The Biographer (25 page)

'Charlie, there's something I have to tell you.' Before he turned his head away she saw his lips whiten with the premonition of shock.

'I've met someone, and I've fallen in love. I'm so terribly, terribly sorry, Charlie.'

Even to her ears the words sounded rehearsed, stiff, banal, reeking of synthetic compassion. Their very ordinariness made her feel suddenly detached from the scene, like a visitor.

'I didn't seek it out, Charlie, truly. I never expected it. I never wanted to hurt you.'

They were standing two metres apart, facing each other. He shook his head, and
Greer saw a fleeting expression on his face she had never seen there before.
It was a defenceless, frightened look that altered Charlie's entire appearance.
He was normally so debonair. Her mask of detachment dissolved in an instant
and she began to shake. He took her arm and led her to a chair by the fire.

'Sit down and try to relax. Do you want a cup of tea, or – a drink?'

'No.Yes. Perhaps a drink.'

He'd gone to the fridge and poured her some white wine, topped the glass with soda water, then pulled his chair round and sat opposite, his eyes fixed on her.

'How long ago?'

His first question. It was automatic. She had expected it.

'Less than a month.' She met his eyes.'I didn't want it to happen, Charlie. It was an accident.'

'An accident.'He gave a half smile.'A one-off?'

'I really wish that's what it was.'

'But we've just been away for three weeks. You can't mean less than a month.' She saw him computing this, his mouth taut.'Greer, what exactly are we talking about? Over what period did this – whatever it is – happen?'

'Just – well, just literally before we went on holiday.'

'You mean, really only a few weeks ago?' He looked incredulous. 'Three weeks? Before this wonderful holiday we've just come back from? That was our honeymoon. Did you forget?' He stood up and immediately sat down again. She saw his hands clench and unclench on his thighs.

She looked away. Put like that, it was shaming. 'Only a week before. Otherwise I wouldn't have – gone.'

'A week!' He shook his head in disbelief. 'Why not? Why wouldn't you have gone? I didn't know, did I?' He managed a full smile, without a vestige of amusement in it. 'Why are you telling me now?'

She drew a deep breath.

'Because I – knew straightaway what it was going to mean.'

He got to his feet slowly and refilled his glass, came back and balanced on the arm of her chair.'Let's not get ahead of ourselves here, dear. There's no point in saying anything both of us might regret.'

He often called her dear. She had never liked it much, associating it with an older generation's endearments. But she had never said anything. On hearing it now she felt two tears squeeze out and run down her cheek, and Charlie's handkerchief wiping them away.

He said gently,'I'm your husband now,Greer.As of two months, remember? We have an awful lot riding on this, don't we? We can get over this,whatever it is.We can fix it, however bad it might seem at the moment.'

'Fix it' was his typical attitude to problems of any kind, and she had always admired it.

'But this is too bad to fix, and that's the whole trouble, Charlie. When it happened, you see, when it happened I knew, in spite of –' she dropped her eyes, unable to bear his expression, 'in spite of everything, that it was going to change everything.'

'You mean, you were thinking like this before you went away? On your honeymoon?'

The repetition of the word was like a well-placed punch, but she said,'Not just thinking. I knew, immediately.' She thought of the young Frenchman, Jean-Claude, who had understood. He had said, hadn't he, and it was only last week that he had said it: when it happens, you know.

'And you didn't tell me? You still went away with me,as if there was nothing wrong?'

'I didn't want to disappoint you.'

'Dis
appoint
me?' She thought, he's going to laugh in my face.A lesser man might have spat.

She bit her lip.'Sorry,that sounds crass.'

'Yes. It sounds crass, darling, because it is crass.' He got up and walked away from her, his posture and shoulders rigid. 'Look, shouldn't we stop beating about the bush? You'd better tell me exactly what we're talking about.Who the third party is would be a good start. Is it someone we both know?'

She shook her head.'It's Mischa Svoboda.'

I had to tell him who Mischa was.

'Who?'

'The Czech artist we were showing last month.' She hesitated.'He's very brilliant. I must have mentioned him.'

