The Biographer (14 page)

'Has Gigi told you about her babies?'

Tony did not answer immediately. His eyes flicked towards Greer. She was looking out of the window towards the sounds of the birds, which always reminded her of creamy pearls on a silk cushion in one of Rollo's paintings.

'Uh, no. She hasn't.'

'She bought ten pairs of caged doves a year ago at the local market.Tell him.'

'They had been born in their cages. I released a pair at a time.They all flew
away and established their own territories. Some went back to the village.
One pair stayed here to nest in the cypress. They chose the nearest one to
the house, the one that's bending in the wind.'

Tony smiled. 'That's so neat. And it reminds me of a thing,' he extended his legs, engaging Guy, 'there was an incredible moon last night. I was leaning out, just drinking it all in – you don't need to be told how beautiful it is here – when
wham
! this great big bird nearly slammed into my face. I thought it was coming for me through the window. I got the shock of my life.'

His gaze, wide-eyed with the memory, wheeled and came to rest on Greer. She got out of her chair and threw another log on the fire.

Guy said, 'Most probably our barn owl. Did it have a white face and feathered legs?'

'I didn't see what it had. It was like this monstrous winged creature from a manga comic.'

'There are owls in the tower. They have an impressive wingspan and a remarkable repertoire of sounds. Screeches, whistles, and an extraordinary grunting noise, a cross between an orgasmic groan and a snore.'

'Thanks for the warning. I think I got such a fright because it had been so quiet and still out there. And the shimmering light from that full moon after the rain was just dreamy.'

He switched back to Greer.'Too bad you didn't see it.'

This time their eyes met, briefly. She was reminded of a child's card game, long forgotten, in the course of which players stealthily revealed their hand. On impulse she said, 'Do you play poker,Tony? We should have a game.'

She was pleased to register his momentary flicker of surprise.

2nd August
I of Ps
Sneaking a moment – C. doing laps in pool. Happy in his ignorance. Is this the last time he will be really happy? No, he is the kind of person who will bounce back. I was always the wrong one for him, he just couldn't see it. He will find someone else who will love him properly, I'm sure of it.

We go back tomorrow. Back to face the Music with a capital M.What an inadequate, woeful phrase – sword of Damocles is more apt.Whatever that was. I feel as if it's dangling above my head. I feel sick all the time. I'm thinking about Mum's reaction. If she thought I was impulsive & headstrong before, now she'll think I'm positively criminally reckless. She'll probably disown me. I'll be cast aside like some nineteenth-century trollope who transgressed society's mores.

And what about Josie? What if she will have nothing to do with this? Is it too much to ask? It is a very big thing to ask, of any sister. But my instinct makes me hopeful.There's her situation, and her nature is so radically different from mine, people have always said that. I've seized life with both hands & jumped in, whereas she's always somehow been on the sidelines, observing. Waiting for this? Is it possible? Since it all fell through with ratty Richard it's not as if she's got anything much else going on in her life...

That sounds terrible. Callous and calculating. Has love got me by the throat and shaken every shred of decency out of me? Is this even the real me talking?? Perhaps I've turned into a changeling now, substituted for my old self by Cupid's fairies.

That reference, Greer supposed, had been prompted by the opera, a recent visit
she and Charlie had made, at her instigation, to Britten's
Midsummer Night's Dream
.

She sat with her elbows on the desk, chin in her hands.

What does it ever mean,'Who is the real me?'Was it the rash young woman I was
then, contemplating the transgression of society's mores? There was another
self lingeringly present, one whose desultory, whispered words – words like betrayal, words like duty and responsibility – were suppressed and ignored.Was she the real me? Or have those two evolved into
a descendant who is another person altogether?

When Greer looked back on the former self who was the writer of this diary it was as if she had arrived from nowhere, a visitor from outer space. At the time it had felt like being reborn inside her own skin. Mischa is right in a sense, she thought. In the way he refuses to engage with his past, as if his early lives belonged to a series of prototypes of himself. I had to rethink my identity after I met him. My sense of self imploded. I felt it had been wrenched from my control.

It was like living through an earthquake. Such a powerful one that twenty-five years afterwards I am still living through the impact.What I should have remembered, of course, was that all earthquakes are followed by after-shocks, which do not necessarily come immediately.These, though, have been delayed for two and a half decades, and I did not anticipate their arrival. I have immersed myself in an alternative reality all these years, in an altered landscape. I am, in the deepest sense, unprepared for these aftershocks and what they may herald.

