‘We always had such fun,’ Ava said the words aloud. There was plenty of fun in the early years, no question of that, but for the last four or five the fun was replaced by a good deal of distress. Had Fleur not noticed? Had she forgotten the betrayals and bitter arguments? Had she forgotten the barrage of criticism she aimed at Ava, the faults she found no matter how many changes Ava made? Was Fleur’s fun at the expense of her own pain?
How easily, how surreptitiously can love become panic. That teetering at the edge of the chasm, that swimming endlessly against a swollen tide, that driving the wrong way up a one-way street. And you can’t turn round and you can’t go back. It makes a nonsense of happiness, it makes a nonsense of love too. And all it takes in this misery is one good time and the misery falls away (she loves me, I knew it, she loves me), one good hit and you’re strengthened for the next several months of abuse. But never would you call it fun. Ava did not regret her rapid-fire response to Fleur’s email: she had no desire to see her, not this woman with her fun and her forgetting.
There was no reason to expect a response from Fleur, nonetheless Ava checked her email a dozen times throughout the day. In between she potted lilies, she had coffee with her neighbour Minnie, she took Minnie’s dog for a walk, she read Oscar Wilde’s letters in an attempt to gatecrash other intimacies, and then more soberly a portion of De Profundis; she made vegetable soup, she tidied her desk, and finally at ten past five there was a response from Fleur. Melbourne, she wrote, why not? May never have another chance. She would tack a few days’ holiday on to her trip.
There were so many escapes at this stage and Ava ignored the lot of them, for now a meeting with Fleur was possible it became, ipso facto, essential. By the time Harry came home, Ava had cancelled all engagements for the week of Fleur’s visit with the exception of one reading on the morning of her arrival, just in case she required distraction. There was no question of telling Harry. If the visit turned out to be inconsequential he would never need know, and if not, with desire and disgust amassing in equal strength, she refused to consider that option.
During the weeks that followed, Ava applied herself to work. There were periods when she slipped smoothly into the new novel but mostly the narrative ran amok; sometimes her patience was so fractured that even reading was reduced to rubble. As she lay in bed on the Friday before Fleur’s arrival, Ava wondered how she would make it through the next four days. The filming of Connie’s pilot at the State Library the following Monday would swallow a few hours, but the weekend loomed endlessly.
From the kitchen she could hear the familiar sounds of Harry making his breakfast; it would be at least thirty minutes before he appeared with her coffee. She tried one more time to apply reason to the impending Fleur visit and yet again she failed. She was about to call Harry and suggest an earlier coffee when suddenly she remembered recitations from memory, the way they could moor attention in the most violent of currents. She began with the ice and albatross stanzas from ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ followed by the beginning of ‘Prufrock’. Then Hardy’s remarkable comment on modernity, ‘We are getting to the end of visioning/The impossible within this universe.’ And finally, as if it were waiting for her, she seized on Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’. She had recited it three times by the time Harry arrived with the coffee.
‘I’ve been thinking of Auden’s poem how “everything turns away quite leisurely from the disaster”,’ she said when he appeared in the doorway. ‘Why is it, do you think, that in so many instances people go on with their business, despite a boy falling out of the sky, or war or famine or politicians lying in the name of democracy?’
Harry smiled and bent down to kiss her. ‘I do enjoy our morning conversations.’
He settled himself on the bed, careful not to crush his trousers. ‘It’s a matter of self-interest I think. People turn away from a disaster because they’re already consumed by events closer at hand, events that more directly involve them, events more important to them and considerably more pleasurable than war or famine or destruction of the planet.’
‘But what about those occasions when the disaster has them in its sights, is hurtling towards them and about to swallow them up like a triffid? What then?’ She was picking at a pulled thread on the quilt cover. ‘And often the events that absorb them are not in the least bit pleasant.’
‘Pleasant or unpleasant, the focus keeps the person at the centre of his or her universe –’
‘But surely not everyone is that egocentric.’
