The Biographer

by Virginia Duigan

  She felt a compulsion to pursue this, to make sure this nonchalant boy grasped the essence of what she was saying.

  'I knew Charlie very well for nearly five years, and there's nothing bad I would want to say about him. He was a sweet-natured and lovely man.'

  'He was mad about you, wasn't he?'

  He's been told that, she thought, but does he know what it means? Does he know anything about love?

  'Have you ever been in love,Tony?'she asked,on impulse.

  His dancing blue eyes conveyed amusement at the topic, and no surprise at all. 'Oh, yeah. In fact a few times. I'm a bit of a love junkie. It doesn't stick, that's my problem.'

  As I thought. He knows nothing, like Manuel in Fawlty Towers, which he has probably never seen either. She was tempted to tell him that Rollo had all the videos of this famous BBC comedy of the '70s.

  'Has it never stuck with anyone? Is the problem usually with you, or with – them?' Why am I being so coy about their genders, she wondered.

  'Not for long, and it's usually both, me and them, kind of a simultaneous slide into disenchantment.Which is lucky, I guess. I've seen what happens with the unrequited version, and it's not pretty.'

  'Is there anyone in your life right now?'

  'Well, yeah, there is somebody I quite like, as it happens. We only just met before I had to fly over here, so we didn't even have the chance,' there was a slight hesitation here and a faraway look,'to get the show on the road.'He threw her a disarming grin.

  Well, two could play at that game. 'So, did you have a nice instructive tour of the winery with Giulia this morning?'

  He blinked. 'Sure, yeah, I did. It's an interesting place, the winery. Full of –' He stopped. The blue eyes were slightly out of focus.

  'Full of wine?'

  He laughed.'What I meant to say was,you see a totally different side of this place, it's a whole other world in there. Well, it's your world, I guess, and Guy's –'

  She waved this away. 'I'm sorry, that was a digression,' she said.'My fault.We can do wine another time, can't we? Now, where were we?' The words gave her a pleasant illusion of being in charge of the interview. She knew it would not last.

  'Ah, OK. Well, uh, we were talking about you and Charlie,right?'

  His eyes went to the tape recorder on the table. But she could see that for a second or two she had thrown him, that in his mind he had been in another country with a person he liked whom he'd recently met, recalling their unfinished business. And then he'd been jerked forwards into a different world, inside the cool winery with Giulia.

  They had just got going again when they were interrupted.

  'Greer, I hate to be alarmist or anything but there's a whirling dervish on the loose.'

  Tony had seen her first out of the corner of his eye, the small figure in a billowing scarlet shirt who was flying at them dangerously fast down the steps from the house. Greer thought she looked less like a dervish than a child's shiny plastic windmill, her arms flailing in concentric circles in front of her.

  'I search for you everywhere! Where are you?' Agnieszka pulled up, laughing and panting.

  'We're here.'They were amazingly united on this.

  'Oh, I know that, I see you now. You two are hiding down here from me and having nice little private conversations.' Her petite, eloquent features gave vent to a sequence of expressions, chiding, frisky and finally conspiratorial. 'I like it give you this. I have it all day long waiting to see you in my bag and only now I do it!'

  She flourished a shimmering object in Greer's face, and dropped it like a trophy in her lap. Greer saw it was a spiral jotter with a fluorescent lime-green cover.

  'I go with Eva after school to newspaper shop with magazine, you know this one, by old ruins wall? We no making decide which colour: she like it one, I like it other one. You don't believe me! There is this green, and also orange one, and nice purple, but Eva think you no like purple. Now you make diary, with lots of detail lists for every day, what thing to do and what buy, and when Mr Tony is coming, and then life is organise, and everything is much better.'

  Greer thought, as she submitted to the hug: if only it were that simple.

  Agnieszka patted Tony on the head.'You come last night to the bad boys,'she winked at Greer,'and eat my dinner?'

  'The bad –? Uh, I get you.Yes, your dinner was awesome,Aggie.'

