The Biographer (21 page)

Greer looked closely at the photo, recalling Tony's recent remarks, the
aspersions
he claimed to have heard about Verity and Mischa. Tried to picture this immaculately groomed spinster-ish woman with the younger Mischa, rumbustious and unkempt. However much she tried to steer her mind into this groove, it remained stubbornly risible as a theory.

In between the wedding photos was a visual record of a family, not vastly different from most family snapshots.The original wartime couple, and then, around a year later, the joyous arrival of a baby.That was Josie. Josie crawling, then walking. Josie on her first day at kindergarten, clutching her mother's hand. Then another fair, chubby-cheeked baby crawling and walking.That was Greer.

The sisters in the garden with their pet rabbit and later on their Siamese cat and blue heeler puppy. Making funny faces, wearing the gingham summer dresses of their girls' private boarding school. Greer had loved it; Josie had been homesick and eventually switched to a day school. Birthday parties.Teenage parties.The family in swimsuits, on holidays at Aireys Inlet. Josie at her end-of-school formal, long dark hair in waves, slinky dress of blue Thai silk, looking far prettier than she (or Greer, gawky at the time) had any inkling of. The four of them picnicking with friends on another summer holiday at Portsea.

Her father dropped out of the snaps after Greer turned twenty-one.The last photo of him was taken at her twenty-first outside a flower-bedecked marquee in their Camberwell garden. Bill was standing between his daughters, his arms round their shoulders, smiling at Lorna, who held the camera.A week later he was dead of a heart attack.

Her father, mother and Josie were the three people Greer had once known best in the world. Of the three, only Josie was left. People could disappear off the face of the earth without warning. Life was like that, she had seen it happen. People you once loved vanished from your life. People you loved now, and those who were inextricably linked to you, even if you never saw them. People linked by blood.

She herself had vanished from the lives of people she loved. Greer pressed her hands against her face. They were cold to the touch, she could feel the pads of her fingers making white indentations in her cheeks.

Josie was her blood relative, and she was surely still here. Not here, she amended that, but somewhere in the world. Where was that, and more to the point, who was Josie with? Who were the most important people in Josie's life? Greer rocked back in her chair. She thought, I have stifled the anguish of years.

Her sister was her primary point of contact. How had she allowed herself to lose touch completely and absolutely with Josie, of all people?

But that had been part of the plan, hadn't it?

I doused my fears & insisted that C. wouldn't be a problem. It's not as if he doesn't like Josie, or she's a complete stranger. But it does depend totally on him, she's dreadfully right.When I spelt it out to her, voiced the plan aloud for the first time since Jean-Claude & I nutted it out, I saw how much rests on Charlie's co-operation. I will have to convince him it's the best way. I know him so well, I think he will see the logic of it. It does make things a whole lot easier, from every angle.

Josie could see that too, once she could bring herself to get beyond the standard objections. She started to see that for everyone it provides a viable way out of an unfortunate situation. Being a management consultant, C. is bound to appreciate that.

How confident that sounds. Inexplicably so, in retrospect. Did I seriously imagine I was going to convince a man such as Charlie that it was 'the best way'? That he would see 'the logic of it'? The doubts are there, I can feel them, below the surface, between the lines. Would anyone else see I was racked with them?

Not my poor sister. I wasn't going to admit them to her. Or to myself, either. Well, I was intent on getting my way, wasn't I, and Charlie was never going to stop me. I think Josie could see that.

I started thinking we were home and hosed, then she brought up Mother. I said Mum would accept it as the least worst alternative, in fact a vastly preferable outcome to anything else. J. said yes, maybe so, but there was another outcome Mum would like a whole lot better. She had to retreat when I repeated that was not to be mentioned again, it was not on the negotiating table, it was a non-outcome.

Then suddenly she started on Verity. Of all the possible objections that has to be the looniest. She went on about how Verity depends on me, how she trusts me, how could I not take her into my confidence, etc. etc. I said I was only an employee of bloody Verity, for God's sake, I wasn't married to her. J. shrieked at that, but it more or less threw cold water on the V. offensive.

