The Biographer (3 page)

Rollo gurgled.'"Karlovy
Var
i: the Un
var
nished Truth".'

They were rubbing along quite well now, and Greer was the outsider. Guy turned on her, smiling.

'What about your secret years, then? Life before Mischa. You never talk about it.'

She wanted to say, I wrote about it once. To myself. Instead she said, 'I was just a mewling girl.There's nothing much to tell.'

She was on the point of adding something,but she could see they believed her. They were easily satisfied, these two men who knew her so well.Who thought they knew her.

Saturday 8th July
The opening went fantastically well (except for one thing).Nearly two-thirds sold. V. tickled pink, in her phlegmatic way.Other people wouldn't necessarily have known, but I could tell –the corners of her mouth that are normally turned down werehorizontal at least. I'm pleased for her, she needs a hit.

He was waiting outside when I got there at 4, looking in worse shape than yesterday, if possible. I was positive he hadn't even changed his shirt. I asked him if he'd slept on the pavement.

'I do have somewhere that is not the pavement to go. Do you want to come and inspect it? Is that why you are rudely asking?'

'You seem to have this effect on me. I'm sorry, I'm not usually like this.'

'What effect are you talking about?'

'Well, asking questions you think are rude.'

'What are you usually like?'

'I'm usually quite polite.'

'You are a very bourgeois little girl then, aren't you, in your nice white suit?'

That really annoyed me, and I pushed past him & started turning on all the lights. Verity came in & I buttonholed her, away from him, & suggested she at least get him to go and have a shave & a wash. She said it was not her place to tell him what to do, he was a grown man. And she's normally sooo fastidious. Then she added, 'You wouldn't think of telling Francis Bacon to go and have a shave, now, would you?' She laughed, quite light-heartedly.

She's not only putting him in the big league, now she's making jokes as well.

A column of smoke split the horizon in two equal, and equally decorative, halves. The smoke is the colour of pewter, Greer thought, and the sky is lavender. If I were a landscape painter I would be sitting here with an easel on the terrace, or up among the olive trees on the hillside, translating this sublime view. The way the land lies, the changing shape of its moods. It has the open, responsive countenance of a face.

I was never a landscape painter. I was always more drawn to people. People and appearances. The unlimited variety of the human face, with its capacity to hint, to express, to reveal. And equally, of course, to lie. In the same way as the landscape painter observes the bones of the earth's crust, the way the land lies, you might say that I was a student of the lie of the face.

I was a competent portraitist. Possibly more than that; Verity was always encouraging me to do more drawing, to go to art school part-time, to explore and develop my talent. She urged me to push the boundaries. I was about to, of course.That was the plan.And I suppose I did push them, but not in the way she meant. Not remotely in that way.

A corner of the diary page curled slightly. She felt the sun move between clouds
on her back. She had brought sunglasses on to the terrace to take advantage
of the brightness and warmth, which would not last. And to take advantage of
this unaccustomed free time, which she had set up for the duration of the biographer's
visit.

From her chair she saw that part of the gutter was coming adrift. It needed fixing. So did the cistern in their bathroom, which was making a constant low-level flushing noise. She noticed a couple of loose bricks in the archway over the kitchen door, where the mortar had crumbled away.There was always something, with an old house.

A silky drift of perfume hung in the air.The old wisteria vine clinging to the east wall of the house and, she thought, practically holding it up, was in full flower. The speckled stones were only intermittently visible behind prodigious spouting fountains that cascaded down the wall like blue waterfalls. Heliotrope-coloured flowers, she maintained, largely because she liked the old English word. Not a bit of it – Cambridge blue crossed with gentian violet according to Guy, a pedantic King's man.

There were a couple of Guy's discarded wine casks directly below the small terrace,
planted with spiky rosemary bushes. Next to them were smaller, sawn-off barrels
of lavender. The rosemary was coming out early too, dotted with its more reticent
blue flowers.Very soon, on the cusp of summer, when it was especially still
and there was a particular configuration of sun and wind and light, the air
on the kitchen terrace would fizz with a broth of wisteria and rosemary.