'I don't remember you saying anything. But I'm relieved to hear he's brilliant.' It was unlike Charlie to be sarcastic, and also unlike him to be topping up his glass before it was finished.

'You've been to bed with him?'

She nodded wordlessly. An engraved silver cigar box that her father had brought back from wartime service in the Middle East lay on a coffee table next to Charlie.They used it for pastel-coloured Sobranies, cocktail cigarillos to offer guests. He selected a green one, saying,'I won't tempt you,' and lit up. He had not smoked for over a year, and she was shocked.

He drew the smoke deep into his lungs. 'However did you fit it in, dear? I wouldn't have thought there was much time for such a significant dalliance to occur, only days before our little overseas trip.'

He expelled the smoke in a long-drawn-out sigh.Then he stopped short, seized by a sequence of ideas. 'But that was when I was away in New Zealand, wasn't it? I rang and you weren't here.You said you'd stayed with one of your girlfriends. Lambie, wasn't it? Were you with him that night?'

She went to the fridge and poured another drink. 'Charlie –'

'Did you see him today?'

'Yes.'

He winced.'So.We've established a few things. Including the identity of the lover.What
was the name again?' He yanked at the knot of his tie.

'Mischa Svoboda.' My lover's name. Even in the midst of this painful conversation,
just speaking his name transported her from that room with its bleak portents
to a place of tropical colours and caressing threads of sand.

He questioned me about him.

She rubbed that out.

He didn't want to hear about Mischa.

'I don't think I really want to know anything about this man, Greer, so please
don't bother to fill me in. Hearing you confirm he's very brilliant and an
artist is more than enough. But,' he got up again restlessly, ostensibly to
fetch an ashtray, 'what I do have to know is, when you say everything's changed,
what is it you're really saying?'

I told him that I could not stay married to him and we were going to have to separate. He couldn't comprehend this, or believe I meant it.

'Didn't you get this out of your system before we got married? All those years of indecision and messing about, when you kept talking about buggering off and couldn't?'

He had an odd expression on his face, part ironic and part mocking. She thought, I'm not sure that he's taking this seriously.

'I know, but –'

'It's a bit late in the day for this now, isn't it? You should've given me the elbow before, if you were going to. We can't split up now. It would be bloody wrong.' She heard a raw edge of outrage in his voice. 'It's the wrong fucking way round, Greer. It's not the way people do things, not in the famous moral universe you're always banging on about. Surely even you can see that?'

She had gone to his side, tears flowing freely.'I know it's not. You're right, I should have left before. Oh, Charlie, I know I should. But this hadn't happened before, and now it has and I can't help it. I only wish it hadn't. If I could put back the clock I would.'

The lies were consumed in the flames along with the truths.The long hospitable
room, glowing with firelight and jewel-coloured Persian rugs and lamps, did
not discriminate. There were no blinds or curtains at the far end, the casual
area of pot plants and cane furniture they called the conservatory. Charlie
looked down the room through the wide windows into the dark.

'I feel as if I'm staring into the future.' She sensed his tremor.'Greer,you're not going to–?'

She broke in violently,shaking her head.'It's too late.'

'What are you going to do about it then?'

'I have to go away.' It was only half an answer to only half his question, but she was gearing herself up.

'Go away? What are you talking about?' He reacted to her expression, looked bewildered first, then disbelieving. 'Do you mean, with
him
?'

'I think so. I do think so.Yes. I'm so desperately sorry to do this to you, Charlie.'

He stiffened but didn't resist as she put her arms tentatively around him. But
even as she did this and spoke the required words, the words she knew she owed,
she did not feel fully present. Part of her was already out of that glowing
room, that comfortable house, that relationship with its myriad complex components,
and radiantly on the move.

I'm in transit and I have already left Charlie behind, she thought. I may enfold him in my arms, but it's an empty gesture. My heart has hardened towards him, of its own accord, with no prompting from me.

'Be as mad and contemptuous and furious with me as you like,' she said, the words muffled into his chest. 'Please. Hate me, Charlie – you're entitled to, you're completely blameless, and I deserve it.'

