Reunion

by Andrea Goldsmith

  She disembarked at the next stop and as she walked back she was filled with hope. The block had survived, her fortunes had turned, she would find Stephen and he would help her. A new entrance had been installed with a board of buzzers and a list of tenants. She propped herself in front of the names and looked down the list for Stephen Webb. She started again at the top saying the name of each tenant aloud. She zoned in on the number of his old flat. There was no Stephen Webb here.

  All of the tenants appeared to be companies; perhaps no one lived in these flats any more – although given her experience with Stephen, perhaps no one lived here twenty-five years ago either. And how foolish to think he would still be here, her mind on a fantasy rampage and not to be trusted. And because she realised how stupid she had been, she could not feel much in the way of disappointment.

  She smoothed herself down – even a solitary woman nicely if a little flamboyantly dressed was sufficient to arouse suspicion these days – and walked outside. The car access was an open drive with a boom gate; whatever Brinsley Close had become it was not security conscious. She hesitated just a moment, and then she entered.

  She was standing in the centre of a rectangle. Bushes, a bit of grass, a tidy but uninteresting garden. And exactly the same sense she’d had more than a quarter of a century ago of being enclosed by the flats, three storeys high on all four sides, enclosed and exposed. Who is looking at me? she was thinking now. Who is looking at me? she had wondered then.

  Four weeks had passed since Ava had met Stephen Webb in the second-hand bookshop. She had read all her new books and written the reviews he had requested. She kept changing her mind about ringing him but, in the end, taunted by a future that was still out of reach, she collected her courage and called.

  He seemed so pleased to hear from her. ‘Come and see my library,’ he said again.

  He offered to meet her in the city and accompany her to the flat, but she refused: she wanted to appear independent, she wanted to feel independent too. And yet her nervousness was so great as she boarded the tram, she could hardly draw breath. She felt in her pocket for the reviews. She’d worked hard on them, and what if he didn’t ask to read them? What if she had misjudged this entirely?

  It was a Sunday, the traffic was light, the tram sped along St Kilda Road and less than ten minutes later passed his block of flats. She deliberately missed the stop. During the walk back she reminded herself that no one was forcing her to come here and nothing was stopping her from turning back. And she did hesitate at the entrance, just a moment before walking through to the patchy garden. She gazed at the flats on all four sides; his unit was located on the first level, he had said, on the northern side. And again she wavered: she could guess what she was letting herself in for, and while that was far from reassuring, the man might be crazy or violent as well. She waited just long enough to recite what had become her motto: if you risk nothing, you’ll gain nothing. She was not here in all innocence; innocence would not be here at all. She found the stairs and made her way along the walkway to his door.

  There was no doorbell, she knocked on the door and stepped back to wait. He took his time, sufficient for her to rehearse her fears, sufficient for her to run back along the passage, down the stairs, across the garden and into St Kilda Road. But she stayed exactly where she was, breathing down her jitters and feeling her pocket yet again for the reviews.

  At last the door opened and there he was, large and smiling. He seemed to fill the doorway. He was not wearing a jacket and tie; his shirt, white with a dark blue stripe and causing a shuddering in her eyes, was open at the neck. So pleased you could come, he said with fastidious courtesy – adult courtesy was how it seemed to her – and invited her in.

  Three years would pass before she learned how Stephen had prepared for that first visit, how in the days since her phone call he had moved bookcases and a couple of hundred books into the flat, sufficient to cover an entire wall. Over the next few years he would bring in hundreds more. But on that first day a wall of books more than satisfied as a private library.

  He offered her a Coke, he offered lemonade, but she asked for black coffee; it was important, she believed, to appear grown up – that he did not want her grown up was only a later learning. As for the black coffee, what she had assumed to be a sophisticated choice turned out to be almost undrinkable. The biscuits he offered were of a type she had never seen before; with a tiny pattern of two-tone checks each looked like a miniature draughtboard. If it had been possible she would have nibbled with geometric precision, eating the chocolate squares separately from the vanilla ones – not simply for the different tastes, but an appealing neatness in the messy situation in which she now found herself. (Years later when she saw Jack eating cherries as if each were significantly different from the others, eating in such a way to provoke a false sense of order in his jumbled world, she recalled Stephen’s biscuits. As if food could reduce disorder in her life, or indeed anywhere in the well-fed world.)

  She had missed lunch in order to cover her fares so she was hungry, nonetheless she took just two of the biscuits, an acceptably adult number she thought. As she ate she looked about her. The kitchen benches were bare, there were no mugs on the hooks nor utensils in the wall brackets. The bathroom door was ajar, no bottles on the shelf and a single towel over the rail; there was a double bed, a side-table and a solitary lamp in the bedroom; and in the living room, just the two chairs, a fold-up table, a desk and the wall of books. There was none of the clutter of a lived-in home, none of the activity of a busy office either, the place seemed to be waiting for something. The curtains were the only oddity: stiff and new with bright splashy colours they were like neon signs in a desert.

  He saw her looking at them,

  ‘Ersatz Marimekko,’ he said.

