Reunion

by Andrea Goldsmith

One night at the pub in the middle of a particularly volatile argument on the origins of evil, Helen suddenly pitched forward, held up her hands and silenced the lot of them.

  ‘We should start a club,’ she said, ‘a club for discussion – like the Cambridge Apostles. We could invite others to join, choose an evening, a venue, present papers, make a few rules.’ Helen was now on her feet. ‘It would have to be secret of course, for the mystique factor. And members would need to pledge eternal loyalty to one another and the life of the mind.’

  And so the Laconics Society was born. They settled on Thursday evenings for their meetings and the pub in which the proposal was first advanced became the first location. They used a room off the main bar – formerly the ladies’ lounge, according to the publican, ‘Back in the days before women’s lib, when there were sensitive female souls who could only swallow alcohol separately from men.’

  Helen and Ava were quick to remind him that away from the environs of an inner-city university, ladies’ lounges were still essential to Australian life. And in an aside to Jack, Helen had added, ‘My mother would prefer to be seen in her underwear than in a public bar.’

  The former ladies’ lounge suited them well. The walls were a pale khaki and adorned with cigarette posters: Kent, Lark, Camel, Marlboro, Kool, Craven A ‘they never vary’, Turf cork tips, and ‘fresh as a mountain stream’ Alpine. The floor of ancient pine boards was heavily gouged and stained with cigarette burns and booze; over in a corner they dubbed Pollock was an interesting splash of blue and orange paint. There was a table of murky green laminex roughened with food and spills which Jack attacked with steel wool and cleanser the afternoon before the inaugural meeting. The chairs with slatted backs and wooden seats were so uncomfortable they could only have been designed by a misanthropist and purchased by a publican who never sat with his customers.

  The Laconics Society endured throughout their undergraduate years and reconvened when they moved to Oxford. Every Thursday they would meet to hear a paper presented by one of the members, followed by raucous discussion fuelled by house wine and hot chips. Membership was by invitation, and once admitted members were bound to secrecy.

  Ava, Helen and Jack formed the core group, to be joined at the end of the first year by Conrad Lyall – Connie. Other members were drawn from classmates, from Connie’s best students, and from their own lovers, many lasting only as long as their affair with one of the founding members. The weekly meetings rarely garnered more than six people, but no matter how tired they were or at war with the world, no matter how severe the headache or chest-cold, no matter how hostile the weather, Jack, Ava, Helen and Connie when he was in town, would attend.

  Other interests simply could not compete. Apart from Ava and Helen’s feminist groups and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament they joined no clubs. Although Jack had long been partial to sport, specifically middle-distance running, a predilection he kept to himself, not because he was unable to defend an interest in sport, but he worried he might be a middle-distance man.

  Unlike the others, he lived in constant discomfort. He didn’t like it this way, but it was how he understood living in good faith to be.

  ‘Like Hell,’ Ava had commented after listening to a paper he had presented to the Laconics on the nature of perfection.

  ‘But always in sight of the sublime,’ he had replied, looking pointedly at her. He paused a moment before adding, ‘I suppose I could apply for a transfer to purgatory.’

  ‘I don’t think that would be much of a promotion,’ she had said.

  Ava, in contrast, was happy and she made others happy. Even at eighteen she was possessed of great intellectual sympathy, an almost tangible effect she had of being in step with you, of knowing you in a way no one else did. When she listened, she seized you with her great hooded eyes and in you went as if she were permeable, and you never wanted to leave. What Ava recognised in others and what needed to be protected was passion itself. People without passion are wasting themselves, she would say. She lit up the skies, and not only for herself.

  One day during their second term at university, when she and Jack were hurrying across campus to meet Helen, suddenly she stopped. It was dusk, a light rain was falling, her face was pale with cold and the mass of caramel curls glittered wetly. She raised her arms to the sky, he had to hold himself back, hold his own arms tight to his sides.

  ‘This is exactly how I hoped university would be,’ she said.

  They discovered the world together, the three of them and, by their second year, Conrad Lyall too. Every day was marked with wonder. None of them demonstrated temperance when it came to reason. The brain, the mind, was an instrument of excess. They were contemptuous of sleep: it was high tide every hour of every day.

