Reunion

by Andrea Goldsmith

  You must change your life.

  Some people pull themselves up by the bootstraps, Ava had used her brains. Every step of the way the emerging Ava had been forced to hack away at the life she had inherited. By the time she began university, she had shed everything from her background except her name.

  Ava. After Ava Gardner, whom Meryl Bryant had glimpsed during the filming of On the Beach, an event that had marked a high point in an otherwise flaccid life. When Meryl found she was pregnant, it was ordained that if the baby were a girl she would be called Ava. The choice of name was Meryl’s single attempt to love her daughter. But while language can deceive, cajole, distort, convince, disguise, seduce, a single word, a single name cannot produce miracles.

  Hollywood Ava might easily have overshadowed Australian Ava, but instead, the circumstances of young Ava’s naming persuaded her that deep down her mother really did love her, and it fuelled the driving passion of her childhood: to extract that love. Later, when she realised there was no love and no effort of hers could conjure it up, the circumstances of her naming shaped Ava’s desire to escape. Ava Gardner had famously described Melbourne as an ideal place to make a film about the end of the world. She had been desperate to leave, so too was her Australian namesake.

  During the stiff pallid years of childhood, Ava had no conception of her future and this frightened her, but she was drawn to the idea of destiny and allowed her imagination to play through a range of attractive futures. What remained indisputable was that like the ugly duckling she had been plopped into the wrong pool. As for the right pool, the right family, it was not so easy to define; indeed, as the years passed and her mother’s indifference became evermore entrenched, Ava had a sense she was not made for any family. Or perhaps it was more fundamental: she simply was not suited to childhood.

  It took Ava most of her youth to learn that no matter how well behaved you are and no matter how helpful, if your mother has decided she doesn’t want you it is well-nigh impossible to change her mind. Meryl Bryant never actually said Ava had wrecked her life but she made it clear she believed this to be the case. She insisted she would have managed with only one child, particularly as Timmy was such a love. But this second child, this Ava, who would never have been conceived if not for an alcohol-soaked mistake after a party when she and Bob had tumbled into bed together, this child she was carrying when Bob walked out never to return, this child made life an impossible burden.

  Ava’s childhood was a shabby affair for both mother and daughter. When the mother was too cold or the home too hostile, Ava would escape to the streets. But there’s nowhere to take your confusions and disappointments in the suburbs, no hiding places where you can dream of a better life, no crowded streets in which to lose yourself, no warm nooks in which to read without disturbance. A civic centre that included a library was built when Ava was ten and this supplied a welcome bolt hole, but the suburban streets always condemned her just as much as her family. She did not dare complain, after all, she was fed and clothed, she had a roof over her head, she received gifts for her birthday and at Christmas. But her mother and brother resented her, and despite her efforts to be useful to them, they were not interested in her help, they were not interested in her.

  Ava knew that come sixteen her mother expected her to leave school and start work. Other bright girls opted for nursing with its learning on the job and accommodation in the nurses’ home. But just as Ava could not see herself as the shopgirl her mother had been, neither could she see herself as a nurse, not even as a means to an end. And the end? To live overseas and be a writer. She needed to finish school and she needed to find a way of paying her mother rent and board while she did. The way she chose would have led many people to condemn her if they’d ever found out, although she always knew they would have condemned Stephen a great deal more.

  She kept Stephen secret and she kept her ambitions secret, for to reveal them, she believed, would spoil them. But even with a major ambition finally realised, the start of university and the happiest day of her life, she was aware of a drag on her heart as natural and permanent as the heartbeat itself: that she would grab her mother’s affection without a moment’s hesitation should it ever be offered. She would observe mothers smoothing their child’s hair or wiping a smudge from a young cheek. She would see them rolling up their child’s sleeves before play or reaching for a small hand before crossing a street. She would notice all these small motherly gestures that no one notices because they are so small and normal, and could not ever remember her own mother doing such things for her. But she missed them, and she wanted her mother still. She nursed this irrational desire like a punch-drunk fighter who still believes the title will be his; it was her burden and it refused to be wished away.

  That first day of university she had arrived early, and with ample time to enrol she had wandered through the campus before returning to the quad outside the union building and a grassy patch in the shade of one of the old trees. The heat was filtered by a light breeze; she shuffled against the bark until she found a smooth hollow, then rummaged in her bag for her copy of Rilke – this was a day deserving of ritual – and opened the book to ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’. She lit a cigarette, and hidden behind her sunglasses she recited the poem silently by heart.

  You must change your life.

  And so she had. With a hefty swag of unrequited longing and sufficient knock-backs for a lifetime, she intended to pack up her past and shove it out of sight. Don’t be a masochist, reason insisted in her sweet firm voice, just turn your back and walk away; that R.D. Laing and David Cooper had announced the death of the family reinforced her decision. Life with her family had been like an interminable stay at a railway station, waiting for that special train to whisk her home. It would never come, it was never going to come. And should she ever be tempted to linger a little longer, there was the final evidence: Meryl had gone shopping the day her daughter left home, she had not even said a proper goodbye.

