Reunion (28 page)

With four books on the definite pile and enough money for two or three more, there are some difficult decisions to be made. She adds, she takes away, she makes three piles instead of two, she totes figures in her head, she counts her money. It's like playing patience with a short deck.

‘Easier to choose between diamonds.'

Her head jerks up, the professor is standing a metre away. His accent is English, his utterance of a type she might read in a book. He is looking down at her, his face very serious. But with choices to be made and time running out, she just gives him a nod.

He does not move. He suggests she leave some for next time.

This man with his posh accent has no idea. ‘It's not as simple as that,' she says, and doesn't care if she sounds rude. She glances at her watch, then returns to her three piles.

‘How much do you need?'

She swallows the ache in her throat, she doesn't want him to see how much this matters. And then a slump like wet wool and her perfect day is in tatters. Her books are in piles before her. There's nothing more to lose.

‘Six dollars twenty-five.' Each syllable is a tidy punch as if he, or anyone with money is somehow to blame. She will not look at him, she keeps her gaze on her books. Impossible to have all thirteen. She pushes the right-hand pile behind her, out of view and out of contention, and recalculates. ‘Make that three dollars sixty-five.' She swallows hard, and now she looks up. She settles her face into a smile.

He opens his wallet and withdraws two two-dollar bills. ‘Take the money,' he says. ‘It delights me to see a girl your age so keen on books.'

Ava looks at the money, she looks at her books,
her
books, and then she looks at him. He is obviously rich and probably harmless. Being careful will only harden the cement of her current life. She stands up. Her heart is thumping. She takes his money. She tries to keep her voice steady as she thanks him.

‘I'll pay you back,' she makes another quick calculation, ‘in three months.'

He nods as if in thought. ‘What I'd prefer is a note from you with your impressions of each book.'

‘Like a book review?' The idea is so grown-up and so very writerly.

He smiles. ‘Yes, like a book review.'

He writes down his name, Stephen Webb, his address and phone number.

‘So you do work at the university,' she says.

He nods and gives another smile. And even though the beard makes him look old, it's a nice smile.

He is not finished. ‘Perhaps one day you'd like to see my library.'

In her short life she has learned to be watchful for experiences and grab them when they present. Now she studies Stephen Webb with a different eye. He is tall, at least six feet, with lines around his eyes – not the crêpey collapsed skin of a truly old person, just clear smile lines, and across his forehead there are lines of thought. His hair is brown and thick and brushed to the side. The hair makes him look less old, perhaps even in his thirties – although thirty or forty makes no difference and she knows it. But he is not fat, and he doesn't look like a sleaze, and there's no hair on the backs of his fingers. And he has his own library.

I can do this, she thinks, as she pockets his money. I can do this.

 

‘Nothing's free in this world,' her mother always said. The difficult part was arriving at a fair price. With Stephen, Ava believed she had. Over the next several years, like God with
the Israelites, Stephen supplied her necessities in the desert – and, as far as she was concerned, for bargain prices.

He guided her through the classics, he taught her about poetry, he instilled in her the importance of memorising, he gave her old books, he gave her new books, he gave her the complete works of Shakespeare in a red leather-bound copy with tiny bible-sized print, and he gave her love. Stephen was worldly and he was wise and everything he had he was willing to share with her. Before she met him, every day was fretted with want, but Stephen made it clear that with him she would never want for anything. He had a wife, he had two sons, he had friends, perhaps he had parents and sisters and brothers as well, but she was convinced he put her first.

As they read and talked together she found a language for her life to come, a mysterious exciting future that grew ever clearer and ever more possible. She told him of her dream to write novels; he told her he had absolute faith she would. She told him she planned to live overseas; he said whatever she set her mind to do she could achieve. It was Stephen who taught her the importance of travelling, of knowing other places and other people, and so different from her mother for whom home was not only enough, it was unquestionably the best. It was Stephen who suggested Oxford and it was Stephen who supplied the money – for school, for Melbourne University, for Oxford too, a monthly deposit in an account he set up for her.

