The Biographer (23 page)

Why are you telling me these things? Why do you imagine I want to know anything about you? No, you don't imagine anything of the kind.You want me to know.

'You managed to do all right, in spite of everything.'

He laughed again,almost gaily this time.'Yeah,I guess I did OK, didn't I?'

She felt vaguely nauseous, and turned away from him to the fourth photograph. It was larger and in colour, and showed a narrow house, three storeys with a steep gable, Juliet balcony and decorative black-painted fretwork.

Tony had taken this photo only last year. There were different owners now, of course, but they'd let him take a look inside and he'd seen the very room where Mischa came into the world. It was a simple, sweet house,Tony went on, as if this subject flowed naturally from the previous topic, and Mischa lived here until he was seventeen. It must have influenced his aesthetic sense.

Under the heading 'Chapter Two: Prague, 1957–1969' were two postcard-sized reproductions, atmospheric paintings of the city
at dusk, with elegant street lamps and lighted windows. One showed a downpour
on the Charles Bridge and glistening water on the road. Both were new to Greer,
but the artist's youthful virtuosity was evident, even in these small-scale
images. Tony touched them in a manner that verged on the reverential.

'These are amazing, aren't they? You don't get much of an idea with prints this size, but he's blended quite dramatic chiaroscuro with elements of grisaille. Gone for and achieved kind of gothic effects with the elongated treatment of the houses. The technique is incredibly confident and daring already.'

Neither had she seen the pair of black-and-white personal snaps pinned here. One was a grainy group shot, which Tony had identified underneath as Mischa's art-school class.

'Isn't this a classic? He's the unwashed hippie here,' he pointed, 'dangling a yard of ash off his fag. How about the long hair and stubble? And the scowl. He's ostentatiously ignoring the camera.
La vie de Bohème
's the desired effect, wouldn't you say, en route to an absinthe at the Café des Artistes?'

The other was of Mischa looking much as he had when she first met him but a little less wild and dishevelled, standing next to a petite young woman with an hour-glass figure and heart-shaped face. Her face was tilted up towards his and crowned with a halo of dark hair set in neat, shining waves. She was leaning into him, encircling his waist with possessive arms.They were in a rural setting beside water and trees.The caption read:'With Elsa Montag, summer of 1968.'

Tony said, 'That was taken in the Prague Spring, in the halcyon days just before the Russian tanks rolled in. She's fixated on him but he's looking away from her, it's quite revealing, isn't it, in that half-accidental way you often get in photos? The original was very creased,but it'll touch up OK.'

He took the photo by the corner and laid it on the table.'They're an incongruous couple.Don't you think so?'

He is monitoring my reaction, Greer thought, conscious of the tape recorder working
away on the table in the narrow gap between them. She picked up the photo.
She knew Elsa's age to be twenty-four, but in this picture she looked more
like an innocent schoolgirl. Her unguarded expression, the devotion and longing
on her face struck Greer as almost shocking in their nakedness. Before everything
ended in tears, perhaps well before anything had even happened between them,
people would have worried about the emotional insecurity of this young woman.

She asked, without needing to feign interest or concern, 'Is this the only one you have of Elsa?'

'Greer, I was lucky to get even this one. She had destroyed everything to do with Mischa. His sister found this. It was in the pocket of an old duffle coat Mischa left behind, and Grete came across it when she passed the coat on to her son, Milos, after it had been hanging in a cupboard for a couple of years. She'd shoved it in the family album and forgotten all about it, until she brought the album out to show me. She was embarrassed to see it there actually. I had a helluva job getting it out of the album so I could photograph it.'

He grimaced. 'Had to resort to the biographer's party trick of pinching it in
the end.' He noticed Greer's expression.'I mean borrowing it.Yeah,she was quite
protective of her little brother, in spite of the enthusiastic disapproval
regularly dished out.' He glanced at her.'I guess siblings are like that. Blood's
thicker than water, right?'

She thought, what big eyes you have, Mister Wolf. The artfulness of those clear blue eyes was so transparent to her by now that she was surprised no one else had remarked on it. Mischa too was transparent to her much of the time, but never with artifice. He was still humming – now it sounded like 'Stormy Weather' – and wielding a screwdriver. He had his broad back to them, and even at this distance she could pick up his vibrations, his total immersion in the task at hand.

