The Biographer (2 page)

This thought was so provocative, such a series of life-changing events evolved from it, that her mind reeled.Were there other innate qualities lying below the surface, hidden and unsuspected, awaiting only an unknown agent – an experience, a word, a special person – to bring them to life? How many people lived out their lives in ignorance of another self, a shadowy form that they carried within them but knew nothing about? This might, she thought, be the real meaning of the fairy story 'The Sleeping Beauty'.The princess who lay asleep for years, until awakened by a kiss.

What had happened to Verity after Greer left the gallery? How old would she be today? The twenty-nine-year-old Greer had considered Verity an ancient monument, but she was probably only in her mid fifties at the time. Around Greer's present age, funnily enough. That would make Verity what, about eighty by now? Almost certainly she wouldn't still be running the gallery in South Yarra.Was she, even, still alive?

Had Antony managed to track her down? All Greer's mental pathways converged here in the same blind alley, no matter what strategies she employed to divert them.Verity had played a pivotal role in her life and Mischa's. Quite unwittingly, Greer thought, and decidedly unwillingly, she had been a manifestation of fate.

Wasn't a biographer, in essence, a detective investigating a life? If so,Verity was an essential clue for Antony. A primary source. Clues were the seedbeds of his raw materials, and the quality of his work must depend to a large extent on his forensic skills. It couldn't be that hard to find Verity, could it, even though she had been an unsociable woman? Everyone knew everyone else in the Melbourne art world of the 1970s. It would be all too easy to locate an elderly former dealer.

But there was an outside chance, there was slightly more than an even-money possibility, that she was no longer around. She might have retired to Queensland, to Port Douglas perhaps, or even to an apartment on Manhattan. Verity had once admitted to a weakness for New York City. She might have developed cancer, or Alzheimer's, or some other incurable disease. In Greer's mind was the wish, almost inaudible: let Verity be dead.

Greer hadn't thought of Verity for years.Her young self had viewed the older
woman, absorbed with her work and her artists, uninterested in any form of
social life, apparently without friends or even family, with a kind of uncomprehending
pity. But she remembered her now as that comparative rarity: a woman who appeared
content. An unencumbered woman.

Greer's own relationship with Verity had exerted an influence she was unaware
of at the time. For it was a kind of friendship, she could see that now, even
if it had not always looked like one. The type of lopsided, intergenerational
friendship that is possible between mentor and pupil. I learnt a lot from Verity,
Greer thought. I learnt how to approach paintings, to read them. She taught
me the language of art, or more precisely some of its many languages.

Who had replaced Greer in the gallery? Her departure would have left a gap. No,
she corrected that. Her departure would have left a void.

Greer had worked there for nearly five years on her return from London. She'd taken an art history major at university, but Verity made it crystal clear she regarded her new employee as a greenhorn. She was a dogsbody to begin with, Verity's lowly assistant, but gradually took on wider duties and more responsibilities until, almost imperceptibly in the fourth year, she had been aware of herself evolving into a kind of equal – Verity's trusted right-hand woman.

It occurred to her now, belatedly:Verity was grooming me to take over from her. Not in the immediate future, perhaps not even for some years, but eventually.Verity was like that.A meticulous forward planner. She liked everything to be mapped out, all contingencies anticipated and taken care of. Forewarned is forearmed. This, thrown more than once at her young protégée, was one of a set of key maxims on which she structured her life.

Verity cared for no one except her artists, in Greer's opinion. But she was fond of me, Greer conceded now. I knew that very well, even though she never said it. And I walked out on her without a word.

It was always going to be difficult for Verity to find someone to take my place. Few young people would have the tolerance to put up with her brusqueness, her autocratic ways. Her bloody-mindedness, let's face it, and inflexibility. I made allowances because I recognised her wellspring. Art was the core of her life. And she believed it was mine. That was the thread that linked us, two such disparate personalities – opposites even – drawn together by a mutual obsession.That was the mistake Verity made.

But I believed art was my life, too, for almost the entire time I worked for Verity. Until the cataclysm happened. Strange, to remember it like that. But that is how it was. I can see it now, from this distance, in the generous spring warmth of this classical landscape that is not foreign to me, but is somewhere, unmistakeably somewhere other than the land of my youth.

