important has already happened.'

In the past few months, Jack had come to know Luke well. While he seemed to be a typical teenager in many respects, he also demonstrated a sensitivity to others and an acuteness of understanding rare in his generation. ‘It's being the only son of a single mother,' Luke said with a smile. ‘I don't have much choice.'

Luke often had dinner at Jack's place when Helen worked late, and the previous week, while Helen attended a meeting in Jakarta, he had stayed with Jack for a few days. They were taking a stroll along the Esplanade after dinner one night when Luke spoke up. ‘This place for example,' and he waved at the beach, ‘you remember it as it was early one spring morning – twenty-five? thirty years ago? Why not look at it now? Clean sand and lots of it, hardly a syringe to be found, and far better for outdoor sex than ever it used to be.'

Luke's point was valid, but what Luke and everyone else failed to see was Jack preferred it his way. The beach was precisely significant because it was where he made love to Ava, yes, in the past, but still of far greater interest than today's cleaned-up,
syringe-free stretch of sand. Yet now as he sat in his office high above the city he was aware of a strange unease. What sort of man is always oriented towards the past, towards what is already known? And what sort of life does it produce? No surprises, no originality, just treading the same old familiar groove. And so conservative – the thought shocked him. Perhaps it was not surprising he had written nothing new for so long.

Yet he wanted to write and he had tried these past months but the discipline had perished, maybe the ideas too, although that was harder to accept. And his mood was at odds. The pleasures he had felt at Connie's pilot the previous day had disappeared even before he had left the library; in fact, all pleasures these days were short-lived. After the filming, instead of bundling into a bar for a spirited wrap-up, Helen had dashed back to the laboratory to check on an experiment, Connie had dashed back to Sara who was expecting him, and Ava, who looked uncharacteristically tired, went home. They gave their excuses, leaving Jack alone on the lawn in front of the State Library. He watched Ava board the tram heading north, then he walked to the corner to wait for a tram to carry him in the other direction.

Today he had arrived at the office just before ten o'clock. He had browsed the newspaper, more out of habit than interest, and an hour later he could not have named the main stories. His email was similarly uninspiring, consisting of petitions, advertisements and an annoying message from Harry, highly critical of an old friend of the Adelsons. This woman, a fearless and very public campaigner for human rights, had recently sought Jack's help in applying for refugee status for an Iraqi family. A series of emails had passed between them. The woman was a well-known figure, she was often in the press,
nonetheless, Harry's timing was uncanny – suspiciously so. But the possibility that Harry might be shadowing him in cyberspace – and if him, perhaps anyone associated with NOGA – was so unpalatable, so beyond the realm of acceptable behaviour, Jack preferred to ascribe the interference to coincidence. He trashed the email without acknowledging it.

He paid a couple of bills and checked out the
Guardian
online with much the same attention he had given to the morning paper. He cruised some of his favourite websites, but even these failed to stir. He read through the letter he had written to Ava the previous night; it would, he realised, be added to the never-sent file, which was now so large it occupied an entire drawer. He went to the window and gazed out, but was savaged by an irritation so intense that if he could have cracked open his body and leapt out of his skin he would have. At quarter past twelve he heard the squawk of Harry's voice along the corridor, and knowing he could not face him, not even a short polite greeting to the man long married to Ava, he grabbed his things and left the building for an early lunch.

He crossed to the other side of the river via the footbridge and went directly to a café in one of the lanes off Flinders Street. He had become a regular here – not just the good coffee and Mediterranean food, but with the parade through the lane and the coppery old shops he might be in London, Paris, Amsterdam or Florence. Everywhere and nowhere. There should have been freedom in the geographical slipperiness, but he experienced only the slipperiness,

Soon he was settled at his usual table, dipping into a plate of antipasto and drinking the first of two espressos. He propped his novel against the sugar bowl and began to read. It was Bellow's last, not because Bellow had spoken to him in recent
novels, but long ago
Herzog
and
Humboldt's Gift
had set his world on fire and he longed for the same again. He turned pages while he ate, cleared the plate, had no idea what he had read, turned to the previous page, no recognition, and the one before that, still nothing, and with a surge of frustration closed the book. So much din in his brain and he couldn't even attend to a novel any more. He ordered his second coffee; it arrived too quickly. He wasn't ready to return to the office, he would prefer never to return, and why from this cerebral wasteland should rear up one of Archimedes' maxims he did not know, but it did stop the bluster.

Give me a foothold and I shall move the earth
.