'What happened to Elsa?'

'After he cleared out? It was no picnic, to be honest. Young woman dumped by penniless, oddball artist she'd left her prominent husband for.'

He was being careful to sound neutral, even jocular, she noticed.

'Yes, I am aware of the background.'

'OK. Well, yeah, she disappeared for a while. No one knew exactly where she went.'

There was a thumping full stop here with a questioning intonation. He was seeking a response. Greer shook her head.

'When she turned up again she was in the throes of a pretty full-on breakdown.The first of many. Pavel refused to have her back. She worked sporadically, survived. Life was tough of course for everyone, everything either stagnated or went backwards after the Russians moved in.'

She thought he had finished with this, when he added, 'I think her diagnosis would be severe bipolar, these days. She's pretty screwed up mentally, as I see it.To put it mildly.'

Did he see his own mother as having been similarly screwed up by men?

'Did she ever marry again? Have another relationship?' Greer heard unwelcome notes in her voice, of anxiety and something else more unfamiliar. She collected herself. 'Did she – get over Mischa at all, eventually?'

'Did she put it behind her and move on? I guess not. She doesn't look anything
like that picture now, I can tell you. She's a little old grey-haired lady,
you wouldn't recognise her.There's a kind of fervent submissiveness about her,
but maybe she always had that, you know?'

He was staring at the photograph, running his fingers through his blond-streaked hair, which stood on end like the bristles of a brush, in the currently fashionable manner. He must have put gel in it this morning to get it to behave like that, Greer thought irrelevantly.

'What I think is, it was like she came to the decision way back in 1969 that
when she lost Mischa her life would be ruined.And she stuck by that decision,and
it duly was.I think that happens with people sometimes, that relinquishing
of responsibility for their fate, you know what I mean?'

Greer nodded. She knew exactly what he meant. She felt a tingling in her hands, and realised she had been digging her nails into the palms.

Then he surprised her: 'Your husband, Charlie McNicoll, on the other hand, was not like that. He reacted the opposite way. He made the decision he wasn't going to let his entire life be ruined by losing you, and it wasn't. He got over it just fine. Eventually.'

Now she did meet his eyes. It was as if she had been cast overboard to flounder in a choppy sea and someone, the least likely person, had thrown her a lifeline. She had to make an effort to stop herself from saying to him, from saying humbly: thank you for telling me that.

Mischa came over to them just then, having finished with his stretcher and displaying an example of that sixth sense Greer had always been convinced he possessed. He stood at her side with his arm draped across her shoulder in a reversed reflection of the image, nearly forty years old, that lay on the table in front of them.

Greer said sadly,'She was very pretty, Mischa.'

'Pretty and sweet. Far too sweet and a hundred miles too trusting for me. I needed a rude and bossy woman. Do you hear that, Tony?' He raised Greer's arm and kissed it from the elbow to the wrist. 'Don't look at those photos, they make me feel old and bad. I don't want them in the book,Tony.'

'Well, I'm always at you for some more modern ones where you're good and old.'

'They would be worse. Paintings can do the work much better. Let them tell the story.'

'That's quite true, isn't it, if you could only decipher them,' Tony said to
Greer as Mischa sloped off with a backward grin in her direction. 'The art
is the real autobiography of the artist. Did you know he left behind a whole
bunch of paintings with Elsa? All his work up to that time. That was all he
had to give her, I guess. He had no money.'

'Yes.What happened to them?'

'Well, that's the tragedy of it. If only she'd hung on to even one, but she didn't keep any of them, just gave them away or flogged them at the time for next to nothing. One does pop up very occasionally at auction, like these two here, but mostly they've disappeared off the radar.'

There were few surviving paintings from the third section,'Between Continents'.This
covered Mischa's unproductive years, his haphazard, zigzagging journey to Vienna
and eventually to Australia. But 'Chapter Four: The Australian Period, 1976–1981' had two rows of images. Greer recognised every one, even though she hadn't
set eyes on the originals for more than twenty years.The majority of them,
she saw, had remained in Australian hands.