He drew back at once, affronted.'Of course I don't hate you, Greer,' he had said, wearily. 'Never make that mistake either, along with any others you may be contemplating making. I just simply don't and can't understand you.'

Dinner – the warmed-up fish and chips – had been something routine to do that required no thought. Charlie took a bottle of chardonnay from the fridge and uncorked it.They had laid the table and consumed everything on their plates as if they were subservient children. Greer made a salad, he did the dressing, and they had cheese and crackers afterwards. It was a travesty of intimacy but did serve, briefly, as a respite.

At first they talked desultorily about other things, in a stilted way punctuated by painful pauses.Then they returned to the subject. Charlie was drinking continuously. He had gone through the white and opened a red to go with the cheese. At one stage he said, with a trace of mordant humour,'Now I know who supplies Pinter with his bloody plots.'

Again she had thought, I introduced you to those plays and now you will probably never want to see another one in your life.

We tried to talk to each other over dinner. He wanted to know how I proposed to manage things.

'What the fuck are you scheming, Greer?'

I told him what Josie was willing to do, subject to his approval.

'Subject to my approval?' Charlie said. His voice darkened at first satirically, and then rose.'
Subject to my approval
, is it now? You sound like one of my bloody company reports, for God's sake. You've dragooned poor Josie into being your accomplice already, have you?'

He got up from the table in a rush, spinning his chair backwards,and leant over her.'What the
hell's
got into you, Greer? Are you crazy, or what? Am I supposed to
approve
this? Think of your poor mother,how she's going to feel.Do you really think you can trade in people and their emotions? Parcel up human beings and give them away, and get out of their lives? It's grotesque, isn't it?'

He gripped her by the shoulders and gave her a sharp, barely controlled shake. She sensed his own shock at this as he moved abruptly away from her and rephrased aloud what she had just told him. It was shocking and irresponsible and effing wrong, he reiterated more than once.

'I know it is. But I've got no choice.'

'That's absolute rubbish!'This was shouted close to her ear,and she leapt in her seat.'Of course you've got a choice, you're not a fucking robot! There's always a choice.'

She thought but didn't say, yes, there may have been a choice once. In the fraction of time before Mischa and I spent the night together, I might have stopped at the cross-roads and taken yours – the road marked 'Charlie'. But once we had made love, to use Mischa's words – those perceptive and true words that our language cannot improve on – freedom of choice ceased to exist for me.

'No. For me there is no choice.'

In their unshakeable certainty the words sounded despairing. Charlie had responded by smashing the flats of his hands down on the table, on either side of her.There was a loud bang. Cutlery clattered on to the floor, and their glasses and the pepper grinder spun and toppled. It was the most immoderate thing Greer had ever seen him do. She was alarmed but not seriously frightened by his behaviour. This was Charlie, after all.

He grabbed his chair and sat down again, hunched over and breathing heavily, staring at the red wine stain as it spread over the white tablecloth. 'Do you really want to know what I think? If you tried to carry this out you'd change your mind at the last minute.When it came to the crunch you wouldn't be able to go through with it.'

Greer said, quite calmly,'I won't change my mind.'

His head jerked up.'You may have no conscience now, Greer, but I have a terrible feeling you will regret it, later on when it's too late.'

She said nothing to that. Later on. Regret it. Conscience. They were just arrangements
of words. Like freedom of choice, they had no purchase on her mind.

Charlie became angry, and we argued. He had every right to be angry with me. He said it was a choice, and I could choose not to go ahead with this.

But that was the whole point.What he could not see was that I was unable to make that choice. I had already made my decision. I was in a state of certainty.

They watched each other for a moment like wary dogs. Then Charlie straightened up and lit another cigarette. He shook his head several times, as if to steer his mind through a fog and reach a decision.

'This is not the barnyard, dear, where you jump on anyone just because you like his smell.' She had flinched at that.'Don't kid yourself that I'm going to happily wave you goodbye at your own bidding – not after I've gone through all hell to get us to this place.You can bloody wait for a few months and then see how you feel. How does five months sound? That'll take us to just after Christmas, won't it? To the New Year. You owe me that, Greer, to put it mildly. You owe it to us.'