‘Dr Macleish’s reputation speaks for itself,’ the principal said.
Fleur Macleish cut a striking figure, pale dark skin of the northern rather than southern Indian kind, arched cheekbones, carved jaw, slender neck. The sculpted face was accentuated by the closely cropped black hair. She was dressed in Western clothes – trousers, shirt and blowsy scarf in a riot of pinks and reds and a startling contrast with the drab colours then in vogue. Fleur Macleish was an arresting figure, but Oxford was full of arresting figures. What was remarkable was the shock of the Scottish accent. Ava checked the biographical notes: Indian mother (herself an old Somervillian) and Scottish father, and settled back to listen.
It may have been the lyrical voice, it may have been the unaccustomed heat, it may have been the smooth comfort of Jack against her, but before long Ava lapsed into her own thoughts, nothing significant nor, she realised at the end of the lecture, enduring, for she could not say what had passed through her mind. As for Fleur Macleish’s lecture, it had not even scraped the surface of consciousness. It was only when the applause had finished and people were preparing to leave that it suddenly came to her: Stephen, she had been thinking of Stephen, and a fillip of embarrassment, for it was not Stephen telling her about books or taking her to the theatre. While Fleur Macleish had been giving her lecture Ava had been back at Stephen’s flat, in his bed and cradled against his naked body, the greying tufts of hair about his nipples, the rise of his stomach, and that crease where his abdomen ended just above the pubic hair. She now knew it as the shape of a mature man, but not all those years ago when his was the first male body she had seen. She had liked that quiet time after the sex, Stephen stroking the length of her back, and nothing required of her at all.
Where, she wondered, was he now? Had he replaced her? And because she was no fool she corrected herself: what was his new girl like? Very different from herself, she expected, for she truly believed he had loved her and wouldn’t want his memories challenged. He’d still be sending her monthly cheques if she hadn’t insisted he stop – with her marriage to Harry she didn’t need his money. And while she would have liked to keep him as a friend, it was impossible to erase their sort of history and replace it with something more acceptable. So she had opened the door and let him out of her life. He slipped back when she wasn’t attending – in dreams, in daydreams, but never before in this sexual way.
Jack was speaking to her. ‘You didn’t hear a word of the lecture, did you?’
She shrugged. ‘But I enjoyed being here.’
They filed out. The sun was still strong, and whether it was the weather or being at Somerville, or whether it was Stephen or Jack or both, she realised there had been a lifting of her spirits. She looped her arm through Jack’s and suggested they stop for a cider on the way back, ‘At that pub we used to like, with the outdoor area.’ She noted his pleasure, and while it was disturbing – it required so little to make him happy – she decided not to dwell.
They were passing by the Porter’s Lodge when she heard a voice calling her name. It was Fleur Macleish, running to catch up with them.
‘Ava,’ she said in her Scottish lilt, ‘Ava Bryant,’ and extended her hand. The skin was cool, the grasp was firm, the smile was broad and blazing. ‘I like your work,’ she said. ‘I like your work very much. Thanks for coming to my talk.’ And before Ava could utter more than the briefest of courtesies, she had withdrawn her hand and turned back to the college.
‘That was kind of her,’ Ava said to Jack as they entered the road.
They paused at the corner to read a flyer advertising a series of lectures on Proust. ‘Have you heard?’ Jack said. ‘There’s another English translation of A la recherche du temps perdu in the pipeline.’
And Fleur Macleish was instantly forgotten as Ava condemned the project. The 1981 Kilmartin version had taken care of the English Proust for years to come, she said. Jack disagreed, but given her French was a good deal better than his, she insisted her opinion should have the greater sway. They were still arguing the issue as they started their second pints at the pub.
A month later Ava was in London for an evening of Australian women’s writing at the Silver Moon bookshop in Charing Cross Road. It was a relief to leave her desk for a couple of days, for despite Jack’s best efforts her work was still stalled. The shop, tiny by Waterstone’s and Dillons standards, was a crush of women, and the air thick with chatter and bursts of delighted greetings as more people arrived. One could be forgiven for thinking that every Australian feminist in London had turned out for the evening.
There were four writers on the program with Ava slotted in third. After a short break to refresh drinks and accommodate the smokers, Ava took to the lectern. She began with a brief introduction to The Universal Fool, struggling against a mounting antipathy to this novel which, having sucked her dry, was now pointing to just one almighty fool. If her third novel did not start moving soon, she doubted there would ever be one. And then what would she do? Become the teacher she had never wanted to be? Or with her verbal facility and ease with people perhaps a job in public relations? Or one of those home duties women, given she did not need to work – need, in the sense of requiring money. Her need to write was something quite different. She’d only ever had one ambition, an ambition that rose to its feet early only to trip up long before the journey was finished. Was she permanently disabled? And how to live if she were?
She began her reading and at the same moment the door to the bookshop opened and the Indian antiquities woman, Fleur Macleish, entered. She eased her way through the crowd to a spot alongside a free-standing shelf of books. She was four or five metres away but it was as if a hot wire connected her to Ava. Ava could feel her listening, she could feel her soaking up the words, she could feel this stranger reaching out and pulling her close.