  You know what it is like. You hear a piece of music from long ago, you pick up an old book, you find a scrap of faded photocopying or catch a vaguely familiar scent and you are whisked back to a time that was – truly – perfect. And nothing, neither years nor experience can harm it. Memory is a stalwart protector and the sturdiest of time capsules.

  So how to explain tonight? Jack wondered. Either his memories had failed him or his friends had changed in ways he could never have predicted. And what was he now to do? With his friends? With his stalled work? And most of all with Ava? After a single evening of her real presence, he had a strange sense of himself in the third person, no longer the narrator of his own life.

  He closed his eyes, as if that would silence the questions, and set about re-creating one of his Ava dreams. Venice, he decided, they would meet in Venice at the end of winter for the Festival of the Masks. He creates Venice’s narrow passages, the canals and bridges, he selects for himself a magnificent mask of gold and black leather with glossy feathers fanning wide to each side of his head, he sashays out into the streets. It’s a cold, white day, the air so crisp and clear it dries the throat. The crowds, the laughter, the men in flowing cloaks, the women in lavish costumes, he creates them all. And now, coming towards him, the familiar shape, the familiar walk. But he can’t make it right. And the clothes, he can’t find the right Ava clothes. And there’s no mask, just a white porcelain oval where her face should be. Something is happening, his dream is not working, the familiar scenes are dissolving. He opens his eyes, he can’t make the dream work. What has always been so easy is suddenly impossible.

  He goes to his desk and takes out some notepaper: he will write himself back into a familiar world, he will write to Ava. But a half-hour later he gives up. After thousands of letters to her, his words have jammed.

  5.

  Ava lay propped against her pillows, gazing through the bedroom window. The sky was a uniform whitish-grey, the trees wallowed in the wind. She heard the rattle of the window in the bathroom, and from the kitchen the clatter of crockery as Harry prepared his breakfast. She tightened the quilt around her and nested into its softness. The wind blustered, the trees pitched, while inside the house a stillness fell as Harry settled to his food and newspaper.

  A scattering of books lay next to her on the bed. Ava opened a volume of poetry then put it down again; still caught in the mood of last night, her reading could wait. The familiarity of them all, the familiarity of herself with these her oldest friends. The same ease and spontaneity they had always enjoyed, the same blunt candour, the unparalleled pleasures of a social occasion stripped of the usual protective devices, she had felt her brain springing into action. She had, in short, felt miraculously restored.

  These past two years it was as if she had slipped off the tracks of her life. Trapped in the same drab wasteland day after day, her brain might have been dust; as the months stacked up, not only did she no longer recognise herself, she became less and less sure who her usual self was. But after last night, Ava felt again the swirl of possibility, that familiar sense she could achieve whatever she set her mind to. Last night she had discussed and gossiped and questioned and listened with a lightness and ease she feared had deserted her forev
er. Last night she had not given Fleur a single thought. Last night, far from thinking she was finished as a novelist, she felt again the urgency that had propelled her through six novels. She was now sure there would be several more.

  Her poor lagging brain, she had wondered if she were losing her mind. Yet there were obvious reasons for her functioning below par. Not simply the long aftermath of Fleur, nor her current novel dragging its feet, but the return to Australia after a twenty-year absence posed many more difficulties than the exciting perils of a youthful leaving. And there had been concerns about Harry too.

  Her husband was a careful, meticulous man with talents that had never been fully tested. And while she and Harry had made a point of not interfering with the other’s work, she had nonetheless been worried that NOGA was a rather large challenge and the ramifications far-reaching should he fail. Then there was his involvement with her old friends, not actually directing their work, but certainly overseeing it and managing the funds. Knowing her friends and knowing what they thought of her husband, this situation was so potentially fraught she had hardly dared consider it. But last night her friends had treated him as one of their own; for the first time ever Harry had been part of the group.

