Reunion (29 page)

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.'

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 and 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.

He touched his head. The pain had coagulated in his right temple and when he added the spices to the onions it flared. But like coffee, curries could be kind to migraines, so he threw in some more spices and put up with the pain. Please, he prayed to an unknown being as non-believers
in extremis
tend to do, please make this headache disappear.

Linda sometimes could. There would be a hefty dose of aspirin and strong coffee at the first signs of a migraine and she would stroke his head, bending the hairs close to the tender scalp and stepping her fingers up and down the back of his neck. His wife was a no-nonsense sort of person but often very effective.

Some women are head-strokers and some like Sara are not. Although it was Sara's difference from Linda, her difference from everyone he knew that underscored her attraction. He had always been drawn to the new. (‘Everyone is,' Linda had said during one of their recent disagreements. ‘Far more difficult is finding newness, new interest in what you see every day.' She had paused before adding, ‘Definitely not your speciality.') Sara was turned up high in a way that in others would be overwrought but in her was exciting. He knew his friends disapproved, that they believed him to be mesmerised by her youth, but the problem, if indeed there was a problem
had nothing to do with Sara; rather, when it came to loving attention he was a glutton. His mother's fault of course, who had given him far too much love when he was a child, burdening him with an impossibly large appetite.

His three wives, Rosalie, Linda, even Susan the brief disaster in the middle, had all tried to give him what he wanted, and for a time he made it appear as if it were enough. Rosalie would have eventually tossed it in if he had not pushed her first, and how much happier she had been with his replacement; he left Susan to a childcare worker at the crèche; but Linda was not the sort ever to admit defeat – although, as it turned out, neither was she fool enough to remain where she was not wanted. But it would be different with Sara. He twisted around to look at her. She was chatting online to her sister and talking on her mobile to a friend, she was lit up and laughing, all of her was laughing. Sara believed in plundering life for all it could give; she feasted on passion. And while today's passion could quickly turn into tomorrow's leftovers, it thrilled him that she was constantly on the move. Sara filled him to the brim, she gave him plenty.

He added stock to the curry paste and started up a smooth stirring. He was determined to make this relationship work. In the past he had loved well and to his mind enjoyably, but never steadily. His mother's generation, although not his mother, would say he lacked backbone. Linda accused him of shallowness. But if anything was to account for his changing partners it was his poor tolerance for boredom. He glanced at Sara with all her paraphernalia, it was a quality he shared with her generation.

He poured in the remainder of the stock, slowly brought it to the boil, then turned the gas back to simmer. The fish would
go in once the spices had cooked through. He made himself another large coffee, and with Sara still on the phone, he went into the living room to lie down. He tried to organise the cushions so as not to aggravate his head, but the pain fisted inside his skull no matter what he did. In the end he sat up and switched on the mid-evening news. There followed reports from Burundi, Somalia, the Middle East, insurgents – again – in Chechnya, terrorists in half a dozen different hotspots, unstoppable fires, runaway floods.

‘How can you watch that stuff?' Sara said from the doorway. ‘It's so depressing.'

An extravagant user of rhetorical questions, he knew she didn't expect an answer – and besides politics provided little common ground for them. So he simply smiled in her direction and turned back to the TV; a moment later she returned to the kitchen.

The drugs began to kick in and he plunged into one of those deep, irresistible, fifteen-minute sleeps, more like passing out than normal sleep. When he awoke, Sara was sitting next to him still hooked up to her devices, watching a reality show in which people forced into embarrassing situations shouted abuse at one another. Sara had assured him it had a cult following, and while he had tried to see the attraction, as far as he was concerned the show was tripe.

Nothing is perfect, he told himself as he rose from the couch to check on the curry, and life would be the lesser if it were. He lifted the lid off the pot. He stirred, he sniffed, he risked a taste; just a burn in the throat from the drugs. With his spirits raised he went into the bedroom to change and freshen up. He was aware of that grateful sloughing off of deadness when a migraine is receding. He felt lighter, more spirited than he had
for days; maybe he had beaten this one, the cycle finally exhausted, and then he caught sight of himself in the wardrobe mirror and was felled more efficiently than by the most determined migraine.

It was one of those glimpses of the unprepared self, when the gaze is brutally objective. The face that confronted him was not the face he saw each morning as he shaved and moisturised and combed his hair. This image was recognisably himself, yet foreign and horrifying. There were bruised pouches beneath the eyes, trenches joined the nose to the corners of the mouth, harsh lines cut through the cheeks, jowls souped towards the neck, the neck itself sagged, and there was something shrivelled about the entire figure which simply did not gel with his version of himself.

Connie was appalled to think others might see him like this, that Sara might see him like this. Inside his skin he felt as always. Not for him the tiny crepuscular world of the old, not ever for him that obliviousness to everything beyond the stifling familiarity of the old man's hearth.

