Reunion (33 page)

He tries to shake it off with a cup of peppermint tea and the morning papers, but it will not be ignored. A shuffling of guilt for leaving Ava alone all day? General anxiety about her diminishing abilities? And suddenly he neither knows nor cares but he has to go home, he has to see she is safe, the phone will not do. He grabs his coat, gives instructions to his secretary and rushes out of the office. The way Ava looked at him this morning, her farewell hug, he cannot put his finger on it but something was not right.

Both lifts are at the ground floor. He pounds the call button. At last they begin to climb. Come on, he says through gritted teeth, come on. The lifts are rising in tandem. They stop, they start, they stop, they start. Closer they come to the twenty-seventh floor, closer and closer then both soar past. Both of them are heading to the penthouse suite. How many people could possibly be up there? At last one descends. The doors open, the lift is empty. Express to the ground, and he keeps his finger pressed on the ‘door closed' button. But the system overrides him. The lift stops at nine different floors. The screeching inside him threatens to burst. When the lift reaches the ground he pushes out first, dashes across the lobby and into the street. There's a line of cabs. The fellow in the first car looks like he just got off the boat, but the driver behind has the appearance of a man who hasn't left his cab for a couple of decades.

The driver protests: Ya gotta take the first one, mate.

Harry ignores him and jumps into the passenger seat. He gives the address.

The cabby shrugs and pulls into the traffic.

It's a quagmire.

Harry is desperate. ‘I need to get home.' He raises his voice. ‘Matter of life and death.'

And suddenly the cabby perks up. He pulls down on the steering wheel, whips out of the traffic, clips a wedge of footpath, enters a narrow lane. A right turn into a bluestone alley and the car jolts and rocks over the clotted stone. He dashes up slender alleys, he cuts across a vacant lot, he weaves through a building site, he negotiates lanes built for bikes and hand-carts. No danger, he says, everyone will get out of the way. No worries, he says, he'll have Harry home in a jiffy. He runs a set
of lights. He overtakes a car on the inside. What about the police? Harry asks. Better things to do, says the cabby. He turns into Lygon Street at the southern end of the cemetery. He plants his foot. They're doing eighty kilometres an hour along the tram tracks.

Ten minutes later the cab pulls up outside his house. Harry shoves a fifty at the driver and is out of the car, calling Ava's name even before he opens the front door. Down the hall and into the living room. Ava, Ava, where are you? Then to the kitchen – where is she? He opens the back door, is about to cross to her study when he stops and turns back into the house. He enters her bedroom.

And there she is. She's slung across the bed on her back, a pillow under her head. From the doorway he notices the rise and fall of her breathing. She's asleep – odd for her to be sleeping on her back – but undoubtedly asleep. Her colour is good, she's breathing normally, she's all right. And hasn't he told her to rest? Take naps during the day, he has said to her, conserve your energy.

He sits gently on the edge of the bed, careful not to wake her. He watches the rise and fall of her chest; her breaths draw slow and deep. She's wearing the cashmere jumper he gave her for her thirty-first birthday. He reaches out and lays his hand over her heart. Her chest rises and falls, his hand rises and falls. If only he were able to channel his life into her. Down his arm out of his hand into her skin through her ribcage into her heart into her blood, his life pumping life into her body and making her well. He focuses on his arm and hand, wills something – heat? energy? life? – to flow from him to her. But it won't work, the exercise is far too contrived for a man like him. But he wants to believe, he wants to believe he can save her.

She snuffles in her sleep, her eyes move behind the lids, there are her usual purrings and murmurings. He catches a whiff of alcohol, her perfume or cleanser. His girl, his Davey, still so beautiful. He will never be ready to lose her.

He sits on the edge of her bed. His hand rises and falls on her breast, while she sleeps on.

1.

There were several trams lined up in the street outside Flinders Street Station. Ava boarded one with a number more familiar than the others on the assumption she must have taken this route as a girl. In the late morning lull the tram was almost empty yet she was still vacillating in the aisle when it started to move. This is not a major life decision, she told herself, and took the nearest seat. She jammed herself against the window and stared through the glass.

The tram passed Federation Square and crossed over the Yarra River into St Kilda Road. This broad boulevard lined with great knobbly plane trees had been known as the golden mile back in the 1970s, an allusion, Ava had believed with youthful idealism, to the art and beauty of the period homes and not the prime real estate. At that time most of the mansions had already been converted into offices, but the original bluestone and red-brick façades had been preserved along with the wrought-iron lacework and the leisurely English gardens. Entrances were via tessellated tile verandahs and heavy timber doors, and there was a plethora of brilliant leadlight windows.

Art and beauty had now succumbed. The plane trees remained, but the splendid old places and their glorious gardens had all disappeared. And while the Botanic Gardens and the Shrine of Remembrance had postponed the glass-clad towers on the eastern side of the boulevard, a kilometre or two beyond the city centre, the road was wedged between skyscrapers on both sides.

