The Biographer (10 page)

She nodded. Rollo added, 'So, Antonio, what is your plan of campaign for the morrow?'

Tony looked at Greer and smiled.'Good question.What
is
my game plan?'

They worked something out on the short drive back to the Castello. It would be a loose arrangement.Tony would spend the first few days or so mostly with Mischa, starting chronologically with the early years in Czechoslovakia and his birthplace – the old spa town of Karlovy Vari.

'Karlovy
Var
i, the un
var
nished truth,' Rollo said, turning round to smirk at Greer,who duly laughed.He was ensconced in the front next to Mischa. Greer was aware of Tony's presence beside her, and of the narrow space that separated them.

Tony said pleasantly to her, 'Maybe I should drop by tomorrow and start checking out your archives.When Mischa needs to take a break from my gruelling interrogation?'

'You mean the cardboard boxes? Of course, yes.'

'Mischa has a ludicrously short attention span.' Rollo swivelled round again.'You'll find the breaks will vastly out-number the gruelling grillings.'

Tony asked her,'Did you manage to unearth much?'

'A few things,I suppose.All jumbled up,as I said.'

'Letters?' He was clasping his hands together in a prayerful pose.'Please say you kept some letters.'

'He doesn't write letters,Tony, so why would he get any?'

'Shut the fuck up, Roly, if you don't mind,' Mischa said mildly. He turned the car up the hill.The rain had eased to a drizzle.

'There are letters –'

'Yes!'

'But nearly all from the last ten years, since we came to the Castello. We moved around so much before then. We were constantly shedding things.'

This was a safe enough topic. She felt quite expansive. 'We were like gypsies
for years, weren't we?' She looked at the back of Mischa's head, but he seemed
intent on driving. 'We wanted to be free to take off and go anywhere, with
no encumbrances, nothing to tie us down. Except his equipment, which didn't
boil down to much more than a handful of favourite brushes in a cigar box.'

And my equipment too. The biscuit tin of pencils, charcoal and chalks, brushes and watercolours. She added rapidly, to suppress this thought,'That's a lot of years without much documentation, I'm afraid. How awful for you.'

She stopped.They were winding upwards on the unlit dirt road, and it was too dark to make out his face without turning and staring, but something told her he was smiling again.

'Don't worry about it. They're not entirely without documentation, those years. You'd be amazed how much inadvertent flotsam gets left behind. It's the other guys, you see, the motley crew you hang out with on your travels. They hold on to things, remember stuff, keep diaries, even. To be honest, it's a bit of a relief you don't have a whole bunch of material from that time.'

'I'm sure she's got more bunches than she's letting on.' Rollo searched for the outlines of their faces in the rear-view mirror. 'Every little twiglet is grist to his mill, Gigi, remember.Who was that Aussie composer who hung on to every scrap of paper he ever had in his life? You know, the self-flagellating one? Not just the dirty-linen bits, he kept all his dry-cleaning bills, shopping lists – a biographer's wet dream, Tony. Of course, Mischa's never had anything dry-cleaned in his life so Gigi couldn't have kept the chits even if she'd wanted to.'

'It was Percy Grainger,' Greer said.

Tony added, 'And all those chits would be more of a biographer's worst nightmare, I'm here to say.'

'Come on, admit you'd love the flogging.'

'The flogging would be knockout, I give you that.'

'The flogging would be knockout.' Greer heard Rollo's appreciative snicker. 'Well, he won't be tripping over any birch rods at your place, will he, darling? I fear you may be confronting a tragic dearth of debauchery instead.'

Mischa interjected forcefully, 'You can find that at the priest's house, Tony. That's Roly's house, if you didn't know yet.'

Rollo chuckled at this.'Ah, well, all wives secretly love to dish the dirt on their husbands, don't they? I'll do what I can, but Gigi's probably your best hope.'

They were feeling their way through the second entry gate now. The movement triggered an outside light that thinly illuminated the parking area.

