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Authors: Andrea Goldsmith

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Jack finds the whole idea abhorrent and he is sure Ava would too, but where once he would have tried to persuade Helen to change her mind, he won't bother now. Friendship is no longer the complete and coherent package it once was; both more clear-sighted and more browned about the edges it requires far greater understanding than its youthful progenitor.

Come and visit me, Jack
, Connie had written in a recent email.

Poor Connie, every moment's genius until the inevitable future seized him by the neck and began to squeeze.

I miss you, I miss us as a group
. And:
When did our friendship become old times?

Connie wrote of a gap where Ava used to be.
I'm aware of it even more than I was aware of her presence.
This was not lost opportunity, he insisted, but lost possibilities. Jack detected a
flatness in these communications, a resignation, but Connie was adamant: he had made the right choice in returning to his family.

How different they all had been at the reunion. Jack can still feel the texture of that evening: the terror of seeing Ava mingled with his desire, her easy duet with Harry, the carefree conversation of his oldest friends, and a sense of being locked in a scene in which he had no role. Looking back on that night and all the nights preceding it, it was as if, for him, love and friendship were a one-way ticket not to the next stop, nor even the next suburb, but right to the end of the line.

He had always assumed he loved Ava best. Loved her better than did Connie or Helen, loved her better than Harry. But he had just loved her more exclusively.

He crosses the road and enters the grounds of the university, the place of their beginning. What now? he wonders. What now with Ava? After decades of wanting nothing other than to devote himself to her, the answer to Harry's proposal is no longer so clear. He has read about the strange neurological tricks of a damaged brain that cause people to know that one side of their body is paralysed but have no real sense of the existence of that side. It is how he feels about Ava. He knows she is dead but he cannot quite believe it. When the bewilderment overwhelms, he reaches for her fictions, but then he has always felt more at home in her work than he ever felt with her — until those last months when finally he shaped his love to something she truly wanted. He came to their friendship too late. But there are the books. The only life remaining.

He has no photographs of those last days. None of them do. Yet he pictures her easily: Ava perched on the verandah
of her house, Ava stretched on the couch in all her lovely lushness, Ava in her courtyard, Ava strolling through the cemetery, Ava listening while he played his guitar. And Ava asking whether he could help a loved one end their life. Did he let her down? Jack has posed the question so many times and still he is not convinced that if she wanted to die (and, unlike Minnie, he will never be sure she did), she understood why he could not help her. Although he knows she valued his visits those last months, that they gave her life when the rest of life was wearing thin.

It is quiet here in the grounds of the university. The library is lit up and through the glass he sees the night students at work. There are people walking the paths, shadowy figures and solitary like him. The wind has freshened, life itself rushes into his face. He picks up his speed, he begins to run. He feels his heart racing, the knots fall away. He passes familiar buildings, he moves swiftly through this landscape of his past.

And now he leaves the campus, a lone man in his middle years streaming through the streets, back to the city centre, across the river and into St Kilda Road. He passes the Botanic Gardens where he spent so much time with Ava; he is skimming the asphalt, like skating or flying. He runs and runs, pulling away from the past. Finally he slows down, finally he stops. He waits at a tram stop outside a block of flats he has never before noticed, a tatty oddity amongst the glassy towers. His head is so clear he sees everything tonight.

The tram picks him up and carries him through the darkness to the terminus. He disembarks and walks the short distance home. The flat is still warm after a day of sunshine. He switches on lamps and shuts the blinds, then he collects Ava's novels and settles on the couch. He has no regrets. He rests
one hand outstretched on her books, and the other curls in that vulnerable human hollow above the heart. Early friendships are cemented with the hardest glue, Ava used to say. But time has the hardest grip of all. Jack closes his eyes and sees himself as he once saw Ava, one hand grasped to the rail of a speeding train as it hurtles into the future.

My partner, Dorothy Porter, died on 10 December 2008 after a brief illness. She was healthy all through the writing of
Reunion
, she was healthy when the novel went into production in late 2007. We looked forward to celebrating together the publication of
Reunion
in 2009.

Both Dorothy and I believe in the power of fiction to take one into the hearts and minds of characters who owe their existence to the author's imagination.
Reunion
is a work of fiction. None of the happenings in the novel are drawn from my own personal loss of late 2008.

About the Author

Andrea Goldsmith originally trained as a speech pathologist and was a pioneer in the development of communication aids for people unable to speak.

Her first novel,
Gracious Living
, was published in 1989. This was followed by
Modern Interiors
, then
Facing the Music
,
Under the Knife
and
The Prosperous Thief
, which was shortlisted for the 2003 Miles Franklin Award.

Her literary essays have appeared in
Heat
,
Meanjin
,
Australian Book Review
,
Best Australian Essays
and numerous anthologies. She has taught creative writing throughout Australia, and has mentored several new writers. She edited an anthology written by The Burnt Fingers Collective, a group of people with gambling problems.

She lives in inner Melbourne.

Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollins
Publishers

First published in Australia in 2009
This edition published in 2011
by HarperCollins
Publishers
Australia Pty Limited
ABN 36 009 913 517
www.harpercollins.com.au

Copyright © Andrea Goldsmith 2009

The right of Andrea Goldsmith to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the
Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.

This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the
Copyright Act 1968
, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

HarperCollins
Publishers
Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street, Sydney NSW 2000, Australia
31 View Road, Glenfield, Auckland 0627, New Zealand
A 53, Sector 57, Noida, UP, India
77–85 Fulham Palace Road, London, W6 8JB, United Kingdom
2 Bloor Street East, 20th floor, Toronto, Ontario M4W 1A8, Canada
10 East 53rd Street, New York NY 10022, USA

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Goldsmith, Andrea, 1950 –.

Reunion/Andrea Goldsmith

ISBN: 978-0-7322-8784-9 (pbk.)

ISBN: 978-0-7304-5088-7 (epub)

Interpersonal relations – Fiction.

Reunions – Fiction.

A823.3

Cover design by Nada Backovic Designs

Cover images: woman by esthalto/Matthieu Spohn; group of friends by Supernova/Getty Images; frame by Adam Radosavljevic/iStockphoto

Photograph of Andrea Goldsmith © Alden Ford

Epigraph from
Open Closed Open
by Yehuda Amichai © Georges Borchardt, Inc., New York; quote in “Chapter 6: Universal Fool” from ‘This Be the Verse' from
High Windows
by Philip Larkin © Faber and Faber, London; quote in “Chapter 6: Universal Fool” from ‘Lazarus Not Raised' in
Selected Poems
, 1950–1975 by Thom Gunn © Faber and Faber, London; quote in “Chapter 6: Universal Fool” from ‘Heptonstall' in
Three Books: Remains of Elmet, Cave Birds, River
by Ted Hughes © Faber and Faber, London; quote in “Chapter 6: Universal Fool” from ‘Letters to Live Poets, XXI' in
New and Selected Poems, 1960–1990
by Bruce Beaver © UQP; quote in “Chapter 6: Universal Fool” from ‘Dust to Dust' in
Selected Poems
by Gwen Harwood © Collins/Angus & Robertson; quote in “Chapter 6: Universal Fool” from ‘Musée des Beaux Arts' in
The Penguin Poets. Selected by the Author
© W.H. Auden; quote in “Chapter 7: Bondage” from
Errata:
an examined life
by George Steiner © Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London.

BOOK: Reunion
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