‘There’s every reason now to be optimistic,’ Harry said, slapping Connie on the back. ‘After all, who better than you to make sense of these times?’ – as if Harry would know anything about it. Although Connie, Jack noticed, didn’t object.
The focus switched to Helen. She said the NOGA fellowship had come at just the right time for her. She needed a break from her usual schedule to take stock of recent trends. ‘Scientists don’t control the applications of their work any more.’
‘They never did,’ Connie said quickly.
Helen looked annoyed. She was, she said, enough of an idealist to believe he was wrong.
Jack, who already knew something of her predicament, reached out and put a hand on her arm. ‘Not much room for idealism in today’s scientific world.’
She shook him off. ‘I think you’re both wrong. Times have changed and we scientists need to change too. For a start, we need to ask more questions of the funding bodies.’
‘So what’s the problem?’ Ava asked.
Helen removed her glasses and dangled them between her fingers. She took a moment to collect her thoughts, then settled her gaze on Ava.
‘In research you put your mind to a task,’ she began. ‘Your vision is narrowed by the particular problem you’re exploring. The way ahead is clear.’ Her hand rocked the glasses in a gentle pendulum. ‘While you’re working on your problem it becomes the whole picture, and your goals, as against the goals others might see in your work, are the only ones that matter. But they’re not.’ Her hand stilled, the glasses wilted. ‘It’s not a simple matter of me and my bugs any more. It’s not just about me and my science.’
Food-borne diseases, formerly the domain of scientists, epidemiologists and hygienists, were now of serious interest to politicians and the military.
‘Bioterrorism.’ Helen shook her head slowly. ‘My work is being used for bioterrorism. It’s unbelievable.’ And she really looked as if she could not believe it.
‘What happened about eliminating shigella infections from refugee camps?’ Ava asked.
‘For some years now, a good deal of scientific research has been funded through military-related companies or the military itself.’ Helen sounded defeated. ‘Even research into vaccines is funded by the military.’
‘Including shigella?’ Jack knew a shigella vaccine was the end-point of Helen’s work.
‘Yes, including shigella.’ Helen replaced her glasses, she looked to be on the verge of tears. ‘These funding bodies have insisted on complex ownership practices regarding any new science produced. Scientists rarely predict all the applications of their research,’ and now her face relaxed into a smile, ‘which has led to some amazing and unexpected discoveries. But under the present funding arrangements, my research could easily be channelled into work on biological weapons.’ She shrugged, ‘I’m faced with some difficult decisions.’
Harry said her NOGA fellowship was ideal for just this purpose. ‘And don’t forget, there’s plenty of help around. Just let me know if there’s anything or anyone you need.’
Harry then turned to Jack, cocking his head in such a way that the light bounced off his baldness.
‘These troubled times have brought you back into the swim,’ he said.
There are bald heads that are classical domes which concentrate the thoughts, others are globes of worldliness. Harry’s baldness, Jack decided, was not of either kind. His head lacked hair and the skull thus bared lacked those interesting mounds that suggest wisdom and experience. Harry’s head was big. His skull was naked. A numbskull, Jack thought, and stifled a laugh.
‘Well, Jack, what do you say about your new popularity?’ Harry’s voice was raised.
And Jack’s humour evaporated. It was as if Harry were conducting the evening, conducting them all. Jack looked across at Ava. She was watching her husband with a smile on her face, gazing at him with unambiguous pride. This new Harry had an unnerving confidence entirely lacking in his younger self. This new Harry, it seemed to Jack, was accustomed to running the show.
4.
Jack was home by eleven. His flat was empty, the evening was empty, his life, if not yet empty, was draining fast. He poured himself a glass of wine and stood at the window, staring into the blackness. From the road outside came the swish of cars speeding people home to families and conversation and someone to sleep with. He stared at the glass until his own image forced itself into consciousness, then abruptly he turned away.
He had chosen the permanent glitter of the remembered past over an increasingly parsimonious present, but now he was wondering if it was nothing more than the comfortable familiarity of the past that made it so attractive. Like nostalgia, that B-grade emotion. For everything about tonight had disappointed: the conversation, the humour, his best and oldest friends.
He refilled his glass and wandered into his study. This room, little changed from his university days, used to be his bedroom; this place where he now lived, was where he grew up; this flat used to be his parents’ flat. Around the time he had left for New Zealand, his parents had moved down to Tasmania. Unsure whether they wanted to start again in a new place, they had rented out the flat. But several years later, drawn by what they described as the only truly radical community in Australia and the only location with a civilised climate, they decided to move to Tasmania permanently. In the same week that they put the flat on the market, the NOGA fellowship was offered to Jack. The flat was withdrawn from sale and Jack moved in. He bought some furniture, he stocked the kitchen drawers and cupboards, otherwise everything remained much as it was when he was growing up.