  Nostalgia and love fertilise childhood’s attractions, Ava reminded herself, and she had recourse to neither. She would leave childhood behind and stream into the future without the sting of disapproval to slow her down.

  She leafed through to Rilke’s First Duino Elegy and read the familiar words. Every angel is terrifying – Rilke hit the jackpot there. Hide, reveal, do whatever seems best but always take the plunge. Ava longed for angels, though she was quite prepared to take the devils as well. And at that moment, right on cue, Stephen appeared from the union building. She watched him stroll towards her, watched his deliberate slowness, his careful nonchalance, the delicate stretch of his own pleasure. Stephen, her own angel–devil. As he drew closer, his greying hair lifting in the breeze, his large frame slightly stooped and, yes, endearing, it occurred to her that freedom, like ambition, always requires some degree of secrecy. Stephen had spelled freedom to her, he still did, and while there was a price to pay it had always struck her as a bargain.

  And here he is, smiling and greeting her – and uneasy; she senses his nervousness as he meets her in this public place. He refuses the invitation to join her on the grass: forty-something university staff are wary of grass-sitting with students fresh out of school. Yet still he lingers.

  He indicates her Rilke. ‘One of the first books I gave you.’

  She opens to the dedication: Stephen’s name crossed through with a single stroke and written beneath in his neat familiar script: For Ava, from my library to yours. It was an early gift; later he would never have been so careless as to leave his full name. But then later there was more to be careful about.

  In the unaccustomed awkwardness between them, Ava finds herself searching for words. Usually there’s so much to talk about: books, politics, theatre – he has taken her to the theatre many times – films, people in the news; she can discuss anything with this man who might have stepped out of a book he is so different from other adults she has known. And he looks after her, properly cares for her, not like her mot
her, and certainly not like her terminally absent father.

  He is talking, his voice is low, and instead of his usual eloquence punctured with sharp questions he plies her with platitudes about her first day at university – he actually refers to ‘the first day of the rest of your life’. And she knows he is wanting reassurance, but he won’t ask; Stephen is strong but the nature of their relationship makes her stronger. So his questions remain unspoken while they make idle chat about enrolment procedures and signing up for the best tutorials. The wind picks up; he bends down and brushes a stray wisp of hair from her cheek. Quickly he retracts his hand. And a short time later, with nothing left to say, he walks away. He looks old, she thinks, as she watches him enter the crowd. He is old.

  During the past three years with Stephen, she has delved into literature and history and philosophy. During the next four years at university she will amass experience and acquire wisdom. Already she has written several stories, enough to know that in fiction she can be most of all herself, a fluid self, a restless and knowing self, a self cloaked in magnificent disguise. She will find her own way as she always has done. She will go where the hard flame burns. She will be fearless, and she will write.

  Twenty-five years later, her Alma Mater was still proving to be bountiful, with a non-teaching fellowship, library privileges, and a well-equipped office. Very little had changed at this end of campus – some landscaping, more places to sit, a bank and post office in the approach to the quadrangle, but it was very different inside the union building. No longer the messy cafeterias smelling of chips and boiled peas, no longer the trestle tables packed with students shouting to be heard over the general clamour, the union had been taken over by commercial food outlets and resembled a miniature food hall. Formerly the hub of the university, this place with its efficient renovations was now almost deserted, and hovering in the sedate space an echo of something lost. Ava found the nearest exit and hurried outside.

  She walked past mostly familiar buildings and soon her face was prickling with warmth. There was a gorgeous pull on her thighs, she sprang from stride to stride in her cushiony shoes, she removed her hat and shoved it in her pocket and pushed herself forward in one of those floating moments when all which makes a responsible, civilised human being is legitimately switched off – like in meditation, or listening to music, or playing pinball, or the third drink alone. Harry had at last found a job he loved, her best friends were just a phone call away, and the weight of Fleur was finally shifting. Now she would start working again.

  Ever since she and Harry had returned to Australia, she had struggled to hold Fleur locked in memory, but despite her efforts there had been a steady oozing through the cracks. She knew that the end of the affair had been a good thing, but it was good in an abstract moral sense, just as the affair itself had been bad in the same abstract moral sense; but neither the affair nor its ending had settled calmly in the far-from-abstract beat of her heart. She had tried to be disciplined – she truly wanted to forget. The early years of passion and pleasure could not be revisited, the cards and letters could not be reread, the box filled with all those silly treasures lovers keep could not be opened. Because of the pain, all of the good – and there had been so much good – had been put in storage along with the rest. Throw it all out, Ava had told herself when she was packing up the house in Oxford, throw this stuff out. But she couldn’t. Not the letters nor mementoes, and not her own diaries with their predilection for misery, pages of detailed yet incredulous accounts of Fleur’s neglect, pages more of her own pathetic crawlings – no humiliation was too much to keep Fleur in her life. All these welts and wails were as impossible to read now as the love letters which had preceded them.

