Reunion

by Andrea Goldsmith

  She and Stephen usually met at his flat not far from the city centre, ‘my private office’ as he called it; only twice did she go to his home – a large old house in a leafy suburb. He denied he was rich but the big house, the sons at private school, his job at the university plus his private office, his Mercedes Benz, even his pen collection suggested great wealth to her. He was an administrator at the university, not an academic, a man who had come from the private sector and expected to return there.

  She never coveted his money, only the freedom it afforded. Stephen could travel anywhere, he could buy any book he wanted, he could add to his pen collection according to his fancy. He collected Parker Duofolds, a classic workmanlike pen according to him, but with their round belly, the way they fit so snugly in the hand and their lovely weight Ava thought them lushly feminine. On the first anniversary of their meeting, he made her a gift from his own collection. It remained her favourite pen.

  Stephen said he would always love her, and perhaps he would have but she never put him to the test. Six years after they met she was wrapping up her Melbourne life, she was going to Oxford, she was moving on. No false hopes for him and no Melbourne ties for her – although he had insisted on continuing his financial support, and nothing she said would make him change his mind. She hadn’t seen her family for more than a year, her best friends were travelling with her, once she left Melbourne there would be no looking back. She did not talk about leaving him, and knowing how she abhorred dependence in others, he would never have raised the issue himself.

  Some people treat their mistakes and regrets like bruises, prodding them every now and then to keep them tender. Ava was not the type to dwell on her mistakes: they happen, you learn, you make sure not to repeat them. But of all the mistakes she had made none involved Stephen Webb. He was the right person for those years and how she had missed him when she first left Australia. He still appeared in her dreams a quarter of a century on.

  He would be well over seventy now, and rising up and taking her quite by surprise was an urge to contact him. But aside from satisfying some inexplicable nostalgia, what could possibly be achieved? Leave your memories alone, she told herself, for neither she nor Stephen had what the other wanted these days. He had loved her, loved her unconditionally as her parents had failed to do. He had loved her all those years ago like Harry did now. Contact Stephen? She was turning into one of those pitiful middle-aged people for whom the past acquired ever brighter and more varied hues while the present dissolved into a vale of tears. No purpose would be served by meeting Stephen now. Of course she wouldn’t contact him.

  She left the shelter of the second-hand bookshop. The rain had stopped, the humidity was worse than ever. She burrowed in her pocket for a tissue to wipe her face and pulled out a piece of green glass. She turned it over in her hand. How on earth did that get there? and tossed it into a rubbish bin. As she made her way back through the Carlton streets she felt a need for Harry. She picked up her pace, soon she would be home, and within a few hours he would be too. Perhaps he might leave work early. She rummaged in her bag for her mobile phone and turned it on, but the battery was flat. She would ring him as soon as she arrived home. It was not a day for being alone.

  2.

  Helen Rankin was sitting on the front verandah of Ava’s house. She had rung Ava’s mobile but it was not turned on. She had dialled the landline and heard the phone ringing inside the house. She and Ava had arranged to meet at three, it was now a quarter to four. Ava had clearly forgotten.

  Since the Aiken meeting Helen had been working flat out, not simply the demands of her current research, but there had been reports to write and grant applications for the laboratory back in the US, and almost daily communications with Möller. Her superiors in Maryland were haranguing her to return to America; NOGA had expected her to leave Australia months ago; but what seemed so sure and certain when she met Möller at Aiken was now blurred with doubt. After weeks of trying to see Ava, she and Ava had finally agreed on today. It was Ava who had suggested her place, Ava who had suggested three o’clock so as to have plenty of time to talk before Harry came home. ‘And then,’ she said, ‘the three of us can toast your brilliant career.’

  Helen couldn’t help wondering if in the scheme of things friendship now received a lower priority than in the old days. And yet she really did want to talk to Ava – not to help in making a decision, for unless she had a kamikaze instinct as far as her career was concerned, the choice was clear, but to help settle the decision she had made. She wanted Ava to study the various issues, weigh up the ethical pros and cons and produce an inspired and original reason for the only sensible option open to her. And if she was to be entirely honest, she also wanted Ava’s approval.

