The Biographer (22 page)

Greer had read about recent research that suggested there was a significant benefit to the mental health of people exposed to trees and nature, even in cities. But as she stared fixedly at the landscape she knew so well it seemed to ripple and change its nature before her eyes. She gripped the railings of the terrace wall. It was almost as if she had momentarily lost her bearings in a world which was not quite as it had been, its landmarks no longer safely familiar.

She thought, what can we do if the present is not here long enough to protect us? When there is a veil that hangs over everything beyond it, even over the day after this one? When all living beings are trapped in the same predicament and no exceptions are made? The truth is, no one can have more than a suspicion of what lies further away.There are no safe bets on the future. It's all guesswork, a bewildering maze of untrodden ways.

She had never imagined the future as a fearful place. Living with someone who inhabited the here and now with such alacrity, such intensity, the future hardly rated as an abstract idea. It was not a presence in her life or Mischa's, not in the way that most of her friends were constantly preoccupied with it.

But a different concept was beginning to assemble itself in her mind.A more concrete way of looking at the future, as an organic entity with visceral links to the past and to the present. It was a disturbing notion fraught with implications she would not, could not, think about.Was this, indeed, how others routinely saw it? Had her inability to do so been a wilful failure of the imagination?

You could influence the present, and through it the future,but you could do nothing about the past.Alone of the three the past was irrecoverable. It could not be changed, and it was potentially merciless.

I know about the past and its tentacles, she thought, but I have been blind.
How have I never allowed for the possibility that the future, indecipherable
though it surely is, might conceivably exert an influence over the present?

She felt herself caught up in a momentum she was helpless to influence, as if
she were on the cusp of a volcanic river, rushing towards the mouth of a distant
sea. The forbidden territory that beckoned from the outer reaches of her mind
lay in the direct path of the boiling, heaving waters. The amorphous shapes
were massed there in the dark, awaiting. She felt as if she were being borne
bodily forwards, propelled towards them.

This was the future. It came to her like a blow to the heart.

Greer and Guy watched four men unloading huge logs from a lorry in the drive. It was cool today but not cold. A good day for replacing the wormy old pergola that ran half the length of Rollo and Guy's house and along the side garden. It had seen decades of service providing leafy shade, but now it was buckled and in imminent danger of collapse. It would be a tricky operation to save the equally timeworn grapevine it supported.

In charge and the brawniest was Agnieszka's husband, Angelo, a barrel-chested larrikin with a dirty, infectious laugh.The men were lugging chestnut beams 30 feet long. Chestnut was the hardworking wood they called the oak of Italy. It was used when something was built to last.This will see us out, Guy said,
and
our posterity what inherits it from us.Whatsoever that may be.

'Who
am
I going to leave this to?' he remarked to Greer,who was standing next to him.'The feckless crew of nieces and nephews, I suppose. But don't worry, I'll bequeath you something if I pop off before you. What would you like? The winery?'

'That would be most acceptable.' Greer had had a conversation along these lines some years before with Rollo. Guy would be his chief beneficiary, of course, but he had promised to leave her something special. From time to time he pointed out items he was setting aside for her: his Californian Bauer pottery, for instance, his Matisse odalisque and the exquisite pair of Gallé vases.

'Who are you going to leave your lot to?' Guy demanded inquisitively.'Assuming Mischa falls off the perch first, which is a reasonable assumption. Haven't you got a sister?'

'Yes,I have.Somewhere.'A bleak wind seemed to blow around the words.

'I thought so.Tony said you and Mischa both had sisters, and I'd forgotten.You'd lost touch with yours, he said, and so, coincidentally, had M.To lose one is accidental but two looks like carelessness, he said.'

'When did he tell you this?'

'Oh, the other night. Last night, in point of fact.We had a nightcap together.As it were.'

'Did you?' She was galvanised. 'What else did he tell you?'

'Nothing much else, though I was pumping him.' He gave her a sly look. 'It was only a short talk we had. It was rather late.'

'Did he . . .?' She stopped, then made herself continue. 'Did he say whether he'd seen my sister? Did he tell you if he'd seen Josie?'

'No, I don't think he did. Say, I mean.You can ask him yourself, he won't bite
you
.'

He was summoned over to the men, where an animated conversation to do with the preservation of the grapevine ensued in Italian. He smirked at her over his shoulder.

Greer heard a crunch on the gravel and her name called. It was Tony. He wanted to show her something, he said, looking pleased with himself. Something that might interest her. He waved a jaunty hand at Guy.

Tony led her to the upstairs floor of Mischa's studio in the tower, where he had set up three plywood sheets. Attached with double-sided tape were photographs of Mischa's paintings, all the works Tony planned to refer to and illustrate.The photos were divided into sections under separate chapter headings, with the current location of each picture and the permission of its owner neatly listed on an attached card.

