The Biographer (27 page)

'Landscapes or nature. Not Man Ray then. Stieglitz? Ansel Adams? Minor White?'

Rollo struck his chest. 'Minor White, the very one. I should have known because
I bought a postcard emblazoned with a quote by him. I had it stuck up there,'
he pointed to a cork noticeboard layered with cuttings and photos,'for years."Be still with yourself",it said,"until the subject affirms its presence".Then we had the great Ice Age of 1985. You've heard of that, I expect? It's
when all the hundred-year-old olive trees died. Half the roof fell in here
and Mr Minor's
majorly
apposite words got washed away.'

Guy blew a raspberry.'Having affirmed its presence the subject disintegrated.'

'He may scoff but it spoke to me, that quote,Tony, and it speaks to me yet. I'm going to have to write it down and pin it up again. It's very high on the quotable quote meter. Never underestimate the value of an improving homily,Tony.'

There was another snort from his left. Tony made a note. 'I must remember to ask Mischa about the quotes in his life.'

'Forget it,' Guy said.'Mischa's not into self-improvement.'

Tony stopped to give Rollo's corkboard the once-over on the way out. He saw photos whose colours were fading to sepia, faces he recognised lunching al fresco under the vines. There were some statuesque lifesavers on Bondi Beach, newspaper cartoons, and postcards of works by Cézanne, Goya and Morandi.

A saucy seaside postcard from England engaged his eye, a woman with a bulbous cleavage standing on a staircase next to an undersized, goggle-eyed man. She was saying,'I'll just slide down the banister and warm up the supper.'

Directly below this was a postcard from a French series, with a quote from Cocteau.It read,'Whatever they criticise you for, intensify it.'

Guy saw him looking at this one.'The story of his life.'

'Tony and I were having an in-depth confab before
he
came barging in and ruined it,' Rollo said to Greer.'It started off all highbrow and arty and then segued into the realm of intimate relationships.We've enjoyed a deep and meaningful bonding,haven't we,Tony?'

Guy yawned as he levered open a bottle of prosecco rosé.'Well,don't inflict it on us,for God's sake.Anything but art and relationships.We
think even the bloody bio is preferable to that lot, don't we?'

Eyeing Tony, who was smiling, Greer said, 'I'm not so sure that we do.'Tony returned the look and laughed.

They had ventured on to the western terrace, a small paved extension of Rollo and Guy's garden, to catch the dying rays. There were four or five iron chairs around a marble-topped table. Guy had brought out a tray of glasses and a two bowls of nibbles. He poured four flutes of the sparkling blush-coloured wine, handing Greer hers first.

'Here's to the damn thing anyhow,' Guy said. He clinked glasses with Greer and Rollo.'Tony's bloody bio.'

'And all who sail in her,' Greer added, telling herself, I will be upbeat.

'Aren't I allowed to drink to that?' inquired Tony.

'Oh no, it's very bad form to drink to your own bio,' Rollo said. He turned to Greer. 'Is Tony going to be in it, darling? Will it be a gonzo type of thing? A bit sluttish and postmodernist,like Hunter S.Thompson?'

'God knows,' Greer said. 'If he's planning a personal appearance he hasn't told me.'

'What do
you
know about postmodernism?' Guy was demanding of Rollo.'Let alone the tedious Hunter S.T.? He was just a jumped-up T. Capote. It's pathetic, isn't it? By the time he catches on to these terms and gets round to dropping them in a vain attempt to keep up, they've become obsolete.We're into the post-postmodernism now.Verging on the
ultra
-post-post. Everyone knows that.'

Tony had sat himself down on the low stone parapet facing the other three. It was unexpectedly mild and he had rolled up his sleeves to the elbow. His blond hair, with the sun's rays catching it from behind, gave his head a lustrous golden crown. Greer thought, he knows. He's sat there on purpose, to give himself a halo.

'It can't resist a little
carp
, can it?' Rollo was saying amiably.'Listen to it carping over a perfectly reasonable and well-informed question.Where a biographer plonks himself in relation to the material affects everything else, I should have thought.'