  Helen walked down the path to the gate. It was still humid, but with a misty rain falling it felt a little cooler. The drop in temperature had brought out some joggers on the cemetery track, and there was a group of boys kicking a football around. She checked her watch again, and was about to leave, when Ava appeared at the corner of the street.

  Her floating clothes were easily recognisable, so too the shape of her as she walked along the footpath, but everything else about this unmasked Ava was strange. The drooping head, the slow inward shuffle, the arms immobile at her sides. Strange and infirm. Helen was about to step out and make herself known but something about this figure held her back. Halfway up the street Ava stopped. Now she seemed to be talking to herself, her arms were extended in front of her, palms turned upwards in a questioning gesture, or perhaps she was pleading. She appeared stripped bare. Helen continued to observe, undercover as it were and breaking the rules. You think you want to see your intimates without their public disguises, but confronted by this view of Ava, Helen decided there was too much to lose by such uninvited sightings.

  Ava continued up the street, drawing closer to the house. Her arms were now wrapped tightly about her in an invisible straitjacket, her feet dragged against the asphalt. Helen’s problems were bad enough, but if Ava’s appearance was any guide, hers were a good deal worse.

  Helen wanted to dash down the street and enfold her in her arms. But everything she knew about Ava suggested she would be embarrassed to be caught in this state. The Volvo was parked around the next corner. Helen grabbed her bag, slipped through the gateway and into the side lane. A minute or two later, when Ava entered the house, Helen walked the short distance to her car and quickly drove away.

  3.

  ‘She seemed cut off from her surroundings,’ Helen said to Jack. ‘And blunted too, as if switched to one of those economy settings on air-conditioning units.’

  It was the evening of the missed appointment and Helen, together with Luke and Jack, had packed a picnic dinner and joined the hordes at the beach. The earlier cool change had been no more than a tease. It was now after nine, the temperature was thirty degrees, and with their meal finished they had moved down the sand to sit in the shallows.

  ‘I watched her walking up the street,’ Helen said. ‘She was hardly recognisable. And she forgot our appointment. Ava never forgets.’

  And she was never sick, not that Helen believed there was anything physically wrong with her now. ‘I think she’s suffering some sort of psychological malaise. If she could just finish her novel, she’d be back to normal in no time.’

  Jack was surprised Helen knew anything about the state of Ava’s work.

  ‘From the very first book,’ Helen said, ‘she’s supplied me with regular updates. And for each new novel when the end is in sight she sends me a draft. She says I’m sensitive to the big picture – stumbling story, dull characters, that sort of thing.’ Helen let out a laugh. ‘What she really means is I have an extremely low threshold for boredom.’

  Why had Ava not told him? Jack wondered. He had thought he alone read her work in draft. And might have said something he’d have regretted if Helen had not continued.

  ‘Too bad I’ve been immune to the big picture in my own wo
rk. Although,’ and she slapped at a mosquito, ‘now that I have the big picture, I wish I could forget it.’

  And because Jack did not share Helen’s concerns about Ava – far from being stressed or anxious, Ava seemed more relaxed with him than ever before – he stretched out in the shallows, propped himself on an elbow while Helen pursued her career dilemmas.

  ‘Germany under Hitler had a policy called “Gleichschaltung” or “alignment”,’ she said. ‘Organisations and institutes were required to “align” themselves with Nazi goals and methods. The policy determined what was acceptable in painting, sculpture, literature, music, architecture, journalism. And domestic schedules too: the composition of meals, exercise, friendship, the lot. And the policy shaped science. Subversive Jewish theoretical physics was outlawed in favour of “Aryan physics” – as if atoms wore little swastikas.’ She slipped lower in the water and tipped her head backwards to wet her hair. ‘So what’s happening at the moment isn’t new.’

