Jack’s situation left him just as happy, although more than a little surprised. If not for Helen and Ava, he would have remained in Australia close to his family for his postgraduate work. As it was, his parents were intending to visit at the end of the Michaelmas term and he was already planning their itinerary. He wanted them to see his Oxford life: the Bodleian with its six million volumes, including some of the oldest books and manuscripts in existence; the desk where he worked in overcoat and hat, and no, he didn’t mind the cold. He would show them the fakes in the Ashmolean – they’d be amused by those – and give them a tour of Oxford’s chapels and churches to fire them up about conflicts between church wealth and Christian charity. And together they would travel up to London to visit Highgate and the buxom bust of Karl Marx, and Panizzi’s round reading room at the British Library where he would point out Marx’s favourite seat and show them some of his papers, although he had recently discovered, to his surprise, that most were held in the Netherlands. He was thrilled about their visit – as was Ava. Anyone from the familiar past was welcome, she only wished someone would make the journey especially to see her. But the only person she had was Stephen and she didn’t want to ask him.
Throughout those early months, Ava felt constrained by the triple stigma of being Australian, being an Australian from the wrong background, and being an Australian without ties to home. It was like being stranded on a sheet of clear glass with nothing but blackness beneath. The college rules made no sense; privacy was impossible; the other students had already formed cliques, and while she joked about her supervisor, in truth she was desperate to see him, desperate to know whether the books she was reading were the right books and the papers she was writing had any merit. The food was appalling, the weather inhospitable, and the price of escape, whether a cinema ticket or the return train fare to London, exorbitant.
In despair she wrote to Stephen, a long letter rather than the postcard platitudes she had sent him on her arrival. She filled page after page, confiding in him as she would no one else, and at the letter’s end she asked him to ring her. She didn’t care that there was only one very public phone on her floor at the college, she was so desperate to speak to him she would have taken his call anywhere. And such luck, the first since her arrival, the day he rang the college had emptied out for a bank holiday long weekend. She blurted out her woes; pressing the phone against her ear and herself into a corner, she told him everything. He soothed and reassured; she was not to worry about money, he said, she was not to worry about anything, and of course he would ring her again, he would ring as often as she wanted.
Every Monday morning thereafter would see her by the phone waiting for his familiar voice, his reassurances that she was not alone, that he loved her and would always care for her, that he was not so far away, nor was she so far away, and most important of all, that no one would make her stay in Oxford. ‘You can come home whenever you want. But give it a little longer,’ he said at the end of the first month. Give it a little longer, he said during the second month. Give it a little longer, he was still saying at the beginning of the third.
The turning point came unexpectedly as turning points often do. It was a Friday towards the end of the Michaelmas term. Helen and Jack, together with a couple of Jack’s new friends, had gone up to London for yet another farewell party for two more Zimbabweans returning home. Ava had invented a pressing paper, but in truth their high spirits just made her feel more inadequate. She did, in fact, dabble at her desk in order to consume some time, and then might have gone to a film but there was nothing she could bear to see. The only free lunchtime concert featured a contemporary concerto for tuba and glockenspiel, suggesting the program director was in as desperate straits as was she, so she walked down to Magdalen Chapel on the off-chance that one of the organists was practising. It was quiet within, nonetheless she settled into a pew hoping the churchy tranquillity would soothe her, but the stillness scratched her raddled nerves, the cold too, so she returned to the street and made her way back towards college. With nothing better to do, she would sleep the afternoon away.
She slowed up as she approached Blackwell’s, glanced in through the glass, hesitated, and then entered the main bookshop – no heart to explore, just a place to warm up, to expend thirty minutes of a day of painfully sluggish minutes. She walked downstairs, she walked back up again. She touched covers and spines, she flicked through pages, she watched the shoppers. Some were alone, others were in pairs, all had purpose. She browsed through an out-sized book on the Sahara – better that inhospitable landscape, she found herself thinking, than inhospitable Oxford. She lingered until the lingering itself was an added irritation and headed for the door. As she left the shop she checked her watch: only twenty-three minutes had passed. Twenty-three measly minutes.
There were at least three hours before nightfall. And after that? Two years of counting off each malnourished minute. The prospect was unbearable. For so long, this place, this Oxford, had been the apotheosis of desire; how could she have so miscalculated? In the past she had not always known where her choices would lead, but she had trusted herself to make them. Now she was doubting all the decisions, some going back to childhood, which had led inexorably to this moment, this situation, this Oxford.
The wind had gathered strength, it was freezing outside. People were hurrying between warm places, only Ava was loitering. She glanced at the posters on doorways and in shop windows, an overlapping jumble of advertisements for sports, talks, clubs, concerts – Oxford’s rich lode on display yet out of reach of her pathetic grasp – and was about to head back to college when her attention was caught by a small roneoed flyer, not particularly distinctive but for a slightly skewed, grainy image of a fat laughing woman’s face in the lower right corner. Ava stood in the chill and gazed at it, acknowledging a flutter of interest. The pamphlet was advertising an exhibition of self-portraits and she took down the details. Back in her room, a map showed the gallery to be located in a village a good hour’s ride away. With little reason to view the exhibition, but every reason to escape Oxford, she collected her bike and set off.
