A few more people had wandered in but not nearly enough for reassurance. Assuming a confidence he did not feel, he marched across the room to the adjacent auditorium where the formal proceedings would take place. In this area was seating for three hundred and ninety, and should his estimates be wrong, too many spaces here would condemn him far more strenuously than a thinnish crowd chatting over drinks and savouries next door. He paused inside the auditorium, took a few deep breaths, then gathered himself up and marched down the aisle to the stage. He mounted the steps two at a time, gazed at the rows of empty seats, just a moment’s hesitation before returning to business. Here the main work of the evening would occur: his own welcome, followed by Sir Richard Treat’s speech and Conrad’s keynote address. He waylaid the lighting technician to discuss the stage lighting, he cornered the sound technician and was assured yet again that the body microphones were highly effective, he checked the podium height and the reading light, and with everything in place he returned to the main reception area.
Just ten minutes had passed but now the room was crowded. Conversation surged, hands waved, mouths worked hard around words, while waiters glided through the throng dispensing drinks and hors d’oeuvres. Harry’s anxieties vanished as he stood in the doorway savouring the scene. He would present the Network’s mission statement and strategy plan; Jack, Conrad and Helen, the inaugural NOGA fellows would be on show; there was Conrad’s speech – whatever Harry might think of his appalling morals, Conrad was an excellent speaker; and among the guests were some of the more beneficent members of the community. If the evening went well, and as he surveyed the crowd he was now convinced it would, NOGA would net millions of dollars and incalculable prestige.
Harry helped himself to a drink from a passing waiter and walked into the throng. He made his way towards Lady Stiller, whom, he noticed, like so many wealthy women did not carry a handbag.
2.
Jack dawdled along the path by the river. Night had already fallen but the area was well lit; in fact, all of the city was lit up these days. The temperature had plummeted and his hands ached with cold, but he was in no hurry: a large cocktail party, much less one in which he was on display, was simply not his scene. He checked his watch and continued on his way.
Renovated to the far more respectable ‘precinct’, this area on the north side of the river had been the domain of derelicts when he was a student, a rat-infested corridor of the city reeking of menace and bad reputation. The contemporary upgrade was now busy with suited pedestrians wearing trainers, and home-bound joggers with their work life crammed into backpacks. There was a vigour and prosperity about both the people and the area, and a youthfulness too, which by the very fact he noticed it made him uncomfortable: he had not realised he had reached that stage of maturation when youth is viewed as other, as not yourself.
He wandered a little further, stopped and checked the time again. The cocktail party venue was perched at the top of the slope; it was glowing hugely against the night sky, and the terrace out the front was already thick with smokers. He lingered a moment longer, then left the path and made his way slowly up the hill.
There was a jostle of people at the entrance to the building. He stood aside allowing others to pass ahead of him, amused that his reluctance to go in might be misconstrued as politeness. While he was waiting, a commotion started up at the door, someone struggling against the new arrivals, a woman wanting to leave and making no bones about it. Hats were dislodged, a bag fell to the ground, and amid a chorus of aggrieved protests Helen emerged from the crowd.
She was furious.
Jack caught her by the arm. ‘Where are you going?’
‘As far from that insufferable shit as possible.’
‘Harry?’
‘Of course Harry. Who else but Harry?’
She dragged Jack away from the entrance, pulled out a cigarette and lit up. ‘I made an effort for Ava’s sake. We all did. I won’t say I became a Harry convert, but he was growing on me. But this NOGA business, this power, has made him a monster.’ Small puffs of smoke accompanied each word. ‘He thinks he can tell me what work I should do. He actually threatened me.’
Jack asked her to explain.
‘Not here, not now,’ she said. ‘I have to leave before I do something I’ll regret.’ She rummaged in her bag for her hat. ‘I’ll ring you,’ she said, pulling on a green cloche. And with her scarf flapping in one hand and the cigarette glowing in the other, she bolted down the steps and into the night.
