The Biographer (6 page)

Greer walked quickly away from the guesthouse towards her own.As she climbed the steps to the kitchen door she again had a glancing view of the distant valley floor with its slow trickle of cars. She paused at the top as she always did and looked out over the face of the landscape, the rolling panorama that she could have drawn on paper blindfolded, whose every swelling and indent she could have reproduced with meticulous exactitude.

Antony Corbino will surely think I am spoilt, she thought. A privileged woman with an enviable life, living closeted away from the outside world. That is, if he is a charitable man. If he is not, and if he's a good detective, will he think all this beauty, all this creativity, are in some respects ill-gotten gains? He won't see into my mind. How could he? And even if he could, what difference would that make? Would it be enough to stop dead in its tracks the suspicion that I must be a monstrous woman?

Before I had time to think what I'd said, he was kissing me – so violently I nearly fell over. He backed me up against the wall, there was this incredible ravenous hunger coming from him, and from me too – oh God yes – we just kept on going, kissing, oblivious to the windows & the lights – it was dark outside, rain pelting on the windows – until suddenly he jerked his head back & it dawned on me where we were. In the GALLERY for God's sake, lit up, in full view of the street & passers-by – heaven knows who might've seen us – and he just looked at me wordlessly without any question and went over & turned off all the lights & bolted the front door.And we fell on the ground right there,on the polished floor, under his pictures.

The sloping writing had grown more and more undisciplined, veering over to the
right until it was almost horizontal, careering off the faint blue lines of
the exercise book, the words so crowded they were nearly joined together.A
line of dots,thick and heavily indented,followed the last sentence. Several
of them had speared through the paper. If dots could be expressive, thought
Greer, these were.

She leant back in the chair in her study and closed her eyes. She remembered the force of the kisses, the bruises on her mouth. How, for the first time in her life, she had felt sick with desire.

After, I remembered I hadn't locked the connecting door to V.'s flat! She could've come in from the garage, she could've come down!! BLOODY HELL!!! While I was fumbling with it, he said,'We must go somewhere,very fast.Where can we go to?'

There was some light from the street but my legs were like water & I was shaking so much I couldn't get the key in the lock. He came up behind me & put his hands over mine.'You live in an apartment? A house?'

'Yes, in Eltham, but it's miles away and...' I didn't know how to tell him.'What about your place?'

'You would hate my place.You have a boyfriend, yes? Is that it?'

'Yes. He's away tonight. But...' Even then, I couldn't say it. He could see, though. Some of it. Not all. Not the worst. He said,'A hotel then.What is the best one in Melbourne? The Hotel Windsor?' I said yes, but it would be horribly expensive, more maybe than one of his paintings.'So,no problem,I will just paint another one!' I tried to insist on paying half, but he wouldn't hear of it.'I am rich.Don't forget.'

I told him he'd have to have a shave or they wouldn't let him past the portals.

'So, you are bossing me about now.'

'I thought that since we've just made love I might take the liberty.'

'Is that what you thought?' He cupped my face in his hands, very gently,& closed my eyelids.'That was not love.When we make love you will not just think, you will know.' I felt a jolt in the pit of my stomach.

We went in my car to his place to get something to look like luggage, & money – he said he had some that Verity had advanced stashed behind the loo(!). He obviously hasn't got a bank account yet.We got drenched racing to the car. I let him drive, I felt faint all the way. I think I was in shock.

He drove like a maniac, but well.The rain was bucketing down in torrents, flooding the windscreen.

She saw the two of them again, clear in every detail, pressed hard against each other on the front bench seat of her Holden station wagon. Hurtling along in a metal capsule insulated from the outside world. And oblivious to that world too, self-consciously sharing a Gauloise, like the leading actors in a noir film. Outside, the rain was sheeting down, surging in glistening rivers on the road, and inside the car suffocating clouds of cigarette smoke swirled against the glass and almost obliterated the windscreen.

Rubbing portholes in the steam that immediately fogged over again, clutching on to his arm and chest as if she were drowning.The backs of his hands, knotted and dense with coarse hairs, paint embedded in the fingernails. One hand abandoning the gearstick recklessly and enclosing both of hers, gripping them with a kind of desperation. The sensation of giddiness, of being drugged on air that fairly reeked of carnality. Both of them too tense to say a word.