There was a flyer on his study wall advertising an anti-apartheid demonstration and next to it a ‘Sisterhood is Powerful’ poster; above his desk was a picture of a blood-coloured mushroom cloud and the caption ‘One Nuclear Bomb Can Ruin Your Whole Day’. An old school tie hanging from the door handle was pinned with badges: ‘When this button melts we are in a nuclear accident’; ‘Seen one nuclear war you’ve seen them all’; ‘Who killed Karen Silkwood?’. If he were to flip through his notebooks and diaries of his university days, he would find references to debates, lectures, seminars, radical theatre, late-night readings, seasons of European films, and discussions with an astonishing array of people. There was something intrinsically wonderful about those days when he and the others first met. Such a contrast with the bullish ordinariness of tonight.
Whenever Jack looked back to his university experience and compared it with today’s student life, so much seemed to have changed – even friendship itself. Without computers and mobile phones, face-to-face communication ruled the day. He, Ava and Helen had started talking before their first classes, they talked between classes, they talked over lunch in the cafeteria. They talked at the pub in the evening, they talked as they ate supper, they talked long into the night. They trawled through hundreds of ideas across a multitude of subjects. He learned very quickly he would need to get over his shyness if he was to belong to this group; and similarly, a scientist like Helen had to read energetically outside her discipline to be a fully-fledged member.
And there was so much to read. Books were constantly passing between them: Sartre, de Beauvoir, Adorno and Barthes, Ginsberg, Rilke, Rimbaud, Plath, Orwell, Woolf. Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet assumed iconic status, as did Canetti’s Auto da Fé. In the early hours of the morning alone in his room, Jack would find himself reading not only for his classes and assignments but for conversations in the days ahead.
To attend university in the late 1970s was to enter a promised land where anything seemed possible. There was a church-going, private-school girl in his philosophy class who metamorphosed into a radical lesbian separatist before the end of the first semester; and a classical pianist and first-class dork from his high school discovered basement jazz clubs and reconfigured himself as an avant-garde musician. As for his own guitar-playing, a few weeks after the start of the university year he was regularly performing at an inner-city fol
k club. Such things just happened: someone suggested it, someone else made the introductions, and suddenly he had a regular paying gig.
Fortified by free education and feminism, mature-age students flocked to the university. Together with Ava and Helen, he met nuns in civilian clothes and housewives fairly bursting out of their narrow lives. They mixed with Greeks, Italians, Indians, Chinese and Vietnamese, throngs of people from Melbourne’s multicultural heart. Ava from the white and uniform outer suburbs and Helen from provincial Geelong met people the likes of whom had never before crossed their paths. Even with his own left-wing, Jewish background, Jack’s circle of friends was soon more colourful than that of his parents.
For students fresh out of school, university supplied a brilliant sojourn between the restrictions of childhood and the responsibilities of maturity. And it was surprisingly easy. With free education and living allowances, no one needed to work more than a few hours a week, and although money was always in short supply, particularly for Helen, he and Ava were happy to cover for her. Ava, with no family to call on, never seemed to run short. She said she had savings; once she mentioned a bequest from an aunt. Neither he nor Helen pursued it. The personal was far less intrusive back then and a great deal more private.
Theirs was the post-Vietnam generation, wise to authority but not stymied by cynicism. Pre-Thatcher and pre-Reagan the world was more than a collection of GNPs. The iron curtain was still in place although the cries from behind had become disturbingly shrill. No one was denying the repressive culture of Soviet politics any more, but the loss of ideals was palpable in many quarters, and his own parents, who had quit the Party in 1959, were not alone in their political griefs. The Cold War was arctic, and with nuclear stockpiles increasing at a terrifying rate the world was sandwiched between two righteous Goliaths, neither of which was about to fall. In the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate there was a pervasive anti-Americanism among their generation, but also a loss of confidence in the power and promise of the left. Spin was confined to tops and planets, backroom boys were illegal gamblers, and globalisation and the global economy were yet to enter the lexicon. The marriage between science and the military was still in its honeymoon phase with both parties on their best behaviour, and business donations to political bodies were made with a sturdy veneer of social responsibility. Broadsheet seriousness dominated tabloid trash; CNN was yet to be born and the BBC lived up to its accent. Australia was poised to make its way in the Asia–Pacific region, but in the real world of Europe, the only world that mattered to those like them with scholarly interests, Australia was not on the map. In the post-Nixon era in America and the post-Whitlam era in Australia, politicians in the West had lost much of the respect they had formerly engendered, although were far from being the sweet-talking, poll-driven shysters of recent times. In fact, the cavalier attitude of the self-righteous liar so common to contemporary democratic leaders was thought back then to be the exclusive province of despots and criminals. When they entered university there was a sense of the future, and the future was positive.
It was also young. Far from parents being your best friends, in those days of free will and self-expression, the family, rotting deep in the reservoir of determinism, was definitely on the nose. People moved out of home as soon as possible, and many of them, including Ava, returned rarely, if at all. Both Helen and Ava were the first members of their family to attend university. Helen’s parents were proud of their daughter but, according to her, bewildered. Ava marched into the future as if her family did not exist.
