Luke’s point was valid, but what Luke and everyone else failed to see was Jack preferred it his way. The beach was precisely significant because it was where he made love to Ava, yes, in the past, but still of far greater interest than today’s cleaned-up, syringe-free stretch of sand. Yet now as he sat in his office high above the city he was aware of a strange unease. What sort of man is always oriented towards the past, towards what is already known? And what sort of life does it produce? No surprises, no originality, just treading the same old familiar groove. And so conservative – the thought shocked him. Perhaps it was not surprising he had written nothing new for so long.
Yet he wanted to write and he had tried these past months but the discipline had perished, maybe the ideas too, although that was harder to accept. And his mood was at odds. The pleasures he had felt at Connie’s pilot the previous day had disappeared even before he had left the library; in fact, all pleasures these days were short-lived. After the filming, instead of bundling into a bar for a spirited wrap-up, Helen had dashed back to the laboratory to check on an experiment, Connie had dashed back to Sara who was expecting him, and Ava, who looked uncharacteristically tired, went home. They gave their excuses, leaving Jack alone on the lawn in front of the State Library. He watched Ava board the tram heading north, then he walked to the corner to wait for a tram to carry him in the other direction.
Today he had arrived at the office just before ten o’clock. He had browsed the newspaper, more out of habit than interest, and an hour later he could not have named the main stories. His email was similarly uninspiring, consisting of petitions, advertisements and an annoying message from Harry, highly critical of an old friend of the Adelsons. This woman, a fearless and very public campaigner for human rights, had recently sought Jack’s help in applying for refugee status for an Iraqi family. A series of emails had passed between them. The woman was a well-known figure, she was often in the press, nonetheless, Harry’s timing was uncanny – suspiciously so. But the possibility that Harry might be shadowing him in cyberspace – and if him, perhaps anyone associated with NOGA – was so unpalatable, so beyond the realm of acceptable behaviour, Jack preferred to ascribe the interference to coincidence. He trashed the email without acknowledging it.
He paid a couple of bills and checked out the Guardian online with much the same attention he had given to the morning paper. He cruised some of his favourite websites, but even these failed to stir. He read through the letter he had written to Ava the previous night; it would, he realised, be added to the never-sent file, which was now so large it occupied an entire drawer. He went to the window and gazed out, but was savaged by an irritation so intense that if he could have cracked open his body and leapt out of his skin he would have. At quarter past twelve he heard the squawk of Harry’s voice along the corridor, and knowing he could not face him, not even a short polite greeting to the man long married to Ava, he grabbed his things and left the building for an early lunch.
He crossed to the other side of the river via the footbridge and went directly to a café in one of the lanes off Flinders Street. He had become a regular here – not just the good coffee and Mediterranean food, but with the parade through the lane and the coppery old shops he might be in London, Paris, Amsterdam or Florence. Everywhere and nowhere. There should have been freedom in the geographical slipperiness, but he experienced only the slipperiness,
Soon he was settled at his usual table, dipping into a plate of antipasto and drinking the first of two espressos. He propped his novel against the sugar bowl and began to read. It was Bellow’s last, not because Bellow had spoken to him in recent novels, but long ago Herzog and Humboldt’s Gift had set his world on fire and he longed for the same again. He turned pages while he ate, cleared the plate, had no idea what he had read, turned to the previous page, no recognition, and the one before that, still nothing, and with a surge of frustration closed the book. So much din in his brain and he couldn’t even attend to a novel any more. He ordered his second coffee; it arrived too quickly. He wasn’t ready to return to the office, he would prefer never to return, and why from this cerebral wasteland should rear up one of Archimedes’ maxims he did not know, but it did stop the bluster.
Give me a foothold and I shall move the earth.
