The Biographer (9 page)

'I am very partial to a well-padded seat,' Rollo said, looking at Antony.'Especially since me piles.'

'Shut the hell up about seats and piles, Roly. We will have straight-talking because the straight majority rules,that's right, isn't it, Tony? Maria Paola, meet Tony, my authorised biographer from LA. If you treat him well he will give you a rave write-up and you will become rich and famous –'

'And our nice quiet place will be rooned.' Rollo laid a hand on Antony's shoulder.'She
doesn't understand a word of English, you know. Especially Mischa's. We can
assassinate critics and shred reputations in here to our hearts' content. It's
so very therapeutic and restful.' He looked around approvingly.'You see? Not
a horrible tourist in sight.'

21st July
Isle of Ps
What's really ironic is that people come here for a rest cure, it's so unbelievably quiet & peaceful. I must be the only guest who's in a permanent massive turmoil. It's only a week since we came and it seems like a year. We've settled into a routine – getting up late, having breakfast on the porch, collecting a packed lunch and biking off somewhere in our togs. Picnicking at some idyllic spot with no one else around, going for a swim, then back for a siesta & read. A sail or another swim, then dinner. The food (Frog) is divine. You couldn't find a more gorgeous place for a holiday.

Charlie's so happy & I'm trying to act as if I am too, when inside I'm cold & apprehensive and full of dread. He keeps urging me to do some drawing, but I've got no motivation at all. He even offered to sit for me, to mark 'this auspicious occasion'. I just felt ill. He keeps making advances at night and I keep making excuses, which he's accepted, so far. He's always so understanding. I just can't face it.

What am I going to do?

'What are you up to, Mrs Smith?'

Greer's hand flew to her heart.'Don't come in like that, Mischa, you gave me a terrible fright.' His eyes were accusing and blurry from sleep. He was naked.

'Why are you in here? I woke up and you weren't there. I was worried. Come back to bed.'

He advanced. She pushed him away, gently. 'I couldn't sleep, that's all. I came to get a book.'

'Why couldn't you sleep?
I
was asleep.'

He always relates everything back to himself, she thought without rancour. 'I know you were, you were snoring like a steam train. Go back. I won't be long.'

He looked hurt. He always claimed he couldn't sleep without her in the bed. 'You'll catch cold. Bring the book back to bed and I'll warm you up.'

'I'm looking for it. Go away, you'll catch cold too. I'll come back in a minute.'

He padded off, apparently satisfied. She waited, then went through the kitchen
door and out on to the side steps. She looked across to her left at the smaller
of the two neighbouring houses.Antony's house.Tony's.There were no lights burning.
Under the clear moonlight it was the same as it had always been, much as it
had looked for centuries, yet she found she could not think of it in the same
way as friendly territory. Because of the person within, it had ceased to be
neutral. It had taken sides.

Was Tony in bed, fast asleep? Or was he lying there in his upstairs room, blue eyes wide, shutters open to let in the moon, idly regarding the beam of its light on the wall as he mulled things over? He would think, wouldn't he, that the evening had gone well?

It had been a convivial table, jolly, the three-cornered conversation of the
men ranging over art, inevitably on to conspiracy theories (Rollo's speciality)
and thence progressing naturally to European and American politics. Mischa
found politics baffling but he enjoyed discussions about their Machiavellian
complexities. His naïve amazement at what he heard tended, as on this occasion, to rouse his informers
to competitive heights of hyperbole. He had begun to draw a maze on the paper
cloth, using the flattened edge of a black crayon.

Greer hadn't contributed much.The reason for Antony's being there at all didn't come up until late in the piece. Until they started on the Bilbao art gallery. He had written about it.

'Talking of galleries,' he went on casually,'what do you think of the one in Melbourne?' None of the others had seen it. 'Huge mosaic stone walls: it's like great sheets of crazy paving have been levered off a sidewalk and hoisted a hundred feet in the air. Lots of angled glass that doesn't seem to be held up by anything. Natural light as far as possible, a very Southern Hemisphere openness.'

He gave Mischa and Greer a surprised look.'You haven't gone back at all? You should definitely do a pilgrimage. It's a changed city, I guess, from a quarter of a century back. Cosmopolitan, lots of buzzy little laneways full of bars and cafés.Very multicultural.'

'It was multicultural then,' Mischa said. He was drumming his fingers on the
table. His nails were encrusted with paint in a variety of colours.

