The Biographer

by Virginia Duigan

  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.'

  She nodded. Rollo added, 'So, Antonio, what is your plan of campaign for the morrow?'

  Tony looked at Greer and smiled.'Good question.What is my game plan?'

  They worked something out on the short drive back to the Castello. It would be a loose arrangement.Tony would spend the first few days or so mostly with Mischa, starting chronologically with the early years in Czechoslovakia and his birthplace – the old spa town of Karlovy Vari.

  'Karlovy Var i, the unvar nished truth,' Rollo said, turning round to smirk at Greer,who duly laughed.He was ensconced in the front next to Mischa. Greer was aware of Tony's presence beside her, and of the narrow space that separated them.

  Tony said pleasantly to her, 'Maybe I should drop by tomorrow and start checking out your archives.When Mischa needs to take a break from my gruelling interrogation?'

  'You mean the cardboard boxes? Of course, yes.'

  'Mischa has a ludicrously short attention span.' Rollo swivelled round again.'You'll find the breaks will vastly out-number the gruelling grillings.'

  Tony asked her,'Did you manage to unearth much?'

  'A few things,I suppose.All jumbled up,as I said.'

  'Letters?' He was clasping his hands together in a prayerful pose.'Please say you kept some letters.'

  'He doesn't write letters,Tony, so why would he get any?'

  'Shut the fuck up, Roly, if you don't mind,' Mischa said mildly. He turned the car up the hill.The rain had eased to a drizzle.

  'There are letters –'

  'Yes!'

  'But nearly all from the last ten years, since we came to the Castello. We moved around so much before then. We were constantly shedding things.'

  This was a safe enough topic. She felt quite expansive. 'We were like gypsies for years, weren't we?' She looked at the back of Mischa's head, but he seemed intent on driving. 'We wanted to be free to take off and go anywhere, with no encumbrances, nothing to tie us down. Except his equipment, which didn't boil down to much more than a handful of favourite brushes in a cigar box.'

  And my equipment too. The biscuit tin of pencils, charcoal and chalks, brushes and watercolours. She added rapidly, to suppress this thought,'That's a lot of years without much documentation, I'm afraid. How awful for you.'

  She stopped.They were winding upwards on the unlit dirt road, and it was too dark to make out his face without turning and staring, but something told her he was smiling again.

  'Don't worry about it. They're not entirely without documentation, those years. You'd be amazed how much inadvertent flotsam gets left behind. It's the other guys, you see, the motley crew you hang out with on your travels. They hold on to things, remember stuff, keep diaries, even. To be honest, it's a bit of a relief you don't have a whole bunch of material from that time.'

  'I'm sure she's got more bunches than she's letting on.' Rollo searched for the outlines of their faces in the rear-view mirror. 'Every little twiglet is grist to his mill, Gigi, remember.Who was that Aussie composer who hung on to every scrap of paper he ever had in his life? You know, the self-flagellating one? Not just the dirty-linen bits, he kept all his dry-cleaning bills, shopping lists – a biographer's wet dream, Tony. Of course, Mischa's never had anything dry-cleaned in his life so Gigi couldn't have kept the chits even if she'd wanted to.'

  'It was Percy Grainger,' Greer said.

  Tony added, 'And all those chits would be more of a biographer's worst nightmare, I'm here to say.'

  'Come on, admit you'd love the flogging.'

  'The flogging would be knockout, I give you that.'

  'The flogging would be knockout.' Greer heard Rollo's appreciative snicker. 'Well, he won't be tripping over any birch rods at your place, will he, darling? I fear you may be confronting a tragic dearth of debauchery instead.'

  Mischa interjected forcefully, 'You can find that at the priest's house, Tony. That's Roly's house, if you didn't know yet.'

  Rollo chuckled at this.'Ah, well, all wives secretly love to dish the dirt on their husbands, don't they? I'll do what I can, but Gigi's probably your best hope.'

  They were feeling their way through the second entry gate now. The movement triggered an outside light that thinly illuminated the parking area.

