Reunion (19 page)

The spider remained throughout the long month of Fleur's leaving and for the first couple of months of bereavement. This little creature with no other motive than a good feed in a sheltered spot provided an easier and less guilt-ridden solace than Harry. When the spider eventually disappeared, the days and nights were still pitted with loss but Ava was aware of Fleur taking up less space. She stretched her limbs, she looked about. The short English summer had passed, the leaves on the trees were beginning to colour, the students were back in Oxford, and she and Harry were going home.

At first she had resisted the return to Australia. What would happen if Fleur changed her mind? She wouldn't change her mind, Harry said on one of the few occasions he referred to Fleur directly, and, besides, everything was arranged, a job for him, a university fellowship for her, too late to back out now. Ava packed up the flat, it was good to be occupied, she packed up their life in Oxford. She wrote lists in the evening and followed them religiously the following day. System took the place of suffering. The days and weeks passed, the flat was emptied out. There was a farewell party, she and Harry spent the last night staying with friends, and the following day they travelled up to London and caught the plane home.

Then, nearly three years later with life tripping along nicely, all the friends back in Melbourne, an ordinary Tuesday with the usual morning routine of breakfast, reading, shower, dressing, then to her email, an excellent alternative to the phone, Ava believed, but an extremely poor substitute for the romance of the post, and there it was, the familiar address.

Fleur.

Ava did not hesitate to open the message, one rarely does with email. Fleur was coming to Sydney to courier some treas
ures for an exhibition on Indian art and culture. Only a brief visit, but it would be wonderful to see her. Could Ava come up to Sydney?
I've so missed our times together,
she wrote.
We always had such fun.

Riding the rapids of email, Ava hit reply and dashed off a ‘what a surprise but what a shame' email citing long-standing work commitments in Melbourne. With only a short time in Australia, Fleur, never much interested in putting herself out, would not make the effort to come down to Melbourne.

Ava selected send, and then sat stunned in front of the screen, not seeing, not reading, not thinking, a minute or two and then rising out of the email those words: we always had such fun.

‘We always had such fun,' Ava said the words aloud. There was plenty of fun in the early years, no question of that, but for the last four or five the fun was replaced by a good deal of distress. Had Fleur not noticed? Had she forgotten the betrayals and bitter arguments? Had she forgotten the barrage of criticism she aimed at Ava, the faults she found no matter how many changes Ava made? Was Fleur's fun at the expense of her own pain?

How easily, how surreptitiously can love become panic. That teetering at the edge of the chasm, that swimming endlessly against a swollen tide, that driving the wrong way up a one-way street. And you can't turn round and you can't go back. It makes a nonsense of happiness, it makes a nonsense of love too. And all it takes in this misery is one good time and the misery falls away (she loves me, I knew it, she loves me), one good hit and you're strengthened for the next several months of abuse. But never would you call it fun. Ava did not regret her rapid-fire response to Fleur's email: she had no desire to see her, not this woman with her fun and her forgetting.

 

There was no reason to expect a response from Fleur, nonetheless Ava checked her email a dozen times throughout the day. In between she potted lilies, she had coffee with her neighbour Minnie, she took Minnie's dog for a walk, she read Oscar Wilde's letters in an attempt to gatecrash other intimacies, and then more soberly a portion of
De Profundis
; she made vegetable soup, she tidied her desk, and finally at ten past five there was a response from Fleur.
Melbourne
, she wrote,
why not? May never have another chance
. She would tack a few days' holiday on to her trip.

There were so many escapes at this stage and Ava ignored the lot of them, for now a meeting with Fleur was possible it became,
ipso facto
, essential. By the time Harry came home, Ava had cancelled all engagements for the week of Fleur's visit with the exception of one reading on the morning of her arrival, just in case she required distraction. There was no question of telling Harry. If the visit turned out to be inconsequential he would never need know, and if not, with desire and disgust amassing in equal strength, she refused to consider that option.

