Reunion

by Andrea Goldsmith

  She stops in front of a map at the entrance to the university then decides to ignore it, not simply through self-consciousness – what real student would need to consult a map of the campus? – but because maps flummox her. With no natural sense of direction either, she decides to follow her fancy, and crosses the threshold into a new world. The day is calm and gently warm, most people are carrying books, she smells freshly turned earth and the lingering ooze of hot chips; old shadows beckon and everywhere the mesmerising prickling of age. The usual edges of her life have melted away.

  She strolls along corridors with greenish lino and yellowed walls. She is wrapped in herself and so content; no one stops her, no one interferes. She wanders from the law building with its must of age, into biology and the sour wince of organic matter. She browses the numerous pinboards, reads posters advertising film festivals, meetings and discussion groups – Kantians, Existentialists, Phenomenologists – labels which might be Greek for all she understands.

  I will belong here one day, she tells herself, I will belong here.

  She stops at a cylindrical bulletin board of a type she has only ever seen in pictures of Paris. It is thick with flyers. She walks slowly around, reading as she goes. A boy approaches and points to an advertisement for an anti-apartheid rally. This protest is not to be missed, he says. And Ava smiles and says she’ll be there. But she won’t; she’ll be back at school where opposition to apartheid is definitely not on the curriculum, and at the end of the day she’ll return to a mother who has never attended a political rally in her life.

  ‘What if Tim had been old enough for conscription,’ Ava had once asked. ‘Would you have marched in the Vietnam moratoriums?’ And her mother had simply assumed one of her ‘How idiotic can you be?’ looks, as she always did when confronted with a hypothetical situation. But without hypothetical situations Ava would not be exploring the university today. Without hypothetical situations she would have been unable to imagine an alternative future for herself.

  After an hour of wandering the campus she follows the signs to the Union Building and the main cafeteria, where she buys coffee and chips and settles at a table. Most people are in groups, but those who are alone sit with food and a book, stretching into the space around them in a clear statement they are choosing to be alone. Ava puts her feet up on a vacant chair, spreads out her things and opens a book.

  She sips the grey coffee and picks at the chips. She takes in the students with their conversation and laughter; she sees their friendships. There is an ease amongst these people which comes, she supposes, from their sense of belonging here. This is my future, she says to herself, my future.

  She sits until self-consciousness makes further sitting impossible, then gathers up her belongings and wanders outside again. Eventually she finds her way back to the campus entrance. She is reluctant to leave, but she’ll return, she tells herself, as often as money allows, until she enters here as a proper student.

  With the help of books from the library she has imagined herself in London and Paris, Oxford and Cambridge, and more recently, guided by Henry James, she has imagined herself in Venice and Rome. But in the next three years while she is finishing high school, it will be this university that will form the backdrop to the most satisfying of her dreams. This she determines.

  She leaves the university and with no tram in sight she decides to walk down Swanston Street to the train station. A short time later she crosses with the traffic lights and immediately sees the sign: Second-hand Books.

  Wine lovers remember their first taste of good wine, orchid growers their first glimpse of an orchid, musicians the first time they heard Bach. Book lovers, too, have their firsts: the first book they read by themselves; their first visit to a library; the first book they bought with their own money; and for many, the discovery of second-hand bookshops.

  Until that moment Ava had not known such places existed. Gordon Comstock worked in a ‘used books’ shop in Keep the Aspidistra Flying and she knows of other characters in fiction who have picked up bargains in shops that sell ‘old books’, but beyond the pages of a novel, a shop consisting entirely of second-hand books open to real people like her is a revelation. She should be heading to the station but she can’t resist a quick look.

  The man at the front desk glances up as she enters. With his shabby hair and beard, his baggy jacket and frayed cuffs, with the glasses held together with sticky tape and a wisp of cigarette attached to his lower lip, he fits exactly her image of an intellectual. A Gordon Comstock look-alike. And like Gordon, this man too is probably a writer, and one day he’ll be famous, or perhaps he is already. And the book he is reading might be philosophy, or given its size perhaps an illustrated commentary on classical Greek literature. A second-hand bookshop, a writer at the front desk, the university just five minutes away. Life is extraordinary.

  As much as she wants to explore every inch of this shop, she decides to forfeit this first area. She doesn’t want the man looking too closely at her. He must be at least twenty-five and in his eyes she would be just a child, perhaps a runaway looking for a safe place to rest, even a common shoplifter. And besides, she doesn’t want him watching her read. With books as a clearly signed short cut to the soul, you would have to be either very stupid or very careless to make your reading public. Although this doesn’t stop her from sneaking a peep at his book as she passes.

  It’s a gardening book! This man, the guardian of this extraordinary place is reading a gardening book similar to those her mother borrows from the lending library. It couldn’t be, Gordon Comstock would never read a gardening book, and with a flick of her mind she converts it to a volume on Versailles.

  A sign on the wall advertises eleven more rooms beyond this one. Ava would rather starve than sell any of her books. Although another sign about deceased estates suggests that some of the former owners are dead bibliophiles whose heirs have dispatched their relative’s books as if they were no more significant than crockery and cutlery. Passions are such personal things.