In the corner of the terrace she kept pots of jasmine. It had been warmer than usual this year and already they were starting to bud, the stems sporting silvery slivers of magenta. Long sultry evenings were just around the corner. In a week or two – it couldn't be long now – with the lavender out in force and the jasmine in full rampaging flower like the clouds of a child's snowdome, the air would vibrate once more with the scent of seduction.

I'd only just got the cheese & biscuits & wine put out when the GP started arriving.All the usuals,but a few extra VIPs.Verity's obviously been putting the screws on around town.There was a distinct buzz. I was run off my feet putting red stickers on.

The Aboriginal girl went first, then there were a couple of photo finishes that almost turned nasty. Jane C. & Stephen S. both wanted the dero, & the charcoal drawing of the woman in an apron doing the vacuuming had two others after it. I told V. she should've charged more.She said,'Next time we'll double the prices.'

He was quite low-key, relatively well behaved. Maybe Verity had had a quiet word. She steered him round the bigwigs & the silver-spoon brigade.You could see people thinking, wow, a real live Bohemian artist! The genuine article – grotty & eccentric, none of your modern, suave art-school product.They were lapping it up.

He came over to me at one point, to get his glass filled. He leant over & shouted (it was v. noisy),'I would like to offer you dinner tonight.'

I must have looked flabbergasted, & he immediately said: 'You are alive, so you probably eat food? It would be a pity to waste that nice white suit.And now I have lots of money.'

I said,'Thanks, but I'm not wasting the suit so you needn't worry.'I was meeting C.at Mietta's.As I said that I realised it sounded quite ungracious.Then something made me add,'It's cream, by the way. Not white.'

He made a series of silly faces & yelled,'Oh, really? You don't say! Is it CREAM? I am SO SORRY for my STUPID mistake!' He was trying (unsuccessfully) to do an exaggerated English accent. I realised he was actually quite drunk.

He went off to eat with Verity afterwards.

Why did I say that? But his invitation was pretty damn ungraciously expressed too.What did he expect?

C. goes to the NZ conference tomorrow, for 3 days.

His overreaction was ridiculous. Childish.

She picked up the diary and went inside, into their bedroom, a cool, sparsely
furnished space that squared off one corner of the house. The windows on the
two outer walls were flung wide open. If you stood at the door and looked through
the gap of the far window, the room seemed to extend into the sky. Zoom further
in, as if through the lens of a hand-held camera, and the panoramic vastness
of the landscape swung into view.

On the right-hand wall the windows had a different function: to illuminate the
domestic arena. Across the drive and a swathe of lawn dotted with daisies and
yellow celandines – the piazza area they called the parade ground – sat Rollo and Guy's house. It was clearly visible now, its cloak of Virginia
creeper still a wintry tracery of branches, and the vine leaves on the pergolas
tightly furled. Soon the creeper and the vines would be out, concealing the
house behind an impenetrable green wall of foliage.

Normally she loved this airy bedroom, with its contrasting outlooks. She thought
of it as giving a physical voice to the two halves of her existence, the outer
and the inner life. Her mind's eye, the imaginative play of the mind, was as
crowded and colourful as a kaleidoscope.There were times when she wondered
if she was more occupied with the world of the mind than with what people called
real life.

But in recent weeks the imminence of the biographer's arrival had achieved a kind of upheaval. It was as if her private horizons were no longer unrestricted. They had contracted into a small claustrophobic space, rather like a safe house. She had begun to think of herself as living under a house arrest of the mind.

Beyond the perimeter of her mental safe house lay a cordoned-off area, a dark no-man's land ringed by shadows. It was an ominous and forbidden place, and yet time and again she would find herself drawn towards it.There was a pattern to this apparently unconscious process. It was always the same. She would find herself out there, stealing towards that dangerous forbidden boundary, creeping up on it.When it dawned on her she recoiled and drew back. Both moves, the cautious advance, the shocked retreat, were like reflex actions, each as involuntary as the other.

The zone that lay beyond the perimeter was not empty. She knew there were things out there. She sensed, but could not grasp, their amorphous shapes.

Always, the bedroom had a calming effect. The walls revealed the fugitive presence,
both physical and ethereal, of previous generations. Unlike the rest of the
house, which was mostly plastered and hung with pictures, she and Mischa had
left these walls untouched. They were flecked with spectral tints of pigment,
these walls that had once been menaced by brambles and worn away by wind and
rain. For four desolate decades the house had lain uninhabited, abandoned to
the elements, before Mischa and Greer arrived to live in it. Like the other
two main houses it had once been divided up and occupied by two or three families.