Jack was willing to give up sleep for his new friends, he was willing to share his music, he would dress down, read up, he would march for the liberation of women, but when it came to family he was stymied. Family was his connective tissue: to turn away from his mother and father would be to walk away from himself. He, too, was the first of his family to attend university, but unlike the Bryants and Rankins, his parents, forced by circumstances to leave school early themselves, had always touted tertiary study as a basic essential of life, along with food, drink, shelter, warmth, a sense of history and left-wing politics. He would observe Ava and Helen as they shaped themselves according to the times and their ambitions, and even if he had wanted to follow suit it would have been impossible. It was as if he were grafted onto his parents and their past, saddled with all the hopes and opportunities denied by Polish anti-Semitism, by Hitler, by the brutal deaths of aunts, uncles, cousins and neighbours who had remained in Poland long after his own grandparents had migrated to Australia. Then there was communism and the years of loyalty, visionary years followed by confusion and distress and disbelief and finally his parents quitting the Party not long before he was born. Jack doubted he would ever be a child of his times although he tried to make light of it. ‘I am a cyst on history,’ he wrote at the top of a blank page. But despite his efforts, neither the essay nor his levity progressed.
He knew that Ava and Helen envied him his background; more families like his, they said, and the institution might be worth saving. And he accepted their compliments, although in truth what they admired he had experienced primarily as discomfort. He was convinced that 1960 was a most inauspicious time to be born. All the excitements of the sixties, the new politics, protest music, students determined to strip the world of their parents’ mistakes, all of this was happening while he was still in primary school. Too young to have a personal stake in the movement for change, as the child of activists he nonetheless found himself at its centre.
He had marched with his parents in Vietnam moratoriums and anti-apartheid demonstrations; he had accompanied them on each new campaign championed by the left. But he wasn’t of draft age and he wasn’t under threat; he was just a child, a child, moreover, who hated crowds. The crush of people so much bigger than he was, the shouting, the huge banners with their precarious lurchings, how he envied the babies and toddlers protected by prams and strollers. And he couldn’t rely on his parents to look after him as they were seasoned banner carriers and loudhailer users. He might well have attended some of the defining moments of the sixties and seventies but his childish fears and failings were inflamed to a far greater extent than any political passions. For all that Helen and Ava admired his background, all too often he had felt a fake.
Family aside, in most other respects he, Helen and Ava inhabited the same made-to-order, one-size-fits-three utopia, and a queer business how oddballs and outsiders managed to find one another. Not that it was always a happy liaison. Leopold and Loeb, for example, gravitated together only to commit what turned out to be the not-so-perfect murder, and Parker and Hulme, those two imaginative creatures from New Zealand, suffered a similar fate. And there were some outsiders like Orwell and Wittgenstein who abhorred other outsiders. But not so for the three of them. After years of finding sanctuary in the solitary protectorates of their own minds – the same solution for all three despite their different backgrounds and sensibilities – they arrived at university and found one another.
Most conversations would find them in an impassioned state of wonder, most days an exhilaration which never ceased to amaze. Serenity was on the dark side, serenity looked across the river to death; together they experienced so much that was new, and change itself seemed to add to the intensity. They fell in love with ideas, they fell in love with books, they fell in love with films and songs, they fell in love with their tutors who fell in love with them, and they fell in love with each other – although only Jack would make it an enduring devotion. Restraint was practised very occasionally and only when issues of safety were involved. Like most students at the time, they believed all ages of consent should be lowered, marijuana should be decriminalised, judges and lawyers should stay out of the bedroom, that the law was an ass.
They regarded their friendship as special, and wondered, or rather hoped, they were perpetuating the tradition of the Bloomsbury group or the Cambridge Apostles or the luminaries who gathered at Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Co in Paris. The
y assumed they would always be friends.
‘Early friendships are cemented with the hardest glue,’ Ava had proclaimed one evening, about a month after they all met.
As for the wider world of the 1970s, it came via films and music, books and periodicals, all reinforcing how very seriously Australians had missed out. Australia had neither Jimi nor Janis nor Woodstock nor Black Panthers. There were no Beats on or off the road. Critics like Foucault and Barthes would starve in the wilderness that was Australian culture where intellectuals were regarded as less desirable than dole bludgers. There were no Australian Buñuels or Wertmüllers or Herzogs, and the only thriving political groups were feminism and the anti-nuclear movement and these were nourished by their overseas counterparts. The brain drain of the fifties and sixties that had eased during the Whitlam years was again a stream and they planned to add to it. They wanted to make a difference, they wanted to contribute to the future, and there was no point in staying where they were not appreciated. Indeed, the major reason for being at university in Melbourne was to acquire the credentials to be transported to a university elsewhere.
And yet despite its apparent shortcomings, there was a sense in which Melbourne, located in a country from which they all felt estranged, provided well for them. Together they discovered an underground city, a secret intellectual city of art-house cinemas and makeshift theatres where entry was by donation and included a tumbler of wine. They patronised bookshops without street frontages and attended public lectures in dusty back rooms. They read alternative journals and newspapers and a welter of broadsheets. And in pubs and cafés and cluttered student houses at all hours of the day and night they argued about love, death, betrayal, responsibility, progress, goodness, evil, marriage, as if these concepts had never before been properly considered.
Reunion Page 3