The Biographer (29 page)

'And I'm afraid it was categorically due to your evil influence, Greer. Not only did you spirit Mischa away, you also made him sever his links with the gallery. You had nothing to do with any of it, in her eyes, Mischa. She was still besotted with you. She'd have given her right arm, she told me, to have those Queensland pictures.'

He gave Greer a teasing look. 'But she was remarkably balanced and even-handed where the works were concerned. I truly believe she wouldn't have minded one itsy little bit if the whole lot had happened to be of you.'

To begin with Greer had found it disquieting, the disconnect between their laid-back
life in the sun and the sometimes confronting subjects of Mischa's paintings.
In Sydney there had been a stark correspondence between what was going on and
the nature of his work. She had assumed this would always be the case, and
was disconcerted when their comparatively idyllic days in Far North Queensland
threw up uneasy images.

At first Mischa had painted Greer, but nearly always obliquely, in backward or
sidelong glimpses and partial reflections, often in veiled or washed-out light.
And following on from that came the period, not an extended one but intense,
of dishevelled figures with shadows, long and looming or distorted, and then,
unnervingly, detached and unrelated.

Over the years Greer had come to think of each picture as having two distinct, separate provenances: its coming into being and its subsequent history. She saw the products of Mischa's creativity as mysterious, independent entities with lives of their own, just as she knew Rollo did with his own works. Rollo blamed his pictures for his episodes of painter's block, accusing them of sabotaging him. He boasted that at other times they were capable of being charmingly amenable and co-operative.

In Greer's opinion Mischa's images did not reflect his state of mind in any direct external way, although you could (and critics did) analyse them and make plausible cases for psychological expressionism. But not always, or even that often. Some subjects she was at a loss to relate to anything. Mischa's artistic preoccupations appeared, apparently from nowhere, and vanished or went into abeyance with the same quixotic spontaneity.

He himself did not change according to the mood of the work in progress,Greer informed Tony.She could see he was resoundingly unconvinced. And nor, she told him, did Mischa's own mood impinge on what he produced.

Always excepting, of course, and this she did not tell Tony, the time in Sydney. The Sydney period of Mischa's career was an exception to every rule. Not that it was ever identified as such, since it had to all intents and purposes ceased to exist.This was because there was no evidence for it. In the canon of Mischa's work, there were no extant paintings to bear witness to any Sydney period.

21st April 2006
Last night I dreamt of two men. I was with Mischa, it was now, in the present time, and nothing was changed. But unbeknown to him I was having a wild, tumultuous affair with a much younger man.

The mood of the dream was frenetic. High anxiety alternating with electric excitement. I was mired in terrible guilt, yet felt powerless to end this affair. I rushed to see my lover in secret, when our intense erotic encounters were punctuated by urgent talk. He was pressuring me to leave Mischa and run away with him, and part of me desperately wanted to do this. I felt pulled and torn between the two, unable to imagine leaving Mischa, and yet intoxicated with the rediscovery of passion.

Then it came to me suddenly in the dream with a shocking, revelatory force: I am in love with the two of them. And with that, just as I was half aware of emerging from the dream, I was hit by a second, almost simultaneous realisation: they are not two different men at all. They are the same man. They are Mischa now, and Mischa as he was.

Greer lay in bed alongside Mischa in the immediate aftermath of this dream, unable to move, at once drained and exhilarated by the feverish emotion of it. She closed her eyes and tried to draw back the mental curtain, to re-enter the roller-coaster journey with its searing, conflicting feelings. She tried to envisage again the face and hands of her younger lover, who was also Mischa, but they were not be retrieved.

She felt she must tell it, write it down, before it faded away or vanished entirely in the way that most dreams did. She ran in nightdress and bare feet from the bedroom to her study, unlocked the desk drawer and wrote rapidly at the end of the diary on one of the empty pages that followed her last entry. Quite why she felt compelled to make a record of it she did not know. Neither did she feel the need to analyse anything – the dream or her intentions. It was enough to put what she could of the story of the dream on paper while she still marvelled at it.

It sounds odd to say this, perhaps, but in the drama of this dream there was something poetic. It was like a duel, a choreography involving the mind and body, with a wholly unexpected denouement that tied up all the ends. It had been such a frantic, high-octane ride, and its final mood contained an enormous component of relief – the realisation that I did not need to leave at all.When the dream ended and I came down from it, I was not in the least depressed, but instead strangely uplifted.

Mischa slumbered on unaware of any of this, but it was already dawn and Greer found herself disinclined to return to bed. The scent of wisteria surged through the open windows and she felt energised, better than she had felt for the past few weeks, since well before the biographer's arrival. It was a novelty, this giddy sensation of wellbeing. It had become unfamiliar. She thought, why am I feeling like this? There's no reason for it. He is still here. Nothing has changed. It can't possibly last.

