Reunion

by Andrea Goldsmith

  At twenty past six he checked the house phone and his mobile. No messages on either. He took both phones outside to the verandah and poured himself a glass of wine. At six thirty-five he was surprised to find his glass empty; at six thirty-seven he began to worry. At quarter to seven he couldn’t stop himself and dialled her mobile. There was a faint delayed ringing, which he traced to the living room. Wherever she had gone it was without her phone.

  It was just before seven when he crossed the courtyard and climbed the stairs to her study. He was looking for clues, he told Jack later, to indicate where she might have gone. What struck him first was the tidiness of the room. Papers were stacked in neat piles, pens were in their jar, her desk was clear, and she’d removed her working notes from the wall. Ava tidied up at most once a year, but he had suggested recently that less clutter in her study might clear away some of what she called her ‘cerebral debris’, so what might have been odd in other circumstances could be easily explained.

  ‘I kept staring at the tidy desk, the bare wall,’ Harry said to Jack, ‘taking in the strangeness of it.’

  And then he saw her. On the floor, on her back, her head resting on a cushion, lying motionless, her eyes closed but – a glance was sufficient to reveal – not asleep. And in that moment when everything was blatantly not normal he found himself thinking about the lies perpetrated about the dead. For dead people do not look as if they are sleeping peacefully. Dead people look lifeless. Dead people are changed, changed utterly. No peace to that pallor, no peace to that stillness. His wife overlaid by death, death-wrapped. It was horrible, it was fantastic. His wife dead on her study floor, wearing a shirt he had never seen before, her feet bare, her hands spread on the rug, her face utterly lifeless. His lovely, lively wife. He had promised to be with her at the end. ‘Please don’t let me die alone,’ she had said.

  He knelt on the floor and touched her breast, an automatic reaching for the heart which had failed her. There’s no predicting these things, the neurologist had said recently. Her body was in a weakened state, anything might take her. But not yet, not yet.

  He pulled in the air and expelled it forcefully in a brutal resuscitation of his own arrested life. He couldn’t look at her, it was too brazenly real – her death – and a sense that if he didn’t see, if he refused to cooperate, this unnatural turn of events might be reversed. Seconds later and he had to look at her, this woman he had loved for most of his life, had to take her in before she disappeared entirely. She had a fearful uniform bloodlessness. The lines, the flaws, the tics, her idiosyncrasies had all disappeared from her face. Sheared of expression it was as if the life, all of Ava’s big brilliant life had been fleeced from her. The face on the cushion was perfect.

  He touched her arm just above the wrist, plastic skin just like her favourite cheese. And cold, already cold. How quickly does it happen, this settling of the blood? And how long has she been lying alone? He hated the thought of her being here without him. And if she had died in distress, he would never know, this awful death mask would have removed all signs. Only her hair was unchanged, her beautiful golden hair, and he sat there stroking it as she had always liked him to do, stroking the hair of his wife.

  Outside night fell, and a chill breeze eased through the open door and up the stairs. On the floor in her study Harry sat quietly stroking his wife, as if that might hold triumphant death at bay. But it was a struggle; he needed the sort of imagination Ava had possessed to survive this no-man’s-land between a normal past and an incomprehensible future. He opened his eyes and felt for the desk lamp, knocked something to the floor, winced in the tight hard glare, looked down and picked up a bottle. Pentobarbital was clearly written in black block letters; the rest of the label was in Spanish.

  He knew exactly what it was. Pentobarbital was Nembutal. He knew exactly what it meant.

  He held the bottle to the light. There was a lick of fluid left, the last unnecessary drop. Her heart hadn’t failed, her brain hadn’t haemorrhaged, she had done this to herself, she had done this to him. How could she have left him like this? And lying flat and white on the desk surface, an envelope, her handwriting, his name on the front. Nembutal and a note. And despite the incontrovertible evidence, he couldn’t believe she would have killed herself. He couldn’t believe she would have killed herself without letting him know. He couldn’t believe she would kill herself knowing he would find her. He couldn’t believe she would leave him before it was time.

  2.

  Thirty-eight days had passed since her death and the house reeked of her absence. Each new day loomed with a frightening twenty-four hours, each new hour threatened with sixty impossible minutes. Harry felt as if normal life had been stuffed into a pipe lined with glass shards. Grief in others with its self-indulgent drear had always made him impatient. Get over it, he had wanted to say, just get over it. But it wasn’t self-indulgent and he had no idea how to get over it.

  He wanted to throttle those idiot commiserators with their inane ‘better it happened now’– publicly the cause of death had been given as heart failure; ‘it was time’; ‘she was saved from the worst’; and the one he hated most of all: ‘you were saved from the worst’. Because it wasn’t time and he hadn’t been saved, he wanted more, much more of Ava. She was wrong not to have waited, she was wrong not to have told him what she planned. If she had been so desperate, so determined, why hadn’t she begged him, forced him to change his mind and help her?

  Several times a day he would cross the courtyard and enter her study as if he might find her reading or tapping the keyboard or just staring through the window. The condemning patch of floor he had excised from his field of vision. At four o’clock the morning after her death he had leapt out of bed. If anything should ever happen to me, she had always said, check the shelf of my favourite books. Her Parker pen lay in its felt pouch in front of the books; he put it in the pocket of his pyjamas. He removed her Proust, her collected Milosz, her cloth-covered Portrait of a Lady. Nothing. Behind Mrs Dalloway was a flashdrive marked as a copy of her latest novel, behind Wuthering Heights was a wad of Euros. Nervous, expectant, desperate for something, anything, he had continued along the shelf. But there was nothing. No letter, no proper explanation of why she had acted as she did.

  Thirty-eight days after her death, her desk drawers, the filing cabinet, the stacks of paper still remained exactly as she had left them. Such finality, unbearable it seemed, if he were to move any of her things. Yet he had found her dead in her study along with an empty bottle of Nembutal – how much more final does it get? He had seen her coffin, he had buried her ashes and now he was rattling around in the life they once shared. How much more brutally blatant could it be? None of this was logical, but logic played no role here.

  His loneliness grew large in their kitchen, at a table set for one, in front of their collection of CDs. Her garden was a hell of loneliness. He would dash outside when he could no longer tolerate being indoors, and dash inside when her bushes, her pot-plants, even the mottled sky threatened to crush. From house to garden to her study and back again, always on the move, always slamming against the walls of his own loss.

  His eldest brother, Miles, flew in from Adelaide as soon as he heard the news. It helped to have someone in the house. But the day before the funeral, when the rest of the Guerins arrived, Miles moved with them into a city hotel. Harry would have been happy for the entire family to have stayed with him, anything to drown out the roar of Ava’s absence. But the Guerins had never been the sort to press their needs, so he remained in the house alone.

  During the first two weeks Helen had phoned every day, but it was her loss not his that prompted the calls. Each day her gushing tears and the same questions: Why so soon? Surely there were signs her heart was failing? Surely you noticed something? And his unspoken accusation: if you’d turned up when you promised, perhaps Ava would be alive today. He loathed Helen’s outpourings and in the last days before she left for America he screened his calls to avo
id speaking with her.

  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.