‘You enjoy book readings then?’ Ava said an hour later when the two of them had adjourned to a nearby café for supper.
Fleur put down her coffee. ‘Readings have about the same attraction to me as an abattoir. I’m a vegetarian,’ she added. ‘The world’s awash with bad books and even worse readers. But you,’ and she reached across the table and lay the flat of her hand along Ava’s left cheek, ‘you demand to be heard.’
Ava had planned to stay two nights in London. She ended up staying ten.
‘Research,’ she explained to Harry. And when he suggested he might join her, she put him off: the novel was finally moving so best not to jinx it. She told him she was staying with a friend and gave him Fleur’s phone number. Each evening Harry would telephone as was his custom whenever she was away from Oxford, to swap stories of the day just passed and exchange plans for the one to come. ‘You don’t have to stay with this Fleur Macleish,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to stay with anyone. You could hole up in a hotel or even a serviced flat in Bloomsbury.’ But she assured him she was quite comfortable and in the best place for her work.
New love is explosive, and first passion takes your breath away. Every night after Harry’s phone call, she and Fleur went out to a concert or the theatre or just to walk together, and after a late meal they would fall to the bed, the couch, the bath, the floor in a furious feeding on each other. And later still there was more food, easy-eating food of crisps and cream biscuits, chocolate, cheese, roasted almonds and grapes. Night after night, so that late meals and wild love would forever be partnered. Then the quick sleep, the springing into the new day, breakfast together at a local café and leaning across the eggs, the croissants, the coffee to touch each other again and again and again. When Fleur left for work, Ava went to the library to write in the underwater blue of the Round Reading Room, rising from her desk only to use the toilet or slip out to the colonnade for a cigarette. Five days, that’s all it took to fill the first notebook. And in another five days after the train pulled out of Euston, she was still writing and a second notebook was nearly finished.
She had never before worked liked this. The first draft of h
er third novel was completed in two months; the final draft of The Glimmering Web was ready to be delivered to her publisher in London four months after that.
‘We’ll celebrate when you return,’ Harry said, as he handed her and the finished manuscript on to the train at Oxford.
As the train pulled out of the station, she saw him standing on the platform. He looked sad and strangely small. Harry knew about Fleur. How he knew, she could not say, but he had known from the beginning.
Fleur was not waiting to meet the train at Euston. There is a protocol to an affair – although already this felt far weightier than an affair – and it would not have been right to embrace her husband at one end of a journey and her lover at the other. Ava had come to London to deliver her new novel to her publisher and deliver it she did. The relationship with Fleur was extra to the trip, although no longer optional. Neither Harry nor Fleur was optional.
For the next seven years there was a reckless propulsion to each day. She knew she needed Harry’s calm, reliable love as well as Fleur’s unpredictable and fiery passions. And her novels needed the secure domestic space to be written and the turbulence of the affair for their inspiration. She had her safe harbour and she had her muse. The tranquillity and the energy. The earth and the fire. Beyond this she did not think.
2.
It was another spring day seven years later when Fleur left for good. She left in a trail of emails. She had met someone else, she wrote. And while she was always meeting someone else, this time was different, this time she had fallen in love. It was fortunate, she continued, that little was required in the way of housekeeping. No joint assets and any mementoes easily divided. All very tidy, she said.
Nothing provides consolation when you have been dumped, and certainly not tidiness. Ava rang Fleur, but Fleur wasn’t answering her phone. She staked out Fleur’s flat, but Fleur wasn’t at home. She contacted the museum but Fleur had taken leave. Fleur was neither in Oxford nor London, or not the Oxford or London of her years with Ava. Ava was desperate to speak to her, to argue, persuade, cajole and reason with her. Fleur was not allowed to leave, and everything that filled her days was in service to this singular belief. It was a type of madness. But as it happened, madness was to prove far more effective than reason in providing the energy to keep going, for when Fleur returned to her job, her flat and her usual email address, Ava went a full fifteen rounds, fired by high-octane masochism and one-hundred-per-cent-proof stupidity.
Seven years jettisoned in a few sentences. Seven years recorded in letters, phone calls, emails and, in the last couple of years, texts as well, sometimes as many as a dozen contacts in a single day to spark the time between the afternoons and the occasional night when mindlessly hungry they would grab each other and not let go until the last minute had expired. So much feeling, always uncontainable and explosive – and always separate from her marriage. But in the chronic desperation of Fleur’s leaving Ava could recall neither the substance nor the texture of those wild hours, she only knew they must not stop.
‘We are each other’s drug of choice,’ Fleur used to say.
For seven tempestuous years even at a distance Fleur was pungent, heady, and stunningly intrusive; up to her neck in pure suffocating bliss, it was all rush and oblivion for Ava. And while the fact of Fleur infused her daily life, that they lived apart, in different cities, was essential. It was not simply that they ran the risk of burning each other up; there was Fleur’s brigade of lovers. Ava would sense a rival in a new coffee mug, a theatre program, a different brand of biscuits, a spate of hushed-voice telephone calls. But rather than confront Fleur, Ava, who had no intention of ever leaving Harry, would take her jealousy home and transform it into emails and letters of such wit and artistry that Fleur would be persuaded to abandon the lover for her far more desirable self.
