He had left her study even more concerned. The sun was strong in the courtyard and he had adjusted the shade over the spa tub, picked a couple of leaves from the water, and then – why not? he could do with the relaxation – had switched on the spa, slipped out of his clothes and into the water. In the heat of a summer morning and rocked by the moving water he deliberated what to do. Was her work causing the malaise? Or was the malaise at the root of her work problems? He did not want to worry her, particularly as she did not herself seem concerned; and besides, if there was something physically wrong it would only be minor, the sort of problem for which his grandmother would produce a tonic. He warmed at the thought of his gran. How he longed for her common sense wisdom now.
As he lolled in the jostling water he applied logic to the problem. Ava had a strong constitution; in all the years they had been together she had never been seriously ill. It stood to reason, that whatever was bothering her was not serious, although no harm in ringing his sister for her opinion. It was possible that Ava in her mid-forties was suffering ‘hormones’ – his gran’s diagnosis for most female complaints, and Wendy, a doctor, would know what to do.
Wendy was altogether reassuring. She was sure there was nothing to worry about but advised that Ava have a check-up. She talked diet and exercise, and yes, she mentioned hormones. That was a couple of days ago and in the intervening time Harry’s anxieties had eased. It was only when his stress levels were raised, like having to rewrite his report, that the worries about Ava resurfaced. But his sister said there was nothing to be concerned about, and this morning Ava seemed to be back to her old self. As for those manuscript markings, what was havoc to him may not be to the author.
Harry returned to his report. He deleted a paragraph from his introductory remarks and pulled out some statements fairly bristling with possibility. Before attacking the specific fellowship items, he went to the kitchen for a hot chocolate and when he returned to his office he did not shut the door. An hour later he handed his secretary the revised edition for copying. He was pleased with the result.
2.
This is the life, Connie is thinking, as he lounges in a shaded alcove of the Prime Ministers’ Memorial Garden at the Melbourne Cemetery.
Sara had assured him no one ever came here.
‘Shows the parlous state of Australian history,’ Connie said.
‘More the parlous state of politicians,’ Sara replied, pushing him against a wall and slamming her mouth against his.
‘Isn’t there a law against obscene acts in public?’ he had asked.
She had responded by unbuttoning his jeans and guiding him to a bench. And he’s barely seated before she’s leaning over him and doing those extraordinary things she does with her mouth. He has known no one to compare.
This is the life. The private bower, the warm day, the gentle breeze, and this young and beautiful woman, all spontaneity and joie de vivre who cannot have too much of him. He runs his hand over her smooth dark hair. He has always been fortunate in the women who have loved him, and Sara is the best of them all. He should arrange a weekend away, a cottage with a view to the ocean, no phone, no demands, just the two of them together. But for now – he checks his watch – it wouldn’t do to be late for the board meeting, and hooks his hands under her shoulders and raises her up to straddle him. At some point during the upward movement she does something with her knickers (how grateful he is for the return to skirts and dresses), and with a hand on his shoulder and the other positioning him she sinks down. There’s no firm support for her knees so he cups her buttocks, lifting her up and slowly down, and with his arm muscles about to collapse he comes. A short time later she too is satisfied.
While they are tidying themselves, another couple enters the garden. She is olive-skinned and wearing a long kaftan over trousers. He, gingery and freckled, is dressed in shorts and T-shirt. They sit themselves on the solid bulk of Robert Menzies’ grave – Dame Pattie is in there too – wrap themselves together and start kissing.
‘Those two know where to go for Establishment approval,’ Connie says, with a nod in their direction.
Sara loves cemeteries. ‘Death’s libraries,’ she calls them with the flippancy only the very young can use with death.
‘Sex and death,’ she now says, looking at the couple. ‘They know what works. Just like me.’
3.
Conrad Lyall was that intensely human individual, a flawed man. Gifted, hard-working, attractive, with the intellectual hunger that propels most high achievers, he was also driven by a desire for worldly success – although he would be reluctant to acknowledge this. He insisted that one must always stand up for one’s beliefs, but his desire to be admired often undercut the courage of his convictions. Connie needed less vanity to be truly effective, yet a selfless Conrad Lyall would not have been a compelling figure. It was the mix of him which proved so seductive. He was a man who was easy to like.
Individuals like Connie tend to attract large and willing entourages – not of the paid sort, but more in the way of devoted followers. Look no further than Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre, Nureyev, Ginsberg, Picasso, and men far more than women. People want to connect with them, merge their own world with that of the great man – who must of necessity be stingy with himself or else he would empty very quickly. Fortunately followers comply by being satisfied with tiny portions. Connie acquired his followers from among students and readers, autodidacts were particularly numerous, and women far outnumbered men. He acquired, too, a great many friends, more than the customary number of wives, and a slew of lovers.