It was Rollo and Guy more than thirty years earlier who had stumbled across the
Castello: a medieval hamlet with chapel and watchtower in a state of extreme
dereliction. The cluster of buildings on an isolated hilltop had been abandoned
for at least twenty years, since the inhabitants of the day, a small community
of sharecroppers, were left destitute by their landlord. He was known in the
district as the wicked count. These days some less feckless descendants of
the wicked count still lived in the grand villa further up the hill and were
cordial friends of Rollo and Guy.

The farmers had all dispersed to cities and villages in search of work. Local lore had it that some of them had gone to Australia and ended up in Melbourne, Greer's home town.An example,she thought,of the random circularity of destiny.

Patches of cracked stucco still lay on the bedroom walls, floating like clouds.To Greer,the grainy surfaces,with their layers upon layers, hinted at other lives. The remnants of paint and wash were small testimonies, modest but eloquent, bequeathed to posterity. She speculated often with Rollo about those who had left them. She liked to think of herself and Mischa as the natural descendants of these unknown forbears.

They may be unknown and mysterious, she thought, but I am not unaware of them. We are their posterity and they are not forgotten. She sensed that in some visceral way this ancient house was aware that it had been rescued from rack and ruin and was grateful. Her predecessors, she was certain, had responded to it just as she did. She felt imagined presences at times. She had never once felt lonely in this room, or this house.

She saw now that the stippled smudges of ochre were fragments of autobiography.
A human version of spoor, the track or scent of an animal.What inadvertent
traces would she and Mischa leave behind? Even if it were only a subtle shift
in atmosphere, they would leave their spoor. Proof that the terracotta roof
and these limestone walls had once sheltered this woman and this man, the successors
and inheritors of all those who had gone before.

The house is not mute. Our ancestors may be unnamed but they are not entirely anonymous, Greer thought.There are certain facts about them that I know, certain important truths.They too had their human failings.They were capable of particular things, deeds in their lives that they regretted, which caused them shame; deeds to which this house has borne patient witness. It sustained them in times of joy and passion, anguish and loss. Through infidelities, betrayals and remorse. This house sustained them throughout their lives, and after centuries it is still here, an unprejudiced observer, accepting everything, judging nothing. I find this knowledge strangely comforting.

On her left next to the door was a gold-framed drawing in red chalk, the head and bare shoulders of a man. Signed with a flourish, with a pair of ornate initials, two capital Gs interlocked by curlicues, and a date in the bottom right-hand corner. Her own initials, and a date she knew by heart.

She considered the drawing critically, as if she were Antony the invader coming upon it with no preconceived ideas. It showed a man who looked the age she knew he was at the time: nearing the end of his fortieth year. A strong, square face, fleshy and lived-in, shadowed with heavy stubble. Long straggling hair, almost shoulder length, piercing deep-set eyes, and a complicated expression full of challenge and triumph.

It was, she decided, both a good likeness and a successful rendering of a sensuous
and virile man. But it was neither an objective portrait nor a dispassionate
one. It shouted disclosure. In the bold, suggestive strokes of the chalk a
perceptive onlooker might recognise the feelings, the full-on complicity of
the artist.

On the wall opposite, next to the window, the chalk man was reflected in an old
octagonal mirror whose carved wooden frame had been painted, like the bedroom
walls, layer upon layer. Greer stood next to the drawing and positioned her
face close to his. She examined the two reflected images.

The new portrait was in colour, but looked slightly overexposed. It showed a middle-aged woman, faded blonde hair pinned up untidily, no make-up. Full lips, which matched those of the man next to her. A sensual mouth, unquestionably. Long, narrow nose, pale blue eyes.

She couldn't read the expression in the eyes or the face. It wasn't that it was an enigmatic face, exactly. It was hard to read because it did not give much away.And although it was so familiar, the face, after all, whose every detail she knew, every blemish, there was a sense in which it remained a mystery, even to her.Would it suggest to the onlooker that it was the face of a woman with secrets?