‘– and being so occupied provides the person with a sense of being in control.’ He saw she was about to interrupt again and quickly continued. ‘There’s a deflection effect. Obsessing over something, being plagued by something, fills in time that might otherwise be used in grappling with more relevant issues. The prevaricating, no matter how uncomfortable, is delaying some difficult actions.’
Ava sipped her coffee and avoided his gaze. Harry knew about Fleur’s visit, she did not know how he knew, but she was in no doubt he did know. She was wondering whether she should admit to it when he announced in quite a different tone of voice that he had a surprise.
‘An early anniversary celebration,’ – their anniversary was the following week – ‘a holiday weekend.’ He would go to the office for just a couple of hours, ‘We could get away by midday.’
She leaned forward and pulled him towards her. It was exactly what she needed.
‘We’ll be eating freshly baked scones for afternoon tea,’ Harry said, holding her close.
Ava passed the morning in preparation for their trip, including a visit to the Richmond Hill cheese shop for a selection of Harry’s favourite cheeses, together with a loaf of the rosemary and walnut bread he said was the best accompaniment for blue cheese. By the time he returned from work she was ready to leave: for the coast, for the Grampians, for the lush farming country in East Gippsland, for the old gold rush country – neither had any preference, so they tossed a coin, and found themselves heading west to the Grampian mountains. They ate perfect scones at Dunkeld and reached the town of Halls Gap late in the afternoon.
They ignored the picturesque bed-and-breakfasts and searched instead for a motel where breakfast was delivered on a tray through a hatch and no one bothered you.
‘Atmosphere can be so intrusive,’ Harry said as he always did.
‘– and so risky,’ Ava added her usual reply.
They were still laughing when they turned into the driveway of a four-star motel which boasted grazing kangaroos at dusk. They were settled in their room, which looked and smelled exactly as a four-star motel room should, and were ticking off their desires on the breakfast menu when the first of the kangaroos appeared.
They sat together on the verandah watching the grazing animals, toasting each other with cider bought from the local pub and dipping into Ava’s gift of bread and cheese. The Stilton, Harry said, was excellent, all the cheeses were.
Over the next two days Fleur was packed away while Ava and Harry walked bush tracks, climbed mountain paths and visited every shop in town that sold homemade jams and chutneys, places Harry found irresistible and which Ava tolerated only because of him. They saw galahs and crimson rosellas and rainbow lorikeets, and on one mountain slope a wombat waddling along. They walked arm in arm, breaking into favourite songs, Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’, so at odds with this landscape, and the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ for two voices. They talked about friends and Harry’s family, they discussed home and abroad, they drew parallels between the present time and early last century, both periods of such rapid change and so few people concerned about where the world might be heading. They talked about power and wondered if Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness were made compulsory reading for all fifteen-year-olds whether they would become more responsible citizens. Ava with her faith in the power of narrative believed they would, Harry disagreed as she knew he would. They talked about communication in the age of the computer – never been so efficient, acc
ording to Harry, never been so fragile, according to Ava. For two days they talked and laughed and sang and riffled their store of shared memories so well stocked after more than twenty years.
‘Over twenty years,’ Ava exclaimed, ‘who would have thought it.’
On the way home, Harry pulled into a service station for petrol. He switched off the engine and turned to her. ‘We’re not doing too badly, Davey, we’re really not.’
On Monday morning Fleur sent an email, not the cancellation Ava had both hoped and feared, but confirmation of time and place for their meeting and an excited, See you tomorrow! Can’t wait!
The afternoon at the State Library passed quickly with hardly a thought of Fleur. Not just the bustle of TV, not just being with the others, but Connie in top form and fairly crackling with ideas. And Fleur stayed away during the evening with Harry, his potato pie for dinner and a DVD of Charade, ‘For my own romantic,’ he said. Ava took a sleeping pill and made it through the night.
