‘Everything has changed. Already I’m not myself.’ She grabbed a serviette and blew her nose. ‘I can’t believe you’re doing this to me.’
‘I loved you at your most unappealing.’
‘An affair is not the same as a degenerative disease, Harry.’
He remained impervious. ‘I loved you when you were revealing your worst. Whatever changes may occur as a result of this illness will be less unappealing than those I’ve already witnessed.’
She guessed what he meant without struggling through the negatives.
‘You’re not thinking of me, Harry. Of what I want.’
‘I love you, Ava. You can’t expect me to kill you.’
Briefly it occurred to her she might be better off without him, that he would sap her strength at a time when she most needed it. But she could not manage without him when she was well, so there was absolutely no question now she was ill. So, angry, resentful and hurt as she was, she told herself to move forward. With Harry continuing to love and care for her as he had always done, she should manage to take charge of this one area in which he had failed her.
2.
The following week Harry suggested Ava invite the friends around for a Sunday night meal.
‘Just like in the old days at Oxford,’ he said.
He was thinking of what would please her, for given the state of the NOGA fellowship program Connie, Jack and Helen were the last people Harry would choose to entertain. He made the suggestion and, with an entirely different agenda in mind, Ava arranged the evening. Now all of them were congregated in the kitchen with drinks and savouries and catching up on one another’s news while Harry prepared a cheese and caramelised onion tart for their dinner.
Connie was finishing his second glass of wine and while he looked as haggard as Ava felt, his spirits had clearly lifted. Nothing to do with Sara, in fact since his arrival he had hardly mentioned her. His TV series was on the move again; a new pilot had been scheduled, with a new production team and a whole new approach. Harry, who must have been briefed on these developments, did not look up from rolling the pastry.
Helen seemed stripped of her usual spark; even her clothes, a scatter of browns, were uncharacteristically dull. Luke did not want to leave Australia, she said. And while he was old enough to make his own choices, she had decided to delay her own return to the States in the hope he would change his mind.
Of them all, only Jack seemed happy. He talked about his latest essay, ‘The End of Originality’ – ‘The artists are giving it a wonderful reception,’ he said. ‘And a publisher has approached me about a collection.’
‘And your new Islam book?’ Harry did not sound pleased.
‘That can wait,’ Jack said.
Ava stood at one end of the kitchen propped against the bench, observing each of her friends as potential solutions to her problem. Jack was replenishing her drink and passing her food, clearly delighting in his role. But for all that he was easier in her company, she knew that for much the same reasons Harry couldn’t help her neither could Jack. As for Connie, festooned with his own concerns – his boys, his divorce, Sara, the new pilot – and drinking far too much, he was not a reliable prospect. That left only distracted, anxious and working-eighteen-hour-days Helen.
Her friends chattered on. At first she tried to follow, but the effort required was too much. She let the words sink into meaningless noise, responding only to the rhythms of the conversation, smiling when the others smiled, looking concerned when they looked concerned, shaking her head, grimacing, raising eyebrows, shrugging shoulders in unison with them, folded into a sort of semi-conscious limbo space unknown to her before she became ill. Harry must have noticed, for as soon as the tart was in the oven he came and stood beside her, taking over from Jack in looking after her. She didn’t mind, she understood his need. She only wished he understood hers.
The meal was finished, they were lingering at the table over coffee and chocolates. Ava looked at Jack, Helen and Connie in turn, she rehearsed her opening line, then she began. ‘There’s something I need to tell you.’
Harry leapt out of his chair and joined her down the other end of the table.
‘There’s something I need to tell you,’ she said again. ‘You may have noticed –’
‘Ava’s not well,’ Harry cut in.
She looked at him and shook her head: this was her illness, these were her friends.
But he was determined. ‘Nothing is certain,’ he said, ‘nothing is conclusive. Considerable mystery surrounds her symptoms –’
‘But there is something wrong.’ She gave each word a pronounced shove.