'These are amateurish pics, mostly. I took them as an aide-mémoire.The galleries provide professional transparencies for publication.'

He was still waiting on some of these from various sources.A photographer would be coming in from Florence next week, he told her, if that was OK, to shoot some atmospheric stuff in the studio and surroundings. There were folders of photos still to put up.

Tony took the first sheet of plywood and laid it out flat on one of the trestle tables. 'Chapter One: Karlovy Vari, 1940–1957' had no pictures attached to it, unsurprisingly, but Greer saw four still photographs taken from life.Three of these were blow-ups from original tiny black and white snaps, Tony told her, old and creased but perfectly clear. Greer resisted the temptation to snatch them from the board and pore over them.They were the first images she had ever seen from Mischa's childhood.

She saw a frowning, plump-cheeked baby in a bonnet and long, enveloping gown held vertically aloft for the camera by a grave young woman with a square face and strong jaw, and deep-set dark eyes. Mischa's eyes, but with arched, feminine eyebrows.

'That's Mischa in the embroidered frock with his nice-looking mum,'Tony said.'He was always known as Mikhal, of course, within the family. Wasn't he a cutie? Don't you just love that grouchy expression? Grete said he was woken up for the photo, and it shows. He was a war baby, so they were probably snatching the moment. And it was probably taken to show him off to his dad, don't you think?'

The next picture had obviously been taken in a photographic studio. It showed
Mischa as a small boy seated in front of an older girl standing in a long skirt.
Both children were heavily and rather fustily dressed and appeared to be staring
intently at something behind the camera. The girl had her hands on Mischa's
shoulders.

'That's Grete, forcing him down. He's six years of age here, so it's soon after the war and she's sixteen, but I swear you can already see the word "battleaxe" imprinted on her features.'

Greer scrutinised the image but saw only a stocky girl with a doughy, rather indeterminate face. She looked closely at the well-scrubbed little boy, who was recognisably a prototype of Mischa, only a less emphatic and tidier version. The lower lip jutted out, the eyes were black and bellicose.

The qualities were intensified in the third picture, another formal family group
but this time expanded to six members: their father and mother with Mischa
and Grete, Grete's Russian husband, who had a look of Prokofiev, and their
toddler son. Mischa was a hefty teenager now, with a Brylcreemed quiff.He looked,as
Tony remarked,like one hell of a handful. His parents shared similar pronounced
Slavic features. His father was broad-shouldered and burly, with keen eyes
under bushy brows like Mischa's and a soft, sensual mouth.

Grete's hair was pulled severely upwards revealing, as Tony didn't hesitate to
point out, her high autocratic forehead and pleasure-averse countenance.This
person you are talking so disparagingly about is the de facto sister-in-law
I have never met, Greer thought. Has it occurred to you that I might find that
offensive? Or was that your intention?

'Mischa's seen these?' she asked.

Mischa was working some distance from them near the south windows, apparently
oblivious to the vista with its blandishments as well as to the intruders in
his studio. He was humming to himself a tune from
Pal Joey
as he assembled lengths of cedar into a stretcher – what he and Rollo called the cross-and-bracing work. Both artists enjoyed a
running dialogue about the practical aspects of their craft, the French papers
and Belgian linens, the relative merits of different suppliers and raw materials.
Greer never failed to find these discussions, and the obsessive devotion with
which they were conducted, riveting.

'I showed him all the photos and he was briefly, well, I won't say enthralled, but he did take a good look.'

She noticed that Tony wasn't bothering to keep his voice down. By now he must
know there was no need, since nothing penetrated the forcefield of Mischa's
concentration.

'I even managed to drag a few quotes about his family out of him.' He made a wry face.'I've been finding it hard to get anything personal out of the maestro. It's kinda like pulling teeth. Or is it just me?'

She allowed him a tolerant smile. 'It's not just you. He doesn't like talking about himself very much. Especially to strange men.'

Tony looked humorously crestfallen. 'That's too bad. I'm trying not to act overly strange.'

'Perhaps the trouble is with your acting.'

Now he looked really, pleasingly, downcast. 'Well, any tips or crumbs you can offer would be gratefully accepted.'

'Oh,I've got no tips at all,'she said briskly.'Or crumbs. I warned you before, the maestro doesn't dwell on the past. That includes talking and thinking about it.'

'Thinking as well, huh? Can you really be so sure about that? If you don't mind me asking.'

She glanced across at Mischa. Everything about him was reassuring and solid. She thought, he's wrapped in the protective cocoon of unconsciousness that is his working habit. Neither seeing nor hearing the world around him.

'Yes, I can be so sure. I know him fairly well, remember.' And a great deal better than you do. Except for the time before I met him.