  'You like it? It was all finish – you don't believe me – nothing left in fridge from all that big lamb and potato, only bone for doggies, and one little piece cake.' She bent her head to Greer's ear and lowered her voice.'I like it save for you and I steal from the boys. Mr Rollo he no need any more, he get too –'

  She blew into her cheeks to make a fat face and turned to Tony without pausing. 'I learn that way of making artichoke when I go to Perugia.With garlic, rosemary, olives oil. You cut –'

  Greer saw an exhaustive post-mortem in the offing. She forestalled it. 'We can't talk now, Aggie. We're working.' Agnieszka had a healthy respect for work. Greer knew this, and was rewarded with a vigorous nod of understanding.

  'Sorry, I no interrupt, I leave you all alone again by yourself. But, you must no forget eat your little bit cake. I hide on kitchen table away from that naughty Mr Mischa, he never look under paper because he only man, and man never find anything!' And she was out of there, bounding back up the steps, true to her word.

  Greer said, 'Agnieszka is someone, perhaps the only person in my experience, who never walks away. She's either here, and well and truly in your face, or she's vanished in a puff of smoke. It's as if someone's waved a magic wand.'

  Tony pulled out a handkerchief and mopped his face. 'Whew. She's a character, isn't she? It's kind of strangely exhausting just being around her.' He indicated the sparkly green notebook.'What did she bring you,a diary?'

  Greer said repressively, 'No, just a notepad. Now then, where were we again?' She had a compulsion to get this nice little private conversation over with.

  'Do you mind talking about Charlie?'

  Tony pulled on jeans and a long-sleeved sweatshirt as he listened to the sound of his own voice. There were fewer ambient noises on the tape now, less of the twittering birdsong and background mooing of cows. Not long after Agnieszka's visit it had clouded over and they repaired to Greer's kitchen. Even in here a persistent cuckoo punctuated the tape at regular intervals.

  'Mind? Not especially. I wasn't hurt by Charlie, it was the other way round, as you must be well aware. To avoid repetition perhaps it would help if you also avoided asking me what you already know.'

  They had been seated at the kitchen table with cups of tea and a slice apiece of the leftover chestnut cake they had found, sure enough, smuggled in and tucked under the Herald Tribune.

  Tony zipped up his fly and replayed the last terse statement.Then he stopped the tape and interposed:'She was on the edge of her chair all through this interview.Yet she never came right out and asked me what I actually know or who I've seen.This was the closest she came, and the most overtly hostile she's allowed herself to get.

  'She's in a real bind, because she's assuming I've seen Charlie, but has no way of knowing if he's dumped her in part of the shit or the whole load. Or if he's introduced me to someone she'd far rather I didn't get to meet.And she can't say a word about any of this without giving the shit away.'

  He started the tape again. His voice, larded with appeasing balm, said: 'I would like to do that, Greer, but with a biography, in a sense, there's no such thing as knowing. There's just what you think you know.And that is subject to modification and change.You're dependent on what people remember – or think they do – and on what they're prepared to tell you. And everyone has their own take on events, a personalised version, which they've kind of metabolised over the years into their own truth.You have to learn to sort out those who have accurate memories from those whose memories are crap, basically.

  'If I've learnt anything on this job it's not to take any one person's version as gospel, however co
nvincing it might sound. It may be just plain bitching, or it could turn out to be total bullshit, right? I think I've learnt – well, I sure hope I have – not to draw any conclusions until I've talked to everyone I can find who's in the mix in some way.

  'So, yeah, I'm sorry if I'm a pain in the butt, constantly asking things you think I should know about. It's just I don't feel I necessarily know any stuff properly until I hear it from you.And Mischa of course.Like,you know,from the horses' mouths.'

  At the end of this came Greer's voice on the tape: 'Rather than the mouths of asses.'

  Tony stopped it there to add something else: 'She gave a little tight smile when she said that. The horses' mouths was risky there, but it kind of paid off. Jokes are cool with her – she gets humour – but you need to pitch it right or it backfires on you. I felt the time was right for the heavy spiel. I expected her eyes would glaze over and she'd be really antsy, but she sat and listened, and I think she heard what I was saying. Although she was tapping a finger on the table. Anyhow, it paid off right away.'