He released me – it was that way round, I found myself kind of immobilised with surprise – and started humming, & turned back to what he was doing, hanging another smaller picture, a detailed drawing of a street corner piled with rubbish & an old dero sitting on a moth-eaten Queen Anne (?) sofa.The street was in St Kilda, I recognised a shopfront.

'Is that where you live?' I asked. He had a nail hanging off his lip, like a cigarette, but he clenched it in his teeth and immediately said,'Yes,and it is not a self-portrait,in case you are about to ask me.' He turned his back and got on with it, and I went back in the office. My mouth was still tingling.When V. came back she didn't have a tantrum, as I was expecting, but was quite mild. She made a couple of suggestions to move things around, which he rejected out of hand. Instead of pursuing it she just raised her eyebrows, with a tolerant 'have it your own way' smile. Pretty amazing. He was smoking, too.

I made coffee for us but he wouldn't stop, he just went on in his own private ferment of activity. I watched him for a bit. He seemed extraordinarily decisive; he'd take a quick look at the relevant bit of empty wall & bang a painting up.Very precise, no hesitation,no changing his mind.'Don't you ever make a mistake?' I called at one point. He seemed to find this amusing. 'Of course, but only when it is a matter of love or death.'

'You mean life or death.'

'Don't try to tell me what I mean. I mean love. Perhaps you know nothing about this area.'

Soon after 5 he put the last one up. He and Verity stood in front of it (he was admiring it just as much as her, if not more) then, without warning, he grabbed her by the waist & started waltzing her round the room and belting out 'The Blue Danube' – 'da da da da DA, da da, da da...'V., breathless, didn't know how to react. Probably the first time anyone had dared to touch her for years, maybe since her mother.Then she started giggling almost girlishly. Bizarre. It didn't suit her. I had to leave at that point, because of the drinks party at C.'s work.

But he'll be back tomorrow, for the opening.

Why am I writing all this??

'G.' Guy was there, drumming on the open door. She shut the exercise book and
slipped it inside her desk drawer.'You were in exactly the same position when
I saw you at the window two hours ago. Unmoved and unmoving. Unnervingly sphinx-like.What
are you doing?'

'Just the wretched accounts.'

She preceded him down the three stone steps into the kitchen, where a soft beam of sunlight fell on the table, taking in the stove top and the wall behind, hung with pots and pans and gadgets. Fine motes floated and swam in the air, caught in the light and then extinguished. Like the teeming, fleeting life on earth, she thought, and, billions of years into the future, like the destiny of the earth itself.

Greer loved this kitchen. She could never occupy it without remembering that it had been a kitchen for four hundred years. She took the coffee out of the fridge.

'You should keep it in the freezer, you know.'

'Oh, you always say that. I'm not convinced it makes any difference.'

'Better make enough for three. His Unholiness might grace us. He's intolerable when he's got a blockage.The real problem is that he's miffed, of course.'

She unscrewed the biggest of the three pots, filled the bottom half with cold water and spooned ground coffee into the middle container.

'Miffed about what?'

'You know what.The bloody bio.He wants one.'

'Well, he can have Mischa's, for all I care.'

'Don't say that. Mischa's as chuffed as hell. Isn't he? I've never seen him in such an elevated mood for such an extended period. It's almost as revolting as Rollo's sulks.'

She lit the gas with a match.

'You really wish it wasn't happening, don't you?' Guy was as acute as ever.'Why? You're not jealous.You haven't a jealous arrow in your quiver.' Behind him, Rollo's bulk filled the doorway, ahead of a plodding black pug. 'Oh Lord, it's him already.Trailing clouds of gloom and doom.'

'Hello, darling.' Rollo heaved a lugubrious sigh and deposited a kiss on Greer's cheek. He planted himself in a chair.The pug jumped on his lap.'Forgive me crashing your elevenses, but I'm slavering for civilised discourse. I've only had that,' he indicated Guy,'to talk to for the last forty-eight hours, and the gloss has worn off.The gilt's off the ginger-bread.'

Guy snorted.'It wore off decades ago.'

'I'm exhausted today. I think I'm fading fast.'