'Wouldn't you like to see the place again?'This question was definitely directed at Greer, she wasn't imagining it. She let Mischa reply. She knew what he would say.

'Never go back.' Mischa started to draw a path of arrows through the maze. 'It's
not a good idea, under any circumstances.You should live in the present and
look forwards, not sideways or back.You can write that down if you like,Tony.'

Rollo perked up. 'There you are. Now you see what a dire subject you've got for a bio. Relentlessly simplistic. What a depressing task lies ahead. However will you cope?'

'Oh, I guess I'll muddle through, by dint of relentless interrogation. It's still
going, you know, Mischa, the little Corbett Gallery where you started off.You
wouldn't recognise it now though – they expanded into another property at the back. But they showed me how the
old place was, the room where you had your first exhibition. They even had
photos in an album, of your original pictures on the wall. In colour, so some
had faded a bit, of course, but others were pristine. It was pretty exciting
to see.'

Greer had taken those photos. She heard herself ask, 'Who runs it now?'

'Good question.The old lady Verity Corbett handed it over to her nephew, Simon Corbett, a couple of years back. They all thought she'd die in the saddle and never relinquish it. Simon runs it now, in theory, with his son, Alex, but she still comes in most days and drives them all nuts.'

Greer felt her heart flutter. She's still alive. I never even knew she had a nephew.But I think I knew Verity would be still alive.

'The amazing thing is, I met Alex, that's her great-nephew, when we were both students in London, at the Courtauld.We were friends before I even knew he had an ancient great-aunty with a seminal connection to Mischa Svoboda.'

He turned at Greer, who was sitting next to him. 'It's what gave me the idea for the book, in fact.You hear about these uncanny strokes of fate sometimes, when biographers get together to chew the fat. Everybody seems to have synchronicity stories like that.'

Rollo said, 'I suppose you desperately need a spy, an initial whistle-blower to spill the beans.'

'Right.You need someone to give you that first crucial breakthrough. It was Alex who handed me the intro to Verity Corbett.'Tony looked at Mischa and Greer. Neither responded. He turned back to the more rewarding Rollo. 'Did he ever tell you about Verity?'

'I doubt it, he never tells anyone about anything.Who was she? Not an old flame, shurely?' His eyes twinkled at Greer.

Mischa interjected, 'That's because Roly talks all the time and no one can get a word in. She was a character. I liked her.'

'She discovered you, didn't she? It's a good story. Quite romantic, you know,'Tony glanced at Rollo, then at Greer, 'in the aesthetic sense of the word. If there is one. Can I tell him?'

Mischa was drawing two little figures in the maze, a male and a female.

'You may as well, Tony,' Rollo said, 'then we can skip that bit in the bio.'

'Mischa was painting Verity's bedroom –'

'Did you know about this, darling?' Rollo gave Greer a quizzical look.

'Ah, but wait for it, Rollo. Mischa was painting houses for a living, OK, and
doing his own work at night. He'd only been in Melbourne like a couple of years.Well,
besides her pied-à-terre above the gallery, Verity had a run-down old family home out in the suburbs.
One day she blew in unexpectedly and found him drawing the cleaning lady in
the bedroom instead of painting the walls.The cleaning lady was vacuuming the
room – she was of mature years and fully attired, I hasten to say – and Verity, being a gallery owner, could immediately see that the picture –'

'That's enough of that,' Mischa interrupted. Greer saw that the maze had turned into pieces of a jigsaw puzzle now. They had covered his side of the butcher's paper and were creeping towards hers. 'Let him read about it in the book. I don't enjoy being talked about in the past tense when I am right here sitting at the table. I feel like I am at my own wake.'

Maria Paola's daughter arrived just then with strawberries and plates of homemade
gelato, profuse with graceful apologies for covering over the artwork. Greer
tried to eat the rich scoops of hazelnut and vanilla. Finally Mischa grabbed
her plate and devoured the melting leftovers.

She stood on the stone steps in her long-sleeved nightgown. Although the night was unusually still, she was visited by a sense of abundant life surrounding her, going about its secret work in the dark. Plants growing, nocturnal birds, animals and insects on the prowl.The playing-out of countless other stories,tiny dramas of life and death.As crucial to each one as ours are to us, she thought.

Far above, galaxies swarmed like living beings. The almost full moon had the cold intensity of a floodlight, washing the hamlet in a glow that seemed to her unearthly. There had been a sharp shower as they left Maria Paola's, forcing Mischa to sprint around the corner for the car. Now the clouds had dispersed but the ground still glittered.The buildings looked different.They had a crystalline sheen they never possessed in daylight.