  The next words on the tape came from Greer:'I should never have married Charlie. I knew it right from the start, on our very first date, the evening after we met.'

  Tony stopped the tape.'That came from out of the blue. I guessed it had to be something important, by the way she leant forwards with her eyes fixed on a point just to the right of me, in that weird way she has.'

  Greer had found a sudden desire to relate this story. She told Tony a shortened version, leaving out things he didn't need to know, such as any mention of Charlie's red convertible. None of her other friends in London owned a car. She couldn't even recall what make Charlie's car was, but she suspected that Tony would draw inferences from the fact that he had one.

  Charlie had driven her to the theatre, picking her up from the rather grim Arsenal flat – another censored item – she shared with two friends. It was just around the corner from the football ground, where there was a game in progress. Charlie had been impressed to hear that she could lie in bed and guess who was winning by the roar of the crowd.

  He had bought tickets (the best, in the front stalls; Greer omitted this) for a new play by one of the formerly trendy, kitchen-sink group of writers. She found that she could not at this distance remember who, or what play it was. Afterwards he had taken her to dinner at a tiny, charming little Italian restaurant in Chelsea (she left this out too), his own stamping ground.

  Over dinner they had briefly discussed the play. Greer had remarked that some of the dialogue was Pinteresque. What was that? Charlie had enquired.

  'It turned out he had never heard of Pinter,' Greer's voice on the tape had an edge of incredulity. 'I found that almost unbelievable.'

  There was a pause. 'Actually, it doesn't seem anywhere near as extraordinary now, when people don't necessarily share so many of the same cultural references. But at the time I did think it was rather amazing. I realised there was an enormous gulf in our interests, I suppose, and in what was important to us. I think I knew then, really, that it could never work.'

  'Off the record, did you ever get to ask Mischa if he'd heard of Pinter?'

  A laugh.'I'm sure I never bothered.'

  'It wouldn't have made any difference, would it?'

  'You're quite right. It would have made no difference at all.'

  'So, Greer, why did you marry Charlie?'

  It was not the first time she had heard this question. She had asked it of herself, many times.

  4th August

  Early morning (like 2 am ...)

  Can't sleep.Tried to watch TV. Can't take anything in. Don'twant to go back to bed.

  It was a fuckwitted thing to get married. So much that we're going to have to deal with would be infinitely easier if we weren't. It's not as if it's even remotely necessary these days. Even if you were staying together for ever.Why in heaven's name did I agree to go through with it? It must have been hormonal. I'd lived with C. on and off for nearly 5 yrs & never given in. I should have known it was certifiably insane. I should have listened to what my instincts were trying to tell me, right from the start.

  All those interminable lists I used to draw up, of the pros & cons. Pros: he was so sweet, so nice, kind, devoted, would always look after me, etc.; cons: he's a businessman, his interests are in commerce not the arts, we've got nothing in common, our minds are poles apart,etc.etc.And all those trips away I took on my own, trying to decide what to do, as if being away from him would decide it one way or the other.

  It's so obvious to me now: all that is rampant lunacy. It's obvious to a moron that anyone who can't make up their mind one way or the other should never do it. I should have left him years before, and then this whole catastrophe would never have happened.Why wasn't it clear to me? Why didn't anyone say something?

  If only Dad were here, I know he would have warned me. None of my friends were game to say anything, and they must have all realised it was a mad idea.Why didn't someone wise, like a sensible experienced older woman, my mother even (but she was always besotted with C.) take me aside & say, listen, if you have to make a decision – forget it, it's a non-starter, it's doomed, it's wrong.When it's right you'll know.There will be no decision to make, and it doesn't matter how long the list of pros is, they're a total irrelevance, period.

  Greer had taken the diary into the kitchen, where the fire lit earlier for herself and Tony needed attention. She read the entry through twice. How ignorant it sounded, how evasive and self-pitying.Were other young people like this, wilfully blind? Or was it just her? She thought of Giulia, beautiful and wayward, seemingly bent on wreaking destruction. Giulia was far too pig-headed to listen to anyone, right now.