He was fifteen when first he read this and had been in no doubt Archimedes was speaking to him. He had loving parents, his country was safe and prosperous, he was a successful student and a talented musician; his foothold was excellent, the rest would be up to him. Later he found a different translation: Give me somewhere to stand, and I will move the earth, and realised he may have misinterpreted. There followed days of doubt and frantic research until he remembered something he had once read: that the first translation of a favourite work is like a first love – it may not be the most reliable, but by being first it receives special consideration.
Give me a foothold and I shall move the earth.
His foothold had indeed been excellent, yet here he was in his mid-forties and might as well be on life support for all the effect he’d had on the world. He wasn’t writing, he wasn’t researching, he had produced neither children nor brilliant students, and his only significant scholarship had occurred decades ago. He was dishing out simplified information to anyone who asked, which was then distorted into simpler sound-bites. His group of friends hardly comprised a group any more, and while he clung to his thoughts of Ava like a doomed man clings to life, with her in the same city it was as if these thoughts were cut adrift from their raison d’être, thereby setting him adrift. He could no longer indulge in fantasies of their meeting in romantic corners of the world, nor could he use such imaginings as a distraction from the disappointments of his own ordinary days. Not only did he not have Ava in the sense Harry had Ava, but his own Ava was fast slipping away.
He knew that Connie and Helen had long viewed his love for Ava as a disability, but he felt disabled now, as if he had contracted one of those muscle-wasting diseases where each new day is a reminder of a dwindling future. What Connie and Helen had never understood was that the way he conducted his relationship with Ava had worked for him. He had been happy.
‘If you’d lived the first twenty years of your life in a brick cell, happiness would be a bedsit with a tiny window looking out to a garbage dump,’ Helen had said recently.
It was a couple of days before she left for Jakarta, and Jack had invited her round to the flat for an early dinner to sample one of his experiments: a basil and slow-roasted tomato soufflé served with a salad of blanched green beans and toasted almond slivers drizzled with a thyme-infused olive oil. It was entirely wasted on her of course, food being no more than a bodily requirement as far as she was concerned, but Connie, who would have been more appreciative, seemed unable to separate from Sara even for a quick meal, and Ava was out of the question. They had just begun the meal, but given the turn of conversation Jack wished it were already over. For Helen was wrong: he had reliable standards of comparison, he knew what happiness was.
‘You don’t, Jack. You’ve never had a real relationship with anyone.’
He poured himself more wine and sipped slowly, as if that could quell the seething. Helen had no idea what she was talking about. He had been with many women; the problem was they failed to make the grade.
‘Your standards have been carved out of a long-standing, nonexistent relationship with an idealised woman. No real woman could ever measure up. And as far as I can see you’ve stopped bothering.’ Helen helped herself to another spoonful of soufflé and dumped a pile of salad on top. ‘You don’t need to step out your front door any more. It’s very tidy, very safe in here.’
He defended himself vigorously and with growing peevishness. But no matter how much he insisted his relationship with Ava was real, no matter how apposite his arguments, Helen refused to shift. As for his long correspondence with Ava, Helen believed this had nothing to do with real love.
‘The written word is a powerful aphrodisia
c. Or as Luke would say,’ and she smiled at the reference to her son, ‘the written word is hot. Look no further than the countless people who have been caught up in cyberspace romances only to discover that their partner is a fourteen-year-old boy with bad acne, raging libido and excellent written expression.’
He was about to protest: his correspondence with Ava had nothing in common with chatroom sleaze, but Helen was not finished. ‘Whether cyberspace or old-fashioned mail, written communications make you feel very good. And the pleasures are always solitary, they’re always intense, and –’ she paused for emphasis, ‘they are always self-serving.’
Helen had always been blunt. You welcomed it when she was agreeing with you, you welcomed it when you were head to head in intellectual argument, and you certainly welcomed it in the days of the Laconics. But with his relationship with Ava already struggling, Helen might just as well have plunged the blade in and left him to bleed. They had planned a quick dinner before Helen collected Luke from football practice. Jack cut it even shorter. Helen was wrong, she didn’t understand. And who was she to judge? With the exception of Luke, her most enduring attachment was to bacteria.