After Tony left the house carrying, with her permission, a box of papers with him, she retreated to the safety of her study, unlocked the left-hand drawer of her writing desk and sat in her chair. A silver clock on her desk, which she had polished herself that morning, told her she had been sitting stiffly in the same position for forty minutes. She felt an emotional and physical exhaustion.

She rotated her neck and shoulders.What was it that she was really afraid of? Public exposure and judgement of that ruthless youthful self? Or was it something other than that?

The Art Deco clock in the shape of an aeroplane with two propellers was one of
her first presents from Mischa. He had bought it soon after their first New
Year's Eve together. It was a potent image of escape, of their mutual flight
to freedom.At the time she had seen it as marking their liberation from a more
recent past. The clock aeroplane in sterling silver symbolised their emergence
not so much from their separate years in Melbourne or Prague as from the five
months they had spent closeted together in Sydney.

There was an empty space at the bottom of the page where the previous diary entry had skidded to an abrupt halt. On impulse she unscrewed a fountain pen and wrote some new words there, but slowly, without pausing, and deliberately, in the way of an automaton:

15th April 2006
It is not public exposure I am afraid of. It is the realisation that I have lived as if I hadn't done the thing.

The pen came to a stop, the nib remaining on the paper. Then she added one brief question:

What does it mean, that I am afraid of this?

She thought, but did not write: I am afraid for what it means.

Greer showed Tony around the house. He had already admired the virtuoso painted
frieze of hill towns and distant watchtowers, stone houses and panoramas of
corn-fields, vineyards, olive trees and cypresses that wound in an undulating
ribbon around the sitting room, and had identified it – no prizes there – as Mischa's.

'They're all views of and from the Castello,' she told him. 'Mischa did it out of pique one day, right at the beginning when the furniture was still being moved in here and his studio wasn't ready for him. They were still securing the upper floor with steel struts, and he got very stroppy because they wouldn't let him work in there. He just stood on a chair which he moved along as he went, and painted directly on to the wall, without any prior drawing and without hesitation.'

She brought out an album and showed him photos of Mischa at work on the unfinished frieze, up on the chair, back to the camera and wielding his brush like a truncheon. 'He only did it to annoy me, but of course it's wonderful and I love it.'

Tony was being very agreeable today. In her study he whistled at the wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, and asked if she'd read them all.

'Greer, you're a real live bookworm. An endangered species. I'm intimidated.'

'We both read a lot. Mischa prefers non-fiction. He jumps around, always has several volumes on the go.You've probably seen them lying face down in the studio.' She watched Tony as she spoke. He was eyeing her ornate writing desk.

'What an exquisite piece.' He rested his hand on the graceful curvilinear design of a side panel. 'Art Nouveau. Who is it by?'

'It's French. By Guimard.'

'Fantastic, huh? I love that grain and patina.'

She had a vision, banished as soon as it arrived, of the smooth, finely grained young hand sliding down the desk and wrenching open the left-hand drawer. It had a delicate little lock. Feminine. Not much of a deterrent at all. She told herself,Tony is only human, he can't see inside the drawer. Those artless blue eyes don't have X-ray properties.

On the bathroom walls he noticed the criss-crossed tiles of volcanic rock and limestone, grey and whey-coloured, with their unpolished, pitted surfaces. The same design of diamond-shaped tiles, dark and pale, was used in the kitchen behind the sink. And he admired the light terracotta floor that paved the whole house in a jumble of shades, roseate and tawny, full of irregularities.

'Each tile is a miniature landscape,' Greer said to him, 'rutted and full of potholes.That is, if you look closely at it.'

She didn't tell him that, sometimes, she did take the time to look closely. She found the Lilliputian landscapes with all their imperfections beautiful and mysterious, suggestive of pilgrimages or struggling journeys through life. She had said as much to Rollo, who never found such an idea ridiculous, who celebrated objects that were idio-syncratic or skewed. Who shared her compulsion to look closely at things. The defects of flawed objects made them more human and therefore more interesting, they were agreed on that.

Greer believed Rollo's penchant for the offbeat and the imperfect was directly
linked to his knack of seeing all sides of a question. Mischa was the expert
who dealt in certainties. If you could assign colours to an argument or opinion,
Mischa would need only black and white. In Rollo's palette and her own, greys
and pastel shades would dominate.

Only the other day she and Rollo had talked about the difference between appearance – the face one showed to the world – and the core reality. The discussion was ostensibly about comedians' lives, but had been prompted, she supposed, by the whole idea of biography; the idea that it should even be considered possible to identify useful truths about any life other than one's own. The unstable brew of influences on character and personality. The necessity to look beyond the surface towards the essence, only to confront a hard truth that the essence was itself made up of a multitude of components, and ultimately unknowable.