  She had no idea what he meant but pretended to understand. Later she would never pretend, later she learned she could ask him anything. But for the first few months it was as if she were walking blindfolded, and she moved forward only very cautiously.

  They drank the terrible coffee and ate the patterned biscuits, he in his chair on one side of the small table and she in hers on the other. She had dressed in jeans and a crimson and black zippered jacket. The jacket had been a find – literally – in a tram shelter. It was the right size and the height of fashion and she had wavered only briefly, for if she hadn’t taken it someone else would have. Now under his barrage of questions and despite the coolness of the flat she was hot. But with a scrappy shirt beneath the jacket she was stuck with the discomfort.

  He began with questions about school, then moved on to her interests. When he asked about her family, she told him very little apart from presenting her long-absent father as the prototype of the actively involved dad. She seemed to know how to be careful and how to control and that both were required. She was more forthcoming about her studies, but generally she never liked talking about herself.

  When he moved on to her ambitions, she stood up and took the reviews from her pocket,

  ‘You can read these now.’

  ‘Of course, of course,’ he said. It was the only time he appeared flustered.

  He took his time over her reviews, and while she realised from his comments there was much she had failed to notice, he seemed genuinely impressed. But it was when he turned to his own library, his own books, that she knew she had been right to come. He would select a book and start with a personal statement. ‘This book,’ – The Secret Garden – ‘taught me about loneliness, about friendship too. And this,’ – The Catcher in the Rye – ‘made me feel better about being the odd sort of child I was.’ The Longest Journey ‘convinced me never to compromise my dreams’. A Tale of Two Cities ‘showed the power of books to take me anywhere at any time in history, and into the hearts and minds of people I would never meet in a lifetime’.

  With each book he would provide a brief description of the characters and the story, situate the novel within the context of the author’s career
and the prevailing times, mention the main themes and then place the book in her hands for her to browse.

  On that first visit she selected Patrick White’s Riders in the Chariot – it became one of her favourite books, and Wuthering Heights because Stephen said it was one of the best novels ever written. She also took home the Penguin Book of English Verse because Stephen pressed it on her, despite her confident ‘I don’t like poetry.’ He was sure, he said, there would be a few poems in this anthology that would appeal. And he was right, as he invariably was, although it worried her that of all the authors in the collection only a handful were women and most of these had received very short entries.

  ‘It’s up to you to change that,’ he said, as if he already knew she wanted to be a writer.

  She refused to let him drive her home. She knew it must appear that she came and went as she pleased. He walked her to the door and rather than be at the mercy of how he was planning to say goodbye, she put out her hand like in the movies.

  ‘Thank you for the books,’ she said. And before turning away, she added, ‘I’ll ring you when I’ve finished them.’

  From the beginning she set the limits and he obeyed. And for the first year it was innocent enough. There was always the lavish attention, his sweetness, and so much affection, more in a single year than in the fifteen that had gone before. And he was always polite and always gentle. ‘I’d never hurt you,’ he said, ‘never.’ While they talked he might stroke her hair which felt very nice, her back too, and even though there were things she didn’t much like, neither were they so bad that she couldn’t manage.

  ‘I can do this,’ she told herself. ‘I can do this.’

  She thought of it as a friendship, an unusual and secret friendship. It never seemed wrong to her. She liked him and he loved her – and that made all the difference. And the sex was bound to happen with someone, and how much better with a man who was kind and gentle rather than a clumsy boy her own age.

  And so generous. He gave her scores of books, he bought her clothes and jewellery, he gave her the leather satchel she still used today and the fountain pen from his own collection. He only collected Parker Duofolds, nothing else. He stressed ‘nothing else’ as if he were embarrassed by the idea of collecting, and though he tried to explain his unease, how issues of power and control often fuelled collecting, she failed to see his point. In the end he gave her John Fowles’s The Collector to read. With Stephen there was always a book to explain, even if like The Collector it raised an entirely different set of questions.

  During the last two years of high school she and Stephen met every couple of weeks. However, once she started university they saw each other far more frequently. She would leave her friends at the pub or a café to meet him, mostly at his flat but also at galleries and theatres and interesting restaurants. He taught her about art from Rubens to Rothko and music from Bach to Glass; he told her about the absurdists and modern minimalism in the theatre, and he guided her through the European film classics. He took her to Canberra – it was the first time she had travelled in a plane; they visited Sydney several times, and Adelaide and Brisbane too. They always stayed in good hotels; she checked in as his daughter and no one ever questioned it.

  One time in Adelaide she quipped that Humbert Humbert would have fared better if he had stayed in posher places. Stephen was appalled. This, he said, you and me, can’t possibly be compared with Humbert and Lolita.

  Ava was convinced he would have been less affronted if there had been less truth to her words.

  And when she asked whether he had other girls like her: ‘Why is it so hard for you to understand,’ he said. ‘I love you.’

  ‘But will you still love me when I’m twenty-one? When I’m twenty-five?’

  Stephen had said he would always love her. But would he love a woman in her middle years with a rare form of dementia? She looked up at the flat that had once been his and down at the woman she had become. He might not even recognise her. She hardly recognised herself.