She threw on jeans and an old t-shirt and sweater, aware that for the first time in weeks she had not thought about dressing for Tony's benefit. It was too early to fetch the paper and mail from the village but the temperature was mild. She made coffee and drank it outside on the steps,listening to the birdsong and watching the tepid light creep over the grass.

Some instinct – not a noise – made her look across to the neighbouring cottage, Casanova,Tony's house. She was in time to see Guy emerge from the front door and run down the steps with his loose, loping stride. He saw her, inevitably, and executed a little pantomime, an exaggerated start with finger to the lips. He came over.

'G.What on earth are you doing abroad at this ungodly hour?' He dropped down beside her on the step, yawning.

'I could ask you the selfsame thing.'

'It's only just after five. Obscenely early. Shouldn't you be tucked up in bed sleeping the sleep of the just?'

'Indeed it is. Shouldn't you?'

'I have been. I've finished.'

'Well, so have I. Do you want some coffee?'

When they repaired to the kitchen terrace with a fresh pot she told him, on impulse, about the dream. He rated it highly.

'It's rather profound, in its way. And quite sexy. I'm impressed. And envious:
I don't think I've ever had a profound dream. Or at least not a profoundly
sexy one.'

'Nor had I. It could be a first.'

'What prompted it? Tony raking up your libidinous past with his probing archeological excavations?'He yawned again.

She let him think she considered.'Maybe that was it.'

'Or is it guilt? You're not having it off with the versatile Antonio, are you?' He favoured her with a droll look from under drooping eyelids.

'Not on your life. It's too crowded in there already.Who knows what you might trip over.'

After Guy had gone she wandered, on impulse again, over to Mischa's studio. She passed the big cypress close to the sitting room window, where her nesting doves were cooing. It had several little recalcitrant branches jutting out at right angles and disturbing the symmetry.This happened to some cypresses, but not all. It was caused by snow, Guy claimed. Sometimes they were self-correcting, and the branches would fold back up into the sinuous body of the tree all by themselves.

She put her shoulder to the main door. She hadn't bothered to bring the key. It had a businesslike iron padlock which Mischa had left unlocked, as he usually did unless they were going away or there had been a recent visit from the insurance company. She crossed the floor and went up the stairs to the main studio. She had a good idea by now what she was heading for.

Tony's masonite sheets were laid out on a trestle table under the soaring windows of the south wall. The studio was still dimly lit, but without switching on the lights she could see at once that he had completed his chapter headings and posted new illustrations. Most of these were paintings, but there was a significant quota of new photos attached to some sections. She wasn't interested in those. She only had eyes for the chapter Tony had already brought to her attention.'Chapter Four:The Australian Period'.

She skimmed along the row of images. Mischa at his first Melbourne exhibition; Mischa with Verity at the opening; Greer herself on the Isle of Pines; she and Charlie at the Flower Drum restaurant. Her eyes came to rest on the head shot of Josie, in the orange top and turquoise beads, with her stylishly bobbed hair. Tony had appended a new, single-line caption to this photo. It read: 'Josephine (Josie) McNicoll,
née
Gordon, Hong Kong, 1983'.

Greer took in the brief words. For a second or two it was almost as if she had written them herself, there was such an inevitability in the message they carried. She thought, so this was what they did. This was their solution. Why am I not surprised? My reaction is quite unambiguous. First and foremost, above anything else, it is pleasure. I think it is true to say that I feel unalloyed pleasure, for my sister and for Charlie. And yes, there is also unalloyed relief. It's what I would have wanted, what I'd hardly have dared hope for, let alone put into words.

And yet, if I'm to be honest, I think the germ of the idea was always there, in the far recesses, and not only from the moment I unleashed the plan on Josie.

Josie must surely have made a better wife for Charlie. In Greer's mind Josie was always the one he should have fallen for. He had just happened to meet the less suitable one first.

Josie was the practical sister, always immaculately turned out, whatever the occasion or time of day.The one who had a weekly appointment at the hairdresser.The social one who loved entertaining and devising grand celebrations. It was Josie who did all the organising for Greer's twenty-first birthday party, right down to matching corsages for the sisters and their mother. Later, Greer had thrown away her wilted flowers while Josie had pressed hers into an album.

A sequence of pictures arrived unbidden in Greer's mind. Engraved invitations on a mantelpiece for 'At Homes' and cocktail parties. Josie and Charlie hosting a formal dinner at a long table with lashings of silver cutlery and sparkling crystal. The two of them dolled up to the nines in a late-model convertible with the top down, en route to some smart business engagement or other, or perhaps to a ball.

Their wedding. Greer's mother, Lorna, had been circumspect in her letters, but she would not have withheld such information as this. The marriage must have been arranged soon after Lorna's death.Where had it taken place? In Hong Kong? She saw Charlie in a dinner suit and Josie in an off-the-shoulder gown with a veil and train.