Inside the venue Jack’s body temperature soared to tropical discomfort. He helped himself to a glass of wine and made his way through the crush to a small raised area at the far end of the room. There he cooled off while his gaze traversed the crowd. There was no sign of Ava, but he could see Connie and was about to join him, when Connie slipped from the party into the adjacent auditorium.
Jack remained on his perch at the edge of the throng. He took in the array of hairstyles, the shaved domes, the mobile mouths, groups of people in twos and threes and fours. He noticed Harry weaving through the crowd, working the room. The Harry Guerin he knew was an entirely different creature from this host of the party, this expansive and attentive man laughing with this guest, talking closely with that, a slap to a finely clad back and kisses to the cheeks of elegant women. Whatever had transpired with Helen just a short time ago had left no detectable impression on him.
Power, it’s in a class of its own, Jack found himself thinking. The beautiful know they’re beautiful, the successful know they’re successful, but people with power tend to exercise it as their right, without reflection, as if power confers its own moral authority. NOGA was not a big player even by Australian standards, but within the context of this party Jack could see that Harry was powerful – even more powerful than the position he occupied, more powerful than NOGA itself. How human power inflates itself. And not for the first time he wondered what he and Connie and Helen had got themselves into. So much information flowed into NOGA. How was it being used? How might it be used? And who would have access to it? He had raised these concerns with Harry, but Harry had an answer for every question, an explanation for every doubt. That in itself was troubling.
Jack slipped back into the crush. He stopped to allow a passing waiter to fill his glass, then went in search of Ava. While he sifted through the crowd, he told himself that now was neither the time nor place for doubts about NOGA; he, Helen and Connie had signed up as the inaugural NOGA fellows and they were integral to tonight’s show. Harry had nominated Connie to speak on their behalf, and Jack and Helen had agreed, not simply because Connie had a new book to promote and a TV series in the offing, but of the three, Connie seemed a better fit among Harry’s guests, his ‘knights of industry’ and ‘people who make things happen’. Although as a NOGA fellow, Jack assumed that he, too, must be one of those ‘people who make things happen’, but more in the way of primary producer, he decided, than the value-added people who made up this party. He stifled a smile. He had known for a good long time that it was easier to parody Harry than envy him, although as he caught a glimpse of the homunculus bobbing through the crowd, a blur of glistening head and a permanent smile beneath the ridiculous moustache, Jack was forced to concede that no amount of parody or ridicule would alter their situations.
The air was heavy with perfume and food and too many people speaking at once; Jack moved through the pack to the wall of glass with its view to the riverside promenade. The stream of home-bound workers had been replaced by groups of sauntering youths. Some of the boys sported bare arms, yet it must be only seven or eight degrees out there. Tough and cool was their message, but the fact Jack was thinking cold and stupid just made him feel old again. So much made him feel old these days.
He swapped his empty glass for a full one – his third, he reminded himself – and helped himself to a savoury from one of the mobile waiters. The food fell apart before it reached his mouth. He hated finger food and he hated standing around pre
tending to have a good time. The evening had hardly begun, he was hungry, he was drinking too quickly and there was no escape.
He made his way across the room to the entrance and the book display he had noticed there. With his gaze hard ahead and sheltering his glass from the crush, he made it through the worst and into the lighter air of the foyer. And there she was, Ava, standing in front of the bookstand, oblivious to all around her. Ava, with his own The Reinvention of Islam in her hands, the new edition with the buy-me cover and Connie’s read-me preface.
It is an extraordinary experience to chance on someone reading one of your books. It has the same sort of adrenalin-charged impact as when you come face to face with a long-lost friend. But to see your book in the hands of your beloved, she might be touching you, touching your bare skin. Jack felt the blood flushing through him, and inside his own shuddering self he was joined to her. It was a perfect stilled moment, then she looked up and saw him.
