Free Reunion by Andrea Goldsmith Page A

glass with its view to the riverside promenade. The stream of home-bound workers had been replaced by groups of sauntering youths. Some of the boys sported bare arms, yet it must be only seven or eight degrees out there. Tough and cool was their message, but the fact Jack was thinking cold and stupid just made him feel old again. So much made him feel old these days.
    He swapped his empty glass for a full one – his third, he reminded himself – and helped himself to a savoury from one of the mobile waiters. The food fell apart before it reached his mouth. He hated finger food and he hated standing around pretending to have a good time. The evening had hardly begun, he was hungry, he was drinking too quickly and there was no escape.
    He made his way across the room to the entrance and the book display he had noticed there. With his gaze hard ahead and sheltering his glass from the crush, he made it through the worst and into the lighter air of the foyer. And there she was, Ava, standing in front of the bookstand, oblivious to all around her. Ava, with his own The Reinvention of Islam in her hands, the new edition with the buy-me cover and Connie’s read-me preface.
    It is an extraordinary experience to chance on someone reading one of your books. It has the same sort of adrenalin-charged impact as when you come face to face with a long-lost friend. But to see your book in the hands of your beloved, she might be touching you, touching your bare skin. Jack felt the blood flushing through him, and inside his own shuddering self he was joined to her. It was a perfect stilled moment, then she looked up and saw him.
    There was a single month long ago when they were lovers, four glorious weeks when Jack knew perfection. As Ava beckoned to him, it was as if she were calling him to her side just as she had for that one perfect month when they were eighteen. And then the present muscled in.
    â€˜I’ve been reading you,’ she said, holding up his book. ‘You really were very good.’
    Such are the inadvertent condemnations of the past tense.
    There were a few hundred people only metres away but it felt to Jack as if he and Ava were alone. He stood close to her, close enough to feel proprietorial while she spoke about the reunion last night, the four of them together again and, gesturing towards the display, their books and achievements. As she talked, Jack was seized by the play of words and emotions across her face. Beauty shocks, beauty surprises, it is uncommon, exceptional. For him, beauty was, and would forever be, Ava Bryant.
    He had loved her first. And he knew she had loved him too. Why then had she chosen Harry? And why Fleur rather than him? Although the very fact of Fleur had always given him hope: if Ava could admit a lover there was still a chance for him. But as the affair dragged on year after year, seven long years with a husband and what seemed like a permanent lover,Jack’s own chances grew very thin indeed. Fleur, who had inspired him with hope, eventually added to his failure.
    Â 
    It was Jack who had introduced Fleur to Ava, just as years earlier he had introduced Harry to her. He had often wondered if others would have recognised such self-defeating acts before it was too late. He only wanted to help, to be useful to her.
    He had accrued several months of study leave and Ava had persuaded him to spend it in Oxford, his first visit back since gaining his doctorate. He had arrived to find her stranded in the holding pen between novels, and immediately took it upon himself to provide her with the stimulation to free up her imagination and start working again. One outing he planned was to a public lecture given by Fleur Macleish, a specialist in Indian antiquities. Three months later, with the affair in full heat, Jack had returned to Australia determined to keep half a world between him and Ava Bryant.
    Through her letters he had kept abreast of the affair’s numerous flare-ups