The Biographer (20 page)

The next words on the tape came from Greer:'I should never have married Charlie. I knew it right from the start, on our very first date, the evening after we met.'

Tony stopped the tape.'That came from out of the blue. I guessed it had to be something important, by the way she leant forwards with her eyes fixed on a point just to the right of me, in that weird way she has.'

Greer had found a sudden desire to relate this story. She told Tony a shortened version, leaving out things he didn't need to know, such as any mention of Charlie's red convertible. None of her other friends in London owned a car. She couldn't even recall what make Charlie's car was, but she suspected that Tony would draw inferences from the fact that he had one.

Charlie had driven her to the theatre, picking her up from the rather grim Arsenal flat – another censored item – she shared with two friends. It was just around the corner from the football ground, where there was a game in progress. Charlie had been impressed to hear that she could lie in bed and guess who was winning by the roar of the crowd.

He had bought tickets (the best, in the front stalls; Greer omitted this) for
a new play by one of the formerly trendy, kitchen-sink group of writers. She
found that she could not at this distance remember who, or what play it was.
Afterwards he had taken her to dinner at a tiny, charming little Italian restaurant
in Chelsea (she left this out too), his own stamping ground.

Over dinner they had briefly discussed the play. Greer had remarked that some of the dialogue was Pinteresque. What was that? Charlie had enquired.

'It turned out he had never heard of Pinter,' Greer's voice on the tape had an edge of incredulity. 'I found that almost unbelievable.'

There was a pause. 'Actually, it doesn't seem anywhere near as extraordinary now, when people don't necessarily share so many of the same cultural references. But at the time I did think it was rather amazing. I realised there was an enormous gulf in our interests, I suppose, and in what was important to us. I think I knew then, really, that it could never work.'

'Off the record, did you ever get to ask Mischa if he'd heard of Pinter?'

A laugh.'I'm sure I never bothered.'

'It wouldn't have made any difference, would it?'

'You're quite right. It would have made no difference at all.'

'So, Greer, why did you marry Charlie?'

It was not the first time she had heard this question. She had asked it of herself, many times.

4th August
Early morning (like 2 am ...)
Can't sleep.Tried to watch TV. Can't take anything in. Don'twant to go back to bed.

It was a fuckwitted thing to get married. So much that we're going to have to deal with would be infinitely easier if we weren't. It's not as if it's even remotely necessary these days. Even if you were staying together for ever.Why in heaven's name did I agree to go through with it? It must have been hormonal. I'd lived with C. on and off for nearly 5 yrs & never given in. I should have known it was certifiably insane. I should have listened to what my instincts were trying to tell me, right from the start.

All those interminable lists I used to draw up, of the pros & cons. Pros: he was so sweet, so nice, kind, devoted, would always look after me, etc.; cons: he's a businessman, his interests are in commerce not the arts, we've got nothing in common, our minds are poles apart,etc.etc.And all those trips away I took on my own, trying to decide what to do, as if being away from him would decide it one way or the other.

It's so obvious to me now: all that is rampant lunacy. It's obvious to a moron that anyone who can't make up their mind one way or the other should never do it. I should have left him years before, and then this whole catastrophe would never have happened.Why wasn't it clear to me? Why didn't anyone say something?

If only Dad were here, I know he would have warned me. None of my friends were game to say anything, and they must have all realised it was a mad idea.Why didn't someone wise, like a sensible experienced older woman, my mother even (but she was always besotted with C.) take me aside & say, listen, if you have to make a decision – forget it, it's a non-starter, it's doomed, it's wrong.When it's right you'll know.There will be no decision to make, and it doesn't matter how long the list of pros is, they're a total irrelevance, period.

Greer had taken the diary into the kitchen, where the fire lit earlier for herself and Tony needed attention. She read the entry through twice. How ignorant it sounded, how evasive and self-pitying.Were other young people like this, wilfully blind? Or was it just her? She thought of Giulia, beautiful and wayward, seemingly bent on wreaking destruction. Giulia was far too pig-headed to listen to anyone, right now.