'Well, I'll just have to put the screws on you then, won't I, and hope for the best.' This time she distinctly saw the whites of Tony's smiling teeth.

23rd bloody July
What am I going to do? It's impossible, I can't bear C. to touch me. I can't conceal it either, he can tell. I couldn't help it, last night when I tried to go through with it I actually recoiled, gorge rising. He thinks he understands but he knows nothing. There's not a single thing I can do to change this. I know now it could never work with C. If it ever did work before, in some kind of disabled way when I didn't know anything about anything, it couldn't any more.

What on earth am I going to do? What am I going to what what whatwhatwhat is there available for me to do? What the fuck can I in fact actually do?

WHAT THE FUCKING HELL CAN I POSSIBLY DO???

The night before, for the first time on the holiday, she had yielded to Charlie's sensitive overtures. Forced herself to go through the motions, in a resigned spirit of experimentation. It had been a disaster.

The diary page was torn and ragged. The letters were agitated, getting progressively larger, more fevered and out of control, until the ballpoint pen had ploughed into the paper and ripped it.The brief entry filled the whole page.

She had let the pen and diary fall on to the sand. It took no effort to recall the scene. Her hunched figure in the blinding light, sitting with her back to the sea on sand that was as refined and pale as finely milled face powder.A young woman in a straw hat and burnt-orange bikini, slender, with long blonde hair. It could have been any hackneyed photo in a travel magazine, except that the sun-tanned legs were drawn up to the chin, the eyes squeezed shut and the mouth clenched in a grimace.

She had groped for a cigarette and found the packet empty. At precisely that moment a young man, French, had come up and offered her a Camel. He must have been watching her. She'd taken a cigarette automatically and accepted his light, then had trouble getting rid of him. He was personable, polite, insistent. What was the matter, he wanted to know.Why was she so upset? Was it love?

Instantly the tears spilt over. His handkerchief came out. Was it a letter she was writing? he demanded. Had he broken it all off,
le salaud
?

'No, no, not that at all! It's only my diary!' It was as if a tap had been turned on and, just like the tears, a torrent of words had spilt out.

For the rest of the morning, while Greer's husband, oblivious, threw fishing
lines over the side of a swish catamaran, the two young people who didn't know
each other (and one who would never meet Charlie) had thrashed out a problem
he didn't know he had. The foundations of his future and the fates of several
others would be sourced as a result of this casual encounter on a beach, and
the intense conversation that ensued.

It was a shamelessly frank conversation. In later years, whenever the meeting
with the young Frenchman crossed her mind in the seconds before being dismissed,
Greer had thought of it as a secular variant of an epiphany. She had told this
unknown Frenchman private things that she could not imagine saying to anyone
else.The fact that he was a total stranger and foreign to boot had made such
candid confessions possible. He was sympathetic, with no axe to grind. And
he was young and attractive.These facts too could not be discounted.

They had been like a pair of spies having a covert rendezvous on an empty beach.
Or, more accurately, conspirators. She knew nothing about her fellow conspirator
beyond his Christian name, Jean-Claude, and his occupation. But he spoke English
fluently, being a graduate student attached to a medical research lab in Canberra.And
as they groped towards an outcome she had hardly dared conceive of, he was
prepared to envisage the unthinkable. Not only to imagine it, but to say it
out loud.Which eased the way for her.

'No, it is easier for me,' he countered, 'because I don't know your husband. He is Mr X. If I know Mr X, maybe I cannot talk like this. But I see you, and I see that you cannot be unhappy for the rest of your life.'

'You don't find the idea terribly shocking?'

'Shocking? Perhaps, but only if you are a bourgeoise.'

That's the second time in two weeks I have been accused of being bourgeois, she thought.

'To be bitter and frigid, and not to have great sex again, ever.Those things are shocking to me,'he added.

Once the unthinkable had been given an imaginative existence, they were able to take it further. By the end of the morning they had worked out a plan. It depended on contingencies that were both considerable and unpredictable. It had no guarantee of success. The very word success was inappropriate.