He forced himself to stand in front of the mirror. He straightened himself up, he cocked his head slightly to the side, he coached the neck out of its sags, he arranged the mouth into a part-smile and the rest of the smile he put around the eyes. The lines softened, the face filled out, he looked altogether firmer. Now he concentrated on the feel of the arrangement, to imprint it over that ashen, ancient parasite of himself. Never again did he want to see that used-up old man.

 

When he returned to the lounge, the yelps and groans of the TV show were blaring into an empty room. He switched the television off. Sara's laptop was propped on the couch and
playing across the screen was her Sara-as-mermaid screensaver replete with glistening tail and bare breasts. Her mobile phone was gone, but then Sara never separated from that.

From down the hall, past the bedroom he heard the slam of a cupboard door, a drawer opening, the squeak of floorboards in the hall outside the bathroom, the faint clatter of make-up containers – Sara never shut the bathroom door – and finally the flush of the toilet. Connie heard these noises with the same heightened but distant awareness he had to sounds in an audience when he was giving a lecture. A short time later she was standing in the doorway of the lounge room, smelling sweet, lips glossed, stretches of shiny skin around a silvery garment. She was clearly going out.

‘I thought we were having dinner here,' he said. And after a hesitation, ‘Together.'

‘And we were. But Jimmy has just called and he's at No-Names and feeling miserable and he absolutely needs me, and of course you could come too, but I know it's not your scene.' And before Connie could do anything so embarrassing as to negotiate, she stepped forward, kissed him on the mouth, squeezed a buttock – ‘I won't be late, and that's a promise' – and was gone.

There was an amplified silence whenever Sara quit a room. Connie immediately switched the TV back on, turned the sound to a murmur in deference to his head, and then realised the headache had completely disappeared. That at least was something. He turned off the heat under the curry, he wasn't hungry, and even though he knew it to be unwise poured himself a scotch. The TV was an irritation and he switched it off again and sat on the couch sipping his drink, wanting to metamorphose into Wallace Stevens's ‘thinking stone'.

The scotch mixed with the drugs and he fell asleep again, another fifteen minutes, but this time one of those calm sleeps that feel so much longer and a dream about Linda in their early days before the boys arrived. It was winter and she was shovelling fresh snow from the path. On either side of her, the drifts were piled high and white, and a delicate white piping along the black branches of the trees. She was wearing the same red jacket she wore in the photo he used to keep on his desk and she was laughing. He was not visible in the dream but the perspective was his. The satisfaction of it rolled through him even while he slept.

When he awoke he no longer wanted to be alone. Briefly he considered joining Sara and her friends, but common sense kicked in and he walked around to Ava's place instead. The front of the house was in darkness and he went around the back expecting to find her in her study. The living room lights were blazing, the curtains were not drawn. Connie stopped and stared, a frozen moment before collecting himself and pulling back into the shadows. Harry and Ava were on the couch. Harry was cradling Ava like a baby, stroking her hair, bending over her and talking to her. Connie felt a physical revulsion. This was not how he wanted to see Ava, and certainly not how he wanted to see her with Harry.

He rushed from the courtyard and hurried home. Baby Ava and bovine Harry: had the marriage always been like this? Such ghastly possibilities he couldn't bear to think about it. He poured himself another scotch and drank it far too quickly. He was chafing in the empty house. He tried reading, he tried the TV, he doodled with the script for his TV series. Ava clinging to the gruesome Harry. Sara just walking out. Where exactly
did he fit in her life? Was Sara tiring of him? He missed his boys. The script was rubbish. He was rubbish. In the end he took a Valium and went to bed.

At three o'clock he awoke. Sara was not yet home. The Sara-appropriate action would be to text her, but he lacked both the energy and the goodwill for such a ridiculous form of communication. At six o'clock he awoke again. No headache – and still alone in the house. He showered and dressed and went out for a slow breakfast. He hoped Sara would return while he was gone. She did not. But as he stood in his study wondering what to do, a text came through: Jimmy very upset, too many drinks, stayed with him, home later – in her own inimitable shorthand.

It was now after nine, and knowing Harry would have left for the office, Connie again walked around to Ava's. A multiplicity of reasons: he didn't want to be alone, Ava could always fast-track to the core of a problem, and he needed to replace the pathetic curled-up figure in Harry's arms with a more congenial image. She answered the door within moments of his knocking, smiling that whole-face smile of hers and a waft of her lily-of-the-valley perfume as they embraced. Ava was floating in sky-blue over faded jeans and bore no resemblance to the creature in Harry's arms last night. Although she did look pale, and as soon as they were settled on the couch he asked if she was quite well. She was so slow in answering there was time enough to worry.