But she will probably grow out of it, Greer thought. Most people become less selfish as they grow older.Would Tony think that is what I have done? And Mischa? Or does he think we're both swanning through life without a regret in the world, with never a backward glance? Mischa's work consumes everything,the present moment included.That is both his reason and his excuse. But what is mine?

She had a memory of herself gripped by successive waves of panic that night after their return to Melbourne from the Isle of Pines. Unable to sleep, tossing and turning beside the quiescent body of her husband, who was sleeping the deep sleep of the just. Finally getting up in the early hours, seizing on the diary as if it were a confessional and pouring her heart out.Then lying huddled under a doona on the couch in front of the TV and watching, without comprehending a word, as if it had been some arcane gibberish, a 3 am re-run of
The Sweeney
.

There were two empty lines at the bottom of the page, where the diary entry had ended. Greer felt a need to add something.

She wrote:

17th April 2006
Why did I marry Charlie? I gave in,finally.And at the time,for obvious reasons, it seemed the right thing to do.

She was coming to the end of the second line, and wrote in squashed letters between square brackets:

[Cont. at back]

She turned to the back of the exercise book, where there were a few empty pages,
and wrote three more careful paragraphs.

17th April 2006 (cont.)
Until (and perhaps I should add, unless, because I'm not sure that it is for everyone) you fall in love yourself, it is no more than an abstract idea.You read about it, people may try to explain it to you, and you may talk about it yourself and imagine you know what it is you're talking about.

But you don't know. It's like trying to speak a foreign language without any grasp of the key words. Until it happens you cannot imagine how it will affect you.

For that reason, even if my mother or some other sensible and objective older woman had taken me aside, I had not yet had the experience that might have enabled me to see the wisdom of their advice.

She considered now how she had answered Tony's question about her marriage. He would see it as a decisive event. He would guess there was something of central importance she wasn't telling him. Since he appeared to be a good detective it was quite possible, it was more than likely, that he knew exactly what this was, and was contemptuous of her clumsy attempts to deflect him.

A mere 50 yards away,Tony had moved over to his favourite armchair, the winged one with its airy, summery design of shells, flowers and oak leaves. He listened once more to Greer's explanation of why she had consented to marry Charles McNicoll a mere two months before Mischa Svoboda charged into the Corbett Gallery and derailed her life, as well as Charlie's.

Greer's words came slowly to begin with and the voice sounded tentative, as if she was thinking on her feet.As if she knew, moreover, that this was how she sounded.

'Charlie was always so sure he wanted us to be married, and his certainty made up for my indecision. In a way, it almost cancelled it out. He was so reassuringly free of doubt. You know about his consultancy work, do you? He dealt with firms who were having problems, or wanted to reorganise or streamline their operations.'

The voice gained conviction, picked up a bit here. 'That's what Charlie was very
good at: making rapid assessments of companies' strengths and weaknesses. He
was accustomed to battles in the boardroom as well as the work-place, and arguing
his case for constructive reform. He was used to an interim period of uncertainty,
and negotiations and argy-bargy, and eventually getting his own way.'

There was a short interval.Tony sat still,his eyes apparently glued to the empty
whirr of the tape, on which the sound of the inevitable lone cuckoo was just
discernible. When it resumed the voice sounded different, altogether more spontaneous.

'I'm afraid that's inadequate. But I don't know how I can convey the relentlessness of Charlie's suit, the sheer pressure of his niceness. In the end, they wore me into the ground.'

Tony stopped the tape. He sat staring into space, fingers laced together, then said:'She was sincere there, you can hear it. Or about as sincere as you can be when you're telling only half the truth.'

The conviction came to Greer in the night: I must talk to Charlie. I need to find out exactly what happened when he spoke to Tony.Assuming that has occurred.I think, however, I can safely make this assumption now. I would be extremely foolish to continue to kid myself that there is any conceivable chance Tony has not met and interviewed Charlie McNicoll, the bit-part, but definitely not two-bit, actor in the drama.