Harry met her gaze. ‘Yes, there is probably something wrong – or rather it’s unlikely that there is nothing wrong.’
Connie, Jack and Helen looked confused – not surprised and certainly not shocked, just confused.
‘What is this illness?’ Helen finally said. ‘Is it serious?’
Ava silenced Harry with a firm hand to his arm. She had a job to do. ‘The neurologist referred to a form of semantic dementia.’
They all looked horrified, exactly as she had been when the neurologist first uttered the terrible word.
‘You’re too young for dementia,’ Connie said. ‘Aren’t you?’
Ava composed a wry smile. ‘Apparently not.’
‘No one knows the precise condition nor its cause,’ Harry said quickly, ‘nor any notion of its progression –’
‘Or treatment,’ Ava added.
‘You mean this illness can’t be fixed?’ Jack looked to be in pain.
Ava shook her head.
‘But what will happen to you?’
Again Harry went to respond and again Ava stopped him. ‘There are many different types of dementia,’ she said, as if reciting from a textbook. ‘They begin with different symptoms, but all of them,’ and she looked at Harry, ‘all of them end up exactly the same way.’
‘But Ava and I will manage,’ Harry said. His eyes were wet and he reached for her hand. ‘We will manage.’
Ava wanted to shake him off, not because she didn’t feel sorry for him, not because she was unmoved by those rarely seen tears, but she needed to get on with the job. Although as she took in the stunned, distressed faces of her friends, she realised there was probably nothing more to be done now. In a few days, after the news had settled, she would approach Helen.
‘You must have access to any number of lethal substances,’ Ava said, as she and Helen strolled through the university on their way to lunch the following week.
‘A smorgasbord of them,’ Helen replied. ‘Although more a well-stocked bank vault these days. The restricted stuff is kept under lock and key. It needs to be signed for in duplicate, in triplicate, in quadruplicate. It’s time-consuming and a blasted nuisance.’
When you have only one issue on your mind and there’s only one reason for making a statement or asking a question you assume your motives are transparent. Encouraged by Helen’s tone and taking for granted she knew the point of this conversation, all that was required, so Ava thought, was for the two of them to plan the heist.
‘So what would be the best way to get what we needed?’ And after the briefest pause, ‘I assume you know what would be the most effective?’
Helen stopped and turned to face Ava. She squinted behind her glasses. She spoke slowly, carefully. ‘Let me get this straight. You want me to supply you with something from the lab? Something lethal?’ She spoke as if the words themselves were poisonous.
Ava smiled and nodded.
Helen lowered her gaze and stood shaking her head through a long silence. ‘I can’t believe you’re asking me this, Ava,’ she said at last. ‘I couldn’t take – steal – materials from the lab.’ There was neither sadness nor apology in her voice, if anything she sounded affronted. ‘If I were discovered taking restricted substances, taking them illegally, my career would be finished. And even if I could get away with it, I wouldn’t do it. It’s entirely at odd
s with my professional ethics.’
With her comprehension not reliable these days, Ava did not at first trust what she was hearing. But Helen quickly dispelled any doubt.
‘I couldn’t steal poisons for you,’ she said. ‘It’d be professional suicide. I’m sorry, Ava,’ and she put her arms around her. ‘I hate what’s happening to you and I’d do anything to help, but not this.’
Ava could understand Harry and Jack: they couldn’t assist because they loved her too much. But Helen refused to help because she loved science too much. She shook herself out of Helen’s embrace. She was alone, entirely alone.
3.
When winter finally arrived it did so with a fanfare from Antarctica. July was cold and August was freezing, but the crisp icy days Ava had always loved had come too late. Harry bought her pots of cyclamen bursting with bright, beautiful flowers. Too late, she thought, too late, and left them to die. Two weeks passed until she could bear it no longer, the long slender stems drooping over the sides of the pots, the flowers shrivelling into morbid stickiness. She watered the plants, she fed them, she hovered over them and protected them, and all the while she longed for someone to do the same for her.
