Reunion

by Andrea Goldsmith

  He crossed the courtyard into the house and to her bedroom; her mobile was where he had left it on her bedside table. He plugged it into the charger and turned it on; the phonebook was empty, the file of recently received calls was also empty, text messages in and out, empty. She had stripped her phone of information, or rather someone had; if it had been left to Ava she would have simply thrown out the SIM card. Maybe she needed to have her phone working until the very end? Back he went to her study for her telephone directory. It took less than fifteen minutes to check: none of the unknown numbers was listed.

  He went online for a list of country and city codes. He confirmed that for a period of five weeks Ava had phoned someone living in outer London forty-one times. During the first three days of the sixth week of the billing period, she phoned someone in New York City and Los Angeles. Over the next two days, she made two calls to Tijuana in Mexico, three to San Diego and two more to Los Angeles. On the sixth day in the morning, a brief phone call to Sydney – he felt this unknown person drawing closer – and then in the afternoon, rather than phoning from her home region, Ava made three short calls from a place called Bulla – the first two calls were to the unknown mobile number, the third was to his own phone.

  Where on earth was Bulla? He ran outside to his car for the street directory. Bulla. Bulla. Bulla. He’d never heard of Bulla. He scanned the map and there it was – the region for Melbourne Airport. She must have travelled out to the airport that day. He ran back into the house for his organiser. He scrolled back: it was a Friday and the start of the three-day ‘Energy in the Asia–Pacific’ forum. He had been at meetings all day and had attended the dinner in the evening. In all the months of her illness it was the only time he had left her alone so long. And she had gone to the airport to meet a person who had travelled from outer London, via the US coasts and Mexico to be with her in Melbourne.

  There was someone else. There must have been someone else. Someone else at the end as there had always been someone else. Even when she was dying she could only love him if there was someone else. He cannot believe this is happening. He goes to her computer and turns it on. He enters her email files, he does not hesitate. The mail folder labelled Fleur contains just nine emails, and what sad, innocuous communications they are. In Fleur’s last email sent months ago, she says she has settled well in Geneva and is renting a flat in a building where George Steiner once lived. The last email from Ava wishes Fleur well in her new job. Nowhere in her communications does Ava mention she is sick.

  It isn’t Fleur, not this time, but there was someone else. What a fool he has been, what a fool she must have thought him to be. This is worse than Fleur, this unknown person. And suddenly he is hit with the naked, unsparing truth. The tidy computer, the empty phone, her body lying so peacefully on the floor. And he knows with absolute certainty that this other person was with her. Someone else, not him, was with her at the end.

  Despoiled. That’s the right word – his wife was mistress of the right word. Despoiled. She has despoiled his love. She has despoiled their marriage. She has despoiled his memories. She has despoiled his future. At the end there was someone else. But wasn’t there always someone else?

  He scrolls down the email folders. Each name is known to him. He almost doesn’t open the one labelled SW, assuming it is her US agent Stephen Weinberg, but Steve’s is labelled with his nickname, Berks. This is another SW, an unknown SW. Harry pauses, he feels sick. There will be answers here. How quickly does a life unravel. He doesn’t want to know. He wants to know. He clicks on the folder.

  It is empty. The folder labelled SW is empty. Like the mobile phone, it is blatantly and significantly empty. But the erased emails will have left traces and Harry will track them down. He’ll find this SW. This SW will not escape.

  CHAPTER 17: The Waiting Page

  1.

  On the thirty-eighth day after Ava’s death, Jack was seated at his computer dressed in pyjamas. He had been at his desk since dawn, finishing the introduction to Ava’s first novel. He scrolled down the screen reading the fresh sentences. What a godsend this work had turned out to be.