He told her his wife went her own way even more than he went his. Ava never pursued what he meant, not because of the wife's activities, rather she preferred not to know how Stephen viewed his own. He showed her photographs of his family because she asked to see them, but the images, like the people themselves, remained blurred.

She and Stephen usually met at his flat not far from the city centre, ‘my private office' as he called it; only twice did she go to his home – a large old house in a leafy suburb. He denied he was rich but the big house, the sons at private school, his job at the university plus his private office, his Mercedes Benz, even his pen collection suggested great wealth to her. He was an administrator at the university, not an academic, a man who had come from the private sector and expected to return there.

She never coveted his money, only the freedom it afforded. Stephen could travel anywhere, he could buy any book he wanted, he could add to his pen collection according to his fancy. He collected Parker Duofolds, a classic workmanlike pen according to him, but with their round belly, the way they fit so snugly in the hand and their lovely weight Ava thought them lushly feminine. On the first anniversary of their meeting, he made her a gift from his own collection. It remained her favourite pen.

Stephen said he would always love her, and perhaps he would have but she never put him to the test. Six years after they met she was wrapping up her Melbourne life, she was going to Oxford, she was moving on. No false hopes for him and no Melbourne ties for her – although he had insisted on continuing his financial support, and nothing she said would make him change his mind. She hadn't seen her family for more than a year, her best friends were travelling with her, once she left Melbourne there would be no looking back. She did not talk about leaving him, and knowing how she abhorred dependence in others, he would never have raised the issue himself.

Some people treat their mistakes and regrets like bruises, prodding them every now and then to keep them tender. Ava
was not the type to dwell on her mistakes: they happen, you learn, you make sure not to repeat them. But of all the mistakes she had made none involved Stephen Webb. He was the right person for those years and how she had missed him when she first left Australia. He still appeared in her dreams a quarter of a century on.

He would be well over seventy now, and rising up and taking her quite by surprise was an urge to contact him. But aside from satisfying some inexplicable nostalgia, what could possibly be achieved? Leave your memories alone, she told herself, for neither she nor Stephen had what the other wanted these days. He had loved her, loved her unconditionally as her parents had failed to do. He had loved her all those years ago like Harry did now. Contact Stephen? She was turning into one of those pitiful middle-aged people for whom the past acquired ever brighter and more varied hues while the present dissolved into a vale of tears. No purpose would be served by meeting Stephen now. Of course she wouldn't contact him.

She left the shelter of the second-hand bookshop. The rain had stopped, the humidity was worse than ever. She burrowed in her pocket for a tissue to wipe her face and pulled out a piece of green glass. She turned it over in her hand. How on earth did that get there? and tossed it into a rubbish bin. As she made her way back through the Carlton streets she felt a need for Harry. She picked up her pace, soon she would be home, and within a few hours he would be too. Perhaps he might leave work early. She rummaged in her bag for her mobile phone and turned it on, but the battery was flat. She would ring him as soon as she arrived home. It was not a day for being alone.

2.

Helen Rankin was sitting on the front verandah of Ava's house. She had rung Ava's mobile but it was not turned on. She had dialled the landline and heard the phone ringing inside the house. She and Ava had arranged to meet at three, it was now a quarter to four. Ava had clearly forgotten.

Since the Aiken meeting Helen had been working flat out, not simply the demands of her current research, but there had been reports to write and grant applications for the laboratory back in the US, and almost daily communications with Möller. Her superiors in Maryland were haranguing her to return to America; NOGA had expected her to leave Australia months ago; but what seemed so sure and certain when she met Möller at Aiken was now blurred with doubt. After weeks of trying to see Ava, she and Ava had finally agreed on today. It was Ava who had suggested her place, Ava who had suggested three o'clock so as to have plenty of time to talk before Harry came home. ‘And then,' she said, ‘the three of us can toast your brilliant career.'