While Connie totted up the years, his girlfriends all stayed much the same age. He believed that one’s notion of attractiveness was formed early, that what appealed to the twenty-year-old self would appeal to the fifty-year-old. He also believed that one’s sense of the age fifty was formed in youth, around the time when one’s own parents reached that age. To be fifty then, remained extremely old and always a disturbing fit. When Connie turned fifty he refused to celebrate. The numbers were conveying him to the grave, he said to Linda, yet he felt he had hardly begun. He dreaded turning sixty. It was the lengthening distance from boyhood he hated, and the decreasing distance to death he hated even more.
Such intense self-interest as Connie’s exacted an intellectual toll. Not that his work wasn’t serious and challenging, but in order to satisfy his personal needs his imagination was all too often pulled away from those uncharted waters from which the most remarkable work emerges. Not for him the Socratic view that for the true philosopher the body was an irritating intrusion on the far more important workings of the mind. But then, as Connie was quick to point out, there was nothing Socratic about Bertrand Russell’s way of life either, and even morose old Schopenhauer liked his food rich and his sex regular. What really set Connie apart was the sweep of his personality and it was this which brought his work to such a broad audience. When a reporter remarked on the difficulty of being the layperson’s philosopher, Connie quipped it was easier than bricklaying and better for the skin. But in truth it came easily to him: he was a natural and beguiling communicator.
While the label – the layperson’s philosopher – carried a certain lowbrow resonance, Connie enjoyed the recognition that came with being popular. After all, he would say, it’s a short bridge between fame and forgotten, and who would doubt which was preferable? His skill lay in making original connections, of looking at a tree and seeing the sap, one of the many qualities he shared with Ava. But while he knew he had a masterful intellect, like all men and women of vast intelligence and unlike their mediocre counterparts, he was acutely aware of his limitations. Connie agreed with Browning’s ‘Andrea del Sarto’ that ‘a man’s reach should exceed his grasp’, so even when he overcame one set of limitations he expected a new set to appear.
What was indisputable about Connie was his verbal prowess. Cross a blowtorch with the OED and that was Connie in conversation. One former colleague who had fallen
victim to it described Connie as a verbal terrorist and, with his own reputation to protect, refused ever again to exchange anything more than a quick social greeting with him. Connie didn’t care. He agreed with Oscar Wilde that the worst a person can suffer is indifference and, like Wilde, he had never experienced that.
For all these qualities, his election first to the NOGA board and then its chairperson was passed unanimously. Connie’s natural stance tended towards the maverick and he was not a good team member; however, he saw advantages in accepting the chair, not the least that it would add to his credentials when decisions about the TV series were being made. As it happened, he had misjudged. A couple of months earlier Harry had said the television series was just a nod away from signing, but despite the successful pilot nothing had been approved nor had any money appeared. Harry, so enthusiastic at the beginning of the campaign, now seemed a great deal more muted. And without knowing exactly why or how, Connie knew that in the issue of his TV series Harry was pivotal.
From his usual position at one end of the boardroom table, Connie looked down to Harry at the other. The meeting was drawing to a close and Harry was summarising the main actions: that NOGA appoint a full-time media officer – a proposal advanced by Connie, not that Harry had acknowledged this – and that it increase its penetration of the Asia–Pacific region. Seated at the table were the Minister for Science, an attractive woman around his own age far more interested in Helen’s research than anything Connie had to offer; the director of the nation’s largest fully privatised business school; Sir Richard Treat of North West Mining; the CEO of Pacific Media; the MD of Taylor Holdings, the construction company responsible for the NOGA building; Josie Stacie from the accounting firm of Stacie Palmer Ross, and the Pro Vice Chancellor for international studies, all of them high-flyers and all admirers of Harry. They asked his opinion, they valued his suggestions, they considered him the rarest of individuals, the wise yet practical man. Connie had made an effort to see Harry through their eyes, but it proved impossible even for his prodigious mind. Or perhaps he simply lacked the desire.
Not so long ago Harry had counselled patience about the TV series, that with so much money involved and producers in two different countries delays were to be expected. Patience, however, was not among Connie’s qualities, nor for that matter did he regard it as a virtue in an intellectual. You need to be chafing at the unknown or the nearly known, you need to be filled with an urgency to propel you to the next idea, the next nugget of understanding. Patience, like satisfaction, is a poor achiever.
Linda berated him for his impatience, for while it might be crucial for new work it did not readily cement an enduring intimacy between two people, nor did it mesh well with children. In fact all three wives had at one time or another suggested he should have married a clone of himself. They were wrong of course, he would not care for the competition.
When Harry called the meeting to a close, he had said nothing about the TV series; more significantly, apart from a few general statements about the fellowships, he had not mentioned Connie at all. Nor had Harry involved him in the proceedings as he had in previous meetings. As much as he might not care for Harry, Connie would rather be on his side than in his sights. As the meeting broke up, Connie decided it was in his interests to make more of an effort with NOGA.
4.
It was after eight o’clock and a humid dusk when Connie turned the corner into his street. As he passed one particularly ragged place he inhaled the delicious reek of frying onions, that old smell of home-cooking. He missed cooking, he missed meals at home.
‘What are cafés for?’ Sara said, when he suggested they might eat at home more often.