He was fifteen when first he read this and had been in no doubt Archimedes was speaking to him. He had loving parents, his country was safe and prosperous, he was a successful student and a talented musician; his foothold was excellent, the rest would be up to him. Later he found a different translation:
Give me somewhere to stand, and I will move the earth
, and realised he may have misinterpreted. There followed days of doubt and frantic research until he remembered something he had once read: that the first translation of a favourite work is like a first love – it may not be the most reliable, but by being first it receives special consideration.

Give me a foothold and I shall move the earth
.

His foothold had indeed been excellent, yet here he was in his mid-forties and might as well be on life support for all the effect he'd had on the world. He wasn't writing, he wasn't researching, he had produced neither children nor brilliant students, and his only significant scholarship had occurred decades ago. He was dishing out simplified information to anyone who asked, which was then distorted into simpler
sound-bites. His group of friends hardly comprised a group any more, and while he clung to his thoughts of Ava like a doomed man clings to life, with her in the same city it was as if these thoughts were cut adrift from their
raison d'être
, thereby setting him adrift. He could no longer indulge in fantasies of their meeting in romantic corners of the world, nor could he use such imaginings as a distraction from the disappointments of his own ordinary days. Not only did he not have Ava in the sense Harry had Ava, but his own Ava was fast slipping away.

He knew that Connie and Helen had long viewed his love for Ava as a disability, but he felt disabled now, as if he had contracted one of those muscle-wasting diseases where each new day is a reminder of a dwindling future. What Connie and Helen had never understood was that the way he conducted his relationship with Ava had worked for him. He had been happy.

‘If you'd lived the first twenty years of your life in a brick cell, happiness would be a bedsit with a tiny window looking out to a garbage dump,' Helen had said recently.

It was a couple of days before she left for Jakarta, and Jack had invited her round to the flat for an early dinner to sample one of his experiments: a basil and slow-roasted tomato soufflé served with a salad of blanched green beans and toasted almond slivers drizzled with a thyme-infused olive oil. It was entirely wasted on her of course, food being no more than a bodily requirement as far as she was concerned, but Connie, who would have been more appreciative, seemed unable to separate from Sara even for a quick meal, and Ava was out of the question. They had just begun the meal, but given the turn of conversation Jack wished it were already over. For Helen was wrong: he had reliable standards of comparison, he knew what happiness was.

‘You don't, Jack. You've never had a real relationship with anyone.'

He poured himself more wine and sipped slowly, as if that could quell the seething. Helen had no idea what she was talking about. He had been with many women; the problem was they failed to make the grade.

‘Your standards have been carved out of a long-standing, nonexistent relationship with an idealised woman. No real woman could ever measure up. And as far as I can see you've stopped bothering.' Helen helped herself to another spoonful of soufflé and dumped a pile of salad on top. ‘You don't need to step out your front door any more. It's very tidy, very safe in here.'

He defended himself vigorously and with growing peevishness. But no matter how much he insisted his relationship with Ava was real, no matter how apposite his arguments, Helen refused to shift. As for his long correspondence with Ava, Helen believed this had nothing to do with real love.

‘The written word is a powerful aphrodisiac. Or as Luke would say,' and she smiled at the reference to her son, ‘the written word is hot. Look no further than the countless people who have been caught up in cyberspace romances only to discover that their partner is a fourteen-year-old boy with bad acne, raging libido and excellent written expression.'

He was about to protest: his correspondence with Ava had nothing in common with chatroom sleaze, but Helen was not finished. ‘Whether cyberspace or old-fashioned mail, written communications make you feel very good. And the pleasures are always solitary, they're always intense, and –' she paused for emphasis, ‘they are always self-serving.'

Helen had always been blunt. You welcomed it when she was agreeing with you, you welcomed it when you were head
to head in intellectual argument, and you certainly welcomed it in the days of the Laconics. But with his relationship with Ava already struggling, Helen might just as well have plunged the blade in and left him to bleed. They had planned a quick dinner before Helen collected Luke from football practice. Jack cut it even shorter. Helen was wrong, she didn't understand. And who was she to judge? With the exception of Luke, her most enduring attachment was to bacteria.

He had been determined to dismiss her opinions out of hand, but not only had he found himself dwelling on what she had said, he had dipped into some well-known correspondences – Virginia Woolf's with Vita Sackville-West, de Beauvoir's baggy tender letters to Nelson Algren, even John Evelyn's correspondence with Margaret Blagge, these last such chaste letters yet emitting such heat.