Charlie's preference was always for a full-blown, traditional church affair.
He agreed to the registry office to appease me. Well, he would have agreed
to anything. This time around, though, the bride and groom would have been
of one mind. The groom was divorced, of course. Perhaps the ceremony had been
held out of doors on someone's sweeping lawns with a view of the sea.

There was another aspect to Josie's personality. From childhood Greer had always been aware of it, because she had so often been on the receiving end. Josie liked to look after people. She was a nurturer. If there was such a thing as a defining characteristic, this was hers. She was the kind of traditional young woman everyone tended to describe as slightly old-fashioned. As maternal. Which was a painful irony, because Josie had known since her teenage years that she could never bear a child.

I grew up knowing she was a deeply maternal person, Greer thought, and with the knowledge that her biology had dealt her a killer blow. I was able to make use of both halves of that information for my own ends.

Before leaving the studio she looked over Mischa's works in progress.There were two large examples of what were already being called his Displacement pictures. One showed a crowd of people massed in the foreground and disappearing into the distance. All were staring in different directions, wildly. Since early last year Mischa had been drawing more than usual on paper, in crayon, charcoal or pen and ink. Here he was employing marks, impressionistic but emphatic, to blur the boundaries between static and moving images. Lines and ghosting in pale wash around the bodies suggested movement of limbs, fluidity and flux.

He had sketched a rough, idealised cityscape around and among the figures. It appeared to be partly in ruins and partly a futuristic metropolis.Just off-centre was a blank area,almost like a gaping hole in the canvas.

In the second picture on the west wall two characters, not identifiably male or female, were looking from right to left and appearing to age before the viewer's eyes.The facial contours were in segments, Cubist-style, fragmented yet not spacially detached from each other. Behind them in the background strange shapes and shadowy figures were looming. In front of them, again near the middle of this picture, was an empty area of nothingness.

As with others in the series a seething sense of transience and loss pervaded the scene. Standing in the studio, as the sun's rays intensified by the minute and spilled through the east windows, Greer tried to pin down exactly why this was. Was it the restless interplay of line and medium that created this feeling, or an urgent, tensile quality that was intrinsic to both compositions? They seemed to be in suspension between points of essential information, rather like the stop-start narrative of a dream. The gaps in the pictures were suggestive of dreamscapes, too.

Greer looked at the shadowy shapes massed in the back-ground of the second picture. She had not seen that one before. He must have started on it yesterday.

The whole studio was bathed in rosy morning light as she descended the stairs and pulled the heavy door closed behind her. Dew was all around, glittering on the leaves and grass and sparkling off the planes of gravel on the path. She and Guy had visited the local gravel pit late last winter, after torrential rains turned the path to Mischa's studio and sections of their access lanes into rutted quagmires.

She had been struck by the industrial activity of the pit and the heavy machinery that ground stones and rock into different grades of gravel, spewing it out to form sleek geometric heaps in the shapes of pyramids and rhomboids. The following day she took Rollo down to show him. Rollo was fascinated by the hermetic hive of activity, so much at odds with its bucolic surroundings. Who would have thought it?

Greer walked across the parade ground on the springy grass dotted with daisies, poppies and buttercups. Her feet in their rubber-soled sneakers were sodden with dew. It was still too early for anyone else to be about – only the birds, which were in full harmonic voice. The energy that had possessed her since she awoke from the dream of the two men who were the same man was still there, but it was tempered since the visit to the studio with impulses that were less clear-cut.She glanced behind at Tony's cottage.His bedroom window was open, but the front door that Guy had eased back on the latch remained tightly closed.

She skirted the side of the chapel and took the track that clung to the ridge, heading north alongside rows of twenty-year-old olive trees, then down a little pathway to the swimming pool tucked into the side of the hill. It boasted a grotto, which showed off a bronze sculpture of an athletic youth, made early on in their tenure by Rollo at a studio in Rome.

A single magisterial olive tree presided over the pool in the lee of the hill, one of only a handful to survive the freak winter of 1985. It was four hundred years old, and known to them all as the grey eminence. Greer leant against it, running her hands over its extraordinary trunk, a work of art in itself, furrowed and twisted into fantastical shapes and protuberances.

The four full-time human residents of the Castello would describe themselves as irreligious, perhaps profoundly so, yet she suspected even Mischa if put on the spot might not deny a spiritual connection with this tree.To Greer and Rollo it had the status of a tribal elder, a fellow owner-occupier with its own legitimate claim to the land. It was a living being with the wisdom of age and a personality – quirky, dispassionate – clearly defined. She sometimes climbed it, just as she had swarmed up trees incessantly in her childhood, with Josie craning to get a glimpse at her through the foliage. But this morning she had something else in mind.