She said again, 'Wouldn't it be impossibly ruthless? And – unnatural?' She felt her heart race.

'Youth is always ruthless.That is its nature. Love is the most ruthless of all.'

'What about unnatural?'

'What does that mean, natural? It is a meaningless word. The whole of civilisation has been a process of improving on the natural.'

'How do
you
know all this?'

'Everyone knows it in their heart.That's what great art is all about.The great novels,the work of Tolstoy,Flaubert, Zola. Music, paintings. You say Mischa Svoboda is a great artist.Well, he will have no difficulty with it.You just wait and see.'

They had been so engrossed in the conversation on the beach that when she looked at her watch she was amazed to find it was lunchtime. Charlie would be back from his fishing trip, anxiously seeking her out.

The Frenchman got to his feet first, then pulled her up and kept hold of her hands. He said,'But all of this, it rests on the hypothesis that the great artist Mischa Svoboda you have only known a week is the true love of your life.'

'It's not a hypothesis. It's a certainty.'

The love of my life. The phrase stirred a physical response.

'
Je comprends
.When it happens, you know.'

They stood in silence, hand in hand, facing each other. She remembered how they had suddenly and spontaneously embraced, and the way the embrace had morphed like a computer-generated image into a passionate kiss. How she had let it happen, with her eyes closed, with no resistance. The release of it.

At least I was the first to pull back, she thought now, wryly. At least, I always like to think I was. It hadn't felt reckless, or even disloyal, just natural.Whatever that was. She had disengaged herself.They were both left smiling, rueful, and distinctly breathless.

'So,' he'd said, 'then you will have to go through with this plan. When you get back, you must make a start by coming clean with him.'

'Yes.Oh,God.'

'If it's going to work out between you, it will work. You don't need God.'He grinned.'Love has a famous habit of finding a way.'

She remembered his parting words.'
Bonne chance
. I wish it was me.'

It was the last day of his vacation and she had seen Jean-Claude only once more, that same evening, at the far end of the resort dining room. Just an impression of his face, angled towards her as she walked in ahead of her husband. She had turned sharply on her heel, gasping involuntarily, as if stung. At dinner outside on the candlelit verandah she kept her eyes fixed on her innocent husband seated opposite, as if she were wearing blinkers.

Even at the time Greer had retained no clear picture of Jean-Claude's face. He remained a blur, like the fleeting glimpse that night in the hotel. Sometimes she found herself wondering if she had imagined the entire incident.Was he some kind of ghostly scapegoat she had conjured up, so she could tell herself: it was his idea, not mine. He planted it in my mind; I would never have contemplated it. Had he been an agent provocateur, prompting a sequence of events that she might not otherwise have had the nerve, the heart, to embark upon?

But her recall of the conversation was total.And she had no memory of ever asking him whether he thought she would find the strength to go through with it when the time came.The possibility that she might find herself unable to go through with it, she suspected, had never even entered her mind.

In Greer's study lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves was a fine walnut writing
desk with two lockable drawers. For the last ten years she had left the diary
lying at the back of the left-hand drawer, unlocked. She turned the key of
the drawer now, and put the key in her purse. The diary was an incriminating
document, without any doubt. She could burn it. She was surprised to find herself
strongly disinclined to do this. Because hidden between these covers is the
person I was then. The answers to the questions are right here: the how and
the why. This is the evidence, with no excuse and no apology. Just the raw
feelings on the page.

There was something abhorrent about the idea of destroying the evidence, however incriminating it might be. She felt some pride in taking this attitude. Even if it was never used, either for biography or autobiography, it was the personal equivalent of a historical document, a primary source. And a primary source, she felt instinctively, should be sacrosanct.

She had been thinking of the diary as a fragment of autobiography. She revised this idea now. It was a mistake to think of it like that.The diary was too immediate, with its heat-of-the-moment roughness, its shameless partiality.

An autobiography was another thing altogether. It required distance from events.You
had to take a step back, make an attempt perhaps to view the past through the
eyes of a second self – a more dispassionate and grown-up version. A self that had become, you might
even say, a different person.