  It was the day of the funeral when Ava’s Australian publisher had first approached him. Hundreds of people had crammed into a Carlton bar after the service; hushed, stunned and sombre they huddled close over their drinks. Death is always short on supporters but this death seemed particularly wrongful. The publisher – ‘Call me Victor’ – had cornered Jack. He had plans for Ava’s work, he said. ‘New editions of all her novels. Small format, like Penguin classics but much more hip, each with its own introduction.’ Victor’s face all doleful sympathy a moment before had perked up. ‘And who better than you to write an introduction to her first novel.’

  ‘But we’ve only just buried her!’ Jack’s voice was shrill in the muted air and several people glanced in his direction. ‘We’ve only just buried her,’ Jack said again more quietly.

  The publisher took him by the arm and guided him through the throng to an alcove at the end of the room; Jack, with insufficient energy to resist, allowed himself to be led. The publisher sat him in a chair, put a drink in his hand and settled beside him.

  ‘Given this tragedy,’ he said, ‘what would Ava want?’

  In her various workrooms over the years, Ava had pinned to her noticeboard quotes in her own handwriting. Eliot, Shakespeare, Rilke, Woolf, all her favourites, and some lines from Milton: A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life. Ava would want what all writers want, and had said as much to Jack not so long ago. Victor’s timing might be crass, but his plan was right.

  Victor had already spoken with Harry. ‘He’s well aware of Ava’s views and he’s right behind our proposal. But we need to act now.’ Victor looked concerned. ‘We need to bring out all her novels quickly before the public has moved on.’

  Jack wanted to protest. The unseemly haste. The bereft heart. But Victor spoke first. ‘I know the reading public, and believe me, the window of opportunity is very small.’

  Again Jack tried to speak, and again Victor prevailed. ‘We propose to market the new editions in such a way as to remind her usual readers how much they’ve always enjoyed her work while simultaneously attracting a new and younger audience. By the time we publish her last novel – our aim is to release it on the first anniversary of her death – we hope to have a bestseller on our hands.’ Only now did Victor pause, and with a nonchalant cocking of his head, ‘Have you read it?’ And when Jack failed to respond, ‘Have you read her new novel?’

  Choking on a cocktail of the publisher’s opportunism and the fact there would be nothing new from Ava ever again, Jack could not speak.

  Victor was not deterred. ‘We have one opening in our current publishing schedule for the reissue of the old novels,’ he continued. ‘If we miss the spot then the whole Bryant project is finished.’

  Jack was desperate to get away. He said he would think about the introduction – although he knew he had no choice – and before Victor could stop him, plunged back into the crowd. The mourners, fortified by alcohol and an avalanche of memories, were gaining voice. Jack found Helen and the two of them got drunk together.

  Victor contacted him a few days later and after discussion with Harry, Jack agreed to write introductions to Ava’s first and sixth novels. Connie would do the second and fifth, although exactly when was anyone’s guess given Connie had embarked on a full-time campaign to persuade his wife to take him back. Each of the other two novels had been given to ‘the best in the business’, according to Victor.

  With the first of the introductions finished, it was a relief to know there was another, and possibly more given Connie’s parlous state. It was the only work Jack wanted at the moment, for as long as he was focused on Ava, she was not so adamantly gone. There would come a time, so he had been told, when she would fade, and while he longed for the terrible ache to subside he dreaded any diminishing of Ava h
erself. He struggled to erase her absence – deny her death – by keeping her close. At the same time the very fact of his efforts reminded him she was gone forever. Not departed. Not absent. Not passed away nor passed on. But the unpoetic, unlovely, defiantly unchallengeable gone.

  He worked, he spent time with Helen, he visited Harry and he ran. Penned in by grief there was hope in movement. He ran during the day and in the early morning, he ran at night. He ran through the streets near his place and those near hers, and although you can’t trample down pain the movement made time pass. But it was touch, physical comfort, he most wanted. Helen understood, perhaps because she needed the same herself, and the two of them would hold each other, not saying a word, just holding on while the evenings drifted away.