There was a single month long ago when they were lovers, four glorious weeks when Jack knew perfection. As Ava beckoned to him, it was as if she were calling him to her side just as she had for that one perfect month when they were eighteen. And then the present muscled in.
‘I’ve been reading you,’ she said, holding up his book. ‘You really were very good.’
Such are the inadvertent condemnations of the past tense.
There were a few hundred people only metres away but it felt to Jack as if he and Ava were alone. He stood close to her, close enough to feel proprietorial while she spoke about the reunion last night, the four of them together again and, gesturing towards the display, their books and achievements. As she talked, Jack was seized by the play of words and emotions across her face. Beauty shocks, beauty surprises, it is uncommon, exceptional. For him, beauty was, and would forever be, Ava Bryant.
He had loved her first. And he knew she had loved him too. Why then had she chosen Harry? And why Fleur rather than him? Although the very fact of Fleur had always given him hope: if Ava could admit a lover there was still a chance for him. But as the affair dragged on year after year, seven long years with a husband and what seemed like a permanent lover, Jack’s own chances grew very thin indeed. Fleur, who had inspired him with hope, eventually added to his failure.
It was Jack who had introduced Fleur to Ava, just as years earlier he had introduced Harry to her. He had often wondered if others would have recognised such self-defeating acts before it was too late. He only wanted to help, to be useful to her.
He had accrued several months of study leave and Ava had persuaded him to spend it in Oxford, his first visit back since gaining his doctorate. He had arrived to find her stranded in the holding pen between novels, and immediately took it upon himself to provide her with the stimulation to free up her imagination and start working again. One outing he planned was to a public lecture given by Fleur Macleish, a specialist in Indian antiquities. Three months later, with the affair in full heat, Jack had returned to Australia determined to keep half a world between him and Ava Bryant.
Through her letters he had kept abreast of the affair’s numerous flare-ups and its equally numerous burn-outs. Whenever Ava wrote about Fleur, Jack could feel the compulsion that joined her to this woman. It was a type of love he recognised – explosive, unrestrained, addictive, irresistible, and totally unlike her love for Harry, which was useful like an electric kettle is useful, and ordinary. Yet as the affair with Fleur continued, it was impossible not to feel sorry for Harry; the poor man must have been mad with pain.
Throughout the seven years of their affair, Ava and Fleur loved in cycles. It was all fire and fury for a time, a wild burn that consumed work, thought, body, health, each other – like Icarus flying towards the sun, Ava once wrote to Jack, and nothing to equal it. Two or three months were as long as they could tolerate, then they would break away and Ava would lodge Fleur somewhere safe while she returned to the rest of her life. Such a relief to settle, Ava would write in her letters to Jack. And her work would flow.
Love is astonishingly immune to learning from experience. As Jack appeared unable to extricate himself from Ava, so it seemed Ava could not extricate herself from Fleur. Months might pass when the two women had nothing to do with each other. Ava would be hard at work in Oxford or travelling the world’s literary circuit, and Fleur would be hard at work in London and, as Ava would eventually discover, conducting a string of affairs. Then, inexplicably, a shift would occur, sometimes in Fleur, sometimes in Ava, a switch turned on, a tautness, an awareness, and one of them would seek the other out. They would always meet on the neutral ground of a café, where wrapped in eagerness and good intentions they would swap stories of their time apart. But even before the coffee was finished and the neglected food whisked away, the sizzling would have started again. And from there it was just a brief span before they were clawing at each other in a fume of emotions turned up to the level of pain.