  She is about to leave the front room when a tall, bearded man carrying a briefcase enters the shop. He is dressed in a dark suit and tie. A professorial type, Ava thinks, a man with a passing resemblance to the captain in The Ghost and Mrs Muir. He greets Gordon and hands him his briefcase for stowing behind the desk; meeting Ava’s gaze he nods and smiles at her. Quickly she turns away, hurries up three steps which have all but disappeared under books and enters the next room. It is full of literature – hard covers, soft covers, literature from floor to ceiling. She takes a quick inventory before moving on.

  The second-hand bookshop is not a normal shop but a two-storey terrace house with a series of small rooms flowing deep into the building. The walls of each room are crammed with books; there are more books on free-standing shelves, even the passageways are lined with books. And that distinctive tang of old paper – there was exactly the same smell when her class toured the State Library last year – here mingled with the smell of mice. There’s dust on the floor, cobwebs streak the ceiling; in the rare places where skirting boards can be seen they are coated with grime. The lighting is buttery, the globes are old.

  Room after room packed with books, and on such a variety of subjects – although why people would waste their time writing about trains she will never understand. And there’s a whole wall devoted to flashy fantasy novels. Her fantasies plug the holes of this life, her fantasies are possible, her fantasies will happen; she has no interest in weird worlds with unpronounceable names where people speak a stilted English stitched together with antiquated courtesies. One less area to bother with, she tells herself, and moves on. She reads spines, she removes volumes from the shelves, she is aware of such longing, such frustration, just like Coleridge’s mariners, water water everywhere and not a drop to drink. Volumes, volumes everywhere and not the brass to buy.

  To know what you need, to know exactly what is required to move you on to the next stage of your life, to see it in front of
you yet out of reach is a form of torture. Ava makes a pledge in an upstairs room of the second-hand bookshop that when she is grown up she will have the money and independence to own any book of her choosing. This is not mere desire, this is a decision: Ava Bryant will have freedom of movement and a full purse. The woman she plans to be could walk into a hundred different second-hand bookshops – she assumes this is not the only one – linger for hours if she so desires and walk out with as many books as she can carry.

  Today, however, with two dollars eighty-five to spend, she might manage six, maybe seven, paperbacks and no treats for a month. She returns to the literature room. Modern literature, classical literature, hard covers and more orange-spined Penguins than she’s ever seen. Some volumes are familiar, others beckon by covers or titles. She handles the books delicately, she turns pages, she reads paragraphs, she is gripped by old underlinings and margin scribblings, and wonders again how people can part with their books, particularly those that have hooked so deeply into their thoughts. Browsers come and go, Ava ignores them and they ignore her. She reads back-cover blurbs, she reads opening pages, she flips through chapters, she studies biographical notes to discover the age of authors when they published their first novel, she brushes a fragment of something from her face and smells old paper on her fingers. She takes down book after book; a few she replaces, the rest she adds to a pile on the floor.

  The professor enters the room. He is carrying just two books – clearly he’s more practised in resisting temptation than is she. The two of them move slowly around the tiny space, maintaining a distance like in a courtly dance. He does not disturb her, she does not disturb him. Each selects volumes, peruses them, replaces or adds them to their stacks. He is more presence than person, an extension of her own private experience and adding to the pleasure. Fifteen minutes, twenty minutes in this book minuet and she longs for more time, but unless she has the dinner in the oven before her mother returns from work there will be some explaining to do.

  As if he knows she needs to be alone, the professor leaves the room. She glances at him out in the passageway; no longer an extension of herself, he is just a man old enough to be her father. Although if her father had possessed a fraction of the wisdom and sympathy of this stranger, he would not have deserted his family and she might have an ally at home. She shakes herself out of the thought: you don’t choose your parents, you don’t choose your family, but you can choose your future.

  She has selected eleven books – far too many, and not just the money, it’s carrying them home and hiding them in the tiny space of her bedroom. And suddenly she remembers: she’s not finished. She dashes out of literature into foreign languages, and there on the French shelves she finds two copies of Le Grand Meaulnes. She selects the cheaper one with ink markings and a food stain that has penetrated a third of the book, is out in the passageway when she stops and turns – some compromises are simply not worth it – and swaps it for the other copy. She is about to return to the literature room when a book facing outwards catches her eye. She’s heard of Jean-Paul Sartre but not this book. Words, that’s all it is called. Words. A slender orange-spined Penguin in translation, and on the cover, instead of the usual picture there is a quote from the book: ‘I loathe my childhood and all that remains of it …’

  This book has been written for her.