'You're eighty, what do you expect?'

'But I'm a loveable octogenarian at the height of my powers. Everyone says so.'

'Oh, just slink off into your fetid hole and paint, you silly old queen.'

Greer only half listened to them, two grown men bickering like children. Mischa
refused to humour the daily charade, accusing them of living a clapped-out
routine. She maintained that it was purely for show, a modus operandi that
amused and sustained them both. Besides, she rather enjoyed the performance.
It took her mind off things.

Rollo looked much the same. He always brought to her mind a certain portrait of Henry VIII, the bluff exterior masking a core of steel. She could never decide whether he was good-looking, with his trim moustache and small beard, his military bearing, his pale, shrewd blue eyes and enigmatic visage. It was irrelevant, she always concluded. Rollo Sonabend was himself, that was all there was to it. Guy Crewe, on the other hand, was a blatantly handsome man with a fine leonine head. Her age exactly, a generation younger than Rollo.

They were still at it.'I don't think I'll ever paint again, darling.The inspiration's gone.It's just not there.Flown out of the window and migrated. It's probably landed on some art student nonentity from 'uddersfield.' Rollo hailed from Yorkshire, although he liked to assert that he was unsullied by his origins.

'Oh, shut up about it.You're the nonentity from 'uddersfield, and you're pea-green
with envy, that's all. You want some mewling boy to swan in from overseas and
ask you obsequious questions. And formulate drivelling academic theories about
the significance of the banana in your work.'

Lately, Rollo's very accomplished still lifes had been featuring domestic objects against elaborate backdrops rather than the flowers and interiors of his earlier career.

'Only a mewling pretty boy with flattering theories of the banana. Longitudinally flattering.'

'You want to be able to drone on about yourself, uninterrupted, for – how long is the Antonioship staying?'

'A week or two, I think,' Greer said. 'Maybe more. Or less.'

'He'll have to be out of the cottage by the end of May. The crumbling ruins are coming, remember.' Guy's parents were strikingly active and showed no signs of flagging.As far as Greer could see they spent their retirement in ceaseless travel round the world, visiting their three sons. Guy never tired of reminding Rollo that they were in fact younger than him, though by a slender margin.

Greer put the coffee pot, cream and English digestive biscuits that Rollo loved
onto a tray.Guy took three earthenware mugs from the shelf.They went out of
the kitchen on to the terrace, with what Rollo called its vertiginous view.

'Thank you, darling.' Rollo took three biscuits. He looked unperturbed.'Am I jealous?' He ignored Guy's hoot. 'Only up to a point. One has to ask oneself, would one really want someone pissing on one's murky past? The honest answer to that is possibly not,or not in its unadorned entirety.'

'The answer to that is, yes, one would adore every moment of it. One would dig out every pongy scrap of dirty linen and wave it under his nose.'

Rollo turned to Greer.'But Mischa's expecting a hagi-ography, surely, not a warty type of bio, isn't he?'

Guy interrupted. 'Warty ones are the only kind there are these days. No sleazy sexual sod left unturned. That's what she's so worried about.'

'Are you worried, dear heart? Not on Mischa's account, surely. No sleazy sexual sods there, he's just a tortured artiste with a one-track mind, like me.'

'What are you talking about, "like me"? Your past is littered with compulsive lechery. Far more than those disingenuous,
prim, anal retentive little titbits you chose to disgorge in
The Whitewash
.'

The Whitewash
was Guy's name for Rollo's autobiography, published to considerable acclaim
ten years earlier. It had been translated into Italian and, to Rollo's rather
mystified pleasure, Japanese. He had become, he liked to tell journalists,
very big in the Orient ever since.

Rollo chortled at Greer. 'Isn't it sweet? Thirty-three mentions, its own paragraph
in the index, and it's still shirty. Anyway, darling, we all know Mischa's
as pure as the driven snow. A boring subject for your poor unfortunate biographer.'

'The driven snow he skied across? There's always the Iron Curtain aspect, remember, Roly.'

'Ah yes, the crepuscular Czechobosniak Dark Age no one knows anything about.'

'I can see the chapter heading now: "Svoboda's Secret Shame: the Unexpurgated Expose".'