She was making plans slowly, but then everything was slow these days. And while she made her plans she had her consolations. Several times a day she would slip into her semi-conscious limbo state, so safe and silent and trustworthy. And she gave herself over to Harry, who looked after her lovingly and efficiently. He was working at home a good deal more in order to care for her and his ministrations helped them both.
And art was another of her consolations.
‘If I were to have collected anything,’ she said to Jack at a recent exhibition of contemporary Australian art, ‘it would have been paintings.’
They were standing in front of a small canvas, a shadowy cityscape of tall straight-edged buildings and what looked like a double-storey freeway ramp on one side. ‘And look there,’ she said, pointing to the window of one of the buildings. In the painted gloom was a human figure watching the scene beyond the window.
‘That’s me these days. Silently watching.’
And Jack was her final consolation. Three mornings a week he turned up just before ten as Harry was about to leave for the office. He relayed the latest gossip, he read to her from the newspaper, he told her stories she did not always remember from their shared past. When the weather was fine they would go for a walk, sometimes they went out for an early lunch; often they visited galleries and once a week he arrived with food and cooked the evening meal for her and Harry.
Jack these days had a future far more lavish than his past. As well as his essays, he was writing shorter articles on a range of topics: refugees and race riots, political leadership and personal expediency, the compromises of democracy, the threat to creativity in today’s cultural climate. The pleasures of regular completions, he told Ava, were so much greater than the fanfare every few years that accompanied a book.
Even his Islam specialty had taken a new direction following a forum where he had shared the stage with a young Australian-born Muslim. This woman, a lawyer, had later contacted him with the suggestion of a series of public conversations. ‘Not that you Western liberals have done much for us,’ she had been quick to add. But a male and a female, a Muslim and a Jew, would, she believed, lend distinctive and interesting flavours to their intellectual positions. But it was what they shared, she said, their liberal, moderate stance, that would prove to be their greatest strength. ‘Where we discuss and argue, where we employ reason and compromise, those with more extreme views would simply attack each other – if, that is, they were to talk at all.’
The first of the discussions had attracted a large and diverse audience – although not Harry, Jack told Ava. ‘It seems I’m still not producing the work he and NOGA expect of me.’ Ava ignored the comment as she had always ignored these asides about her husband. Two more discussions were planned with the woman lawyer and a follow-up series of articles under their joint authorship.
And Jack was playing his guitar again.
‘I’m so pleased about your music,’ Ava said one day as they sat at the kitchen bench eating a sandwich lunch.
He smiled. ‘Words and music, two of my great loves.’
And welling up from goodness knows where in her brain: ‘The two great imperishables.’
‘You truly believe that the best of words and music endure?’ Jack asked. And when she nodded, ‘And you want that for your own work?’
She took her time to put the words together properly. ‘It’s what any writer would want,’ she said finally. ‘I’ll be gone, but my books will live on.’
It was Ava’s suggestion he bring his guitar when he came to visit. His playing and singing were restful, she said, but at the same time she felt her senses were exercised.
‘When you play,’ she said, ‘I’m reminded there’s still some of my old self left.’
Often she would toss off these references to what was happening to her, and Jack would never know how to respond. Not even in his private thoughts could he consider the course of this illness, although looking at her it was easy to forget she was sick. She was still the most beautiful woman he knew. She did not look particularly tired, she did not look particularly pale, she was thinner, but her loosely flowing clothes helped camouflage this. When he questioned her weight loss, she said it would be masochistic to feed what was fast being wrecked.
So much time the two of them spent alone, and with all the sharp yearnings soft now like an old comforter, Jack found himself properly enjoying her company. She called herself a half-strength person and would refer to the old Ava as the real Ava – ‘not this ruin’, yet he was seeing her more fully than ever before. It was as if the two of them had finally settled into each other. And yet he knew how much she was suffering. She hated what she was becoming, she hated what was left. Even when she spoke like Ava of old she felt no pleasure.