'This group here,'Tony drew an arc around them in the air with his forefinger, 'are the pictures I'm using from the inaugural Melbourne exhibition, the Corbett Gallery show. I didn't manage to get everything: two I really wanted I haven't been able to track down. Nineteen seventy-nine, when you met, and 1980 were the first bumper crop.You can date the beginning of Mischa's real career as an artist from those years.'

He grinned at her. 'Must have been your ground-breaking influence, right? I flirted with a title for this chapter – 'Mischa Meets his Muse', but he vetoed it on two counts.A,it was tacky,and B,you'd never stand for it.'

'He was accurate on both counts,' Greer said absently.As he spoke Tony had been pulling out some new photographs from the folder. She watched his hands with a feeling of renewed disquiet as he began to put them up. His fingers were tapered, with well-tended nails. The nails looked unusually shiny for a man. She wondered if he could be wearing nail polish.

The first photo was a colour shot taken inside the Corbett Gallery showing a
wall of Mischa's pictures. And there was Verity,standing with Mischa at the
opening of his exhibition.Verity looked slim and refined in a conservative
navy suit with a pleated skirt. She radiated pride, proprietorial pride. She
had been to the hairdresser that morning. Greer recalled her own mental eye-roll
at the sight of Verity's hair, newly auburn and newly permed into small immaculate
curls.

'What colour's her hair?'

'Sorry?'

'Verity. I just wondered what colour her hair is these days.'

'Hey, that's a good question. Definitely not your standard-issue blue-rinse old lady.' He was taking the question seriously, as she had expected. 'It's like, obviously henna'd, but in an expensive, discreet way that suits her style. Kind of chestnut, or coppery, I'd describe it.'

So Verity had clung to that colour for the rest of her life. She must have regarded it, Greer supposed, as the colour of her greatest success. A success that had turned out to be fleeting, due primarily to the actions of Greer herself.This was an uneasy thought, and yet the overall idea of Verity was not depressing.The woman she remembered was never going to end up as your standard-issue old lady. She had always exhibited far too much attitude.

Next to the photo of Mischa and Verity,Tony had pinned up the typed catalogue of prices. Further along was a colour head shot of a much younger Greer, tanned and smiling, tendrils of blonde hair in her eyes. She remembered Charlie taking it on the Isle of Pines, on their last holiday together.

And there they were, she and Charlie as a couple, wielding chopsticks, looking
festive and carefree in their favourite Chinese restaurant. An ice bucket of
champagne hung over the side of the table. Charlie had drunk most of that.

Tony's caption to this one read:'Greer Gordon with her first husband, Charles McNicoll, at The Flower Drum in Melbourne, May 1979'
.

She found the choice of photograph and the message conveyed by its selection both poignant and ironic. On this particular night in May she had given Charlie news that had elated him and told him she would marry him, at long last.Was Tony in possession of this highly charged piece of information?

The leaves had scurried in little whirlwinds around their ankles as she and Charlie emerged from the restaurant's bright, soaring interior into the cold snap of Little Bourke Street. It was an autumnal evening, cruelly appropriate, she thought now. Yet neither of them could have had any inkling, as they stepped outside, that the decay and death of their relationship was imminent.

'Was it Charlie,'she asked,'who gave you this?'

Tony nodded. 'And the one from the Isle of Pines. They're copied off the originals, of course. He picked them out because he said you liked these two.'

Had he really said that? 'He'd kept them?'

She wondered if it was her imagination or whether Tony had shot her an odd look.

'Oh, yeah. He wasn't like Elsa, who burnt all hers. Charlie's a very organised guy.That's how I got to see some of your old artworks.'

Ah, so that was how.

'And he kept every photo from your time together, in two albums. Every picture neatly identified and dated. And a whole bunch of your old family photos as well, in case you want any copies. All in chronological order.You're in there only up to the time you disappeared, of course.'

She could read nothing from his bland expression. He had another photograph in his hand, face downwards. He flipped it over. It was another head shot, and she saw whose head it was. If Tony was planning to shock me, she thought, he has failed, because I was half expecting this.