So much hangs on the information Charlie has given, or withheld, and not just my place in Mischa's biography or its effect on me. But I must not pursue that line of thought. It leads to uncharted territory. I can't handle it.

She knew that Charlie would have been perfectly within his rights to refuse to
speak to the man who was researching a biography of the artist who had run
off with his wife. But such a refusal did not square with her knowledge of
him. Charlie was never one to sit on the sidelines: he liked his say. Crucially,
she felt sure he would have insisted on having his say if he thought he might
have any chance of pre-empting the situation.

Meeting Tony would have put Charlie in an exceptionally delicate position. Greer
tried to imagine how he might have decided to approach Tony's questioning.
He had spent his professional life confronting thorny problems and defending
wickets of varying levels of stickiness. This one, however, was in a class
of its own.

Charlie was no fool and neither, she believed, was he a vindictive man. In a
quandary, his instinct would be to protect the vulnerable. Every actor in this
story was vulnerable to a greater or lesser degree, including Charlie himself,
but one was arguably at greater risk than the others.There was only one way
to find out how Charlie had confronted this dilemma: by speaking with him directly.

There were two obstacles. The first one was almost enough in itself to put paid to the idea. She didn't know any more where Charlie and his family lived. She hadn't had any direct contact with him for twenty-five years. No indirect contact either, come to that. She amended this. There had been one indirect contact, a year or more after she and Mischa left Melbourne. A deafening tattoo on the door at 6.30 am in Port Douglas, Queensland. Mischa had gone to the door spoiling for a fight, only to have Greer summoned from bed and divorce papers thrust into her hands by a surly caricature of a bailiff.

But the last occasion she had heard Charlie's name spoken aloud, until Tony came out with it yesterday, was in Sydney during the five long months she and Mischa had spent alone in that cramped, desolate flat in Darlinghurst.

Those months were a blur in Greer's memory. Immediately they were over she had
banished them from her mind. In the same way that Mischa had ceased to think
about his time in Prague with Elsa Montag, because it was in the past and done
with, she had tried to edit those months out of her life. For a very long time
she had managed this quite successfully.

And if it weren't for the biographer's arrival I could have gone on editing them out. Could have, or would have? Just one change of consonant, but a significant, a profound difference. For a quarter of a century, both Mischa and I have conducted ourselves as if those five months and what was going on then had no existential reality. It's almost as if what was happening between us during that time never happened at all.

Looking back, she suspected those months were even harder on Mischa than on her. In all their subsequent years together she couldn't remember him making even one reference to them.

It was at the very end of the five months in Sydney that there had been a conversation in which Charlie was a central but absent player.The conversation was held the day after Christmas, and it had taken place not between Greer and Mischa but between Greer and her elder sister, Josephine.

On Boxing Day Josie made the short flight from Melbourne to Sydney after receiving an urgent summons from Greer. She was intending to come two weeks later, but had changed her plans when the telephone call came and had some trouble getting a flight at such short notice at that time of year. She had not stayed with Greer and Mischa, whose flat was minuscule and crammed with painting materials, but for a few nights – Greer never knew exactly how long – at a small hotel in nearby Paddington.

Greer had a hazy memory of Josie telling her that Charlie had left Melbourne too, soon after Mischa and Greer's precipitate departure, and taken a job in Hong Kong. He'd been headhunted by a US multinational with branches all over South-East Asia. It was a very prestigious post, at least that was a bit of good news, Josie had said at one point, trying to jolly her sister up. Greer thought she remembered her saying that Charlie was initially on a four-year contract, but that there was a strong likelihood of his staying on, if it turned out well, and being posted to other countries in the region.