'At least for us poor
homo sapiensies
,' Rollo had said, 'with our feeble little brainsies.'

Greer was obscurely reminded of this as she preceded Tony into the main bedroom from the hall. He made the observation that almost every room in the house was on a different level. Two or three steps separated each room or passage from the next.

'That's one of the things I particularly enjoy about this house,' Greer said. 'You have to keep remembering to step up or down. It stops you becoming complacent. Especially in the dark.'

'Well, yeah, I guess these houses were put up aeons before ensuites were even a twinkle in a builder's eye.'

As he spoke he was zeroing in on the red chalk drawing to the left of the bedroom door.'Mischa,right? Younger,but it's unquestionably him.'

She thought, but refrained from saying, well, that is a moot point. Does Mischa also see it as himself, or as someone he is now disconnected from? She wondered whether Tony's knowledge of his subject would ever go far enough to enable him to pose such questions.

He inspected the initials closely, 'G.G. 5.8.1979.' He straightened up.'Greer Gordon,her mark,right?'

'Right.'

'It's an accomplished drawing.You nailed him. Not just a good likeness, but a character reference.' He stood and appraised the picture, giving it his complete attention in a way she recognised and respected.

'Verity Corbett said you were a fine portraitist. But she didn't have anything of yours to show me, and I hadn't come across any examples of your work at that stage.'

At that stage.What did he mean by that?

'I think I'd like to use this, if it's OK with you? I mean, in the illustrations.'

He wrote something in his pocketbook. She inclined her head and, as she did so, saw him switch on the little recording device he carried everywhere.

'The drawing is dated August five, 1979. Now, would it be around that time that you left Melbourne? When,' his mouth widened in a smile to leaven the words, 'you and Mischa did your famous disappearing act, to the extreme displeasure of Ms V.Corbett?'

Greer had gone past him to the north window. She rested her arms on the broad sill.

'It would have been about that time, yes.'

Tony bent his head again, minutely examining the picture.'There's something in his expression –'

Triumph,she thought,he's picked it up.It's unmistakeable.

'It wouldn't –?' He looked at her, taking in her body language. She sensed a subtle change in him, a tensing, a whiff of the chase.

'It wouldn't be the actual day, now, would it?'The pitch of his voice kindled a little with excitement. 'Greer, please tell me that you sat down and you made this portrait on the day you ran away.'

The day you ran away. The five words provoked their own visions, a sequence of imagined pictures in his mind too. She could tell that by looking at him. But they could only be that – imagined, fanciful, all in the mind. His mind. Could they conceivably bear any relation to the pictures in her own? What was the nature of his imagination, anyway?

Her mental pictures bore the seal, the exclusive imprimatur, of memory.They unwound
in her mind's eye like a spool of jumpy images from a silent film.Without access
to a projector capable of plugging into her mind and throwing those images
against the wall, the biographer's pictures could never aspire to be anything
more than approximate at best. The likelihood was that they had nothing much
in common with the real thing.

Unless Tony questioned her closely, for instance, he would not know that she had, for reasons she did not intend to go into, taken only one case of clothes and personal effects as she took expeditious leave of her former life. He wouldn't know that this piece of luggage was a black tin trunk painted with her father's name, W. R. Gordon, in white capital letters. It had accompanied him to boarding school in the 1930s and then to Palestine during the war. Years later it had been stored in the garage of the mud-brick house in Melbourne she shared with Charlie, and now it lay in the cellar under this stone house in Italy.

Was Tony even aware that if he was striving for an accurate record he had his back to the wall? He might have the general outlines worked out, but he would never have in his grasp the details, the nuances, which gave those mental pictures visual texture and authenticity.

He must know by now he hadn't a hope of getting much out of Mischa. For certain
crucial components in the story,Greer was Tony's primary source.She was the
wall that he was backed up against, and her inclination was to refrain from
supplying all but the most innocuous of those atmospheric details.

On the day she and Mischa left Melbourne for ever, the lowering skies, for instance,
had been on their side.The rain held off as the two of them pushed the back
seat forwards and crammed Greer's station wagon with the biggest load it had
ever carried.They had stacked it to the roof with paintings and gear, obscuring
the back windows, and headed up the Hume Highway in the thin light of a wintry
morning. This was the road named after the great explorer, the road that pointed
north to the sun. Like a couple of truants in a stolen car they had just let
it take them. Mischa had driven non-stop and tirelessly, it seemed, for hours.