He had been determined to dismiss her opinions out of hand, but not only had he found himself dwelling on what she had said, he had dipped into some well-known correspondences – Virginia Woolf’s with Vita Sackville-West, de Beauvoir’s baggy tender letters to Nelson Algren, even John Evelyn’s correspondence with Margaret Blagge, these last such chaste letters yet emitting such heat.
Anyone who has enjoyed an intense written relationship is well acquainted with the impact of words that are read rather than spoken. In the silence of a room, with all stops pulled out on imagination, emotions swirl like magma below a charged earth. You feel the fire and the erotic plumes, you spark with possibilities, and it begins even before you open the latest instalment, when you collect the mail and recognise her letter. You know her handwriting, the way she prints your name and address, the way she underscores the area code, you know her scrawl of sender details on the back, you can see her fingerprints, her signature as it were, all over the envelope. You feel the quickening of your heart, the thump of anticipation as you take the mail inside. You sort through the letters, you leave hers till last. Then you make yourself a fresh cup of coffee, sit in a favourite chair, open her letter and read, once, twice, three times, the burn of just you and Ava together and nothing to intrude on your secret and highly charged tryst. And during the writing and the reading and the re-readings, and all the times in between as you shop and cook and clean, as you sit out the tedium of dried-out colleagues and plodding students, you not only relive your love, you make it and remake it and embed it in a world that seems both miraculous and tangible. There is nothing to compare with the clandestine enclave of letters.
But now that Jack could see her whenever he wanted, the enclave had broken its borders. It was not that he loved her any less, he doubted that were possible, but the dynamic of his love baulked at its usual functions. The disorientation was at times unbearable, as if he had lost the coordinates to his very existence – much like his parents must have felt when they quit the Party. They had been quick to find other causes, other groups, but Jack didn’t want to leave his Ava; he was hanging on for dear life.
A new book would help, but he couldn’t write. Good causes would help, but he lacked his parents’ commitment. He told himself the situation would pass, that in time his love would find its season again. But despite these assurances he knew something fundamental was changing. Something that had for so long been thoroughly known, thoroughly secure and unquestionably reliable, was losing its form and its footing.
Ava was not similarly disturbed. She rang him often, proposing lunches, drinks, walks, gallery visits – ‘Not Harry’s thing at all’ – but after two of these occasions Jack was determined to find excuses. Indeed, the very first time alone with her was sufficient to reveal how things really were.
She had invited him to her place for lunch. He was nervous, excited, it was as if his whole past had been rolling forward to this moment. He had dressed with care, mindful of colours and styles she had always liked. He selected two books to lend her, he copied out a poem by Yehuda Amichai – they often included poems in their letters – and after a short search he had triumphed with a giant-sized version of her favourite chocolate bar.
The failure of the chocolate bar turned out to be emblematic of the occasion. She had taken it with a vague ‘Why on earth are you giving me this?’ expression, and when he reminded her, she had smiled and said it was very thoughtful of him but she hadn’t eaten chocolate in years. Why didn’t you tell me? he had blurted out. And when she replied that it didn’t seem important in the scheme of things, he wondered what else she had kept from him.
The meeting was stiff with unfamiliarity. Ava drank green tea and not the strong black coffee she had introduced him to. Espresso was de rigueur among the existentialists, the eighteen-year-old Ava had told him, implying that no other consideration, including that of taste, was relevant. So Jack had persevered until he could drink his coffee no other way. But now she had swapped to green tea. What intellectual ever drank green tea? he wanted to ask. And the books he had chosen missed the mark too. One of them was a biography of the Strachey family. ‘It looks interesting,’ she said as she flipped through, ‘but I haven’t read the Bloomsburies for years.’ She handed the book back to him. ‘Perhaps another time,’ she said vaguely. She loved the poem, but it’s not difficult to keep track of poetry tastes in letters.