During the weeks that followed, Ava applied herself to work. There were periods when she slipped smoothly into the new novel but mostly the narrative ran amok; sometimes her patience was so fractured that even reading was reduced to rubble. As she lay in bed on the Friday before Fleur's arrival, Ava wondered how she would make it through the next four days. The filming of Connie's pilot at the State Library the following Monday would swallow a few hours, but the weekend loomed endlessly.

From the kitchen she could hear the familiar sounds of Harry making his breakfast; it would be at least thirty minutes before
he appeared with her coffee. She tried one more time to apply reason to the impending Fleur visit and yet again she failed. She was about to call Harry and suggest an earlier coffee when suddenly she remembered recitations from memory, the way they could moor attention in the most violent of currents. She began with the ice and albatross stanzas from ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' followed by the beginning of ‘Prufrock'. Then Hardy's remarkable comment on modernity, ‘We are getting to the end of visioning/The impossible within this universe.' And finally, as if it were waiting for her, she seized on Auden's ‘Musée des Beaux Arts'. She had recited it three times by the time Harry arrived with the coffee.

‘I've been thinking of Auden's poem how “everything turns away quite leisurely from the disaster”,' she said when he appeared in the doorway. ‘Why is it, do you think, that in so many instances people go on with their business, despite a boy falling out of the sky, or war or famine or politicians lying in the name of democracy?'

Harry smiled and bent down to kiss her. ‘I do enjoy our morning conversations.'

He settled himself on the bed, careful not to crush his trousers. ‘It's a matter of self-interest I think. People turn away from a disaster because they're already consumed by events closer at hand, events that more directly involve them, events more important to them and considerably more pleasurable than war or famine or destruction of the planet.'

‘But what about those occasions when the disaster has them in its sights, is hurtling towards them and about to swallow them up like a triffid? What then?' She was picking at a pulled thread on the quilt cover. ‘And often the events that absorb them are not in the least bit pleasant.'

‘Pleasant or unpleasant, the focus keeps the person at the centre of his or her universe –'

‘But surely not everyone is that egocentric.'

‘– and being so occupied provides the person with a sense of being in control.' He saw she was about to interrupt again and quickly continued. ‘There's a deflection effect. Obsessing over something, being plagued by something, fills in time that might otherwise be used in grappling with more relevant issues. The prevaricating, no matter how uncomfortable, is delaying some difficult actions.'

Ava sipped her coffee and avoided his gaze. Harry knew about Fleur's visit, she did not know how he knew, but she was in no doubt he did know. She was wondering whether she should admit to it when he announced in quite a different tone of voice that he had a surprise.

‘An early anniversary celebration,' – their anniversary was the following week – ‘a holiday weekend.' He would go to the office for just a couple of hours, ‘We could get away by midday.'

She leaned forward and pulled him towards her. It was exactly what she needed.

‘We'll be eating freshly baked scones for afternoon tea,' Harry said, holding her close.

Ava passed the morning in preparation for their trip, including a visit to the Richmond Hill cheese shop for a selection of Harry's favourite cheeses, together with a loaf of the rosemary and walnut bread he said was the best accompaniment for blue cheese. By the time he returned from work she was ready to leave: for the coast, for the Grampians, for the lush farming country in East Gippsland, for the old gold rush country – neither had any preference, so they tossed a coin, and found themselves heading west to the Grampian mountains. They
ate perfect scones at Dunkeld and reached the town of Halls Gap late in the afternoon.

They ignored the picturesque bed-and-breakfasts and searched instead for a motel where breakfast was delivered on a tray through a hatch and no one bothered you.

‘Atmosphere can be so intrusive,' Harry said as he always did.

‘– and so risky,' Ava added her usual reply.

They were still laughing when they turned into the driveway of a four-star motel which boasted grazing kangaroos at dusk. They were settled in their room, which looked and smelled exactly as a four-star motel room should, and were ticking off their desires on the breakfast menu when the first of the kangaroos appeared.