'Quite right, Rollo, and it's funny you should ask that,' Tony said, swinging
his legs, 'because I'm considering writing it the way the research has unfolded – is still unfolding,' his quick glance at Greer was like an afterthought, 'in
real life. Some of it in the present tense, like interviews and observations.That
way the reader will be in on the action.'

Greer looked away. She had a new taste in her mouth, a bilious taste which was nothing to do with the prosecco.

'Do you mean a
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
kind of thing, where the author's one of the luvvies?' Rollo was attending to this closely and leaning forward in his chair, which brought his face close to Tony's crotch.

'Well, very vaguely, yeah.'

'I liked that.Good, cleanish fun, I thought. Nice juicy characters.'

'Of course, mine's a biography rather than a gothic detective yarn.'Tony grinned
impartially at the three of them.

'Still, you wouldn't mind those sales, would you?' Rollo looked at Greer.'I suggested
it for your book reading group, didn't I, and they thought it was a very good
tip. Did you know Gigi was in one of those,Tony? You could sit in on a meeting,
only they won't allow males in. It's full of formidable females with alarming
erudition.'

He winked at Greer. 'She's a very intelligent woman, Gigi, you know.'

'Oh yeah, I think I'm allowed to drink to that.' Tony raised his glass and clinked hers before she could take evasive action.

'She's not one of your common or garden artisans,' Rollo jerked an expressive thumb at Guy, 'like some we could name.'

Guy was leaning back in his chair with a practised air of ennui.'Here we go.'

'In fact she came to the wine bizzo quite late in the piece. Have you told Tony about your coup de palate, darling?'

She shook her head.

'She's far too modest and self-effacing. I'd better fill you in.Women have an extra layer of skin and can hear higher notes than men, so they probably have more tastebuds as well, don't you think,Tony?' He began to recount at some length the story of Greer's performance in the original blind tea-tasting.

Guy interrupted. 'Americans don't understand tea and they're obdurate in their ignorance, so this means zilch to him.You put hot, not even boiling, water in a cup and when it's lukewarm you add a teabag.Right,Tony?'

'Let him finish,' Tony protested, 'he's trying to educate me out of these brutish habits. So, what's the verdict? Do you put the milk in before or after for peak performance?'

'The jury's still out,' Guy barged in again.'It was the best kind of experiment because it had a definite result that was totally inconclusive.'

Rollo brandished a bowl of brazil nuts in his face.'Here, chew on some nice big nuts.You might like some too,Tony. Getting back to the bloody bio, so you're really going to be a major character in it, are you? I'm not sure I'd want that in mine.'

'Well, only in the sense that I'm the guy collecting and synthesising the material,'Tony demurred.'Comes of being a control freak, I guess. Someone has to do it.'

'Aren't you risking a titanic clash of egos: writer and subject?'

'I'm sure Tony sublimates his swingeing ego in his work,' Guy said. 'Like you don't.' He turned to Tony. 'Remind me to tell you my theory of painters. It's better when
he
's not interminably trying to get his end in.Are you monopolising Tony tonight, G.?'

'I hope not.' She threw Tony a derisory look. 'We haven't booked him.'

Tony said,'I've got some stuff to do,but after that –'

'You can tell him now, if you like,' Rollo interposed genially.'I don't need to get my end in any more, unlike you. Mind you, he's not very scientific,Tony. His theories are best kept off the record.'

Tony grinned. 'Allow me to be the judge of that. The record's ready and waiting, Guy.'

'Good, because this is well researched. Fruit of a lifetime's interminable observation.' Guy was topping up Tony's glass. 'All successful ar
tistes
, Tony, have five per cent talent and ninety-five per cent self-belief.You need a messianic ego to succeed. Mischa never wavers. Rollo veers uncontrollably between massive self-doubt and revolting smugness. But the massive self-doubt is simply self-obsession in another guise.'

'Uh-huh. What's your take on this, Rollo? There's no truth in it, is there?'