  She walked back into St Kilda Road and, lacking the energy to get herself on to the right tram, she hailed a taxi. With the prospect of an afternoon alone suddenly intolerable, she gave the address of NOGA. Thirty minutes later she was sitting with Harry in his office, sharing his sandwiches. He was so pleased with her surprise visit that after lunch he collected his things and together they left the building. They made their way across the river to the aquarium, and once inside went immediately to their favourite area, an open space surrounded on all sides by floor-to-ceiling pools full of flamboyant, floating sea creatures. There were fish large and small here, even sharks and stingrays, and swaying underwater plants among vast rocky shelves. They sat on a bench in the centre of the space holding hands, she leaning lightly against him.

  ‘We should come here more often,’ Harry said.

  And even as she agreed, she ticked off yet another experience she would never have again.

  2.

  It was not so difficult to find Stephen via the web, even for Ava who had clung to the dust and clamour of the real world long after most people had migrated to cyberspace.

  ‘The web’s no different from libraries,’ Harry had insisted years ago, ‘and far more convenient.’

  Ava had disagreed and still did. For a start, there was that plural – libraries – each with its own distinctions, its own delights. And the issue of cataloguing, finite and reliable for libraries, but liable to propel you in entirely the wrong direction on the web. While writing her last novel, Ava had done a search on hermaphrodites and afterwards had been inundated with email advertisements about ‘shemales’. It was all very interesting at first, but soon she realised that having entered the world of cybersex nothing short of changing her cyber-identity would stop the web’s fetishists and erotomaniacs from pestering her. As she pointed out to Harry, no librarian had ever stalked her because of catalogues she had browsed or books she had borrowed. And there was the surprise of libraries. You’re wandering the stacks, a book catches your eye, a must-read book which no amount of refined searching could have led you to.

  Ava far preferred libraries – unless she knew exactly what she wanted. And what she wanted now was to find Stephen Webb.

  The afternoon stretched ahead with at least four hours before Harry returned from work. But with nothing easy or routine any more, a task that might once have taken thirty minutes could now occupy a whole day. You have to manage it, she told herself as she collected the thermos of coffee Harry had left for her and crossed the courtyard into her study. You have to manage.

  It was not simply that Harry was spending more time at home, she had no privacy any more. She would leave the bathroom and he would be waiting for her in the hall; she would be reading in the courtyard and look up to see him watching from the living room; and worst of all he would slip into her study without her noticing and stand behind her, the computer screen in clear view. There was no malice in his actions, he loved her far too much for that. He was determined to watch over her and guard her from all harm.

  ‘But it won’t be me,’ she had protested over and over again. ‘It’s not me already.’

  From the moment he knew she was seriously ill, his love kicked into overdrive. And while it appeared as if it were devoted to her, it was, as love so often is, primarily in service to his own interests. She quite clearly wanted to die, he quite clearly did not want her to. His hovering, his thermos of coffee, his neat luncheon sandwiches, his neck rubs served his desires far more than hers.

  Several weeks ago he had arrived home to find one of the elements on the stove alight. Ava could not say how long it had been burning, she could not even remember turning it on. Within twenty-four hours Harry had fitted the stove with a childproof safety feature, he had emptied the spa tub of water and he had organised a weekly care schedule.

  ‘I don’t want you to be alone,’ he said, sticking the schedule on the door of the fridge.

  She glanced at it. ‘No shortage of peop
le to baby-sit me.’ And then reaching in deep and pulling hard on the person she used to be, she waved her hand at the timetable. ‘I don’t want these people.’ And pointing to Jack’s name, ‘Even Jack’s no attraction if he’s just one of the guards.’

  ‘Do it for me,’ Harry said, knowing how hard it would be for her to refuse him. ‘Otherwise I’ll worry. I’ll feel unable to go to the office.’

  She would not give in. ‘You’re leaving home late most mornings, and Jack’s already here three mornings a week. So give me the remainder of the mornings.’

  She argued, she pleaded and in the end he gave her the mornings.

  Then she asked for the afternoons, she begged for the afternoons. She challenged Harry’s exclusive provenance over emotional persuasion by arguing she was tired after lunch and more likely to rest if there was no one around.

  It took all her ingenuity, but Harry finally gave her a part of each afternoon.

  Helen insisted on being involved. ‘Put me down for the late-afternoon shift,’ she said to Harry.

  ‘How late?’ asked Ava, for having fought so hard for her afternoon hours she was loath to give up a minute, and would not have considered it for anyone other than one of her old friends. And no, she did not forgive Helen, she did not forgive any of them. But she had always believed too much is made of forgiveness, that one unforgivable act is rarely enough to toss away an essential relationship.

  It was in the spirit of the friendship they used to have that Helen asked for three late-afternoon slots and it was in the same spirit that Ava agreed to Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays from four to six. But the friendship which was now theirs meant that three times a week quickly became two, twice a week became once, and the last two weeks had seen Helen cancelling altogether.

  ‘You do understand?’ she said to Ava over the phone. ‘It’s my work.’