Reunion (37 page)

Conrad had called in regularly with a bottle of wine and, as they drank, they would talk about Ava. But Conrad's Ava was not his Ava and the conversation did nothing to let the steam off his own grief. By the second glass the talk would have shifted to Connie's problems, all, as far as Harry was concerned, as a result of his own stupidity. The last time Connie visited he was so full of
guilt and so wrapped up in self-pity – ‘Linda will never take me back', ‘I'll never see my boys again' – that Harry snapped.

‘Guilt is nothing more than an excuse for inaction,' he said. ‘Linda should have tossed you out years ago. But if you're so keen for her to take you back, then you need to show her that despite your appalling behaviour and despite what her common sense directs, you're worth another chance.' And as if he had not said enough, he added, ‘You're just an old sleaze, Conrad.'

He had not seen Connie since.

Various acquaintances from the literary community had put in an appearance and talked for the duration of a coffee or a glass of wine. These visits inevitably left him vexed and angry. In life everyone had wanted their bit of Ava Bryant and in death they boasted they'd had it. Even some of the obituaries oozing with insider warmth had been written by people who had never met her. Harry, forced to share his wife while she was alive to a degree that was never fair, would be a fool to give an inch of ground now she was dead.

Jack Adelson was the one exception. He came round to the house several evenings a week, happy to listen to Harry for hours on end. And when Jack talked about Ava, when Jack shared stories of her life, it was the Ava Harry knew.

‘She wrote to you about that?' Harry said, when Jack reminded him of the barbecue he, Harry, had built in the window box of one of their Oxford homes and the subsequent fire. ‘She wrote about that?' when Jack recalled ‘Bryant's Back Lane Tour' which Ava had designed especially for Harry when they settled back in Melbourne. Other people flaunted what were essentially very flimsy relationships with Ava, but next to himself, Jack knew Ava best.

Each day brought an avalanche of condolence cards. The phone, now left permanently on the answering machine, hadn't stopped ringing, and if Harry hadn't switched off Ava's mobile that would be bleating away too. It had rung on the second day, just twenty-four hours after he had found her. He had called out to her in an all-too-brief moment when he forgot she was gone. And then a shock so violent it winded him, and rage at her phone ringing when she was dead.

Her favourite rug, her mask from Venice, her watering can, the flowers drooping in their pots ransacked his empty self. He doused himself in her perfume and bought a back-up bottle for future losses. He washed her cashmere jumper in her shampoo and used it as an antimacassar on the couch. He opened a can of smoked mussels and with the first fumes began to cry reluctant unpractised tears over one of her favourite foods. He slept in her bed on her pillow until his smell replaced hers and returned to his own bedroom furious over what he had wrecked.

He went to bed late and after a couple of hours in the fake solace of sleeping pills he would read, doze, listen to music, tune into the BBC World Service, wrestle his wakefulness until six o'clock when he would allow himself to get up. Today on the thirty-eighth morning he had capitulated at five. It had been a disaster of a night with not much more than an hour of continuous sleep. His head was throbbing and there was a jangling in his ears as he pulled on clothes, made coffee and crossed the courtyard to his office. He searched for work to distract him and found some figures to organise. When the task was finished and he sat holding several spreadsheets of newly printed tables he realised with relief that four hours had passed. A whole four hours without a single thought of her.

He crossed the courtyard back into the house. He would be all right, of course he would be all right, and paused in the living room: he may as well move his office in here, the mess wouldn't matter and it would help put some distance between their old life and a future without her. No hurry, but plans helped. He made some fresh coffee and with the first mouthful felt a gripping in his stomach. He had not eaten properly since a meal with Jack two nights earlier. He rummaged in the fridge and found the last of the Livarot he had bought the day he found her. This cheese was thirty-eight days old. He had bought it for him and Ava. It was these things that straddled life with her and life alone which cut the deepest.