  Then Helen left. Two weeks after Ava’s death, she flew back to America and Jack missed her ferociously. He found himself in an absurd searching of passers-by for anyone familiar from whom he might engineer an embrace. He would admire dogs on leads, admire them in order to have an excuse to touch them. In truth he wanted to gather the animals in his arms and bury his face in their fur. He considered a visit to his parents in Tasmania, but the comfort of family was not the raw comfort he craved.

  One evening the previous week as he was leaving Harry’s place, Minnie, Ava’s friend from next door, called out to him. She was watering pot-plants on her front verandah.

  ‘These were hers – Ava’s,’ she said, indicating the plants. ‘Harry couldn’t be bothered with them and I couldn’t bear to watch them die.’

  Jack heard tears in her voice. What right did this woman have to be so upset, as if grief had a pecking order. She met him at the gate and rested her hand on his shoulder. ‘I’ve only known Ava three years and I miss her terribly. I can’t imagine how bad it is for you.’

  And he burst into tears. He had cried over Ava’s photo, he had cried into a scarf she had sent him from India, he had cried over a fox and hedgehog figurine she had given him one birthday. As for the box containing her cards and letters, just looking at it started the tears. And now with a woman he hardly knew he cried uncontrollably, they both did, holding on to each other as if they were not strangers. And Jack found himself sinking into a sweet quilted state in which grief had shut down for a moment and his mind was soothed and silent.

  He went inside with her. The dog settled on a rug in the living room and fell asleep. They talked about Ava until it was very late, then they moved to the bedroom. They took off their clothes, little was said, they had perfunctory sex and fell asleep in each other’s arms; they did not lose hold of each other all night long. The following morning there was neither embarrassment nor explanation. Jack showered and dressed, he declined Minnie’s offer of breakfast, he took a last embrace, he drove home. And for the first time he understood why a man or woman who has lost a beloved spouse often remarries so quickly and disastrously. Comfort, that’s what you want when you’re grieving, and whoever supplies it is the person you need most. Hard sometimes to tease out gratitude from love, impossible when you are clogged with grief.

  Jack had not contacted Minnie since that night. Now he wrote a note to slip into her letterbox when he went around to Harry’s for dinner. The action energised him and he showered and dressed. At midday he made a sandwich and took it into the lounge. He opened the doors to the balcony, a breeze floated in from the bay. It was cool for a summer’s day, Ava would have approved. Any warmer than twenty-five degrees she considered uncivilised: ‘You can’t think, you can’t work, and you certainly can’t be kind to others,’ she would say. She firmly believed in heat rage, a meteorological version of road rage. She used to joke she had been born at the wrong latitude and proposed a particular recycling of the soul (it was an atheist’s prerogative, she said, to play around with an afterlife), which would have her again enter the world as a human being, but one born and raised in Iceland. And no, she had never been there, but she had checked its weather patterns and they were entirely to her liking.

  Jack gazed up at the sky. ‘Here’s to you in Iceland.’

  2.

  It was early evening when Jack arrived at Harry’s place. The traffic had been unusually light and he had made good time across the city. He parked outside Minnie’s house and was about to slip the note into her letterbox when she appeared at her front door. She was dressed all in red as she had been the first time they met. Her black hair stretched straight and smooth past her shoulders and, as she stepped on to the verandah, her face relaxed into a smile. He walked up the garden path, she met him halfway; they stood there facing each other, both smiling, before she leaned forward and kissed him lightly on the cheek. He gave her the note.

  She read it quickly and laughed. ‘I was worried you might have had the wrong idea about the other night. While I,’ and she paused a moment, ‘I was more concerned about the right ideas – all the possible outcomes, some of them very beneficial, very satisfying and very short term.’

  He laughed too, more from relief than anything else. ‘You mean you don’t want me to move in with you?’

  ‘Not just yet. But dinner,’ she said, indicating his note, ‘would be lovely.’ She suggested the following weekend. ‘The children can stay at my parents’ place.’ And anticipating his next question, ‘You’ll meet them in good time – if you’re still visiting. And if you’re not, then they’re saved any unnecessary emotional rides.’

