The Biographer (5 page)

He winked at her. '
And
at the olive oil. But don't ever tell him I said so. He's so big-headed about everything since your grog gong.'

Their most recent release of Brunello had been awarded the coveted five bunches, top score of the Italian Sommelier Association,and
Wine Spectator
had given it a score of 92 out of 100.

Greer didn't respond. Rollo chewed noisily.'He's quite well regarded, isn't he,
your Yank? His first book was all right.' Corbino had sent them a copy, a competent
biography of a turn-of-the-twentieth-century Boston artist.

'A bit dull, if anything.'

'Dull is good,' Rollo boomed.'If you're anxious to avoid salacious,' he peered at her, 'you want dull. Pedestrian, straightforward, boring.Then no one will buy it.'

She looked at him suspiciously. He cut two thick slabs of cheese and passed her one, adding,'The Boston one's wife died early, didn't she?'

'Yes.Why?'

'There was a bit of a shortage of sex angle.You want the full rich tapestry in
a bio. I expect your Mr C. is well pleased that Mischa has such a palatable
distaff side. He's been cultivating you, hasn't he?'

'Well,I've had a couple of letters.And emails.'

'There you are. That's what they do. He's thinking to himself, I will get to him through her. She will unlock his cabinet of curiosities. He'll be grovelling charm itself, wait and see.'

'But it's Mischa's biography, isn't it? Not mine.'

'Of course it is. But you're the love interest. It's your bounden duty to supply the sexy bits. Is this pecorino from Mario? It's very good.'

She nodded.

'You're distracted, darling.
Distraite
, I can always tell. Listen, if you haven't got any secrets you can always make them up. I'll help you.We will devise an irresistible scenario. Mischa was a spy for the West – well, that's probably true, isn't it? He used to smuggle out information encoded in his pictures.Then, when he was sprung, he had to get out fast. And that's where you came in.You provided a safe house. But it was daggers drawn at first sight.The attraction crept up unawares and exploded one blazing tropical Aussie night, when hate turned to unbridled passion.'

He looked at her expectantly, his eyes keen. She thought, how wily he is. To please him she said, smiling, 'Very good. But not hot. It was Melbourne. It was pouring with 'uddersfield rain.'

Sun 16th July
Isle of Pines
I thought he wasn't going to come in on Wednesday.Then, at nearly 6, there he was. I was about to lock up.V. had already gone.There was nobody else there. He looked even more daggy than last time, and kind of volatile, as if he was living on compressed petrol or something. He barrelled round inspecting the red dots.When he got to the big oil of the people lined up and staring he yelled out,'Hey,what's-your-name!'It was a summons not a question, & it sounded full of pent-up dislike. I kept right on with what I was doing – typing, not looking at him.Then suddenly there he was in the office right beside me, holding out both hands in front of him like a supplicant with the palms up. He said,in a fairly normal voice,'This is a peace offering.'I saw that his palms were sweating.

'What is?'

He stared at me.I said,'If it's genuine,you have to be offering something. I might want to make conditions.'There was a long silence between us. For a dreadful moment I thought he was going to go beserk. He was breathing fast, I could hear it.Then, out of the blue,he seized my left hand.'There is something genuine I am offering. I am offering you a kiss?'

He said it like a question this time and I came right out in goosebumps.It was quite a cold evening.I said,'All right. I accept.' He put my hand up to his lips. I felt them moving against the tips of my fingers. He kept my hand there, for a full minute it must have been, our eyes fixed on each other, then he said,'Come with me?'

Again, it was a question. I got up and he led me by the hand over to the same painting,the queue of staring faces.'Tell me,why don't they like this?'It hadn't sold.I said,'I suppose it's a bit disturbing. But it's very powerful. Like you. Don't worry, I'm sure it will go.They'll come to like it.'We stood there in front of it, very close together. He was still clasping my hand, pressing it hard against his thigh. Neither of us spoke.

He must have pulled me sideways, because suddenly I was right up against him. Heat from him hit me like an electric current. I think I was rigid with shock. I don't know how long we stayed like that. It was as if neither of us wanted to move, we were sort of mesmerised. Eventually he said,'Well? Do you want to make a condition?'