This information, vague, effectively useless, was twenty-five years out of date.Where on earth was Charlie today? He could be anywhere in the world, working for anyone. At sixty-two, affluent and well-regarded, he might have retired. Greer found she couldn't even recall the name of the American company he had originally joined. She'd had other things on her mind at the time.

Josie would certainly know where Charlie was living. But Greer had no idea of her sister's whereabouts either. She hadn't seen or spoken to her since Josie's flying visit to Sydney. Since that particular Boxing Day, in fact. Like Charlie's name, but for a different reason, she had not pronounced the name of her sister aloud to anyone for twenty-five years. To protect herself from the pain of loss, Greer had tried never to think about Josie.

After Sydney, when they headed north to Queensland, she had sent her mother,
Lorna, their next address in tropical Port Douglas. Lorna had kept in touch,
but her letters were reticent. Her mother had found Greer's behaviour incomprehensible
and deeply shocking, although she stopped short of cutting the lines of communication.
Beyond confirming they were well, she supplied no further news of the immediate
family. Neither had Greer asked any questions.

She had stayed in reasonably regular if distant contact with her mother for the first two years, until Lorna's sudden death from a cancer she had first mentioned in a letter that for four critical months had not reached Greer, who was on the move between Bali and Thailand. Since her mother's death there were no Australian entries in her address book. From the day she absconded with Mischa she had cut off all contact with her old friends in Melbourne.

There was, of course, the biographer.Tony would have Charlie's telephone number, no question about that. It would be the easiest thing in the world to ask him for it.

But the second, the insuperable obstacle to contacting Charlie at all was the thought of picking up the telephone and dialling his number without any prior warning. The very thought of having to announce her name to whoever answered the phone was enough to make Greer's blood run cold.

4th August
I've done it. I've spoken to Josie, and she's on side. Kind of.

I bought some brunch things & took them round to her flat – it seemed safer than going out. Plus some champers (& orange juice) – I thought it might be needed. It was, altho' J. tried to stop me on the grounds that it was inappropriate.We made scrambled eggs & talked for a good 4 hours.

Josie twigged practically right away. She's always intuitive. Well, I hadn't seen her for a few weeks. I wasn't at all sure how she'd react, I was worried she might burst into tears but she didn't cry at all, she was good. She would have been pleased if she hadn't pretty smartly seen that it wasn't welcome.

As soon as I got inside the door I dived straight to the point without putting it off, there was nothing else I could think of to say.At first she had a complete fit.She thought I must be joking. Her first reaction was to reject it out of hand. She said it was impossible, out of the question & I must be out of my mind.

I told her about M.The lot.That is, the bits fit to print (not that that's much). She said I must be crazy, kept repeating that I'd hardly spent any time with him, how could I seriously contemplate running away with him, it was absurd. Ludicrous. Etc. etc. But of course she's never been in love, she's never plunged off that precipice, and she hasn't a clue.What she had with Richard was a lot like me and Charlie.

Then she got on her high horse.What was I thinking of, it was so irresponsible & abnormal.When Charlie was so perfect to me & had done nothing wrong.

Greer, I can't believe you're saying this, it's unnatural, Josie had said at first, almost frantically, and then kept repeating it, her eyes round and appalled. You simply cannot let this infatuation, your obsession with this man, lead you to do an irrevocable thing you will certainly regret.

Charlie was popular with her mother and elder sister. Greer was well aware of their view, held jointly and voiced often: she had strung him along in a typically irresponsible and wilful fashion. Her mother and Josie were alike in some ways.There was an affinity between them, as there had been between Greer and her father.

Think of Charlie, Josie had said, over and over. He's a copybook husband. How could you do this, after keeping him dangling for so many years? How could you do it so soon after you've finally made an honest man of him? When this produced an involuntary splutter from her sister, Josie had blinked and stammered out: it's immoral, Greer, really. If I were at all religious I'd say it was a sin.