  Her hair was smooth against her skull. Water was dripping over her shoulders. She was not wearing her glasses. In the evening light she could pass for a young man, a quite beautiful young man, Jack was thinking. He looked across at Luke. The likeness between mother and son was at this moment quite startling, yet it was the mother who would make the more attractive male.

  ‘And Möller?’ Jack asked, turning away from his interesting thoughts.

  ‘It was inconceivable to me he would knowingly work for the forces of evil.’ She lashed out at another mosquito. ‘And yes, it can be as dramatic as that. But when I consider how he is wanting our joint research to focus on producing new organisms, not specifically to further the shigella immunity issue but to customise the survival features of certain microbes, I can’t help but have doubts about him. And if a man of his calibre could sell his soul to the military or the government – for good or ill, it really doesn’t matter – anyone could.’

  The issue now was what to do about the changing power in science, she said. There was a newly formed group of scientists who were devising a set of strategies to keep science honest – not the Union of Concerned Scientists but a more conservative group. ‘If the plans of this group are implemented, scientific freedom will be obliterated.’

  She could not understand why more of her colleagues were not outraged. ‘The group itself is suspect; it’s connected to government and big business, it’s probably an arm of the CIA. But even if its credentials were more acceptable, it’s absurd to curtail all of science because of the worst practices, to propose changes that will severely restrict the good ninety-nine point nine per cent of the scientific community because of the actions of a tiny minority.’ She picked up speed. ‘This sort of over-reaction to science’s underside is as illogical and self-defeating as the developed world’s response to terrorism. Our whole way of life has been altered because of unpredictable happenings far less frequent and not nearly as devastating as natural disasters. Terrorist attacks are unpredictable, that’s the substance of their power. We’re all running scared. We’d report our neighbour for using a crystal radio, we won’t travel by air, we avoid crowds, we don’t demonstrate in public places, we lock ourselves in our safe little houses and open our doors only to those like ourselves. And we call this taking precautions but it’s snuffing the life out of life itself.’

  Jack burst out laughing. It had always been Helen’s way to start talking at one point and end up at quite another. However Luke, who had been largely silent to this point, looked grave. ‘Surely you don’t still believe in a self-enclosed, untouchable science existing independently of a corrupt world. With everything that’s happened to your own work, how could you still believe this?’

  ‘In the heat of doing science, there’s only science. And when I discuss my work I talk biology not biological weapons, microbes not germ warfare. Of course I still believe in good science, ethical science.’

  Soon afterwards they returned to Jack’s flat. With a jug of iced water in reach, they arranged their chairs in the blast from the air-conditioner. Jack’s mind was pleasantly empty, Helen was sifting through terror scenarios and Luke was playing a game on his phone. Several minutes passed before Luke broke the silence.

  ‘Of you all,’ he said in his surprisingly deep voice, ‘you two, Connie and Ava, who will have the enduring reputation?’

  His question came as a surprise. Jack had assumed the boy thought his mother and her friends all rather ordinary, having as he did the kitchen perspective of them all.

  ‘Well?’ Luke said. ‘Whose work is most likely to last?’

  A few months earlier Jack would have said Helen’s; after all, her work was fundamental, her work would save lives. But he was no longer so sure, particularly if she ended up working on a bioweapons project. As for Connie, while he was a significant figure in analysing the current era, people seem to prefer their own contemporary versions of history and would more likely look to their own interpreters to make sense of this particular time. That left him and Ava and he was never in the running.

  ‘Ava,’ he said to Luke. ‘Ava’s work will endure, and if your mother ever finds a rich benefactor without strings,’ he smiled in her direction, ‘hers will too.’

  ‘I’m pleased you didn’t opt for Connie,’ Luke said. His tone was not friendly.

  ‘Tell him,’ Helen said to her son.

  ‘Tell me what?’ Jack asked.

  No longer the lovely ephebe in the shallows, Helen now looked exactly like a mother not pleased with her son. Luke’s face was set stern and stubborn. His cheek muscles flickered.

  ‘Connie is not Luke’s favourite person at the moment,’ Helen said to Jack.