She thought, I know these buildings are made of solid stone, yet tonight they're diaphanous, as if Mischa has given each one a slick of varnish. Or Rollo has draped them in a lacy veil. They could be an illustration in a picture book, with the moon suspended over the sleeping houses on chains of silver stars.

And I could be someone else, a character in a child's fairy story, stepping out of my bedroom into an enchanted village. But I'm not, I am here, in another story I cannot get out of. Mine.We are all trapped in our own stories.We can't write ourselves out of them.We can never write ourselves out of our past.What a burden that is.

Opposite, Rollo and Guy's house was in darkness, save for a solitary light from the porch.That meant Guy was still at large. Her eyes moved to the outlines of the other house, the nearer one, a mere fifty paces away. As she watched, a light came on in the room she knew was Tony Corbino's. Through the open windows, the glow of a bedside lamp. He hadn't closed the shutters.

For a moment she was too startled to move. So he was not asleep after all; he was awake, like her. But unlike her he would be calm and unworried, musing. He would not be gazing at the moon, as if its two faces held the answer to her troubles, he would be planning his strategy.

A wide-winged bird, probably the barn owl that lived in the top of Mischa's tower, swooped towards her, then veered abruptly to the left. It had something in its sights, a fieldmouse perhaps. It looked, briefly and terrifyingly, as if it would fly into Tony's open window, sucked in like a giant moth to the light.At the last moment it braked and plunged vertically, but in the split second before her reflexes flung her backwards, out of sight, she saw the round silhouette of Tony's head.

Behind the concealing shelter of the wall her heart pounded. She hadn't seen his expression or even his profile, he was too far away and the glimpse was too fleeting. Only the smooth circle of his head in the light. Had he seen her? She sank to her knees, winding the thin wool of the night-dress tightly around them. She realised she was shivering. Why did it matter anyway, whether he had seen her or not?

She knew why it mattered. If he knew why she was there outside in the dark, unable to sleep, standing alone in the chilly night air, if he knew that, then he would surely know that she was agitated and cold not so much from the night air as from fear.

Tony Corbino unlatched one of the open windows and pulled it closed. It had an old-fashioned catch. He leant towards the lamp on the bedside table, speaking into his small dictaphone.

'One thing I forgot to say. She got a big shock when I mentioned Verity Corbett. She asked who was running the gallery now, very cool. But when I said the old lady was still around she went a distinctly whiter shade of pale.
He
wasn't worried though. Freely admitted he'd liked Verity, but didn't ask any questions. He lives only in the present, he claimed. Doesn't believe in looking backwards or forwards. He's a simple, uncomplicated guy, if you believe Rollo, who's anything but.

'Maybe Mischa works off his obsessions through his pictures. Or maybe he's evolved the way he is through living with her – the classic reaction. She's either a natural-born cold fish, which doesn't square with her past, or she has to be a bunch of neuroses.The question is, which? And has it impacted on his work?'

The other three had waited inside the restaurant while Mischa went off into the pelting rain. He had roundly dismissed the younger man's offer to fetch the car.

'Don't try and take him on in the macho stakes,Antonio,' Rollo advised, 'you'll
get nowhere fast. Mischa's got machismo overload. It's part and parcel of that
deeply ingrained Eastern European suffering addiction, don't you think, darling?
It must be so nice to be married to. Guy can't bear rain, it ruins his hair,
and phrases like "Empty the mousetrap" or "Fetch my stole" are simply not in his repertoire.'

'However, he makes excellent wine and olive oil,' Greer said. 'And cooks and sings and plays the piano. All good things in a husband.' She was feeling slightly better. Probably the sedating effect of Maria Paola's coarse pork sausage with cannellini beans.And liberal quantities of wine.

'But the sentence "I'll run and get the car while you stay warm and dry" has never issued from his lips?'

Tony is remarkably at ease with us, Greer thought. He's probably a bit tight too.

'Has never emerged from that sybaritic orifice and never will.' Rollo adopted a mournful face.

'He sounds like a fine, well-grounded person.Will I get to give him the once-over tomorrow?'

'I don't see why you can't give him the twice-over, he's got nothing better on the go at the moment.' Rollo gave Tony an ironic look.'And the wine makes itself at this time of year, doesn't it, darling? Tony should be given the run of the place, don't you think? Then he can just front up and give any of us the once-over whenever he feels like it.'