  From the beginning, she and Harry had observed that unwritten marital geography whereby husbands and wives skirt around fractious topics. Jack, Helen and Connie could easily have driven a wedge between them, but Harry, preferring better than evens chances when embarking on an argument, had left the issue of her friends well alone. Despite what her friends might think, her husband was not stupid.

  Although during those early years in Oxford they had often treated him as if he were. All those evenings of exuberant argument – Ignorance and Pragmatism, The Novel as Truth, The Death of Metaphysics, Science and the Murder of Morals, The Death of the Family (death always figured prominently among their interests), accompanied by makeshift food and flagons of Spanish gut-rot, the group of them squeezed into a beery alcove leaving caution behind at the pub door as they throttled that week’s Laconics topic. And hours later, still fired up, they would tumble into the streets, all spark and histrionics among the Oxford stone, as they each tried to out-quote the others from Eliot, Shakespeare, Yeats and the main herd of Romantic poets, advertising their Dionysian spirits as much for themselves as for any nocturnal passers-by. Helen, Jack, herself, Connie too when he was in England, and Harry always as fifth wheel. Night after night of their own essential ecstasies with Harry by turns aggrieved and silent, defensive and monosyllabic, or aggressive and opinionated as he trawled through one of his pet topics indifferent to the disinterest of the others.

  These discussions with her friends were not only fun, they formed an essential part of her life. But Harry was essential too. Many were the times she had interrupted her own pleasure in order to rescue him, which made the others resent him all the more. With or without her help, it seemed her husband would always be shunted to the margins of their group.

  That Harry seemed unfazed by her friends impressed her from the outset, revealing as it did a sense of self and purpose immune to the generally partisan judgments of others. Harry was always reliably Harry and she derived a great comfort from that. Fortunately she had never been the type to want the people she loved to love one another; indeed, in service to her own freedom, she had struggled to keep her loves separate. But in the case of her husband and her best friends it had not been easy, and a little less rancour between them would have cut some slack in a life already pushed to the limits.

  During the past several years with the others living in different parts of the world, the high-pitched strain they had placed on her marriage had been absent. She had seen each of them when they had come to England or she had travelled abroad, but singly they were easier to square with her marriage than ever they had been as a group. And there had been Fleur too; balancing her with the friends as well as Harry would have required planning and endurance well beyond her capabilities. Of course she had missed them, they were after all her only true friends, but in many respects it had been easier with them at a distance. And there was no escaping Harry’s pleasure they no longer trespassed on the daily terrain of his life.

  What a relief, then, last night had been. Harry had joined the various conversations, he had cracked jokes and aimed pot-shots at some shared and deserving targets. As for the discussion about NOGA, Harry had guided it with an authority never before seen by her friends. And while Ava suspected they would accuse him of attempting to shore up kudos in their own circle, many people across the world kowtowed to her old friends, but her husband did not. What Harry had done, she knew, was for the benefit of the Network.

  She could hear him rummaging about in the kitchen again, filling the kettle, the scrape of the coffee pot on the sink, the door of the fridge opening and closing, the familiar movements of a long marriage. And a short time later there he was in the doorway of her room, a mug of coffee in each hand. He bent down to kiss her, then propped himself on the edge of her bed. They launched into a post-mortem of the previous night.

  ‘Entirely successful,’ Harry concluded. ‘Although I can’t say any of your old mates has changed.’

  ‘Helen struck me as rather subdued.’

  ‘If she’s sensible she might well be the next Australian to win a Nobel.’

  Ava grabbed his hand. ‘You really have that much faith in her?’

  ‘I have faith in her need to do science and I don’t think she’d let anything stand in her way.’ He paused, ‘I intend to remind her of that.’

  ‘You wouldn’t want her to do anything morally questionable.’

  Harry raised his eyebrows. ‘You know her better than I do. Would she be capable of that?’

  They moved on to their plans for the day: Harry had several meetings and Ava was heading to the university library; they would meet up later at the NOGA cocktail party. There followed a summary of the news – Harry was a dedicated reader of newspapers, Ava was not – some gossip about distant acquaintances, their usual morning rout, and how they never ran out of conversation Ava did not know. When she had finished her coffee, Harry took her mug to the kitchen, washed it and put it away as he always did. He collected his things for the office and returned to her bedroom to kiss her goodbye. Then his heavy tread down the hallway, the opening and closing of the front door, the clink of the gate and he was gone.