There were numerous other changes, her slower speech and the careful pauses – suitable for a public interview but not at home with an old friend. Although worst of all was her refusal to ignore the phone. While she was speaking with someone called Barbara, he found himself wondering how she wrote her letters to him, how much attention she gave to a task that for him was sacred. He would write only at night, a glass of wine beside him, consulting his notebook where he had made jottings during the previous week. He would spend the better part of an evening writing to her, then the following morning he would give the letter a final reading and make last-minute changes, print it off, seal it in the same airmail blue envelopes he had always used, and send it at a post office rather than a kerbside letterbox as there would be less chance of its going astray. A whole ritual. But after enduring ten minutes of inconsequential banter between Ava and Barbara, during which he waited, ignored, on her couch in her living room, he wondered whether Ava had treated their correspondence with the same indifference he was now receiving.
By the time Jack left the café he was feeling worse than when he arrived. If not for the lingering disappointment following Connie’s pilot he might have passed an hour at the public library, instead he took a stroll through the city lanes and arcades. After thirty minutes, aware that all this time-wasting felt uncomfortably incriminating, he decided to return to the office. He looked around to take his bearings and saw a shop he had never noticed before. In the window was a display of hand-made journals. He stepped closer. Such intricate covers, scenes from old Venice, Japanese pen-and-ink drawings, colourful abstract patterns like the Bargello tapestries his mother used to stitch. And the old-fashioned rough-cut, creamy pages. These books were so elegant, so beautiful, he was tempted to buy one for himself – as if quality tools alone ever produced anything of worth. Then he thought of Ava; she was never without a notebook.
The woman behind the counter looked up as he entered. She invited him to browse and then returned to a page of figures. Mid-twenties, dark, slender and stylish, Jack would have thought her more suited to a fashion house than a business dedicated to handwriting and hand-crafted paper.
The shop was tiny, ‘delicate’ was the word that occurred to him, just a few steps across and a dozen steps deep. There was a free-standing table with a display of paper and cards, and around the walls, arranged on wooden shelving, were the journals. Perhaps it was the lighting, but what might have been musty an
d oppressive was polished and warm.
With no other customers in the shop, Jack was free to make a systematic search for Ava’s notebook. He wrapped himself in the task, so much so that when the phone rang a few minutes later he started at the noise. The girl at the desk answered, and after an initial greeting she switched to Italian. Perhaps she was in the right job after all.
A few minutes more and Jack had selected nine journals of varying size, cover design and paper thickness and arranged them along a narrow bench. While any would be suitable for Ava only one would be best. He stepped back and considered. The illuminated manuscript cover or the blue-green marbled design? A delicate Japanese garden or Venice’s Grand Canal? He returned two of the books to the shelves and flipped through the pages of those still in contention. He weighed each in his hands, he compared size and thickness, he retrieved one of those he had replaced – a marbled cover in pinks and golds and far too lovely to discount. Now there were eight possible journals for Ava.
The air in the shop had thickened, sweat snaked beneath his shirt, he blotted his face with his handkerchief. The girl had finished her phone call. His back was turned to her but he was sure she was watching. Choose, he ordered himself, but if the books had magically reconfigured into a lavishly patterned vice he could not have been more paralysed. A minute more and he was defeated. He left the journals scattered across the bench and with gaze averted he rushed from the shop. Decisions about Ava had never been his forté.
He hurried from the lane into Flinders Street and made his way directly to the second-hand bookshop across from the railway station. He stepped through the doorway and immediately his stress dissipated under cover of the stacks. There were half a dozen people in the shop each silently browsing; the woman behind the counter was immersed in a book. He took down volumes at random, read blurbs, flipped through pages, checked for Ava’s titles in the fiction area. He moved through philosophy, poetry, history, biography, military, self-help, car maintenance and only when he found himself leafing through a Mandrake comic, a favourite of his eight-year-old self, did he come to his senses. There was little point in lingering any longer.
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