Rollo looked blasé.'It's just another way of putting the old inspiration-perspiration, isn't it? A mantra for all shapes and sizes is a suspect mantra, but if it makes him happy.'

'He means, it's true of Mischa but not of him,' Guy said rudely.

Tony said to Greer, 'Is it primarily an ego thing with Mischa? Ninety-five per cent talent apart, I mean.'

She was still processing Tony's laconic disclosure. If he said he was thinking
about putting himself into the biography it meant he was doing it.

Tony turned to the others, shaking his head, 'I don't know about you guys, but this man's a huge puzzle to me. Sure, he works of his own volition, but it's like the driving force comes from somewhere outside of himself. I kind of think self-belief is an irrelevance with Mischa. I'm not convinced it's even a part of his equation.'

He looked at Greer again with eyebrows raised. 'Does that make any sense?'

She said,'Not a conscious part of his equation,anyhow.' She thought, I can't bear this young man. My violent mistrust is so palpable I must be giving it off like an odour; the others must sense it. But even Rollo seems oblivious.

Rollo thrust his empty glass at Guy.'Do you know what I think? Having your bio written is a bit like being outed. Mischa's in the process of being outed by Tony.Tony can say anything he likes about him in the book. Any way-out theory that takes his fancy. He's – what do they call it in spy thrillers – he's running him.Tony's Mischa's control.'

He gave Greer a stealthy glance she couldn't quite interpret. She thought, Rollo
is unusually tipsy tonight. Before Tony could reply, Guy came charging in again.
'The life belongs to the biographer: discuss, with relevance to film noir.'

Rollo's eyes, for the first time, betrayed a flicker of annoyance.

Tony laughed.'These days the life absolutely belongs to the filmmaker.'

'You're from LA, aren't you, Tony?' Rollo said, with another look askance at Greer.'Ah,but you'll never sell the rights to this one.Will he,darling? It's far too straitlaced for a Hollywood fillum.They couldn't raise the money. No one would go.'

'Don't be obtuse, Roly. They'll ditch Mischa and give the lubricious yet intrepid young biographer the lead. Anything they need in surplus raunch they can make up, like they always do.' Guy gazed skywards.'How can I have been shackled to someone for so long and him remain so naïve?'

'You can't make a movie where all the prime movers are still living and litigious,'Rollo objected.'You see,I'm not as naïve as I look.'

Tony nodded. 'It's true, I found most of the people on my A-list were still around and kicking butt. Far more than I thought there'd be.'

'That's what a young man thinks,' Rollo said. 'Just because his subject is of mature years he expects all the suspects to have kicked the bucket, but we're kicking butt instead.' He sniggered at the others. 'In a bit of an arthritic way.Especially we lucky old A-listers.Although if you don't get cracking with me soon you might lose your chance.'

He threw Tony a roguish look. '
And
there might be a marked shortage of bean spillers to interview.You could be confronting a pitiful paucity, couldn't he, Guy? Dear old Dottie Swannage knows a thing or two about me, but she can't last for ever. My colleague here will fill you in,' he beamed at Guy, who grimaced at Tony, 'but you shouldn't put all your eggs in one basket. It's always a mistake to think one person can be the repository of all the secrets.'

He took a handful of Brazil nuts and crunched them with relish.

Tony said,'Right.And if it weren't for the new breed of lubricious yet intrepid young biographers I represent, all those secrets might never get out.' He remained deadpan for a few beats, his blue eyes alighting on Guy, then Rollo, and finally Greer, before the onset of the guileless grin she expected.

Greer watched the two older men succumbing to the embrace of his boyish, inclusive charm. As she stood up to leave them she thought, he is deliberately driving me away.