  An hour later, wrapped in coat and hat, Ava strode through the parkland on the western side of the cemetery, powered by an energy largely absent these past couple of years. She passed joggers and walkers on the path and students muffled in coats; she inhaled deeply as a smoker drifted by. There was a line of nuns’ graves on this boundary of the cemetery, all of them plain grey stone and each identified with the nun’s religious name and her dates. The earliest deaths had occurred in the 1950s when the order, the Carmelites, had clearly made a large investment; the latest had died only recently and there were many unmarked plots for nuns to come. After a life cloistered together, all the sisters were buried together, and why it should be such a moving thought today – Ava actually felt a prickling of tears – she did not know. But if the gate on this boundary had been open, despite her eagerness to start work she would have entered the cemetery and sat for a while in silent contemplation with the sisters.

  Instead she pushed on towards the university. The day was cold, with one of those saw-blade winds unique to Melbourne and a sky murky with cloud; it looked as if it would rain. Ava picked up her pace. She could see the towers of the residential colleges, and beyond them, out of view but lodged firmly in the topography of her mind, Melbourne’s town centre of shops and churches and Victorian buildings and the lovely jumble of bluestone lanes. This was the city she had discovered as a university student and how quickly it had become familiar, as familiar as family – an ideal of family and certainly not the Bryants. Familiarity. Family. Most people have forgotten the connection. Ava had been back in Melbourne for two years, but only now did
she realise how very pleased she was to be home.

  ‘I think I have a greater need for place than you,’ she had once said to Helen. It was a moment of rare confession and she had quickly pulled back. But the fact remained: a city was easier to love than people, you could love it unselfconsciously, without performance and it demanded nothing of you in return. Ava had known this ever since her eighteen-year-old self had left her mother and brother in the outer suburbs, shed her failed past, and moved the thirty kilometres to inner Melbourne and the university. And there, surrounded by books and conversations, in the shadows of huge trees and lofty buildings, in cafés and streets crowded late into the night, she met the people who would become her lifelong friends: Helen Rankin, Jack Adelson and Conrad Lyall.

  You must change your life, Rilke, one of her favourite poets had written, and Ava had taken him at his word. In steady and sometimes reluctant increments she had transformed herself from an hereditary shopgirl with a confined future to a university student and woman of the world. Everything she had hoped for had eventuated: university in Melbourne and then Oxford, a long, loving marriage, friends, travel, excitements and the only career she had ever wanted. And it had all started here.

  ‘My university,’ she thought, as she entered the campus and made her way towards the union building. ‘My university,’ she had thought all those years ago when first she entered here as a student.

  It was early March and very hot her first day of university. She had entered by the same gate she had used today, and had lingered at the edge of the quadrangle in front of the union building. She remembered so clearly the moment with its surprising realisation: home was familiar and yet she had been burdened with self-consciousness, while here, where everything was new, she was brimming with comfortable anonymity. As she stood in the swelling heat on her first day of university, she realised that this levity, this ravishment, was happiness.

  She had walked to the campus alone, better to stamp the experience on herself. The heat for once had not bothered her, softened as it was by the old European trees. The air, she remembered, was juiced with fresh-mown grass. She had strolled towards the union building, past the university bookshop packed with students, all the buildings so massive and solid, weighted by age and accumulated knowledge, or so she liked to think, and such a contrast to the squalid portable classrooms of her high school. She passed from the heat of the day into the cool of the law faculty cloisters and there found herself in as foreign a place as any of Europe’s ancient universities. Overhead were Gothic spines, the slabs of stone beneath her feet were worn smoothly concave, her sandals slapped with an other-worldly echo. Yet foreign as it was, she knew she belonged here, in these cloisters, at this university, surrounded by people she wanted to know, and all of them intellectuals – how she loved the subversive curl of that word. This university would truly be her Alma Mater, and a far more bounteous mother than the one biology had allocated to her.