The following day Harry left home early. He told her he had meetings in Canberra and was planning to stay overnight. Not knowing how long she would be with Fleur, Ava had invented an evening reading and overnight stay for herself, in Ballarat of all places – Ballarat simply popped into her head and she stuck to it. Harry left and Ava was saddled with three hours to fill before her reading – not in Ballarat but at the university a kilometre away, and the one engagement she had not cancelled when first she learned of Fleur’s visit.
She fidgeted for an hour, and when she could bear the waiting no longer she grabbed her things and escaped the house. Soon she was wedged down the back of a tram crammed with workers on their way to the city. In the old days she had experienced none of this disquiet; there was an urgency to the whole Fleur business which, she now realised, must have diluted her usual moral responses. When you are compelled to see someone, compelled to contact them several times each day, compelled to love them, you do not think about the consequences to you or anyone else. How very different things were now.
Just before Harry left that morning, she had reassured him, or perhaps she was reassuring herself, that never would anyone come between them.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘But I like to hear you say it.’
As the tram stopped and started and she was pressed harder into a corner, she instructed herself to put Harry aside: the next few hours belonged to the Ava connected to Fleur and quite a different Ava from the one married to Harry. By the time she arrived in the city centre the familiar churning was back: excitement, dread, and a determination to be sensible but in the presence of Fleur knowing she simply could not be trusted.
Once in the city she wandered across the river into the Botanic Gardens. She considered how best to present herself to Fleur, how much to disclose about their almost three-year separation, how much to reveal about her own anxieties now. She did not see the newly planted flower beds, nor the black swans on the ornamental lake, nor the scrub wrens rummaging in the leaf litter. She was, as she had been so many times before, simply filling the time with thoughts of Fleur until Fleur herself arrived.
She supposed she should eat something and made her way back to the city and the cafés along the river. She stopped at one of the less crowded places and ordered the house speciality, a fisherman’s catch breakfast. She fiddled with it until the hot portions were cold and unappetising and the cold parts were room temperature and suspect, before paying an astronomical price and re-entering the streets. She dawdled in bookshops, plodded through galleries, loitered in front of shop windows, sampled the samples at a Body Shop until it was time to catch the tram to the university for her reading.
The seminar room was already crowded when she arrived. Dotted among the traditional black-clad artistic students were quite a few in skimpy T-shirts and shorts suggesting a greater affinity with the sports centre than the sedentary life of the mind. Ava hoped that appearances would not prove too reliable. She talked with academic staff and was introduced to several students, who were variously described as ‘talented’ or ‘promising’ or ‘one to watch’.
At last it was time to begin. A serious young lecturer welcomed everyone – ‘The largest turn-out so far for this series’ – before providing an analysis of ‘the Bryant oeuvre’ in terms so abstract the novels might have been Hegelian philosophy. Then Ava stepped up to the podium, and after a brief introduction to her most recent book, The Metropolitan, she began the reading.
She had always enjoyed the performance aspect of public readings, so all her reading passages were well settled in memory and required only an occasional glance at the page. Today the audience was mostly comprised of creative-writing students. Five minutes into her reading she noticed two of the students playing the pads of their mobile phones. With another twenty minutes to go, it was anyone’s guess how many more of the talented and promising would follow suit.
All these young men and women were enrolled in a course they believed would equip them to write the masterpieces for which they were destined. Although for many there was a greater sense of entitlement: they expected the course to grant them their masterpieces, and if the masterpieces failed to materialise it was the fault of the course and its teachers, and not any lack of ability on their part. Ava wanted to remind them that Woolf and Austen, Dickens and Henry James, the Brontës and the entire pantheon of Russians had not enrolled in a university program in order to write their novels. And despite earning a considerable portion of her own income through creative-writing courses, she wanted to tell them to quit their writing degrees and go home. Read, write, think, daydream. Writing is a slow and solitary learning, she wanted to say. Go home, all of you.