They sat together on the verandah watching the grazing animals, toasting each other with cider bought from the local pub and dipping into Ava's gift of bread and cheese. The Stilton, Harry said, was excellent, all the cheeses were.

Over the next two days Fleur was packed away while Ava and Harry walked bush tracks, climbed mountain paths and visited every shop in town that sold homemade jams and chutneys, places Harry found irresistible and which Ava tolerated only because of him. They saw galahs and crimson rosellas and rainbow lorikeets, and on one mountain slope a wombat waddling along. They walked arm in arm, breaking into favourite songs, Blake's ‘Jerusalem', so at odds with this landscape, and the ‘Hallelujah Chorus' for two voices. They talked about friends and Harry's family, they discussed home and abroad, they drew parallels between the present time and early last century, both periods of such rapid change and so few people concerned about where the world might be heading.
They talked about power and wondered if Joseph Conrad's
Heart of Darkness
were made compulsory reading for all fifteen-year-olds whether they would become more responsible citizens. Ava with her faith in the power of narrative believed they would, Harry disagreed as she knew he would. They talked about communication in the age of the computer – never been so efficient, according to Harry, never been so fragile, according to Ava. For two days they talked and laughed and sang and riffled their store of shared memories so well stocked after more than twenty years.

‘Over twenty years,' Ava exclaimed, ‘who would have thought it.'

On the way home, Harry pulled into a service station for petrol. He switched off the engine and turned to her. ‘We're not doing too badly, Davey, we're really not.'

 

On Monday morning Fleur sent an email, not the cancellation Ava had both hoped and feared, but confirmation of time and place for their meeting and an excited,
See you tomorrow! Can't wait!

The afternoon at the State Library passed quickly with hardly a thought of Fleur. Not just the bustle of TV, not just being with the others, but Connie in top form and fairly crackling with ideas. And Fleur stayed away during the evening with Harry, his potato pie for dinner and a DVD of
Charade
, ‘For my own romantic,' he said. Ava took a sleeping pill and made it through the night.

The following day Harry left home early. He told her he had meetings in Canberra and was planning to stay overnight. Not knowing how long she would be with Fleur, Ava had invented an evening reading and overnight stay for herself, in Ballarat
of all places – Ballarat simply popped into her head and she stuck to it. Harry left and Ava was saddled with three hours to fill before her reading – not in Ballarat but at the university a kilometre away, and the one engagement she had not cancelled when first she learned of Fleur's visit.

She fidgeted for an hour, and when she could bear the waiting no longer she grabbed her things and escaped the house. Soon she was wedged down the back of a tram crammed with workers on their way to the city. In the old days she had experienced none of this disquiet; there was an urgency to the whole Fleur business which, she now realised, must have diluted her usual moral responses. When you are compelled to see someone, compelled to contact them several times each day, compelled to love them, you do not think about the consequences to you or anyone else. How very different things were now.

Just before Harry left that morning, she had reassured him, or perhaps she was reassuring herself, that never would anyone come between them.

‘I know,' he said. ‘But I like to hear you say it.'

As the tram stopped and started and she was pressed harder into a corner, she instructed herself to put Harry aside: the next few hours belonged to the Ava connected to Fleur and quite a different Ava from the one married to Harry. By the time she arrived in the city centre the familiar churning was back: excitement, dread, and a determination to be sensible but in the presence of Fleur knowing she simply could not be trusted.

Once in the city she wandered across the river into the Botanic Gardens. She considered how best to present herself to Fleur, how much to disclose about their almost three-year
separation, how much to reveal about her own anxieties now. She did not see the newly planted flower beds, nor the black swans on the ornamental lake, nor the scrub wrens rummaging in the leaf litter. She was, as she had been so many times before, simply filling the time with thoughts of Fleur until Fleur herself arrived.