Now the smell rushed into him, and to his surprise he felt the burn of tears. And loneliness. The notion popped into his mind, and just as quickly he popped it out again. He was never lonely, and he couldn’t bear any sort of wallowing.
His own house was in darkness. He flipped on lights as he walked from room to room in this still unfamiliar place, a large family dwelling organised through NOGA, close to the university, Federation style – he ticked off its attractions – owned by an academic currently on sabbatical, and exactly the type of house he, Connie, would covet if he were the sort of person for a settled life. He put his bag in the study, checked the phone for messages, and then to the kitchen – latest appliances, plenty of cupboards, easy-cleaning surfaces. On the bench was a note in Sara’s large round writing: she was catching up with friends, she might be late, he was not to wait up. The note concluded with a row of X’s and O’s, but no signature. The dot of the ‘i’ of ‘Connie’ was heart-shaped.
He folded the note and put it in his pocket: that someone so exciting could also be so sweet was testimony to his good fortune. Although he welcomed an evening to himself, for there were problems to deal with, decisions to make, actions to take. Linda’s work commitments and a long visit to America by her English parents had postponed her arrival in Australia, but there was no reason for her to delay any longer.
He poured himself a glass of wine and settled on the comfortable couch in the comfortable sitting room of this comfortable home. The owner had lived here for more than twenty-five years, Connie couldn’t think of anything worse. He was a man of serial comforts, whether homes, countries, wives or girlfriends, and he was not ashamed to admit it. He worked hard and produced well, he was a scholar and an educator both within and outside the university, and while he may not be cut out for family life there were other weightier roles for which he was suited. And no man in his right mind would have turned his back on Sara. No reason for shame there either, though Linda would disagree. Yet Linda knew what she was getting into when they married; after all, she had been the girlfriend while he was still married to Susan.
The alcohol hit an empty stomach – he had worked through lunchtime in order to meet Sara at the cemetery – and he returned to the kitchen for a plate of antipasto, more cheese than anything else, couldn’t find any crackers so made some toast, and with his wine replenished and a cup of fresh coffee he returned to the couch.
The Linda problem aside, he needed a night to himself. He was exhausted, not that he would ever admit this to Sara, and if he were to be entirely honest, her friends did not excite him in the same way as they did her. And suddenly he was alert, something she had said the previous night as he was dropping off to sleep: that now the wife and children were about to arrive the girlfriend would have to make herself scarce. She had mentioned friends who lived in a large house of numerous rooms, one of which was vacant. Were these the friends she was with now? Not a girl for patient deliberation, she may have already arranged to move. He grabbed his mobile and sent her an I-luv-u-&-c-u-soon text message.
He did not want Sara moving out, although the large house with numerous friends sounded temptingly bohemian. He had married so young he had never known the shared-living experience and he regretted it. Back when they were students and still living in communal houses, Ava and Helen had tried to disabuse him. All he had missed, they said, was dodgy wiring, stinking carpets, rising damp, ants and fleas, monthly fumigations, too many people using the decrepit plumbing, a roster that most people ignored, a kitty similarly treated, and strangers drunk in the lounge and high in the kitchen, strangers who came and went as they pleased in houses without locks. But no matter what they said, a lost experience was exactly that, and no amount of contriving or substitution could ever bring it back.
At the present time the experience he wanted was Sara, and she would not sit by patiently while he dithered about the future. Sara was across town with her friends, perhaps making plans to move out, and across the world Linda and the boys would soon be packing up their life to join him in Australia. Connie didn’t want Sara to leave and he didn’t want his family to arrive.
He was a man in his fifties, not old, but certainly old enough to know there was not another intelligent, beautiful, twenty-five-year-old waiting for him down the years. Although he was sen
sible enough to omit Sara from the end of his marriage. Several times before there had been other women and Linda had forgiven him. She loved him, she said, of course she didn’t want him to leave.
In her position he would have been humiliated.
‘You can’t have humiliation without pride,’ Linda said. ‘And you have sufficient pride for us both.’
In the past Linda had persuaded him to change his mind. But not this time. His marriage was over.
The coffee was lukewarm and he poured himself more wine, just half a glass this time. He should check his email, after more than twenty-four hours his in-box would be bursting, but he could not face it. He should read through a soon-to-be-published article, but he couldn’t face that either. He wandered into the room that would have been Linda’s study, then the room which would have been Laurie’s bedroom and the smaller one for Oscar. He felt sad, endings always had that effect on him, but it was the right decision and the sadness would pass. As soon as he had worked through the practical details he would ring Linda. He should encourage her to move back to England; it would be less lonely for her close to her family, and an English schooling for the boys would be less expensive than an American one.
He returned to the kitchen for the other half of his third glass, then decided he needed company. He really did hate endings. He would have walked around to Ava’s but she had shut herself off recently, finishing her new novel he assumed. Instead he collected his keys, left the lights on for Sara, and drove across town to Helen’s place.
She ushered him in without ceremony.
Reunion Page 22