Ava was sorry for the loss. Place supplies the scaffolding to memory, and given her memory's wear and tear it needed all the support it could get. She travelled down this boulevard and looked out on a landscape that was largely foreign. She knew she had walked here many times by herself, also with Stephen. And Helen too, a vague memory, early one morning – had they been up all night studying? – the two of them leaving the city after breakfast with the night workers and crossing the river into the Botanic Gardens. Dew on the grass, the new blue sky and she and Helen dancing over the lawns.

The days of dancing at dawn with Helen in the Botanic Gardens might have happened in another life. And while she expected friendships to change, to stroke with the current of the times as her friendship with Jack had done, these days the familiar Helen was almost entirely absent. Ava understood the time-consuming passions for a son, and she had always understood work passions, but the allegiances Helen's science now required were in a different league altogether. Her old friend Helen would sell her soul out of misguided loyalty and a warped integrity, but she would not help her best friend.

It was in the wake of Helen's refusal that the surprising idea had started to form. At first she shoved it aside along with all the other bizarre thoughts this illness threw at her. But it kept
nudging her. Finally she took it on and considered it properly. Stephen Webb. The only person who had never refused her.

The block of flats where they used to meet was located further down St Kilda Road. Twenty-five years ago it had been a building with neither style nor distinction and always a disappointment in this grand thoroughfare; it would, she was sure, have been ripped down. As the tram glided through the Toorak Road intersection she kept a close watch. Closer and closer they came to where she thought the block had been. And there it was! Brinsley Close. She recognised it immediately. Brinsley Close, still standing. She could not believe her luck.

She disembarked at the next stop and as she walked back she was filled with hope. The block had survived, her fortunes had turned, she would find Stephen and he would help her. A new entrance had been installed with a board of buzzers and a list of tenants. She propped herself in front of the names and looked down the list for Stephen Webb. She started again at the top saying the name of each tenant aloud. She zoned in on the number of his old flat. There was no Stephen Webb here.

All of the tenants appeared to be companies; perhaps no one lived in these flats any more – although given her experience with Stephen, perhaps no one lived here twenty-five years ago either. And how foolish to think he would still be here, her mind on a fantasy rampage and not to be trusted. And because she realised how stupid she had been, she could not feel much in the way of disappointment.

She smoothed herself down – even a solitary woman nicely if a little flamboyantly dressed was sufficient to arouse suspicion these days – and walked outside. The car access was an open drive with a boom gate; whatever Brinsley Close had
become it was not security conscious. She hesitated just a moment, and then she entered.

She was standing in the centre of a rectangle. Bushes, a bit of grass, a tidy but uninteresting garden. And exactly the same sense she'd had more than a quarter of a century ago of being enclosed by the flats, three storeys high on all four sides, enclosed and exposed. Who is looking at me? she was thinking now. Who is looking at me? she had wondered then.

 

Four weeks had passed since Ava had met Stephen Webb in the second-hand bookshop. She had read all her new books and written the reviews he had requested. She kept changing her mind about ringing him but, in the end, taunted by a future that was still out of reach, she collected her courage and called.

He seemed so pleased to hear from her. ‘Come and see my library,' he said again.

He offered to meet her in the city and accompany her to the flat, but she refused: she wanted to appear independent, she wanted to feel independent too. And yet her nervousness was so great as she boarded the tram, she could hardly draw breath. She felt in her pocket for the reviews. She'd worked hard on them, and what if he didn't ask to read them? What if she had misjudged this entirely?

It was a Sunday, the traffic was light, the tram sped along St Kilda Road and less than ten minutes later passed his block of flats. She deliberately missed the stop. During the walk back she reminded herself that no one was forcing her to come here and nothing was stopping her from turning back. And she did
hesitate at the entrance, just a moment before walking through to the patchy garden. She gazed at the flats on all four sides; his unit was located on the first level, he had said, on the northern side. And again she wavered: she could guess what she was letting herself in for, and while that was far from reassuring, the man might be crazy or violent as well. She waited just long enough to recite what had become her motto: if you risk nothing, you'll gain nothing. She was not here in all innocence; innocence would not be here at all. She found the stairs and made her way along the walkway to his door.

There was no doorbell, she knocked on the door and stepped back to wait. He took his time, sufficient for her to rehearse her fears, sufficient for her to run back along the passage, down the stairs, across the garden and into St Kilda Road. But she stayed exactly where she was, breathing down her jitters and feeling her pocket yet again for the reviews.

At last the door opened and there he was, large and smiling. He seemed to fill the doorway. He was not wearing a jacket and tie; his shirt, white with a dark blue stripe and causing a shuddering in her eyes, was open at the neck. So pleased you could come, he said with fastidious courtesy – adult courtesy was how it seemed to her – and invited her in.

Three years would pass before she learned how Stephen had prepared for that first visit, how in the days since her phone call he had moved bookcases and a couple of hundred books into the flat, sufficient to cover an entire wall. Over the next few years he would bring in hundreds more. But on that first day a wall of books more than satisfied as a private library.