'Yes, actually, I do,' I said. It came out hoarse. I cleared my throat.'I was expecting a proper kiss.'

She snapped the exercise book shut and rammed it in the drawer. It was 3 o'clock. An hour since she had left Rollo. Looking down at her arms in the warmth of her study, she was unsurprised to find the fine light hairs were standing on end. She snatched a key from a hook in the kitchen and with fast steps crossed the courtyard to the third stone house, about 50 yards from her own.

At the top of the steps the front door stood open. Loud music issued from inside – American country music. That meant Agnieszka. She nearly turned back, then went in.

Agnieszka was vacuuming one of the rugs in the sitting room, her back to Greer, who waited until she turned round so as not to give her a fright – Agnieszka was famously highly strung. It was not a long wait. Everything Agnieszka did was done fast and furiously. She reached the edge of her rug, saw Greer, switched off the machine with one hand and the portable CD player with the other, and darted over to enfold her in a beaming hug.They had seen each other the day before but this was a ritual that never varied.

'I like it do the house today, make sure everything is perfect for your man.When he come? Tonight? You tell me when and I finish before he come. He is taking the train from Roma to Grosseto?'

'He's driving from Pisa. But he may not come today, I –'

'He come from Pisa? He must see the leaning tower, he is coming all the way from America. Or Roma, he can see the Colosseum.Why he no want to see these things?'

'He's been here before,Aggie,'Greer said patiently.'Not here, but to Italy. And he's not coming from America, he's been in London.'

'Oh.
London
.' Agnieszka's voice dropped an octave. She looked disappointed and disparaging. Her year in England as a Polish casual worker was a bad memory.

'I'm not sure exactly when he's coming, anyway. It may not be today at all. I deleted the email.'

'You no write it down, the time? You no remember the day?' Greer was familiar with the tone of voice and the expression on Agnieszka's face. She was aware that this model of domestic efficiency considered Greer a lost cause in that department.

'I give you notebook. There is book with,' Agnieszka gestured wildly,'things – round things – metals – on the top. You can get in supermarket –'

'A spiral notebook?'

'Yes, you know it? You write it to yourself, each time you want to remember. Then you tear off, and put by the front door. Maybe hang from a string.You like it I get you next week? There is game I play with Silvio,'Agnieszka's fourteen-year-old, Silvio, was regularly hired to solve computer glitches at the Castello, 'very good for the memory. One person say, I go to the supermarket and I buy one apple.Then the next person say, I go to the supermarket and I buy one apple and one dog biscuit for Rocco, then the next person –'

'Yes, I know that game. It's for children.'

'You know? Then you play with your husband. At breakfast. If you do this every day, you soon find you remember everything, and no forget important thing like when guest is arriving!'

Greer regretted coming in. She went up the short stair-case into the bedroom on the right. Agnieszka chased after her.'All the sheets from wine men are changed, and rooms nice and tidy. So your man can choose where he like it. Maybe he like it big room. Or maybe small room with balcony.The other one big but dark, I think, but if he like it no matter, bed is made up. And towels – everything is perfect.You like it I put flowers?'

'I was going to do that, but if you –'

'I do it, no trouble.What you have tonight, for dinner?'

'Oh, I'm not sure,Aggie. If he comes we'll probably take him out.'

'Yes, you go out, you no want it do cooking.You take the bad boys with you?'
For obscure reasons of her own, which Greer interpreted as conveying both disapproval
and affection, Agnieszka liked to refer to Rollo and Guy as the bad boys. 'I
doing nice big fettucine alfred today for my family,like I make for the boys
last night.And a big tiramisyou. I tell you what I put, and you do it next
week.'

Greer heard this without listening. Having been suspicious of Italian food for
most of her life, Agnieszka was a recent convert. This was Guy's doing. She
cooked dinner for him and Rollo two or three times a week. Last year, announcing
the transformation of their house into a flaczki-free zone, Guy had paid for
her to attend a week-long Italian cooking and conversation course in Perugia.This
had nearly precipitated a terminal rift with Rollo, as Guy well knew it might.
Rollo was an offal man from way back, and flaczki – Agnieszka's hearty tripe stew – was his favourite.