After that Josie sort of lost heart in the argument for the defence (if that's what it was. Prosecution seems more apt) & I thought I could detect a subtle change in her.A glimmering.

We began to get down to the nuts and bolts of how it could be managed.And what will happen afterwards.

Had she really, really not told anyone, Josie demanded again. No one except Charlie? And he had kept it to himself? No one but Charlie and he'd been sworn to secrecy from the outset,Greer was able to say.I hadn't even got round to telling Mum.And not even bloody Verity either,she added,as a tease. And, oh God, not even Mischa, yet. She'd felt a sickening spasm of anxiety then. Josie had shaken her head.You really are mad, she'd said again.You've no idea how he'll take this.

The secret should continue to be kept, they agreed. Kept watertight between them, primarily for Charlie's sake. That meant there was no time to lose. Literally.

Josie was a librarian. She would organise her summer break so that she could
leave home immediately on receiving Greer's urgent summons.

'Or it could be Mischa's,' Josie suggested, but Greer was certain Mischa would not want anything to do with this.

'He may not even want to be with me any more,' she had added, almost blithely.

Where will you go, Josie had asked. They agreed on Sydney. A big city not too far from Melbourne, suitably anonymous, quickly and easily accessible by air. It would be a simple enough matter to disappear in Sydney.They knew virtually no one there.

Josie was adamant about one thing. If she went ahead with this crazy scheme, if this scary proposal ever came to fruition, Greer would have to relinquish all contact with her former life and friends.

'For a judicious interval. Or –?'They tested this, tossed it back and forth. In the end the conclusion was inescapable: the fewer people in the know the safer it was, with the most room for manoeuvre.That meant Greer, Josie, their mother (unavoidable, they agreed, but she could keep secrets) and Charlie.

'And with any luck,Mischa,'Greer said.'Not that luck's an appropriate word,' she added, before Josie could, 'in the circs.'

But this brought Josie back to the basics, which were nothing at all to be light-hearted
about. It seemed inevitable, and most vital of all, that Greer should sever
contact with her husband and with Josie herself. And not just for a judicious
interval. As far as those two were concerned, for the foreseeable future at
least, Greer needed to disappear off the face of the earth.

What happens after Sydney is, hey presto, I do the disappearing act and vanish into thin air. For the duration.

Josie said,through tears:'It's terrible,but I couldn't go through with it otherwise. Do you see what I mean? Do you see why I'm saying that? Do you understand? Do you promise?'

They were weeping now, both of them, and embracing. Yes, Greer promised, she did understand. She would become ex-directory.Vaporise. It was far better that way. Better for everyone.

Talking about the future, let alone the conversation itself, had an air of unreality about it. In her sister's pale yellow sitting room, gazing out through the bay window at the grey Melbourne sky and spindly trees, it hadn't seemed such a momentous thing to promise to vanish into thin air. Her sister was shifting a weight of responsibility from Greer's shoulders to her own, and handing over the golden key to freedom in return.

Greer thought: and I agreed to disappear, just like that. Perhaps I would have agreed to anything at that moment. In spite of the tears, it was almost insouciantly that I signed myself out of certain commitments and certain people's lives. For the duration.

How long is that?

She snatched the nearest pen to hand and wrote, at the bottom of the page:

18th April 2006
We thought that this would be in everyone's best interests. Josie certainly believed that it was. But I fear now that it may have been a deeply misguided thing.

She lifted the pen, twisting her hair around it. The happy photos of the close little family of four remained as she had laid them out, in rows in front of her on the desk.

She added seven more words:

I fear it was an insupportable thing.

The diary entry for 4 August 1979 wasn't quite over.There was a brief addendum:

P.S. I'm in a café. I'm wrecked. Stage one is done. Now I have to spill beans to M. and C. (separately, & different species of beans).

What am I doing, making pathetic jokes? It's like in wartime, going through the Blitz, using humour to stave off the fear.