He offered her a Coke, he offered lemonade, but she asked for black coffee; it was important, she believed, to appear grown up – that he did not want her grown up was only a later
learning. As for the black coffee, what she had assumed to be a sophisticated choice turned out to be almost undrinkable. The biscuits he offered were of a type she had never seen before; with a tiny pattern of two-tone checks each looked like a miniature draughtboard. If it had been possible she would have nibbled with geometric precision, eating the chocolate squares separately from the vanilla ones – not simply for the different tastes, but an appealing neatness in the messy situation in which she now found herself. (Years later when she saw Jack eating cherries as if each were significantly different from the others, eating in such a way to provoke a false sense of order in his jumbled world, she recalled Stephen's biscuits. As if food could reduce disorder in her life, or indeed anywhere in the well-fed world.)

She had missed lunch in order to cover her fares so she was hungry, nonetheless she took just two of the biscuits, an acceptably adult number she thought. As she ate she looked about her. The kitchen benches were bare, there were no mugs on the hooks nor utensils in the wall brackets. The bathroom door was ajar, no bottles on the shelf and a single towel over the rail; there was a double bed, a side-table and a solitary lamp in the bedroom; and in the living room, just the two chairs, a fold-up table, a desk and the wall of books. There was none of the clutter of a lived-in home, none of the activity of a busy office either, the place seemed to be waiting for something. The curtains were the only oddity: stiff and new with bright splashy colours they were like neon signs in a desert.

He saw her looking at them,

‘Ersatz Marimekko,' he said.

She had no idea what he meant but pretended to understand. Later she would never pretend, later she learned she
could ask him anything. But for the first few months it was as if she were walking blindfolded, and she moved forward only very cautiously.

They drank the terrible coffee and ate the patterned biscuits, he in his chair on one side of the small table and she in hers on the other. She had dressed in jeans and a crimson and black zippered jacket. The jacket had been a find – literally – in a tram shelter. It was the right size and the height of fashion and she had wavered only briefly, for if she hadn't taken it someone else would have. Now under his barrage of questions and despite the coolness of the flat she was hot. But with a scrappy shirt beneath the jacket she was stuck with the discomfort.

He began with questions about school, then moved on to her interests. When he asked about her family, she told him very little apart from presenting her long-absent father as the prototype of the actively involved dad. She seemed to know how to be careful and how to control and that both were required. She was more forthcoming about her studies, but generally she never liked talking about herself.

When he moved on to her ambitions, she stood up and took the reviews from her pocket,

‘You can read these now.'

‘Of course, of course,' he said. It was the only time he appeared flustered.

He took his time over her reviews, and while she realised from his comments there was much she had failed to notice, he seemed genuinely impressed. But it was when he turned to his own library, his own books, that she knew she had been right to come. He would select a book and start with a personal statement. ‘This book,' –
The Secret Garden
– ‘taught me about loneliness, about friendship too. And this,' –
The Catcher in the
Rye
– ‘made me feel better about being the odd sort of child I was.'
The Longest Journey
‘convinced me never to compromise my dreams'.
A Tale of Two Cities
‘showed the power of books to take me anywhere at any time in history, and into the hearts and minds of people I would never meet in a lifetime'.

With each book he would provide a brief description of the characters and the story, situate the novel within the context of the author's career and the prevailing times, mention the main themes and then place the book in her hands for her to browse.

On that first visit she selected Patrick White's
Riders in the Chariot
– it became one of her favourite books, and
Wuthering Heights
because Stephen said it was one of the best novels ever written. She also took home the
Penguin Book of English Verse
because Stephen pressed it on her, despite her confident ‘I don't like poetry.' He was sure, he said, there would be a few poems in this anthology that would appeal. And he was right, as he invariably was, although it worried her that of all the authors in the collection only a handful were women and most of these had received very short entries.

‘It's up to you to change that,' he said, as if he already knew she wanted to be a writer.

She refused to let him drive her home. She knew it must appear that she came and went as she pleased. He walked her to the door and rather than be at the mercy of how he was planning to say goodbye, she put out her hand like in the movies.

‘Thank you for the books,' she said. And before turning away, she added, ‘I'll ring you when I've finished them.'

From the beginning she set the limits and he obeyed. And for the first year it was innocent enough. There was always the lavish attention, his sweetness, and so much affection, more in
a single year than in the fifteen that had gone before. And he was always polite and always gentle. ‘I'd never hurt you,' he said, ‘never.' While they talked he might stroke her hair which felt very nice, her back too, and even though there were things she didn't much like, neither were they so bad that she couldn't manage.

‘I can do this,' she told herself. ‘I can do this.'

She thought of it as a friendship, an unusual and secret friendship. It never seemed wrong to her. She liked him and he loved her – and that made all the difference. And the sex was bound to happen with someone, and how much better with a man who was kind and gentle rather than a clumsy boy her own age.

And so generous. He gave her scores of books, he bought her clothes and jewellery, he gave her the leather satchel she still used today and the fountain pen from his own collection. He only collected Parker Duofolds, nothing else. He stressed ‘nothing else' as if he were embarrassed by the idea of collecting, and though he tried to explain his unease, how issues of power and control often fuelled collecting, she failed to see his point. In the end he gave her John Fowles's
The Collector
to read. With Stephen there was always a book to explain, even if like
The Collector
it raised an entirely different set of questions.