'Right.But–'Tony seemed genuinely perplexed.'Is he really,you know,that knowable?'He paused.'That simple?'

'He's not in the least simple. And in his creative life I readily admit that there is a vast area where he is not remotely knowable or predictable.'

'To himself as well, would you say?'

'Perhaps principally to himself.' The mystery of the origins of his work, she had always believed, was the source of his obsession with it. She added: 'His art is a conduit. I think that may be the secret of its hold on him.'

She remembered how she had envied the mystery of his creativity. It had always
been an autonomous entity, invulnerable to any outside forces. Unlike her own.

'Art is his way of tapping into his subconscious? Of plumbing the id?'

Greer smiled involuntarily.'That sounds a touch – glib, if I may say so. I think it's a lot less straightforward than that.' She paused.'Art is not a means to an end for him.It would be misleading to think of it in those terms. His work is a compulsion, an end in itself.'

'Maybe it's also his way of connecting with the past.' Tony had raised his eyebrows, which seemed to widen his blue eyes.

'Possibly, but if so I doubt if it's in any way conscious.' She thought, here
we are, having this very personal discussion about Mischa in his own space
as if he wasn't there, and Tony is taping it. It's an incongruous situation
entirely of Tony's making. He has engineered it, no doubt for his own purposes.

Tony said slowly,'It almost sounds like Mischa has some kind of a mental block about the past. His own history. Could this be because he's uncomfortable with it? That's the usual reason, isn't it?'

Is it Mischa you are really talking about?

'It might be the usual reason,' she said tersely, 'but Mischa is not a usual
person. As you may have noticed. I think you'll just have to accept that his
past doesn't interest him much any more, simply because it's over.When something
is over for him it's done with.'

'And that applies to friends and family alike? Artists are notorious for discarding
people, I guess, when their usefulness is past.'

This sounded more like a joke than a question, but it did strike her as unduly punitive and she felt obliged to amend it, as if she were touching up a portrait she was making of an image-conscious celebrity. Am I protecting Mischa, airbrushing him as if he were a supermodel, she thought, when he emphatically doesn't want to be protected or airbrushed? Or am I striving to protect myself?

'When he has physically moved on I think he moves on mentally too. But I also think this is largely accidental, it's a by-product of his single-mindedness, his driven concentration on his work. Perhaps it would be different if his sister was living in the next village, I don't know.'

'Did you ever encourage him to contact his parents again?'

He was straightening the photo of Mischa with his family. She wanted to object, to say harshly, why would I, when it was a bond between us? We had both jettisoned our families, can't you grasp even that seminal fact? We were on our own together from that time forward.And on the same imaginative level, too.We saw ourselves in terms that were strictly romantic.We were on the run.

But not, she wanted to add, with the same stakes. The stakes for me were of a different order. I had overturned one of society's most cherished norms. I think I saw myself as a moral outlaw.

She said instead, aware that her voice sounded taut and strained,'I don't remember speaking about it.' Her voice was always the giveaway.

'I say that because in spite of all the feuding within the family before he left he never fell out totally with them, according to Grete and others.There was residual affection there.'Tony's pitch continued to be light and breezy, but she sensed he was working up to something. He had an agenda. But then it was wise to bear in mind the fact that Tony always had one of those.

'I'd rate it as a fair to average childhood overall,' he went on, 'say six or six point five out of ten, wouldn't you? Not quite as high on the happiness quotient as your own, right? How would you rate yours?'

It was a chatty little question. His teeth flashed in a smile.

'Mine?' She had a sudden mental picture of the family group, the two sisters with their parents at Greer's twenty-first birthday party, the day they had all been photographed together for the last time.

'My childhood was happy, yes.' She looked away, caught off guard by a wave of emotion.

'That was my impression. He never got on with his sister like you got on with yours, did he? Or, for that matter, with his parents.'

Where had that impression come from? Charlie or Josie? Or both? As she attempted to regroup, to grapple with this issue in her mind,he remarked,'It must be nice,to have had a happy childhood.'

She was aware of his unblinking eyes on her.

'You didn't?'

'Two point five. Three, maybe.' She refused to engage those eyes. 'My mom adopted
me out when I was a little kid. She and my dad were never a couple, and she
was struggling with another baby from a new guy who definitely didn't want
to know me. She just couldn't hack it. Kind of a banal low-rent scenario, I
suppose, right?'

What was he doing, here? The eyes were still on her. He laughed.

'My new parents went on to have two of their own biological kids later – that happens a lot, you know? Two more boys. I grew up feeling I was Cinderella, except my brothers weren't that ugly. To look at, anyhow. The only thing I got back from my real dad was his Italian name, Corbino.'