'Rollo is different when he's not around Guy,' Tony dictated. 'More serious-minded and thoughtful. Yeah, and perceptive. He's a shrewd cookie all right. Guy's the same whoever he's with. Ditto Mischa.They both have emphatic personalities that are kind of indelible and not susceptible to fine tuning. Not spectacularly responsive to the sensitivities of others. Greer, on the other hand –'

He stopped. As he spoke he rocked backwards and forwards in his chair and flicked through the glossy pages of a book on Sicilian wines he had picked off the shelf in his sitting room.It was inscribed by its English author:'To Gigi and Guy,
santé santissima
! With lots of love from Kate.'

'When Rollo talked about how artists put their work first, I went, yeah. But then I thought: is that totally accurate here? Maybe Mischa's only been able to do this because his top priority is sorted.'

He replayed these two sentences twice, listening to them with an air of surprise, toying with his hair.Then he added, 'Could be that's the higher truth. All those years before he met her, he didn't get much done. He did zilch. He was all over the place.

'She's something else. Impossibly hard for me to get a handle on because she's so internalised, suspicious, guarded and uptight. I get little insights of what she's like with other people. She and Rollo are as thick as thieves. I think they get from each other what they don't get from their partners. Interesting he'd say she's the best judge of Mischa's pictures, because she doesn't care to analyse them to me. Has a real resistance to it. She's either got no talent for it or she's frightened by it. She doesn't like me one little bit.What do I think of her? I'm not sure. I provoke her, but I guess I'm kind of neutral about her.'

He pushed the chair back as far as it would go, pressing his heels to the floor.

'We're closing in on the nitty-gritty. Like they say, something's gotta give.All the balls are in my court,and she knows that. I think we need to move things along. It may be a matter of forcing the issue into the open.'

He took his feet off the floor and the chair pitched forwards. It was an old bentwood rocker festooned with fringed suede cushions.

'The timing means it may need to be me who breaks the deadlock, because she knows she's in deep shit but I don't think her pride will allow her to dig herself out of it. Do I have any qualms? Well, hell, I think I may do, actually. Half of one, maybe. I find that kind of surprising. Does it mean I'm more ambivalent than neutral?'

He gave a short laugh and switched off the dictaphone, then flicked it on again and added: 'It means I have mixed feelings rather than no feelings at all. Is that a small step for a man or a giant moral leap?'

The following night he was surprised by a meal cooked by Mischa. The three of them ate casually at one end of the kitchen table, separated by candles and a pot of yellow jonquils. We're having a barbecue tonight, Greer had informed Tony. Mischa is quite a whiz at the barbecue.You can see another side of him.

Tony stayed outside with Mischa on the south terrace below the house, and observed him setting the outdoor fire-place with balls of newspaper and a tent of twigs. Mischa used a single match to light it, then added branches of aromatic wood from a stack of cut logs. When the flames had settled down and the coals were glowing he laid out three freshwater trout on a rack.The fish had been stuffed with breadcrumbs, garlic and rosemary and brushed with olive oil and lemon. Spring vegetables dipped in oil and garlic and threaded with thyme were heaped up ready to be grilled on the side.

'So, how come you got to be such a dab hand at this?'

The two men stood over the fire, drinks in hand. Smoky aromas of sizzling fish and herbs swirled around their heads.

Mischa said,'I had expert teaching.It gives Gigi a break and I like it.'

Tony watched him turning the food and prodding the fire. He said, 'I'm trying to understand the kind of person she is, and I'm finding it unexpectedly hard. How would you describe her?'

'I wouldn't,' Mischa said promptly.

'But you of all people must know her really well.'

'I don't know her really well at all.'

An asparagus spear rolled over and threatened to fall in the fire. Mischa retrieved it smartly with tongs. Tony was about to ask a follow-up question when Mischa added, 'I know what she shows me.She is a mystery in other areas.That is a good quality in a person,Tony.You should look for it.'

'You and she do seem to be very different people.'

This produced a broad grin.'Ah, you've noticed. She is a woman. Luckily for me.'

'And from the way you got together, a woman of strong feelings, I guess.'

This emboldened statement produced a full-on laugh. 'A piece of luck for me again,Tony.' He moved the fish to a quieter corner. 'And she makes very good vino, which is third time lucky.'