Ten minutes later and the Oxford of the university was behind her. The streets were wider here and lined with proper houses, at first in rows, then free-standing; another ten minutes and she was in the country. She followed the road as it curved through meadows and pastures, past clumps of rickety trees and the huddled buildings of farms. She clung to the shoulder of the road to avoid the black ice, and swerved back onto the bitumen to miss the boggy patches. The sky was thickly white, her eyes bleary with cold and concentration; at one point she dismounted to stamp the sensation back into her feet.
If there was any sense remaining to her, she would cancel this mad adventure and return to Oxford. But to what? Her solitary room? A dingy café? An under-heated library populated by strangers? Better to remain in the freezing wind, riding treacherous roads, heading towards an exhibition that under normal conditions she would not venture a block out of her way to see.
She reached the village in just under an hour. It was an English storybook place with a few shops, a cluster of cottages, and, at the far end, an old house set in a straggle of garden. This was the gallery. She chained her bike against the fence and entered the building, helping herself to a pamphlet from a pile near the door. She appeared to be the only visitor, and the first time in months she had felt her solitary state as anything other than punishing. The rooms were small, and with the low lighting and deep shadows they might have been soaked in varnish. A good backdrop for old masters, she found herself thinking, not that there were any here.
The self-portraits were the work of local amateurs. Each was displayed alongside a photograph of the artist, a layout which seemed unnecessarily cruel to an aspiring talent. The artists had attempted to reproduce the figure in the photograph accurately, photographically in fact, and in all of them were failures of scale, perspective or both. The one exception was the fat laughing face used on the
exhibition poster – not a painting but a drawing in oil pastels and by far the best of the exhibits. The accompanying photograph depicted the artist as a dour, forbidding figure clad in grey. It was a full-length, front-on photograph while the pastel was head and shoulders only. Such discrepancy between the two depictions could only be deliberate, Ava decided, given the evident skill of the artist. And in the nature of the discrepancy she saw mystery, possibility, conflicting desires, and in that knowing, laughing face, trickery too. Ava checked the details of the artist in the pamphlet: ‘Anonymous’.
‘Touché,’ she said aloud.
Apart from the fat woman there was little of interest; Ava moved quickly through the exhibition until she reached a larger room at the back of the cottage. Here were prints and photographs of self-portraits by well-known nineteenth-and twentieth-century artists, all men incidentally, unlike the exhibits in the other rooms, which were mostly women. There was Matisse depicted very much as the painter squire, and a childlike pencil drawing of Paul Klee as an oriental thinker. Edward Hopper had produced a figure out of an Edward Hopper painting, Picasso had painted a cubist Picasso, and Modigliani was long and slender like one of his women. Dali presented himself in liquid surrealism and Escher was seen through a play of optics. Hung closely together in a blatant display of either irony or ignorance were Francis Bacon depicted as a swirling, distorted Bacon, and Andrew Wyeth palely poised within a pale Wyeth interior. Kokoschka, one of Ava’s favourite artists, had been incomprehensibly cruel in his ‘Portrait of a “Degenerate Artist”’.
We keep our true selves closed, Ava found herself thinking. And in the absurdity of some of these images, the very act of self-presentation seemed to be mocked. How many of the painters were laughing as they worked? And it occurred to her that these artists might have deliberately chosen self-portraiture in order to retreat from the public eye in simultaneous acts of self-conjuring and disguise. Like writers use fiction. Like Ava, herself, had chosen fiction.
How, she wondered, might her friends depict themselves? Rather than the brilliant scholar whom most people saw, Jack, with his gropings for perfection and his major talent for disappointment, might opt for a quixotic man on a mule – and claim the mule as being truer to his character. And Helen would probably choose an absurdist image, a grasshopper perhaps, propped before saucepan-shaped test tubes and Petri dishes heaped with oranges, all six limbs busy at once. As for herself, all spark and passion as far as everyone else was concerned, she would settle for a set of brightly painted matryoshka dolls, diminishing to ever-smaller figures, the very last one tinier than a thimble and painted a featureless white.
She peered at the sadness in the Francis Bacon, the doubt in a rare Ruskin, and the startled, illuminated face of Munch. No matter what the emotional resonance, there was a swagger to these works, as if the artist were saying: This is how I choose to present myself. And whether you want to believe it or not won’t make a scrap of difference to me.
And wasn’t this the way she had always lived?
When she rode back into Oxford, it was as if layers of hardened mud had been washed away. Suddenly her mind was back in top gear. She must check out the self-portraits at the National Portrait Gallery; at last she could see how to structure her paper on Coleridge; she would write on Jane Austen’s feminism for her thesis. And she would unpack her novel so assiduously avoided since arriving in Oxford. She had left Melbourne behind, Stephen too, and while she had not left her friends, it was in the writing of this novel where her creative and always portable self found a home. How foolish she had been to neglect it.