‘A sentence or two in the old mould just grinds in the losses more harshly,’ she said. ‘I’m taunted by my used-to-be self.’
For him it was all too easy to forget what was happening to her, and then something would wrench him back.
‘Read me your latest article,’ she said one morning.
What she really meant was: Read it to me, Jack, because I can’t manage it myself.
He recalled her question of several months ago, whether he could help a sick friend end her life. He tried not to think how he would answer now. He hoped she would not ask.
CHAPTER 14: Into the Silence
1.
Ava had always been attached to weather, not simply as background to the movements of a day but as connective tissue to mood, and today was perfect – early spring, cool with a white sun and a crisp wind. Standing at the long window of her study she gazed down at the courtyard, observing it as one might a masterpiece. Leaves still yellow from last autumn lay in an impressionistic spotting on the dark garden beds. Along the shady boundary her azaleas all in flower were soft like a Renoir. Scattered across the paving were pots of colour, polyanthus and cinerarias just starting to bloom, and Harry’s cyclamens still going strong. She observed the scene with a pleasing appreciation as if she had all the time in the world. Rituals seemed appropriate at a time like this.
For some inexplicable reason it had to be done right, inexplicable because she was an atheist, although an increasingly shoddy one. With the passage of years she had found it impossible to ignore those unheralded blood-flushing intrusions of a presence or presences beyond earshot of rationality. That she was about to discover the truth brought her no satisfaction: it was a ridiculously high price to prove a belief. Yet the conviction it had to be done right remained, not in the sense of pulling it off, she was sure she would, but observing a certain form, a certain reverence for the life that had been filched from her. The right room, her desk and papers, her books, the cool weather, her old cashmere jumper, even the right view. The last view of life �
�� it sounded so melodramatic, but perhaps everything about death has a touch of melodrama, even the fading of a nonagenarian in bed, the shutting down of ancient organs, the lengthening pauses between breaths, the tiny splutters, the sudden stillness, the absolute end.
Through the years and several different Oxford dwellings Ava had always set up home in her study, each study arranged identically despite the rooms being larger or smaller, flanked by many windows or few, hot rooms, cold rooms, silent or noisy. Always there was her desk and chair, the stack of three drawers, her books installed in their usual configuration, the filing cabinet, the chipped mug she used as a pen holder, the same photos on display, the corkboard muffled with old notes, the mask from Venice, a stone frog the origin of which she had now forgotten.
And in a similar way she experienced home in her garden. Sometimes the garden had been just a cluster of pots or a window box, once there was the full regalia including a lawn, and these past few years this small courtyard garden. She wondered what would happen here after she was gone. Harry was no gardener, and besides, the house was too big for one person. Who might live here next? And would they preserve her garden? As a legacy there would be her books, yet the garden as an expression of self was a legacy too, an inexorably pleasurable one.
‘Inexorably pleasurable.’ She repeated the phrase aloud. How odd it sounded. And repeated it again and again until all she heard was a collection of sounds divorced from any meaning.
She turned away from the window as if that would remove the confusion, her poor brain struggling in the disease’s oily spill. For years she had pondered the notion of meaning without language; now she knew all about it but lacked the words to explain it.
There were times when she really could not believe what was happening and it would take a doctor’s appointment or the withered stump of a once-thriving recollection, or a book open but making no sense to confront her with the hard facts: she was losing her mind, there would be no repeal, she had a job to do. But mostly she had stayed on track, driven by a robust and unmerciful terror. She’d had to labour through each stage alone, making lists to fill in for her crippled memory and discarding them when each item had been crossed off. She laboured secretly and to be honest, resentfully, for she should not have to do this alone. But the major resentment was always of the thing itself: she should not have to do this at all.
Reunion Page 29