We got to the grungy St Kilda corner I recognised from the picture. He was in and out in less than 5 minutes, but when he came back he'd actually scraped some stubble off his face & tucked his shirt in, but he still wore the holey old jumper & was carrying a dirty holdall thing that he obviously uses for paintbrushes, & he still looked like a scarecrow, not remotely like your average Windsor patron.

We got in somehow. I think the man took pity on us, or else he was terrified – we may possibly have looked deranged.We kissed again in the lift & missed our floor, finally got there & shot down the corridor, pelted into the room & he dived at the bed & pulled me down on top of him.

Another line of dots followed. At the end of the line was a scrawled star. Greer's eyes scrolled down to the bottom of the page. She already knew what she would find there: a corresponding star, and the single word:
Paradise
.The letters were small and emphatically printed.

He was right, Greer thought. I did know. It was a revelation.

She couldn't recall anything about the hotel room or the feel of the bedclothes under her skin. Later she was aware of starched sheets and feather pillows. And then the same pillows scattered on the floor, and tangled sheets and blankets hanging off the bed like sails shredded in a cyclone.The top of his head, clumps of black hair matted with sweat. Her heart juddering, streams of sweat mingling with the slap of skin and rasp of breath. Sounds she had never heard herself make.Tears she found herself shedding – scalding, confusing tears, for reasons she had never known before that moment.

She saw them both in the shower, his head thrown back joyously under cascading water. Soaping him.

He grabbed the soap from me.'Am I clean enough for your high standards yet?'Then he launched into,'If I was a rich man'from 'Fiddler on the Roof'.He broke off & said,'I forgot.You hate my singing.'

'I didn't say that. I said I loved your painting. I didn't say anything about your singing.'

'Why not? And why are you not wearing red toenails? Don't you know that is not allowed?'

We had a wild pillow fight that ended up on the bed.At two in the morning we ordered room service, three courses & champagne.As we sat in the hotel dressing gowns eating oysters, he said,'Since we have now made love,before you start to boss me about you had better tell me your full name.'

Greer Gordon, she said. G.G. Like a horse. Like the '50s actress Greer Garson.
Like the Governor-General. Not at all like the Governor-General or old Greer
Garson, he'd retorted, or especially a horse. Like Gigi. And Gigi, eventually,
she had become. Instead of Greer Gordon she had become known in the limited
circles of the art world as Gigi Svoboda. None of her old friends from the
Australian period would know her by that assumed name, that frivolous name.
They might know she had done a bunk, but they wouldn't know what had happened
to her. Unless the biographer detective had tracked them down and filled them
in.

Svoboda is a common name in Czechoslovakia, like Smith. It means freedom. Mischa is his nickname. He told me he had to get out of Prague fast after the Russians invaded in '68. He escaped by skiing across the border into Austria. I just tried to blot things out by bombarding him with questions. I could still eat, but inside I was all clenched up.

Suddenly he gripped my shoulders & said,'Where is your boyfriend? I have to kill him.'

The feeling I'd been fending off surged & I thought I was going to vomit.I burst out,'Actually,it's worse than that.I'm married.'Then I realised I really was going to throw up & rushed to the bathroom. I told him that C. was coming back from NZ tomorrow & after that we were going on
holiday
.Those two dreaded items were all I could manage.

'You don't wear a wedding ring so you can't be married. It's a mistake.A mirage.'

'I wish I wasn't. It
is
a mistake. I wish it was a mirage.'

The long, shuddering sigh.The conviction that at the age of twenty-nine she might have ruined her life.

'Why are you not wearing a ring?'

'I think because I've never felt really married.'

'You see? Your feelings know the truth.You're not really married. How long are you going away?'

'Three weeks.'

'Three whole weeks? Not three parts of weeks? Where?'

'The Isle of Pines. It's part of New Caledonia. Off the north coast of Australia.'

'I know where it is.Thousands of miles from me. For 3 weeks. With your husband.'