It was after four and the street lights were coming on. Oxford looked old and golden. She was ravenous, but first to the post office and a card to Stephen to let him know she was on the mend. Then to a café where she ordered a toasted sandwich and a hot chocolate. The sandwich arrived oozing butter and cheese, and the hot chocolate came with bobbing marshmallows. She pushed up her sleeves in the fuggy air and settled hungrily to the food. Her future was back.
Six months later, Rock Father was accepted for publication. Another four months and Ava had met Harry; with him at her side the way ahead looked clear and calm.
The others never knew how close she had come to falling.
Friendships become swaddled in invisible protective layers and nothing short of a cataclysmic blow can break through to the inevitable stress points beneath. If Ava, or indeed any of the friends were to lose their footing now, would the others notice?
As Jack stood in the colonnade of the State Library alongside Helen watching Connie and Ava tossing ideas between them, far from thinking any of them was in trouble, he felt something of the same excitement as when first they met, that same sense of a future opening up. Connie would get his TV series, Ava would publish another brilliant novel, he would write a new book, and Helen would find her shigella vaccine – all of them with careers on the rise and all of them together again. Their friendship was as strong as ever. They just needed to make more of an effort.
He turned to Helen to float the idea of reinstating the Laconics Society when one of the TV crew appeared and herded them back inside. They crowded through the library entrance, a jostle of elbows and shoulders, the four of them laughing and talking all at once.
The production assistant was smiling at them. ‘If ever we do a program on friendship,’ she said, ‘would you be the stars?’
CHAPTER 5: The Sea Is Not Full
NOGA’s first location was a single office in a nondescript university building equipped with an administrative officer, a computer, a photocopier and telephone conferencing facilities. Two and a half years later it occupied an entire upper floor of a new glass and metal tower on the edge of the city. Jack’s office, one of three Visiting Member’s Studies (or, in the NOGA predilection for prescriptive acronyms, a ViMS), was marginally smaller than his entire flat. Another of the offices had been allocated to Helen but she spent most of her time at the laboratory, while Connie’s area, even larger than Jack’s and with a corner location, adjoined Harry’s suite. Such grand premises had only become possible, Harry told Jack, when the building’s owner-developer had been invited on to the NOGA board. This had paved the way, Harry had lowered his voice, ‘for special commercial arrangements’.
The walls were hung with contemporary paintings, all by up-and-coming artists according to Harry, and highly rated on investment scales; the floor was carpeted in a velvety blue plush, the furniture was an elegance of timber and pale leather, Jack’s desk was solid Tasmanian blackwood. An entire wall of his office comprised floor-to-ceiling glass with a panoramic view of the southern half of the city. Jack would stand by these windows twenty-seven storeys in the sky, the fingertips of his left hand in a steadying pose against the glass, relishing the vaguely thrilling vertigo.
He had moved into this office the week following the reunion, and on the very first day had dragged one of the armchairs across to the wall of windows. In the intervening months he had spent hours – accumulated days – staring through the glass. Sometimes he saw only shapes and colours, as if the city were a huge abstract mosaic; other times he would latch on to familiar sites like the Botanic Gardens, the Shrine, and the neo-classical piles of town halls from Collingwood to Caulfield. He would trace the major thoroughfares to the bay, to the eastern hills, to the docks and loading yards in the west. And the slender spine of the Westgate Bridge, where one blustery night long ago, he and Ava had walked hand in hand across one side and back down the other, oblivious to the lumbering traffic, the fumes, the plain ordinariness of life outside their spectacular selves.
He was expected to work in this room and he had made an effort. The NOGA fellowship had brought him a rush of consultancies, mainly to business groups, although people from the media regularly contacted him for comment and background material, and increasingly there had been inquiries from political figures as well. But the work he most wanted was to write a new book. He was convinced that the best way of explainin
g the complex persuasions of contemporary Islam was by returning to the Islam of its golden age. You can’t understand Islam’s trajectory, in particular its response to the post-Enlightenment world, he would say in interviews and focus sessions, without a thorough knowledge of its history. And most particularly, you can’t ignore Islam’s own perspective of this history. This was not what people wanted to hear, nor was it what publishers wanted to publish. They preferred instead the frisson of their own fear, the safety of clear-cut blame, and the sensational explosions of boys and girls giving up their young lives to defeat the infidels. With today’s spectaculars, the past did not stand a chance.
Ever alert to modernity’s special deals, Luke was critical of Jack’s attachment to the past. ‘And it’s not just your work,’ he said. ‘You act as if everything important has already happened.’
In the past few months, Jack had come to know Luke well. While he seemed to be a typical teenager in many respects, he also demonstrated a sensitivity to others and an acuteness of understanding rare in his generation. ‘It’s being the only son of a single mother,’ Luke said with a smile. ‘I don’t have much choice.’
Luke often had dinner at Jack’s place when Helen worked late, and the previous week, while Helen attended a meeting in Jakarta, he had stayed with Jack for a few days. They were taking a stroll along the Esplanade after dinner one night when Luke spoke up. ‘This place for example,’ and he waved at the beach, ‘you remember it as it was early one spring morning – twenty-five? thirty years ago? Why not look at it now? Clean sand and lots of it, hardly a syringe to be found, and far better for outdoor sex than ever it used to be.’
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