The obvious analogy, she thought, is right here in front of me: wine. A mature wine contains all the elements it displayed in youth, but they have undergone an alchemy, a sea change. Life has tempered them. Or tampered with them, more to the point. If one could freeze a particular red wine in its rackety youth, then drink it years later alongside a mature glass of the same vintage, to claim they were one and the same wine would be effectively meaningless.

In what sense, then, am I the same person as the writer of this diary? Must I take responsibility for what she did? Or could I legitimately disown her?

Mischa, she knew, had a remarkable, even eerie, ability to disconnect himself from his past. Unlike Rollo, he could never write an autobiography. He might get a kick out of reading a perceptive account of the evolution of his work. But he would read his own biography much as he might read someone else's,as an intriguing story.As a fiction,even.

His identity and his sense of self were rooted in the present tense, as this man, this working artist, anchored today in the here and now. His younger self was another person altogether, one with whom he felt no particular sympathy and in whom he had only minimal interest. Was there any particular reason for this, and was it normal or abnormal? Healthy or unhealthy?

How did writers of autobiographical works deal with questions like these? Like all authors, they would use their major resource, the mind. They would then channel it through the crafty constructions of the pen, or more likely the keyboard. Because an autobiography, essentially, was calculated. It was the considered presentation of a life story.

And a unique marketing opportunity – not always taken up, she had to admit, by persons of integrity – to finesse the truth and present the author in a favourable light.It bestowed on the writer the precious gift of hindsight in the form of distance from events and a free hand to put a particular slant on them.

And leisure, she thought, to tamper with those events. The chance not only to tweak, shape and embellish, but also, on occasion, to censor. Or to excise. It offered the chance to delete unwanted events from the author's life.

She recalled Guy once delinquently dismissing Rollo's lauded memoir as the written
equivalent of creative accounting.What an alluring concept this now appeared
to be. She envied the ingenious autobiographer, free to rewrite history through
the filter of selective memory. Free to flirt with dishonest self-interest.At
liberty to leave things out.

Unless, of course, a biographer had already pre-empted that freedom and was planning
to put on record a full and frank account. Unless he felt it incumbent on himself
to put on public record an uncensored, unabridged and essentially unimproved
version of events.

Greer had got up late, unusually for her, and shuffled into the kitchen in dressing gown and sheepskin boots. Mischa had left a fire burning in the grate. She stood with her back to it, reminded of how at school in the frosty Melbourne winters the girls had lifted their skirts and backed up against the radiators, luxuriating in the warmth on their bare legs.

It was cold again today, leaden and overcast, a reminder that winter was not
about to yield possession without a struggle. She felt an unease encircling
the house as if some giant creature, an extinct flying reptile, had invaded
her territory and was hovering overhead, blanketing everything in shadow.The
feeling would persist all day, she knew, until the interloper himself arrived
smiling at her door.

Mischa was already in his studio.The kitchen table was strewn with papers, today's
International Herald Tribune
and a pile of letters, which meant that he had been down to the village. She saw the current
Guardian Weekly
, and the remains of his breakfast – coffee, toast crumbs, a jar of peanut butter and the empty shells of two boiled eggs. Mischa was indifferent to any theories of healthy eating and cholesterol, just as he always forgot to put things away or turn off the radio. It was tuned to the BBC World Service.

Also on the table in a glass of water was an indecently huge and showy pink peony from Rollo's garden and a handwritten note in his meticulous calligraphy: 'Please attend confab soonest.' She felt a rush of gratitude that lasted as she showered, dressed and pinned up her hair. The feeling that she was being watched was still there. She was a woman under investigation. She took her time.

She smelt burning logs and fresh coffee well before she reached the front door of the big farmhouse. Some of Rollo's person was visible through the kitchen window, sprawled in an armchair, not reading but gazing out. He saw her coming and clambered to his feet, enveloping her in a hug at the door.