They did stop once for beer and coffee and for another pressing chore.There were two phone booths back to back at a highway service station.Mischa called Verity and Greer called her sister.

Josie had reacted with explosive relief and indignation. Where on earth was Greer ringing from, because Charlie had rung in the middle of the night, and turned up forty minutes later completely plastered and dishevelled, looking for her, then driven off again in a dreadful state, and Josie was worried stiff. It's quite OK, Greer had assured her breezily, I gave him the slip. We've gone. Scarpered. We're out in the middle of nowhere, on our way to Sydney. I'll get in touch when we have an address.

She hadn't wanted to listen in to Mischa's call to Verity. It had been short
but not sweet, Mischa reported. Short and very sour.Verity had been unamused
to hear of their departure, and only marginally mollified by Mischa's declaration
that she was still his dealer. He would send pictures down from Sydney for
the next show, he reassured her, planned for the following February.

'She must have had a fit of the vapours when she realised I wasn't coming back,' Greer had said airily to Mischa.

The sobering effect of Verity's vapours hadn't lasted, in fact it scarcely survived
his hanging up the receiver.As soon as they got back in the car she remembered
joining in, although Tony might never hear about this and she'd never thought
she could sing, as Mischa plunged into his repertoire of songs from Broadway
musicals.

We were intoxicated, she thought now. Blind drunk on the effrontery of what we'd
got away with.The sheer gall of it.And in my case there was something else
going on below the surface, which must have been perilously close to hysteria.
I had run away with Mischa under false pretences. I had not yet got away with
it at all, and my gall was of an entirely different order.

She became aware of the need to speak in the lengthening silence. Aware too that
without her noticing Tony had finished his examination of the red chalk drawing
and joined her at the window. He stood quite close, trespassing on her personal
space as if to prompt or dislodge her from this reverie. Or, perhaps, to disconcert.

What was it that he had been asking? She retrieved his question with an effort, moved away from him and said, 'So I did, yes. I sketched the portrait on the day we left Melbourne, you're quite right.' Dreamily, as if she had only just remembered.

'The very day you ran away? Oh, boy. I love it.'

She tossed him a crumb. 'It was done in the evening. Before dinner.'

'Where were you? In a hotel?'

He was not to know that the runaways had come to a grinding halt eventually, brought on by exhaustion and Greer's hallucinatory moment. They had wandered into the scrub to pee, she had looked back at the road and seen the car apparently moving along by itself.After that they'd pulled up at the next roadside motel, simply because it was there and had a room with a double bed and was heaven on earth.

'Somewhere on the way to Sydney. God knows where it was. Goulburn maybe.We went
out after I'd done the drawing and found a little Chinese restaurant down
the road.'

Tony repeated slowly,'You'd known each other less than a month, you'd seen him for only a few days of that time, and you'd left your husband for him.' He seemed to be ruminating, eyes fixed on the notebook in his hand and not on his dictaphone.'So, how did that feel?'

'Feel?'

'Yeah, Greer,
feel
.' There was a distinct undertow of amused irritation. His eyes moved from his notes back to the chalk drawing.'You know, were you stoked? I see you there, a pair of naughty escapologists in your blue station wagon, right, like in a road movie, setting the compass for Sydney. Well, as a departure it wasn't what you'd describe as strictly orthodox, so it had to be a bit of a blast, didn't it?'

He looked at her then, eyebrows raised and eyes bright with – with what, exactly? She was fairly sure it was with irony. Or guile. Or both.

She said,'Oh,yes,Tony.It was a bit of a blast all right.'

In order to draw Mischa's head she'd almost had to tie him to the bed, which was another thing Tony would certainly never know. It had been well nigh impossible to get him to stay still long enough for her to sketch his face and to keep his hands off her. And to keep her eyes on his face and on the task at hand, and off the rest of him.

For years afterwards, perhaps for always, no Chinese meal would ever taste as delectable as that one in the obscure, dusty little diner that was only a truckies' pit stop, with its red formica-topped tables and plastic chopsticks.

She decided to throw down a small private challenge, secure in the knowledge that her mental film was locked away unprojected,safe from Tony's prying eyes.'It was rather good, in fact, the Chinese place.Very good, actually.' She let this hang, then added, 'I remember we had Mongolian shredded beef, Szechuan prawns and mermaids' tresses, Confucius-style. It was nothing if not eclectic.'