  It was the hour before dusk and the evening gently cool. The two of them sat on the edge of Minnie’s verandah their feet propped on the steps. The shadows in the street were long and soft-edged, the muted shouts of children playing in the park floated on the air. Jack was struggling to think of something to say when Minnie broke the silence.

  ‘Ava and I spent hours in exactly this spot. When she and Harry moved in, I wasn’t at my best. My husband had tossed me over for a woman half my age, I was under assault from toddlers being toddlers, and reeling from knock-backs by advertising executives who’ve perfected the art of the knock-back. It was a difficult time for Ava too. Harry was establishing NOGA seven days a week,’ – Ava had never told him she was spending so much time alone – ‘and she would come over here with a plate of home-baked biscuits,’ – Ava baking? Never in Jack’s experience – ‘and we’d sit here on the verandah and talk. If the children were at kindergarten it would just be the two of us, otherwise we’d sit up here while the children played in the garden.’ Minnie had that glazed concentration of someone who was seeing exactly what she was describing. ‘Ava liked children. She never talked down to them and children always respond to that.’ Jack realised he had never seen Ava with children. ‘We’d talk for hours,’ Minnie continued. ‘Ava talked about Harry, she talked about their return to Melbourne, she talked about her childhood in the suburbs,’ – with this stranger she had talked about her mysterious, untouchable past? – ‘she talked about you,’ she smiled at Jack, ‘and of course she talked about Fleur.’

  Jack was aware of a weird sensation as a result of this almost incidental information about Ava, as if he were being jemmied from his long-time relationship. Or perhaps the relationship itself was being moved. He picked at a splinter of wood on the step, it came away in his fingers; the timber beneath was pale and fresh, like new skin under a wound.

  ‘Did she talk about being ill?’

  There was a long silence before Minnie answered. ‘Not much. I assumed she was talking with you and Helen.’

  Jack shook his head.

  ‘I know how much she hated what was happening to her.’ Minnie twisted around to look into his face. ‘She really hated it. I was sure she’d never stay the distance.’

  It took a moment for Jack to realise what Minnie was implying. ‘Ava died of heart failure,’ he said.

  Minnie let out a disbelieving snort. ‘I think that’s highly unlikely. Whenever we went out walking, I struggled to keep up with her. Heart failure? I don’t think so.’

  ‘You’re wrong,’ he spoke louder than he intended. ‘Ava lo
ved life.’

  Minnie shook her head. ‘“It won’t be me,” she kept saying.’

  Jack’s brain was shovelling loose ends. ‘What you’re suggesting doesn’t help any of us.’

  But it helped Ava, Minnie was thinking, and perhaps it helped the stranger too. Ever since Ava’s death, Minnie had wondered about the elderly man who had appeared in those last days, wondered if his presence was known to any of the friends. Given Jack’s response now she was sure it was not.

  The man had appeared a week before Ava died. A hire car had pulled up in the street, the name of the company scrawled across the rear window. Ava was in the passenger seat, the stranger was driving. They had entered the house together and about thirty minutes later they reappeared and drove away. Early in the afternoon they had returned. The man had changed out of his suit, and perhaps it was the more casual clothes, but he and Ava seemed easier together, in fact so comfortable he might have been a close relative. As it turned out, he was an old friend on a visit to Melbourne, or so Ava had said when they met Minnie in the street a short time later.

  He stood erect and tall, taller than Minnie herself, a man who clearly looked after himself. His face was kind, with leisurely smile lines about the eyes. His jaw and neck were firm, and about him wafted a pleasant eau de cologne.

  As they shook hands she had remarked how fortunate Ava was in her friends.

  ‘Stephen was the first,’ Ava said, smiling up at him.

  Minnie asked how long he planned to stay in Melbourne.