Perched steeply to Greer's left was a hilltop town, and on a spur in the filmy void, a mere smudge on the skyline, another medieval watchtower.The ancient occupants of that tower once warned this little community when peril was imminent. They would have alerted the lookouts in the tower where Mischa was now working to the approach of an enemy. But they were watching for invading armies. Would they have identified a single stealthy infiltrator, with his camera and laptop, his notebooks and recording devices? With his slick,inveigling charm? Would they have identified these disparate items as weapons?

Below her was the sight, reassuring in its ordinariness, of Guy in a well-worn
sloppy joe stealing a look through his telescope on the terrace outside the
former chapel that was now Rollo's studio. While Greer and Rollo, according
to Guy, were away with the fairies a lot of the time, he considered himself
a man of the soil, well grounded in reality. He had set up his telescope on
a tripod near the little war memorial and the low stone wall, where the land
plummeted into the valley. We do a good class of view around here, Guy would
tell their wine buyers, but this is the eye-candiest, the bobby-dazzler. This
is the g-spot. You can almost drink this view.

Once, after he had observed what a crying shame it was that all the bloody clichés had been used up, they'd launched an ongoing competition to invent some more. It was a tough game – they found it surprisingly difficult to come up with something new, a phrase so pictorial and apt that others cannibalised it and it became a fixture.

Guy claimed this was because the treasure chest of visual clichés was finite. Its emptiness bore witness to the erosion of truth and beauty in their time.They were living through the decline and perilously close to the fall of Western civilisation.

'If we were in the Bronze Age or especially pre-biblical,' he said, 'or even pre the wretched nineteenth century, we could go to town.The cypresses standing like sentinels.The honey-coloured stones.The wine-dark sea.'

There was something about the elegance of their surroundings, he maintained,
that invited rhetorical flourish. The reason for this was simple: the land
they inhabited was the apogee, the ideal Platonic form of landscape that was
a foundation of Western culture.

There was a brief period in which the cliché game had run rampant and made them so self-conscious that it interfered with
ordinary speech. It became impossible to say anything about anything at all,
since whatever was said sounded crude or platitudinous. The game had reached
a natural conclusion soon after this, when Guy came up with what he declared
was the ultimate one-word cliché:Tuscany. This perfectly proper noun had been made into something corny by writers,
mainly English and mainly recent, who had a lot to answer for. Provence was
another.

Greer's kitchen terrace overlooked the valley. On the far side the land sloped away at a steep angle from the thickly wooded floor. Beyond, narrow ridges extended in linear succession to the horizon. She stood out on the terrace and tried to dismiss everything from her mind but this view. She knew it so intimately, so completely, yet it was always surprising.

The countryside surrounded and enveloped her, as it had done since she first
laid eyes on it. She always thought of it as her territory, a diorama tilted
on its axis, an independent world unfolding in waves. It resembled a landscape
painting, complete in itself and self-sufficient, containing a balance of wilderness
and cultivation. She and Rollo agreed that it held within its layout everything
necessary for beauty, variety and surprise in correct artistic proportion.

Landmarks revealed themselves only gradually. A farm-house on the near ridge, encircled with bright fields. Slopes of vines in lucid, typewritten rows. A range of barren-looking mountains beyond, and in their foothills the ribbon of another settlement. On an escarpment to the south a classic silhouette of cypresses and umbrella pines.

At this time of year the air was bluish and hazy, blurred on the horizon, a little clearer but still indistinct in the middle distance. Only the foreground was well defined. Our lives have a similar perspective, she thought: the present moment alone is crisp and unambiguous.Yet the present as a concept is riddled with contradictions.

She retrieved as if from nowhere something Charlie had said on their last night together:'I believe there is no word for "have" in Hebrew.You can't say, I "have" a wife.'This, he said, was because, strictly speaking, there was no way of capturing the present. The moment you tried to speak or write or even think of the moment, it had moved backwards in time and become the past. I feel I have a new affinity with Hebrew, Charlie had added, even if the language won't allow me to express it.