She glanced down at the page to pick up the start of the next paragraph. She couldn’t find it. She couldn’t find her place nor could she remember what came next. She scanned the open page. Where was she up to? Had she read that paragraph? She couldn’t remember. She’d lost her place. She’d have to stop, she’d have to apologise. Never happened before. She felt faint – was she sick? – reached for her water glass and remembered just in time that the paragraph, the one she had just finished, ended on the next page. How could she have forgotten? Her heart was thudding, her stomach fumbling, she’d saved herself just in time. She left the water on the lectern and did not raise her head for the remainder of the reading. When it was over she answered the usual questions, she signed books. And all the while her thoughts jerked back to that moment of panic, and then jerked forward to its cause an hour ahead when she would be seeing Fleur again.
She looked just the same. The dark angular face, the athletic figure, the turquoise jacket they had bought together on a weekend trip to France soon after the Channel Tunnel was opened, the cropped hair bristly against her cheek as they embraced. And the scent of her. So much the same, but as they settled at an outdoor table of a café in Federation Square, ruggedly different. There was the old rush of seeing her, but the churning had stilled. And the usual excitement but without the dread of new revelations. And an easy pleasure, not the wild wind of old, something more sedate, kinder, and never before associated with Fleur. As Fleur chatted away, Ava found herself thinking of the blandness of skin you no longer love. Is there anything more poignant? Anything less ambiguous? And the confusion not to be feeling what you have long been accustomed to feeling. She looked at Fleur, she listened to Fleur, she touched Fleur’s arm and she was perplexed.
They were just like any old friends catching up. They spoke of work, of mutual acquaintances, the situation in the Middle East. And Africa, they spoke of Africa where they had planned to visit. And sitting across the table from Fleur, Ava decided she and Harry would make the trip. She asked about the treasures Fleur had brought out, and whether Fleur would be the courier on the homeward journey in a few months’ time. When told she would not, that these perks were shared around, Ava experienced nothing in the way of disappointment.
It was all very strange.
She asked about the woman Fleur had fal
len in love with, the one who had resulted in her own dismissal, the woman whose name Ava realised with some surprise she had forgotten. Chris, Fleur said, her name was Chris, and then she laughed. It seemed her capacity to fall in love was more robust than reliable, for Chris had proved a disappointment. Fleur embarked on a synopsis of the end of that affair and the beginning and end of the one that followed. Ava listened with an oddly objective interest and, more curiously, only a modicum of unease. She was unsure exactly how to feel. Offended? Played for a fool? Amused? Put in her place? (Fleur had always excelled at putting her in her place.) And settled for amused.
As Fleur nattered on, Ava wondered about the passionate, irresistible woman who had colonised her heart, her mind, her work. Where was the woman who had supplied the spark, the vigour, the urgency that propelled her through seven breathless years? Might Fleur have always been this benign? And if so, how could Ava not have seen?
‘It is so good to see you.’ Fleur laced her fingers through Ava’s. ‘I really have missed you.’
Ava stared at their joined hands, aware of a weird numbness. The sharp edges had worn from her joy, the burn from her excitement; the longing had disappeared entirely. And along with the cravings, the adulation had disappeared too. Adulation: so essential to the type of relationship she had with Fleur, but – she had never before realised – only ever dished out by her. Once she would have done anything to earn Fleur’s love. But while you can earn gratitude, loyalty, a car, a house, an overseas trip, you cannot earn love.
There’s nothing to be picked from the rubble of a dead love, she told herself, and reeled off some unconvincing excuses before hurrying away.
She hailed a cab, she was desperate to be home, away from Fleur and the past. It was Harry she wanted. She’d ring him in Canberra. But there was a light on when the taxi pulled up outside the house. He was home! He must have changed his plans and come home. She ran up the path. And there he was, Harry, standing in the doorway, waiting for her.
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