Jordan’s arm shot out and nearly hit her in the face. She continued on, undeterred. Her hand stroked the front of his boxer shorts.
Jordan didn’t know what to do. He was paralyzed with confusion. He and Ava hadn’t made love in four years. Four years. Since before Ernie. After Ernie, Ava hadn’t wanted to. She was too sad at first, and too angry, too bitter and resentful. After a few months Jordan had tried to reason with her: they could try again for another baby. They could make this a story with a happy ending. Surely that was what she wanted?
“If we have another baby, it won’t be Ernie,” Ava said. “It won’t be Ernie!”
He knew what she meant. He saw that his own desire to have another child was nothing more than a selfish way of exonerating himself. He didn’t really want another child.
There was no sex at all that first year. During the second year Jordan tried again. He tried romance: on nights when Jake was sleeping over at the Alistair house, he lit candles and poured champagne. But he got nowhere with Ava. By then her anger and sadness had hardened into an enamel shell of indifference. She read Moby-Dick, she watched Home and Away, she didn’t care about anything. She asked him just to please leave her alone. Not even touch her.
Jordan came to terms with the fact that his intimate life with his wife was over. He threw himself into his work and raising Jake; he made sure he was so tired every night that all he wanted to do was sleep. Eventually Ava moved into Ernie’s nursery. He never entered; she never invited him in.
Then everything happened with Zoe. Did he need to explain how it felt to have a woman to love again? Someone to hold hands with, someone to kiss, someone to caress? He had been starving for affection, for physicality, for touch-and Zoe fed him.
Did he feel guilty about his affair with Zoe?
Yes.
He had striven his whole life to differentiate himself from his father, but he was cheating on Ava just as Rory Randolph had cheated on his mother. But, Jordan noted, there were differences. Ava had shut him out; Ava didn’t want him, and for years he had lived like a monk. He never thought that Ava might return to him in this way.
Now here she was, stroking him. She was making a purring noise. If he made love to her now, it would be like having sex with a total stranger. But it was a moot point, because his body wasn’t responding anyway. He was headachy and hung over from his afternoon at the pub, and Ava smelled like a dirty ashtray. She’d been smoking again-probably with her sister May and her brother Marco, but maybe with her ex-flame Roger Polly; maybe Roger Polly had showed up at Heathcote Park to play surrogate husband. Jordan couldn’t summon the energy to care. He was exhausted. But those were just excuses. He was a different man now than he had been then. Ava had come back to him, but it was too late.
“Ava,” he whispered.
She shushed him. Her hand, insistent, slid under his boxers. She wanted this to work. And didn’t he want it to work too? Wasn’t that why he’d brought her here? So she would be happy again? So they could try to reconcile?
She gave up after a few minutes and rolled over.
“You don’t want me,” she said.
He closed his eyes and tried to remember the woman he had fallen in love with: the volleyball player in the string bikini with the ruthless serve and the bright smile. He tried to remember the young woman at the far end of her mother’s table, safely surrounded by her tribe. All he had wanted back then was to be able to touch her leg under the table, but she was too far away. Unattainable. It had driven him mad.
But that Ava was gone. And that Jordan was gone. Now they were just two older, sadder people who had done years and years’ worth of damage to each other.
Jordan opened his mouth to speak. But what to say? She would recognize an excuse. This was a big moment. It was, Jordan realized, the moment the whole trip had been about. He wished he were better prepared. All he was armed with was the stark truth.
“I can’t,” he said.
She kicked him, hard, under the covers. His shin hurt, but he didn’t make a sound. He could hear Ava next to him, breathing.
“They all asked about you, you know.”
“I know,” Jordan said. “Jake told me.”
“And what was I supposed to say? ‘Jordan didn’t come because he hates you. He fucking hates your guts, Mum, because you threw away his beachplum jam.’ ” Ava’s voice was nasty, but curiously, Jordan relaxed. The Ava who had tried to arouse him was a stranger, but this Ava he recognized.
He sat up. He could barely see anything of her in the dark, but he sensed her sliding out of bed. He saw the ghostly white of her tank top, the shadow of her legs. “I don’t hate anyone’s guts,” he said calmly.
“You didn’t come because you never come. You’re never around. You never once came back with me here to visit. Never once in twenty years, Jordan. You were always working. Always at the newspaper. God, how I despise that newspaper!” Ava said. “You know I never read a single page of it after Ernie died. Not a word.”
Jordan felt stunned by this. He hadn’t realized that Ava refused to read the newspaper. His newspaper.
“I offered to come back here with you after Ernie died,” Jordan said. “Remember, I mentioned it to you…”
“I didn’t want to come after Ernie died, Jordan,” Ava said. “How would that have felt? All of my sisters and brothers with their broods of beautiful, perfect children, and me showing up just after burying the baby I had waited twelve years for.”
“Okay, Ava, yes. Fine, I get it.”
“The only reason you offered to bring me back here,” Ava said, “was that you felt guilty.”
There was that word. Jordan had chewed on it all afternoon at the pub.
“Yes,” he said. “You’re right. I felt guilty.”
“Because you weren’t home!” she screamed. “Because at the one moment in my life when I needed you most-the very most, Jordan, a life- and-death situation-you weren’t there!”
“Ava,” he said. She was pacing the room now, shaking her hands. Probably she wanted a cigarette. “Ava, it would have made no difference if I’d been home. Ernie still would have died, Ava.”
“He was in distress. You might have heard him if you’d been home! You might have been able to save him!”
“No,” Jordan said. He couldn’t accept that he might have had the power to save Ernie and had failed. “No, Ava, things wouldn’t have been different.”
“But they might have,” she said. She was crying now. “We’ll never know.”
“No!” Jordan roared.
“We’ll never know!” Ava said. “But I will always wonder. I! Will! Always! Wonder!”
“I’m sorry!” Jordan said. “Is that what you want? I am sorry, Ava. I’ve never been sorrier about anything in my life! I was at work! Trying to do my job, to run the paper that has provided my family with a livelihood for eight generations! I didn’t know anything was going to happen to Ernie! I loved him too! I’ve been hurting too! But since then, you have been so focused on your own pain and your own grief that nothing else has mattered to you. You let your whole life fall away! You let me fall away! Because deep down, you blame me!”
“There is no one else to blame!” Ava shrieked.
Jordan sank his head back into his pillow. She was right about that, he thought. There was no one else to blame.
JAKE
In his shed, even with the door closed and a feather pillow over his head, he could still hear them: “You’re never around… Always at the newspaper. God, how I despise that newspaper!”