  But the work had been marvellous. In the six years before meeting Fleur there had been two novels; then came the extraordinary rush of four novels in seven years. ‘I’m your muse,’ Fleur said after the first of the four was finished. ‘You’re my muse,’ Ava said again and again during the writing of the next three. And so Fleur had been; how else to interpret the drone of the past two years? Ava had turned in desperation to the two novels written before she met Fleur, searching for evidence that she could write without her. And while she had read the novels with both pleasure and relief – if she could do it then, she could do it again – it was only now, after last night’s reunion, that she knew she actually would.

  For the first time since the end of the relationship she felt no need to steer clear of her Fleur tokens, no need to cover the page in her diary when Harry came into the room, no need to visit surreptitiously the file of Fleur’s old emails. No need to avoid the huge store of inflammable memories and keepsakes, no need to lie.

  And yet secrets formed the fabric of a life like hers. Not simply the failed childhood shoved into a crate and welded shut, not simply Fleur, a parallel marriage if ever there was one, but a cache of secrets added to throughout her forty-five years, hidden in memory, in diaries, in a bale of documents. Secrets enrich a life, she truly believed this, and without them life becomes a thin bedraggled affair. But secrets require unwavering vigilance, to be loyal to them can be exhausting.

  She wondered how many of her secrets had leaked out. Who, for example, other than the players themselves knew about her month with Jack or her affair with Connie? As for Fleur, Jack knew, and of course Harry, who believed that as long as Ava remained with him she was choosing him above Fleur. And while she would never leave Harry, sometimes you choose but are not chosen in return.

  Old secrets gradually lose their radioactivity, acquiring instead a certain nostalgia. Secrets left behind after your life has moved forward become safe. Fleur, so recently full of hard heat, was finally cooling.

  As for the often squalid side to secrets, Ava had never regarded hers in this way. What both Stephen and Fleur had given her was valuable, and so much of what you value is never put on show. As she walked the grounds of her old university, this place that filled a special part of her past, it occurred to her that memories can become secrets too, sometimes so deeply buried that barely a whisper remains. But at the most unexpected of times they emerge, lovely and lively, returning you to times no longer lost.

  The wind had dropped and as she left the arts building and made her way to the library she felt the first spatter of rain. And what, she wondered, might she not know about her old friends? Helen’s ambitions, for example, and this predicament of hers with science, her longest love. And Jack’s achievements, surely there were more than he had revealed to her. And Connie, how did he square his moral philosopher’s stance with three marriages, a swathe of children and numerous lovers? Only Harry was in the clear, Harry who slept with his bedroom door ajar, who worked always with the door to his office open, her Harry had no secrets.

  CHAPTER 2: The Buried Life

  1.

  It was the evening after the reunion and in a building by the river, in a huge white space with soaring ceilings and a colossal wall of glass, Harry Guerin was working through his final check-list. He had selected this venue for the NOGA cocktail party confident that the three to four hundred people required to fill the area would make the effort to attend. A few guests had already arrived and were idling self-consciously in the no-man’s-land of a room before a party. Harry glanced at his watch, not yet six, and certainly too soon to worry his hopes might have muddied his expectations. He rustled up a waiter to give the early arrivals a drink, then slipped into the kitchen for last-minute instructions to the catering staff. Back in the bar area, he inspected the waiters; he insisted one fellow restrain his dreadlocks and another remove a line of eyebrow studs, and, to quell the murmurings, promised a ten per cent cash bonus for the lot of them. Money, he had learned long ago, was a reliable pacifier.

  He was about to do a final check with the sound and light people when he saw Helen arrive. She might well be in line for a Nobel, but it didn’t take much nous to realise that if improving the lot of the starving multitudes was a widespread priority, the st
arving would not amount to multitudes. Unlike Helen he was a realist, and his job would be a great deal easier if she were too.

  He shoved his list in his pocket and followed her out to the terrace where she had already lit up. Too busy to be anything but blunt, he told her this was not the time for a crisis of conscience; she knew exactly where her expertise lay, and so, for that matter, did NOGA.

  ‘Many people have invested in you and your science,’ he said. ‘You owe it to them, yourself as well, to be sensible.’

  The smile she had raised to greet him slid from her face, but before she could find an answer he had turned and headed back inside. And while he would have preferred a more diplomatic approach, given the pressures on him tonight, pussy-footing around the issue was not an option, nor, he suspected, would it produce results.