  Back in the literature room now with thirteen books from which to choose, she begins by dividing them into two piles. Le Grand Meaulnes is a must. Madame says it is her favourite book, Madame who is small and dark and the main reason Ava has continued to study French; Madame who dresses always in black and wears heavy eye make-up; Madame who is said to have a past, and given that she lives with a man not her husband, a present too, Madame says this book changed her life. Ava puts Le Grand Meaulnes on the left, the definite pile. And Jean-Paul Sartre’s Words – a risk, but worth it for the cover sentence alone. She adds A Fairly Honourable Defeat, one of two novels by Iris Murdoch she has chosen. The cover graphic is a close-up photograph of a woman’s face. The eyes are daubed in black, a bit like Madame’s eyes, the red lacquered lips are exhaling smoke. But is a cover picture enough? The back cover of the other Murdoch, A Severed Head, refers to the ‘sombre themes’ of the book: ‘adultery, incest, castration, violence and suicide’; it is only forty cents. In the end she adds both to the left-hand pile.

  With four books on the definite pile and enough money for two or three more, there are some difficult decisions to be made. She adds, she takes away, she makes three piles instead of two, she totes figures in her head, she counts her money. It’s like playing patience with a short deck.

  ‘Easier to choose between diamonds.’

  Her head jerks up, the professor is standing a metre away. His accent is English, his utterance of a type she might read in a book. He is looking down at her, his face very serious. But with choices to be made and time running out, she just gives him a nod.

  He does not move. He suggests she leave some for next time.

  This man with his posh accent has no idea. ‘It’s not as simple as that,’ she says, and doesn’t care if she sounds rude. She glances at her watch, then returns to her three piles.

  ‘How much do you need?’

  She swallows the ache in her throat, she doesn’t want him to see how much this matters. And then a slump like wet wool and her perfect day is in tatters. Her books are in piles before her. There’s nothing more to lose.

  ‘Six dollars twenty-five.’ Each syllable is a tidy punch as if he, or anyone with money is somehow to blame. She will not look at him, she keeps her gaze on her books. Impossible to have all thirteen. She pushes the right-hand pile behind her, out of view and out of contention, and recalculates. ‘Make that three dollars sixty-five.’ She swallows hard, and now she looks up. She settles her face into a smile.

  He opens his wallet and withdraws two two-dollar bills. ‘Take the money,’ he says. ‘It delights me to see a girl your age so keen on books.’

  Ava looks at the money, she looks at her books, her books, and then she looks at him. He is obviously rich and probably harmless. Being careful will only harden the cement of her current life. She stands up. Her heart is thumping. She takes his money. She tries to keep her voice steady as she thanks him.

  ‘I’ll pay you back,’ she makes another quick calculation, ‘in three months.’

  He nods as if in thought. ‘What I’d prefer is a note from you with your impressions of each book.’

  ‘Like a book review?’ The idea is so grown-up and so very writerly.

  He smiles. ‘Yes, like a book review.’

  He writes down his name, Stephen Webb, his address and phone number.

  ‘So you do work at the university,’ she says.

  He nods and gives another smile. And even though the beard makes him look old, it’s a nice smile.

  He is not finished. ‘Perhaps one day you’d like to see my library.’

  In her short life she has learned to be watchful for experiences and grab them when they present. Now she studies Stephen Webb with a different eye. He is tall, at least six feet, with lines around his eyes – not the crêpey collapsed skin of a truly old person, just clear smile lines, and across his forehead there are lines of thought. His hair is brown and thick and brushed to the side. The hair makes him look less old, perhaps even in his thirties – although thirty or forty makes no difference and she knows it. But he is not fat, and he doesn’t look like a sleaze, and there’s no hair on the backs of his fingers. And he has his own library.

  I can do this, she thinks, as she pockets his money. I can do this.

  ‘Nothing’s free in this world,’ her mother always said. The difficult part was arriving at a fair price. With Stephen, Ava believed she had. Over the next several years, like God with the Israelites, Stephen supplied her necessities in the desert – and, as far as she was concerned, for bargain prices.

  He guided her through the classics, he taught her about poetry, he instill
ed in her the importance of memorising, he gave her old books, he gave her new books, he gave her the complete works of Shakespeare in a red leather-bound copy with tiny bible-sized print, and he gave her love. Stephen was worldly and he was wise and everything he had he was willing to share with her. Before she met him, every day was fretted with want, but Stephen made it clear that with him she would never want for anything. He had a wife, he had two sons, he had friends, perhaps he had parents and sisters and brothers as well, but she was convinced he put her first.

  As they read and talked together she found a language for her life to come, a mysterious exciting future that grew ever clearer and ever more possible. She told him of her dream to write novels; he told her he had absolute faith she would. She told him she planned to live overseas; he said whatever she set her mind to do she could achieve. It was Stephen who taught her the importance of travelling, of knowing other places and other people, and so different from her mother for whom home was not only enough, it was unquestionably the best. It was Stephen who suggested Oxford and it was Stephen who supplied the money – for school, for Melbourne University, for Oxford too, a monthly deposit in an account he set up for her.

  He told her his wife went her own way even more than he went his. Ava never pursued what he meant, not because of the wife’s activities, rather she preferred not to know how Stephen viewed his own. He showed her photographs of his family because she asked to see them, but the images, like the people themselves, remained blurred.