  ‘And why should he be?’ Luke burst out. ‘He’s behaving like a shit. All of you,’ and he looked accusingly at both his mother and Jack, ‘all of you have let him get away with far too much for far too long.’

  Jack was astonished at the attack. Connie and Linda had been like family to Luke. ‘What’s happened?’ he asked.

  Helen glared at her son. ‘Well?’

  ‘I told Linda about Connie’s latest fuck.’ And before Helen could protest at his language, ‘Linda deserved to know. She’s a good person. Connie was playing her for a fool.’

  Jack looked to Helen. Helen merely shrugged. ‘Anything you want to say I’ve already said. It was none of his business, he hardly knows Sara –’

  Luke interrupted. ‘Sara could be Keira Knightley crossed with Rosalind Franklin, she could be fluent in six languages and play concert piano, she could run a four-minute mile without breaking into a sweat and she could have a fashion sense as well, and I still would have thought Linda had a right to know.’

  Helen’s face relaxed into a smile. ‘Moralists shouldn’t have a sense of humour.’

  ‘I’m happy to be a moralist if it means telling the truth.’

  ‘And Linda,’ Jack asked, ‘how did she respond to your news?’

  Luke shrugged. ‘The truth can hurt. But that doesn’t make it less right.’

  CHAPTER 12: Behind Closed Doors

  Connie stood by the stove browning onions for a curry. Sara was seated at the kitchen table threaded to various electronic paraphernalia. Her ability to do several things simultaneously via an array of different modalities was nothing short of Olympian – and Connie had studied some of multi-tasking’s best. She phoned, she texted, she chatted, she downloaded, she emailed and she also appeared to be working on her PhD thesis. And because Connie was peripheral to all this activity and she did not want him to feel neglected, she provided him with an ongoing commentary.

  Connie had learned to cook during his first marriage, in service to a more equitable division of domestic labour. Initially reluctant, within a short time he had appointed himself household chef and had carried over the role into his subsequent marriages. He liked the physicality of cooking, the chopping and slicing, the tossing and stirring; he would draw in the smells with the same appreciation as perfumery’s most fastidious nose a
nd he had always been an indulgent taster. Yet amid all this flamboyance, there was also a solitary, soothing side to cooking, as with musical improvisation or Linda’s knitting. And with a headache now lurking, it provided exactly the right prescription.

  Please let it not be a migraine, he intoned silently. For these days there never was a single migraine but rolling storms of them, and he not knowing when the cycle would stop until seven, eight, nine, sometimes as many as twelve days later there would be twenty-four hours without pain and then another twenty-four and he would know the headaches were finished – at least for now. Day after dreadful day, the mornings crushed by pain, analgesics useless, and the migraine pills so efficient at expelling today’s pain but with a cruel tendency to bring on tomorrow’s in ‘an unfortunate rebound effect’ according to the non-migraine-suffering neurologist. Connie would swallow a pill and by midday the pain would have stopped, but not that shadow, that thumbprint which is pain’s reminder who is boss. By mid-afternoon the drug hangover would have lifted sufficiently for unchallenging reading or bill paying. By night, at least in the early days of a cycle, he would be feeling good, suspiciously good – fresh and flushed through with non-pain, a short-lived respite because come four or five o’clock the next morning the migraine would return triumphant. Then would follow more pills and more respite, but never from the threat of pain, which terrorised more than the pain itself.

  Since his return to Australia the migraines had been as frequent as anything he had ever experienced. He could not explain it, although was tempted to blame tonight’s on Sara. She had said she would be home at six but did not wander in until eight. The weather had finally broken and she and her friends had decided to celebrate with a special pagan thanksgiving. And where, he had asked, had these pagan revels taken place? And when she mentioned a pokey bar in a back lane with uncomfortable seating, poor ventilation and a clientele unlikely ever to have heard of paganism, he was rammed by an anger so powerful it actually silenced him. A moment later he was castigating himself: he should have eaten, he should have worked, he should have done anything other than fill the time by waiting for her. It wasn’t her fault; she hadn’t forced him to wait.