  But she will probably grow out of it, Greer thought. Most people become less selfish as they grow older.Would Tony think that is what I have done? And Mischa? Or does he think we're both swanning through life without a regret in the world, with never a backward glance? Mischa's work consumes everything,the present moment included.That is both his reason and his excuse. But what is mine?

  She had a memory of herself gripped by successive waves of panic that night after their return to Melbourne from the Isle of Pines. Unable to sleep, tossing and turning beside the quiescent body of her husband, who was sleeping the deep sleep of the just. Finally getting up in the early hours, seizing on the diary as if it were a confessional and pouring her heart out.Then lying huddled under a doona on the couch in front of the TV and watching, without comprehending a word, as if it had been some arcane gibberish, a 3 am re-run of The Sweeney.

  There were two empty lines at the bottom of the page, where the diary entry had ended. Greer felt a need to add something.

  She wrote:

  17th April 2006

  Why did I marry Charlie? I gave in,finally.And at the time,for obvious reasons, it seemed the right thing to do.

  She was coming to the end of the second line, and wrote in squashed letters between square brackets:

  [Cont. at back]

  She turned to the back of the exercise book, where there were a few empty pages, and wrote three more careful paragraphs.

  17th April 2006 (cont.)

  Until (and perhaps I should add, unless, because I'm not sure that it is for everyone) you fall in love yourself, it is no more than an abstract idea.You read about it, people may try to explain it to you, and you may talk about it yourself and imagine you know what it is you're talking about.

  But you don't know. It's like trying to speak a foreign language without any grasp of the key words. Until it happens you cannot imagine how it will affect you.

  For that reason, even if my mother or some other sensible and objective older woman had taken me aside, I had not yet had the experience that might have enabled me to see the wisdom of their advice.

  She considered now how she had answered Tony's question about her marriage. He would see it as a decisive event. He would guess there was something of central importance she wasn't telling him. Since he appeare
d to be a good detective it was quite possible, it was more than likely, that he knew exactly what this was, and was contemptuous of her clumsy attempts to deflect him.

  A mere 50 yards away,Tony had moved over to his favourite armchair, the winged one with its airy, summery design of shells, flowers and oak leaves. He listened once more to Greer's explanation of why she had consented to marry Charles McNicoll a mere two months before Mischa Svoboda charged into the Corbett Gallery and derailed her life, as well as Charlie's.

  Greer's words came slowly to begin with and the voice sounded tentative, as if she was thinking on her feet.As if she knew, moreover, that this was how she sounded.

  'Charlie was always so sure he wanted us to be married, and his certainty made up for my indecision. In a way, it almost cancelled it out. He was so reassuringly free of doubt. You know about his consultancy work, do you? He dealt with firms who were having problems, or wanted to reorganise or streamline their operations.'

  The voice gained conviction, picked up a bit here. 'That's what Charlie was very good at: making rapid assessments of companies' strengths and weaknesses. He was accustomed to battles in the boardroom as well as the work-place, and arguing his case for constructive reform. He was used to an interim period of uncertainty, and negotiations and argy-bargy, and eventually getting his own way.'

  There was a short interval.Tony sat still,his eyes apparently glued to the empty whirr of the tape, on which the sound of the inevitable lone cuckoo was just discernible. When it resumed the voice sounded different, altogether more spontaneous.

  'I'm afraid that's inadequate. But I don't know how I can convey the relentlessness of Charlie's suit, the sheer pressure of his niceness. In the end, they wore me into the ground.'

  Tony stopped the tape. He sat staring into space, fingers laced together, then said:'She was sincere there, you can hear it. Or about as sincere as you can be when you're telling only half the truth.'

  12

  The conviction came to Greer in the night: I must talk to Charlie. I need to find out exactly what happened when he spoke to Tony.Assuming that has occurred.I think, however, I can safely make this assumption now. I would be extremely foolish to continue to kid myself that there is any conceivable chance Tony has not met and interviewed Charlie McNicoll, the bit-part, but definitely not two-bit, actor in the drama.