Helen couldn't help wondering if in the scheme of things friendship now received a lower priority than in the old days. And yet she really did want to talk to Ava – not to help in making a decision, for unless she had a kamikaze instinct as far as her career was concerned, the choice was clear, but to help settle the decision she had made. She wanted Ava to study the various issues, weigh up the ethical pros and cons and produce an inspired and original reason for the only sensible option open to her. And if she was to be entirely honest, she also wanted Ava's approval.

Helen walked down the path to the gate. It was still humid, but with a misty rain falling it felt a little cooler. The drop in
temperature had brought out some joggers on the cemetery track, and there was a group of boys kicking a football around. She checked her watch again, and was about to leave, when Ava appeared at the corner of the street.

Her floating clothes were easily recognisable, so too the shape of her as she walked along the footpath, but everything else about this unmasked Ava was strange. The drooping head, the slow inward shuffle, the arms immobile at her sides. Strange and infirm. Helen was about to step out and make herself known but something about this figure held her back. Halfway up the street Ava stopped. Now she seemed to be talking to herself, her arms were extended in front of her, palms turned upwards in a questioning gesture, or perhaps she was pleading. She appeared stripped bare. Helen continued to observe, undercover as it were and breaking the rules. You think you want to see your intimates without their public disguises, but confronted by this view of Ava, Helen decided there was too much to lose by such uninvited sightings.

Ava continued up the street, drawing closer to the house. Her arms were now wrapped tightly about her in an invisible straitjacket, her feet dragged against the asphalt. Helen's problems were bad enough, but if Ava's appearance was any guide, hers were a good deal worse.

Helen wanted to dash down the street and enfold her in her arms. But everything she knew about Ava suggested she would be embarrassed to be caught in this state. The Volvo was parked around the next corner. Helen grabbed her bag, slipped through the gateway and into the side lane. A minute or two later, when Ava entered the house, Helen walked the short distance to her car and quickly drove away.

3.

‘She seemed cut off from her surroundings,' Helen said to Jack. ‘And blunted too, as if switched to one of those economy settings on air-conditioning units.'

It was the evening of the missed appointment and Helen, together with Luke and Jack, had packed a picnic dinner and joined the hordes at the beach. The earlier cool change had been no more than a tease. It was now after nine, the temperature was thirty degrees, and with their meal finished they had moved down the sand to sit in the shallows.

‘I watched her walking up the street,' Helen said. ‘She was hardly recognisable. And she forgot our appointment. Ava never forgets.'

And she was never sick, not that Helen believed there was anything physically wrong with her now. ‘I think she's suffering some sort of psychological malaise. If she could just finish her novel, she'd be back to normal in no time.'

Jack was surprised Helen knew anything about the state of Ava's work.

‘From the very first book,' Helen said, ‘she's supplied me with regular updates. And for each new novel when the end is in sight she sends me a draft. She says I'm sensitive to the big picture – stumbling story, dull characters, that sort of thing.' Helen let out a laugh. ‘What she really means is I have an extremely low threshold for boredom.'

Why had Ava not told him? Jack wondered. He had thought he alone read her work in draft. And might have said something he'd have regretted if Helen had not continued.

‘Too bad I've been immune to the big picture in my own
work. Although,' and she slapped at a mosquito, ‘now that I have the big picture, I wish I could forget it.'

And because Jack did not share Helen's concerns about Ava – far from being stressed or anxious, Ava seemed more relaxed with him than ever before – he stretched out in the shallows, propped himself on an elbow while Helen pursued her career dilemmas.

‘Germany under Hitler had a policy called “
Gleichschaltung
” or “alignment”,' she said. ‘Organisations and institutes were required to “align” themselves with Nazi goals and methods. The policy determined what was acceptable in painting, sculpture, literature, music, architecture, journalism. And domestic schedules too: the composition of meals, exercise, friendship, the lot. And the policy shaped science. Subversive Jewish theoretical physics was outlawed in favour of “Aryan physics” – as if atoms wore little swastikas.' She slipped lower in the water and tipped her head backwards to wet her hair. ‘So what's happening at the moment isn't new.'