When they brought up the trays of food and seated themselves at the table Greer told their guest,'Barbecues are almost the only time he ever cooks, and I love it.' She passed him a plate.

'It's a bit of a male thing, I guess, being outside and grilling food on an open fire,'Tony said cautiously.

'Oh yes, very he-manly. So it's OK to say he does it very well.' She laughed across at Mischa.

'And he tells me he was shown the ropes by an expert?' Tony helped himself to the grilled baby artichokes and asparagus, and the salad of broad beans, tomatoes and wild radicchio. He had waited to raise this question with her, she noticed. He was a fast learner, although he needn't have bothered to wait in this case.

Mischa's eyes were on his plate, but Greer knew that this was one moment in his past he would neither dismiss nor fail to acknowledge. It was part of a set of incidents, a seminal group of memories whose afterglow helped to define their relationship, even to this day. She had always felt it was a key determinant of their survival, their continuing narrative as a couple.

Tony should have some small inkling of this. She said, 'Yes, it was on the drive between Brisbane and Port Douglas.We met some people who invited us to their place for a barbecue. Beer, barbecues and blokes, it's a religious ritual in country Australia, so Mischa was press-ganged into doing his bit.They found he was rather good at fires, in fact, I seem to remember they put him in charge.'

All the same, she was surprised when Mischa expanded on this. 'We made friends with them at a New Year's Eve party in a pub.'

And both of them stopped eating when Tony said,'Well, guess what. I met with some of those people and they send their regards.They remember you very fondly.'

Almost immediately after Josie's arrival in Sydney, as soon as the next day, Mischa had flung his painting materials and Greer's trunk into the car and the pair of them had embarked on the first leg of the long drive up the east coast to the tropics of Far North Queensland. They had an unspoken need to put as much physical distance as possible between themselves and the site of recent past events.

Unlike the mad dash from Melbourne to Sydney five months previously, on this occasion they had kept inside the speed limit.And,unlike that previous drive,this was a sober journey with no singing, and precious little talking either. Which was scarcely surprising. Both of them were in a state of something not far removed from post-traumatic shock.

On 30 December they had motored down the main drag of a Queensland country town in the sluggish afternoon and passed a run-down pub that looked like a picture on a postcard. In its heyday it had been a handsome three-storey hotel built in the gold rush of the last century, with wide wraparound verandahs on two levels. It seemed quite natural for Mischa,without saying anything,to stop,reverse fast down the empty street and park under a tree. They had climbed, silent and tired, out of the dusty station wagon and booked a room. It was an airy bedroom on the top floor, basic but clean, with double doors opening on to the humid verandah.

Their own silence was challenged at once.They found they had stepped into a hive of activity.The hotel had been bought by ambitious new owners and preparations for tomorrow, New Year's Eve, the biggest night of the year, were in full swing. They opted to stay on for it, more through inertia than any anticipation of fun. It turned out to be a wise decision.

The old year yielded to the new in the hotel's lush, overgrown beer garden, crowded with local merrymakers. It was a night of stifling heat that became, somehow, anything but enervating. There were streamers and fireworks, a jazz band in pork-pie hats with a groovy black sax player, a seafood buffet, beer, champagne, the works. The night was intoxicating, in every sense of the word.

In later years, just a languorous whiff of frangipani was enough to transport Greer back to that garden and that particular New Year's Eve.The flowering shrubs seemed to float in the air in the gathering dusk; the creamy yellows of the frangipani and the purple bougainvillea, and the saffron and shocking-pink hibiscus. And the heavy foliage of the trees, draped with tendrils of tiny star-shaped lights.

They had found themselves drawn, or rather coerced – no refusal brooked – on to a family table of nine spanning three extrovert generations. As the evening wore on they had exchanged names, taken puffs of the odd joint that was being openly passed around and told stories that verged on the indiscreet.

They ventured on to the dance floor when the band slowed down, with Greer leaning against Mischa for support and her face glued to his chest. To sensuous renderings of 'When I Fall in Love' and 'The Way You Look Tonight',they had clasped each other tightly for the first time in months.