Greer had been reminded of her recent encounter with Jean-Claude. The intense tête-à-tête with the young Frenchman on the white beach on the Isle of Pines had led directly to this confrontation with her sister in Josie's characteristically tidy and tasteful sitting room in East Melbourne, overlooking the Flagstaff Gardens. Some of the things Josie was coming out with replicated Greer's own initial responses to Jean-Claude's proposition, practically word for word.

Jean-Claude seemed to know all about passion. He and Greer were convinced they had that elemental knowledge in common. It was what made the idea, this unnatural proposition, imaginable to them. Josie, however, in Greer's opinion, had never taken the plunge off the precipice.To her such a plan was, initially at least, unimaginable.

Why didn't you
do
something, Josie had asked, tight-lipped, before it came to
this
? Why didn't you do something about it
earlier
? Then you wouldn't have
...
She had stopped short, unable or unwilling to finish.

I did do something, Greer pointed out. I got married. Josie's look told her that this had been a truly mad course of action. But she already knew that.

After a while she simmered down a fraction, and I could see that there was a sliver of hope. She was starting to think about it more rationally, rather than as a categorical negative. But she continued to bring C. into it, envisaging endless difficulties. She couldn't conceive of any chance of him accepting the idea.

Tucked away at the back of a drawer in Greer's writing desk was a manila envelope containing a bundle of family photos. They were mainly in black and white because her father, a keen photographer, had preferred it. She retrieved the envelope now and laid the photographs out in chrono-logical order in parallel rows. She had never put them into an album, nor had she taken them out of the envelope for a long time.

Her father and mother, Bill and Lorna, dark and fair, tall and short, playful and serious. Those were the obvious differences that would strike an onlooker. But she knew they were merely surface characteristics that became almost irrelevant once one's knowledge of a person went beyond the superficial. You could have such a deep and intimate knowledge of certain individuals that it verged on the encyclopaedic, and yet to claim you knew everything about them was manifestly absurd. She would never claim that of Mischa, whom she knew inside out and back to front.The source of Mischa's boundless creative life was a private mystery, inaccessible to others and even, she suspected, to himself.

She thought now, for the first time: how well do I really know him? What I know about the thirty-eight years of his life before he met me is negligible.And what of it? I would never have thought much of it,if it hadn't been for Tony.He has brought it home to me lately, rather forcibly.

The photographs were bookended by pictures from two weddings. The first, in black
and white, was her parents' wartime wedding in 1944, with the two young people
in air force uniforms, holding hands shyly for the camera, carnations in their
buttonholes.The last one was the most recent. It was in colour, but still twenty-five
years old: Greer's own registry office wedding, no frills by her own request,
to Charlie McNicoll.

Her mother, Lorna, was in this snap as well, standing next to the bride.Thirty-five years older than she had been at her own wedding but hardly looking it in her smart turquoise dress and jacket. She also wore a wide smile in which Greer read more than a tinge of relief. Josie stood on Charlie's other side, holding a posy of yellow roses. She too looked delighted that her stubborn younger sister had finally bitten the bullet.

Greer and Charlie wore suits, his a dark lounge and hers a sharp white pants suit teamed with a straw boater.They looked as carefree as the other two, Greer's hat tilted at an angle.

We're both smiling, Greer thought. Charlie has a spray of wattle in his buttonhole and I have an impudent red bottlebrush. Our smiles appear to testify to an identical level of happiness, and no secrets.What can photographs tell you? Less than two months after this was taken, I was gone.

There was a fifth person in the line-up, on Josie's left. A trim woman in her fifties in a maroon coat and skirt, pepper-and-salt hair drawn tightly back in a formal French roll. Verity Corbett. She too looked pleased to be there. Her precise, angular features and sharp retroussé nose were relaxed and directed towards the wedding couple.

Verity was really quite a handsome woman, Greer conceded, in an ascetic way.This
comes as a surprise but I can see it now, now I have reached the age she was.
I must have invited Verity to be a witness at my wedding, and to the slap-up
lunch afterwards at Florentino's, but I had almost forgotten she was there.