He made some toast and covered it with the cheese. It wasn't the same without her, but then nothing was. The food lodged in his throat, he forced it down. And when he was finished he stood at the kitchen bench, an ugly croaking crawling from his mouth and the tears rolling down his face. Five, ten, fifteen minutes later, he tried the coffee, it tasted rusted and sour, all of him was rusted and sour. He heaved his body to the bathroom, had just finished shaving and was about to shower when the phone rang. He heard Jack's voice, ran naked to the living room and picked up: yes, dinner tonight … six-thirty here … then one of the local cafés.

Nine hours to fill. He showered and dressed.

Eight and a half hours to fill. He went for a walk through Princes Park.

Eight hours to fill. He left the house again and caught a tram to the city. In the past thirty-eight days spring had moved into summer – not that it would be a reliable passage given Melbourne's jittery weather. But today had one of those warm buttery suns softened by a cool breeze, the sort of day Ava
would have liked. The mall was crowded with the usual shoppers, idlers, buskers, shouters, coughers, beggars, kids on the wire, kids on the nod. Harry felt in his pocket for change – Ava's doing: no one would beg if they didn't have to, she used to say, and would always have change at the ready. But no one approached him for money. Perhaps there was something about him that warned people off. Perhaps he appeared as desperate and mad as some of the beggars.

The funeral home – what a contradiction in terms – had provided him with a list of bereavement groups, strangers who met regularly to grieve together. But he wasn't interested in other people's grief, and he certainly wasn't interested in diluting his own in order to communicate it to others. And no, he could not say why he was so angry.

He wandered up Bourke Street to check out the cinema complexes, but of the dozen films screening, there was not one of even the slightest interest to use up a couple of hours. The cafés were filling with lunchtime eaters, the shops were full with lunchtime shoppers. He decided to walk to the tram stop at the top end of the street and was settling into his stride when he found himself face to face with Ava in the window of The Hill of Content bookshop. There was a notice carrying her name and dates in large blue letters and a display of her books.

Harry stared through the glass at the over-sized figure of his wife, a familiar photograph taken in the gateway of Somerville. His throat began to swell, and a moment later with the tears again falling he hurried to the nearest tram stop and headed home.

Five hours to fill. He collected the mail from the box. The bundle was as large as yesterday's and bigger than the same time last week. There had been hundreds of cards from friends
and acquaintances, and hundreds more from readers whose lives, they said, had been changed by Ava Bryant. How he hated their homemade intimacies. They still had her books – it was all they ever had; his Ava was gone.

He was tempted to swallow a couple of pills and sleep through the hours until Jack arrived, but he didn't trust this person he had become and couldn't be sure that if he forfeited one afternoon to oblivion he might not start a pattern. He put the cards in a box with all the other cards and took the remaining letters, mainly bills, out to his office. Gas, water, telephone, credit card, Ava's Amnesty membership. He decided to pay the accounts the old-fashioned way, and for the next half-hour he wrote cheques, addressed envelopes, balanced bank statements. The phone bill he left for last as he liked to check it.

He opened the envelope; it was not for the house phone but Ava's mobile. He looked at the amount, he stared at the amount. It was an extraordinary $779 — obviously a mistake. Ava was a reluctant mobile-phone user; several days could pass without her turning it on. He checked the dates: a twelve-week billing period finishing exactly four weeks after her death. And again that sense of unfairness that life continues even though the centre has dropped out of it. He was left with Ava's telephone bill to pay, her dry-cleaning to collect, her Amnesty membership to cancel, but not Ava herself. He looked at the bill again. He couldn't make it out. He scanned the pages of calls and found his own mobile number several times, all for short calls and typical of her mobile usage. Nothing like these other calls for forty-three minutes, fifty-nine minutes, one for a huge seventy-seven minutes. It must be a mistake. He checked the account details, it was definitely her
phone. And the phone hadn't been stolen, he knew exactly where it was. He looked more closely at the dates of the calls; one or two long calls every day for six weeks and then during the last week of her life several short calls every day. Three of these were to his own number – the last call had been made to him the morning of the day she died – two were to Jack, and the rest to a mobile number he did not recognise. Without stopping to think, he rang the unknown number. There was a recorded message: the number was out of service. He did not understand. The number was similar to his own, a variation of Ava's birth date. Was Ava trying to phone him? He did not understand.