It was a love impossible to reject and impossible to maintain. As a means of protection, Ava would retract the boundaries of her relationship with Fleur, inadvertently concentrating the emotions and raising the intensity. Obsessive loves are never cool and neither are they open to cool reason. Just like Jack’s love for Ava. So many similarities but with two crucial differences. Despite the tumult with Fleur, despite the frequent bruisings and the sharp cut of the separations, Ava produced four new novels in seven years; far from Fleur hindering her work, Ava believed she was essential to it. In contrast, Jack’s writing and research dwindled and then stopped altogether as Ava came to occupy more of his time. In fact, all his other passions waned. There used to be other women, many other women, but there was little beyond sex with them and after a while he rearranged his sexual needs to minimise potential complications. By the time he returned to Melbourne to take up the NOGA fellowship, what intimate ties Jack had outside his relationship with Ava occurred mostly in cyberspace.
And the other crucial difference? Ava had Harry. Rather than focus on the affair with Fleur, Jack would have done better to study her marriage. But he preferred not to look.
Husbands and wives make pacts with each other, shared commitments about how they will conduct their relationship. They also make pacts with themselves as to what they will tolerate in their partner’s behaviour. The shared pacts and the private ones can be the same, but in the rocky terrain of most marriages there are disparities. So it happens that in a marriage in which both partners have committed to fidelity but one embarks on affairs, the marriage does not break down during the first affair, nor the second. But the third spells the end for the faithful partner, even if it was nothing more than a drunken fuck with someone never to be seen again. The personal limit has been crossed. If Fleur had lasted another year, another two, would Harry have stuck by Ava? Would his personal limit have been crossed?
The important issue, and Jack was well aware of this, was not whether Harry would have tolerated another year of Fleur but the fact there was not another year to tolerate. It was Harry who made sure of it with the move back to Australia.
There had been yet another separation from Fleur, but different this time, for Fleur had put a stop to the affair. She had met someone else, she said, and while this had happened many times during her relationship with Ava, she intended to be faithful this time. Faithful in a way she never was with me, Ava wrote to Jack in one of her many sad, aggrieved letters. Harry had been toying with the idea that would become NOGA, and with Ava shredding in distress he decided it was time to act. It took a surprisingly short three months to finalise NOGA on paper and bring it to the attention of the right funding bodies; a further two months and Harry and Ava were on their way home to Australia. Harry had acted to ensure his limits were not stretched any further.
It would be easy to conclude that Harry loved Ava sufficiently to withstand any amount of humiliation, or even that he lacked the usual complement of pride. But Harry was equipped with pride in abundance, that much was perfectly clear even to Jack.
Just seeing him here at this function, strutting around with his ‘captains of industry’ and his ‘people who make things happen’, Harry was king and no one could doubt it. And this was not simply a quality acquired in his middle years: the very fact he set his sights on Ava in the first place, a prize by anyone’s reckoning and the only prize as far as Jack was concerned, showed how highly he had always regarded himself.
Harry’s voice sounded over the clamour. He had mounted a podium, and with a microphone in hand he was calling for attention. The hush was immediate, the people waited for direction. He asked them to make their way into the auditorium and instantly they began to move. Harry Guerin was in control – as he had always been.
Ava too was watching Harry even while Jack’s own book was in her hands. She watched her husband at the centre of his own creation and, as much as Jack might wish it otherwise, the absolute centre of her life.
3.
Conrad Lyall was churning in the wings of the auditorium. He was accustomed to nerves before a lecture, the extra adrenalin charged up his performance and he had learned to capitalise on it, but tonight he was more jittery than usual. Melbourne might be located well off the world stage but home always demands more of you. There was family out there, his mother in particular, his ever-supportive mother who from the moment of his birth had set out to make something of her son. Even now, an old woman in her eighties, she would remind him he had been named after the great Joseph Conrad – more a reflection of her own youthful desires to be a novelist, Connie had long believed, than anything she might have observed in her infant son. His sweet, hungry mother who had channelled all her passions into her only child, so that in the patchy night hours when work and mothering were finished, it was a sour whine which dribbled from her pen. She had always been burdened with more aspiration than talent when it concerned her own ambitions, but in the case of her son she had long been convinced he had lived up to his name.
Reunion Page 6