A TV was wheeled out and they watched the festivities in the state capital cities. They had counted down the seconds until the new year, and whooped and whistled along with everyone else. Then they'd kissed each other hard, embraced their new mates and countless uproarious others, and sung 'Auld Lang Syne' holding the hands of strangers in a circle that swayed and lurched.

Greer hadn't drunk alcohol or smoked anything at all for ages. The unaccustomed effects combined to mask her exhaustion and remnant aches and pains. She had even for a time found herself co-opted with Mischa into the conga line, snaking through the pub and out into the road under the lid of the velvet night, weaving between the worn verandah posts of the town. The rhythmic chants and the rise and fall of their footsteps were almost drowned out by the hypnotic buzz of cicadas.

These protracted revels supplied the blast of normality needed to melt the ice
that had come between them. Sometime in the early hours of the new year, after
stumbling upstairs to their room that looked out on to the drowsy street they
had recently conga'd along, in spite of being pickled and physically and emotionally
drained, they had managed to make love.

Mischa had approached this milestone slowly, and with a tenderness that unlocked
Greer's constricted heart. After they hauled themselves out of bed late the
following afternoon, with him safely down the hall in the shower, she wrote
in her diary. It was the first entry she had made for quite some time and,
in fact, the last one she would make for a quarter of a century.

New Year's Day 1980
We're back together. Permanently and irrevocably. It has to be symbolic that this, the first day of the new year, is for Mischa and me the day of our reconciliation.

I feel flooded with relief and profound thankfulness, quite unlike anything before in my life.This feeling is like a spiritual experience, although I know it's horrendously sacrilegious to say so. Under the circumstances.

We were both on an unbelievable high last night, in spite of being (or maybe because of being) knackered and sloshed (totally, times two).The high lasted the whole night & we haven't come down from it yet.We had the best time.We met some surprisingly nice people too, or they seemed nice. In the state we were in we probably would've liked Stalin or Charles Manson.We're going to see some of them again tonight.

After the party we came to bed. In the aforementioned blotto state we hardly knew what we were doing, but that was a good thing – it made us forge ahead oblivious.We just...I was going to say, threw caution out of the window, but that's not how it was at all. It was, though, utterly different from before.

M. was so sweet & gentle with me, so tentative at first and controlled. He whispered at one stage he felt as if I was a virgin, and it was true, that was how it did feel. He let me guide him. In a way it was as if this was the first time for him too, although his restraint and self-control could only have come about from experience. It was not explosive like before, but gradual and infinitely more delicate.

I will never forget how tender he was. Never.

It didn't hurt but afterwards I cried, I couldn't help it.That made him cry too. It hit me then what all this has been like for him. Not that I haven't been aware of Mischa and his feelings for every moment of every day of the past five terrible months. But I saw it with a new clarity.

We didn't even fall asleep straight afterwards but lay in bed, watching the sunrise through the wide-open verandah doors and talking.We spoke a bit about sex & jealousy.We know we've each had plenty of previous experiences, we just don't want to hear anything more about them. Charlie, Elsa & the rest, they're simply meaningless names to us now.

And I want to hereby put the past, and I mean the immediate past, out of my mind. I intend to banish it.

If you don't make a point of remembering a thing, it doesn't lodge in your psyche. It does not become a memory. Eventually, it fades away.That is what this will do.

After the barbecue Tony was keen to make a start on collating Mischa's library
of musicals. Greer left them with brandy and the soundtrack of
Crazy for You
. From her study she could hear Tony singing a few bars of 'Nice Work ifYou Can
Get It'. He had a light tenor not dissimilar to Fred Astaire's.

She sat with her arms clasped across her chest, the steady light of two candles
glowing on the desk.There was no draught.The flames burnt without a flicker.
She remembered very well the complicated tears she had shed. They were uncontrollable.
It had been like a pent-up dam bursting and flooding over.