'Yes.' I started crying.

'You can't go. I won't allow it.'

'I have to. It's all booked. I have to go.'

We went on & on until we crashed from total exhaustion. Woke up at 8 when breakfast came in. He said he'd been up for ages, he'd used up all the hotel writing paper sketching me, there were sheets all over the floor.Then we had this dreadful row, he wanted us both to arrive at the gallery together, but he doesn't know what that would mean...I tried to tell him that I couldn't face it with Verity, but of course he didn't understand & I couldn't explain...He kept saying 'Why does it matter? Why do you care what she thinks? You're ashamed of me,are you, is that it?'

It was dreadful.Terrible. Finally we went down in a deathly silence & he paid the bill & turned his back on me in the street & strode away from me.

Then, as now, his emotions had a direct conduit to his actions; the two were inseparable. He is so direct, so single-minded, whereas my mind is more of a filter, Greer thought. Or should I say devious? She closed the exercise book. There was a limit to how much of this she could read at one sitting. She forced herself to take a break, to try to think about it in a more objective way.

Here were her first encounters with Mischa. She had never shown him the diary. It occupied a place that was too revealing, too private, even for him. And not only for Mischa. Although she had carried it with her for a quarter of a century and always knew where it was, after making the final entry she had never wanted to look at it again.

Until now.This is how it all began, the diary was saying, this is how it began
for me. For us. But there is a filtering system at work here, she thought.This
is truly how it was, on one level, on its own terms. On that level it is surprisingly
detailed. On its own terms it is a thorough, almost exhaustive account.The
writer clearly couldn't budge from her position until she'd got it all down.

Whereas if Mischa had written about the same sequence he would have got it down and over with in a few bald sentences.Where he acts without thinking, I mull over, premeditate. At least, I do now. I tend to think too much about consequences.The biographer might prefer to call it making up for lost time.

Because consequences seem scarcely to have crossed the mind of this young writer. If I had no connection to her, if I stumbled on her diary with no preconceptions, how would I feel? I would probably picture its writer as a randy, reckless young woman. It's quite vividly written, in its juvenile way. Wouldn't the biographer just love to get his fingers on it?

This was a thought to make the flesh creep.

I crashed into work feeling totally wrecked.Told V. I'd stayed at a friend's & the alarm hadn't gone off. I had to plaster make-up on in the loo, my face was rubbed raw from his bristles.V. noticed I was wearing yesterday's things (rather crumpled).She said,'Forgot to take a change of clothes,did you?'Annoyed rather than knowing, I
thought
.

C. rang from NZ, wanted to know where I was last night. Said I'd gone to Lambie's. Had to ring & word her up. Cut her off before she could lecture me...Restless & anxious all morning. Bought more cigs, smoked the lot in spite of V.'s disapproval. Kept going hot & cold – an icy feeling of dread, then a rush of soaking sweat. She must've thought I was having premature hot flushes. I wish that's what it was.

He didn't come in.V. furious because there was a buyer he was supposed to meet. Of course he doesn't have a phone. Finally she wrote down his address & told me to go & drag him out of bed. I shot off, was in the car & outside his door before I realised we were rumbled – I hadn't even stopped to take the address from her hand...

She'd found the front door of the huge two-storey terrace unlocked. Inside was a dingy central passage of scabby, mud-coloured lino with doors off it on both sides and what looked like a kitchenette at the end. There was no way of knowing which was his, so she'd knocked on all the doors. Only the last one was opened, by a bare-legged emaciated girl wearing a man's nylon shirt. She was friendly, told Greer the artist lived in the front room upstairs.

He'd yelled out when she knocked: 'Go away!' When she turned the handle disobediently and found it open she couldn't see him at first. The room was the width of the house with tall,once-elegant Victorian windows and double doors opening on to a balcony, but the windows were caked with grime and a whirling fug of tobacco smoke smothered everything. She was aware of a strong smell of turps, of a room chaotically crowded with canvases propped three and four deep against the walls, a trestle table littered with junk. Of an unmade mattress on the floor with a grimy under-sheet and grey army surplus blankets screwed up in a heap.