It was Rollo who'd found Agnieszka in the first place, a young Polish bride adrift in the village.'She was dazed and confused, and we took her in,' was Rollo's somewhat self-serving version.

Agnieszka, waitressing in London's Greek Street, had encountered Angelo Brogi,
the most boisterous and disorderly of a local gang over on the razzle in Soho,
and an unlikely but sizzling holiday romance had ensued. This probably should
have been the end of it, but Agnieszka had become pregnant and her will, which
despite her youth had come into being fully formed, ensured that Angelo toed
the line.

Now, twenty years and a daughter and son later, the marriage soldiered on through storms and separations that came and went as regularly as wars and famines in the world at large.Angelo was employed periodically at the Castello to do odd jobs requiring muscle but not much else, and was known as Angelo who-is-no-angel-o.

Agnieszka had returned from the week in Perugia with no discernible improvement in her Italian conversation but with a new fixation on the cuisine of her adopted land. Everyone except Guy was astounded at the success of his plan. Now the pieroszkis and the krupniks, the borscht and the bigos were well on the way to becoming a distant memory. Once Agnieszka had discovered the practical advantages of pasta and risotto there was no looking back. In her life it was a small revolution, and like all revolutionaries she was a crusader, wishing to convert everyone in her path.

It's like the arrival of the pill, Greer thought, backing away from the tidal
wave of Agnieszka's words and making her excuses.The birth-control pill had
unleashed a tsunami of sex. Sex was always there, of course, just as Agnieszka
had always known about the existence of pasta, but before the pill's arrival
it had taken more of a background role, a controlled position, as if it were
on a leash. Let off the leash it immediately leapt to centre stage, impinging
on everything. Dominating everything.

Or was that merely a consequence of being young, and nothing to do with science or sociology or anything else? Because these days, these less frenetic and desperate days, sex was in the background again; it had retreated to its old historical position. It was still there, oh yes – in her mind's eye she saw Mischa standing in the shower, head thrown back – but it had lost the feverish primacy it had claimed for so long.

The gradual decline of the primacy of sex in their lives must have released tracts
of spare time. Rather like an unexpected bonus awarded for long and dedicated
service, she reflected. They had given years of dedicated service to the pursuit
of sex. But any time awarded more recently as a bonus seemed to have been filled
easily, as time invariably tended to be. Swallowed up by other things, such
as work in Mischa's case.

And in her own too.There was no question of that. She imagined a dialogue with the biographer.Without any false modesty I am on the way, she would tell him, to my surprise and probably everyone else's, I am well on the way to becoming rather a talented winemaker. She knew Guy would confirm this. He may even – no, he would very likely – add, perhaps a potentially outstanding one.

But the biographer could decide to tease this out further. He might want to play around with the elastic subject of time. In fact, and she knew this was a given because it was beyond reasonable doubt, Antony Corbino was going to be interested in more than the last decade.

You had, what was it, about fifteen years together before you fetched up here, he might remark.That was a long time to be on the move. How did you fill it? What did you do while Mischa was working? You had years to get to know yourself, right, he might joke, in his American way. But a light remark such as that one might carry a hidden agenda. Behind every throwaway line was the possibility of an ulterior motive. She knew she would be well advised to remember that.

During sex's obsessional heyday, there had been neither pause nor inclination for such new-worldly pursuits as getting to know oneself. She found it was not hard, not at all difficult, even from this distance, to conjure up the atmosphere of that hot-blooded time, to inhabit again that urgent body with its explosive desires, its ardour.

But it was unwise. She knew she was in danger of trespassing again, of breaching those inflexible mental boundaries. Of venturing towards the territory where she could not go. She retreated a little way and breathed deeply, like a woman in labour, concentrating on her surroundings: the beauty of the stone, the diving swallows on the porch, the sound of a distant bell. The cypresses that were like lissom limbs against the filmy April sky.

For a moment she imagined these bright images confronting her alternative landscape, becoming entangled in its darkness, before it overwhelmed them.