It was as if his mind had slipped into a certain gear and there was no changing it. He returned to the earlier weeks of the billing period. Such long calls. Very few made in the morning, many in the late afternoon and some in the middle of the night. She had been phoning someone while he was asleep! He simply did not understand. And most calls were to international numbers. For five weeks of the billing period they were to a British number; he recognised the code as the outer London area. Then in the next week there were several different overseas' numbers, and in the last week the majority of calls were to the unknown mobile – and judging by the low cost they were local. Nearly all the calls on the bill had been made from inner Melbourne, their home he assumed; it was the receiver numbers that kept changing.

He crossed the courtyard into the house and to her bedroom; her mobile was where he had left it on her bedside table. He plugged it into the charger and turned it on; the phonebook was empty, the file of recently received calls was also empty, text messages in and out, empty. She had stripped
her phone of information, or rather someone had; if it had been left to Ava she would have simply thrown out the SIM card. Maybe she needed to have her phone working until the very end? Back he went to her study for her telephone directory. It took less than fifteen minutes to check: none of the unknown numbers was listed.

He went online for a list of country and city codes. He confirmed that for a period of five weeks Ava had phoned someone living in outer London forty-one times. During the first three days of the sixth week of the billing period, she phoned someone in New York City and Los Angeles. Over the next two days, she made two calls to Tijuana in Mexico, three to San Diego and two more to Los Angeles. On the sixth day in the morning, a brief phone call to Sydney – he felt this unknown person drawing closer – and then in the afternoon, rather than phoning from her home region, Ava made three short calls from a place called Bulla – the first two calls were to the unknown mobile number, the third was to his own phone.

Where on earth was Bulla? He ran outside to his car for the street directory. Bulla. Bulla. Bulla. He'd never heard of Bulla. He scanned the map and there it was – the region for Melbourne Airport. She must have travelled out to the airport that day. He ran back into the house for his organiser. He scrolled back: it was a Friday and the start of the three-day ‘Energy in the Asia–Pacific' forum. He had been at meetings all day and had attended the dinner in the evening. In all the months of her illness it was the only time he had left her alone so long. And she had gone to the airport to meet a person who had travelled from outer London, via the US coasts and Mexico to be with her in Melbourne.

There was someone else. There must have been someone else. Someone else at the end as there had always been someone else. Even when she was dying she could only love him if there was someone else. He cannot believe this is happening. He goes to her computer and turns it on. He enters her email files, he does not hesitate. The mail folder labelled Fleur contains just nine emails, and what sad, innocuous communications they are. In Fleur's last email sent months ago, she says she has settled well in Geneva and is renting a flat in a building where George Steiner once lived. The last email from Ava wishes Fleur well in her new job. Nowhere in her communications does Ava mention she is sick.

It isn't Fleur, not this time, but there was someone else. What a fool he has been, what a fool she must have thought him to be. This is worse than Fleur, this unknown person. And suddenly he is hit with the naked, unsparing truth. The tidy computer, the empty phone, her body lying so peacefully on the floor. And he knows with absolute certainty that this other person was with her. Someone else, not him, was with her at the end.

Despoiled. That's the right word – his wife was mistress of the right word. Despoiled. She has despoiled his love. She has despoiled their marriage. She has despoiled his memories. She has despoiled his future. At the end there was someone else. But wasn't there always someone else?

He scrolls down the email folders. Each name is known to him. He almost doesn't open the one labelled SW, assuming it is her US agent Stephen Weinberg, but Steve's is labelled with his nickname, Berks. This is another SW, an unknown SW. Harry pauses, he feels sick. There will be answers here. How quickly does a life unravel. He doesn't want to know. He wants to know. He clicks on the folder.