  'Well, I'll just have to put the screws on you then, won't I, and hope for the best.' This time she distinctly saw the whites of Tony's smiling teeth.

  7

  23rd bloody July

  What am I going to do? It's impossible, I can't bear C. to touch me. I can't conceal it either, he can tell. I couldn't help it, last night when I tried to go through with it I actually recoiled, gorge rising. He thinks he understands but he knows nothing. There's not a single thing I can do to change this. I know now it could never work with C. If it ever did work before, in some kind of disabled way when I didn't know anything about anything, it couldn't any more.

  What on earth am I going to do? What am I going to what what whatwhatwhat is there available for me to do? What the fuck can I in fact actually do?

  WHAT THE FUCKING HELL CAN I POSSIBLY DO???

  The night before, for the first time on the holiday, she had yielded to Charlie's sensitive overtures. Forced herself to go through the motions, in a resigned spirit of experimentation. It had been a disaster.

  The diary page was torn and ragged. The letters were agitated, getting progressively larger, more fevered and out of control, until the ballpoint pen had ploughed into the paper and ripped it.The brief entry filled the whole page.

  She had let the pen and diary fall on to the sand. It took no effort to recall the scene. Her hunched figure in the blinding light, sitting with her back to the sea on sand that was as refined and pale as finely milled face powder.A young woman in a straw hat and burnt-orange bikini, slender, with long blonde hair. It could have been any hackneyed photo in a travel magazine, except that the sun-tanned legs were drawn up to the chin, the eyes squeezed shut and the mouth clenched in a grimace.

  She had groped for a cigarette and found the packet empty. At precisely that moment a young man, French, had come up and offered her a Camel. He must have been watching her. She'd taken a cigarette automatically and accepted his light, then had trouble getting rid of him. He was personable, polite, insistent. What was the matter, he wanted to know.Why was she so upset? Was it love?

  Instantly the tears spilt over. His handkerchief came out. Was it a letter she was writing? he demanded. Had he broken it all off, le salaud?

  'No, no, not that at all! It's only my diary!' It was as if a tap had been turned on and, just like the tears, a torrent of words had spilt out.

  For the rest of the morning, while Greer's
husband, oblivious, threw fishing lines over the side of a swish catamaran, the two young people who didn't know each other (and one who would never meet Charlie) had thrashed out a problem he didn't know he had. The foundations of his future and the fates of several others would be sourced as a result of this casual encounter on a beach, and the intense conversation that ensued.

  It was a shamelessly frank conversation. In later years, whenever the meeting with the young Frenchman crossed her mind in the seconds before being dismissed, Greer had thought of it as a secular variant of an epiphany. She had told this unknown Frenchman private things that she could not imagine saying to anyone else.The fact that he was a total stranger and foreign to boot had made such candid confessions possible. He was sympathetic, with no axe to grind. And he was young and attractive.These facts too could not be discounted.

  They had been like a pair of spies having a covert rendezvous on an empty beach. Or, more accurately, conspirators. She knew nothing about her fellow conspirator beyond his Christian name, Jean-Claude, and his occupation. But he spoke English fluently, being a graduate student attached to a medical research lab in Canberra.And as they groped towards an outcome she had hardly dared conceive of, he was prepared to envisage the unthinkable. Not only to imagine it, but to say it out loud.Which eased the way for her.

  'No, it is easier for me,' he countered, 'because I don't know your husband. He is Mr X. If I know Mr X, maybe I cannot talk like this. But I see you, and I see that you cannot be unhappy for the rest of your life.'

  'You don't find the idea terribly shocking?'

  'Shocking? Perhaps, but only if you are a bourgeoise.'

  That's the second time in two weeks I have been accused of being bourgeois, she thought.

  'To be bitter and frigid, and not to have great sex again, ever.Those things are shocking to me,'he added.

  Once the unthinkable had been given an imaginative existence, they were able to take it further. By the end of the morning they had worked out a plan. It depended on contingencies that were both considerable and unpredictable. It had no guarantee of success. The very word success was inappropriate.