The distance was also essential to maintain her marriage, for Fleur was adamantly not Harry and never a viable alternative to him. Harry had always been wise to his wife’s needs; as a preface to his marriage proposal he had actually said he recognised that marriage with him or indeed anyone would not give her all she required. So while Ava did not doubt the affair with Fleur hurt him deeply, at the same time if there was to be a lover, better she be a geographically distant one.
And the distance allowed the novels to be written. Affairs always operate at full throttle, and if barriers are not erected, an affair will ride roughshod over the solitary and time-hungry business of writing. If she and Fleur had lived in the same city, there would have been no novels after the first two. Although more fundamentally, if she had never met Fleur, Ava truly believed she was finished as a novelist.
The email announcing the end of their years together came without warning: one day the usual texts, emails and phone calls rolled in, and the next day Fleur was peeling Ava from her life – although not forever, she had been quick to add. She suggested a break for a few months so that when they met again it would be on ‘an entirely new footing’. This plan, so Ava had written to Jack, reduced their relationship to one of Helen’s microbes: a blotch of bacteria, a period of quarantine.
Fleur left, and it was not simply that Ava missed her, she hated the hours limp without expectation, the cool order of a life without secrets. If every second makes its presence felt, if every minute drags, if sleep has deserted you and alcohol makes you sick, a month can be a life sentence. If not for Harry making her tea and coffee and casseroles and comforting cheesy things, if not for Harry doing the shopping and washing and organising their return to Australia, if not for Harry running both their lives until such time as she was ready to resume her own, Ava doubted she would have withstood the sustained assault of Fleur’s absence.
The days dragged, the nights dragged more. The emails thinned out, life itself wore dangerously thin. It was in the week after Fleur’s departure that the spider appeared. By day it lived under the eaves near the kitchen, but after dark it would emerge to weave a gorgeous web, a fluid polygon suspended by four fine filaments, a new web every night, stark and silvery in the light from the kitchen with the fattening black spider at its centre. And in the morning the web would be gone, rolled up was the way Ava thought of it, and the spider curled up again under the eaves.
Each night after Harry had gone to bed, she would go outside and with only the spider as witness, she would slough off all pretence. She wanted another chance with Fleur, to be a different lover, a better lover, she wanted Fleur to come back.
A bad love is very demanding. You’ll twist yourself so out of character in an attempt to get it right that the misshapen scrap you present to friends and family is hardly recognisable. But you press on, never wavering in your belief that you know what you are doing. The obvious conclusion, that the relationship is harming you and you would do well to finish it, never presents as an option. Alone with the spider, Ava would address Fleur in the dark, every night a low barrage of words attacking, explaining, condemning, wailing, pleading. And every day rambling messages left on Fleur’s phone and a stream of emails and long pathetic letters as well. Fleur responded half-heartedly at first, and by the end of the month not at all.
At last, reason began to stir. Fleur had left. Fleur was gone forever.
The spider remained throughout the long month of Fleur’s leaving and for the first couple of months of bereavement. This little creature with no other motive than a good feed in a sheltered spot provided an easier and less guilt-ridden solace than Harry. When the spider eventually disappeared, the days and nights were still pitted with loss but Ava was aware of Fleur taking up less space. She stretched her limbs, she looked about. The short English summer had passed, the leaves on the trees were beginning to colour, the students were back in Oxford, and she and Harry were going home.
At first she had resisted the return to Australia. What would happen if Fleur changed her mind? She wouldn’t change her mind, Harry said on one of the few occasions he referred to Fleur directly, and, besides, everything was arranged, a
job for him, a university fellowship for her, too late to back out now. Ava packed up the flat, it was good to be occupied, she packed up their life in Oxford. She wrote lists in the evening and followed them religiously the following day. System took the place of suffering. The days and weeks passed, the flat was emptied out. There was a farewell party, she and Harry spent the last night staying with friends, and the following day they travelled up to London and caught the plane home.
Then, nearly three years later with life tripping along nicely, all the friends back in Melbourne, an ordinary Tuesday with the usual morning routine of breakfast, reading, shower, dressing, then to her email, an excellent alternative to the phone, Ava believed, but an extremely poor substitute for the romance of the post, and there it was, the familiar address.
Fleur.
Ava did not hesitate to open the message, one rarely does with email. Fleur was coming to Sydney to courier some treasures for an exhibition on Indian art and culture. Only a brief visit, but it would be wonderful to see her. Could Ava come up to Sydney? I’ve so missed our times together, she wrote. We always had such fun.
Riding the rapids of email, Ava hit reply and dashed off a ‘what a surprise but what a shame’ email citing long-standing work commitments in Melbourne. With only a short time in Australia, Fleur, never much interested in putting herself out, would not make the effort to come down to Melbourne.
Ava selected send, and then sat stunned in front of the screen, not seeing, not reading, not thinking, a minute or two and then rising out of the email those words: we always had such fun.
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