'What colour's her hair?'
'Sorry?'
'Verity. I just wondered what colour her hair is these days.'
'Hey, that's a good question. Definitely not your standard-issue blue-rinse old lady.' He was taking the question seriously, as she had expected. 'It's like, obviously henna'd, but in an expensive, discreet way that suits her style. Kind of chestnut, or coppery, I'd describe it.'
So Verity had clung to that colour for the rest of her life. She must have regarded it, Greer supposed, as the colour of her greatest success. A success that had turned out to be fleeting, due primarily to the actions of Greer herself.This was an uneasy thought, and yet the overall idea of Verity was not depressing.The woman she remembered was never going to end up as your standard-issue old lady. She had always exhibited far too much attitude.
Next to the photo of Mischa and Verity,Tony had pinned up the typed catalogue of prices. Further along was a colour head shot of a much younger Greer, tanned and smiling, tendrils of blonde hair in her eyes. She remembered Charlie taking it on the Isle of Pines, on their last holiday together.
And there they were, she and Charlie as a couple, wielding chopsticks, looking festive and carefree in their favourite Chinese restaurant. An ice bucket of champagne hung over the side of the table. Charlie had drunk most of that.
Tony's caption to this one read:'Greer Gordon with her first husband, Charles McNicoll, at The Flower Drum in Melbourne, May 1979'.
She found the choice of photograph and the message conveyed by its selection both poignant and ironic. On this particular night in May she had given Charlie news that had elated him and told him she would marry him, at long last.Was Tony in possession of this highly charged piece of information?
The leaves had scurried in little whirlwinds around their ankles as she and Charlie emerged from the restaurant's bright, soaring interior into the cold snap of Little Bourke Street. It was an autumnal evening, cruelly appropriate, she thought now. Yet neither of them could have had any inkling, as they stepped outside, that the decay and death of their relationship was imminent.
'Was it Charlie,'she asked,'who gave you this?'
Tony nodded. 'And the one from the Isle of Pines. They're copied off the originals, of course. He picked them out because he said you liked these two.'
Had he really said that? 'He'd kept them?'
She wondered if it was her imagination or whether Tony had shot her an odd look.
'Oh, yeah. He wasn't like Elsa, who burnt all hers. Charlie's a very organised guy.That's how I got to see some of your old artworks.'
Ah, so that was how.
'And he kept every photo from your time together, in two albums. Every picture neatly identified and dated. And a whole bunch of your old family photos as well, in case you want any copies. All in chronological order.You're in there only up to the time you disappeared, of course.'
She could read nothing from his bland expression. He had another photograph in his hand, face downwards. He flipped it over. It was another head shot, and she saw whose head it was. If Tony was planning to shock me, she thought, he has failed, because I was half expecting this.
The photograph was of Josie, looking just as Greer remembered her, but with her glossy dark hair cut in a chin-length bob that was very chic and '20s and suited her far better than the swinging shoulder-length style she'd worn since she was a teenager.
'This is a nice one of her, don't you think? Charlie took it. He's quite a photographer.'
That had to mean Tony had met Josie. Didn't it? But when had Charlie taken it, and where? The background gave no clues, it was nothing but a cloudless blue sky. Josie was wearing a sleeveless orange top and a choker made up of several strands of turquoise beads. Greer didn't recall it and thought she would have, as it was a distinctive necklace.
'It was taken in Hong Kong,that one,circa 1983.About three years after you left.'
That settled that, then.
Tony's voice said: 'You two look very alike in these shots, don't you?'
There was no reply, and he continued: 'Even though you're fair and she's dark, there's a strong family resemblance.'
He hit the stop button on the first tape, and interposed on the second: 'She was seriously rattled by the picture of Josie. Didn't know what it meant.What she thought it most probably had to mean was going to confirm her worst fears. But she still wasn't prepared to come out and ask me.'
He flicked the first tape back on. Greer's voice, sounding distant and cold,said:'Yes,we were always told we looked alike. It shouldn't surprise you, since we are sisters.'
Tony listened to his own voice saying: 'This chapter's well represented with illustrations from 1979 on.There's all the Melbourne stuff, and examples of works made in Port Douglas and Cooktown, and Darwin the following year. But I've hit a weird blank spot here, Greer. I can't seem to come up with any pictures from the period that came right after Melbourne, before Port. That's the five months' stint in Sydney. Mischa's no help at all, he just switches off, you know how he is.'
There was a long wordless interval in which Mischa's humming could be discerned faintly in the background, before Tony's voice resumed.'I just wondered if you had any ideas of where I might go rummaging?'
He stopped the tape. 'She clammed right up on me then. Just shook her head blankly.'
He switched his recorded voice on again, sounding as matter-of-fact as if he were discussing the provenance of pictures:'I guess it was a tricky time in a whole raft of ways, after leaving your former lives behind, having a first shot at living together. Life with an eccentric artist's not easy, huh, even at the best of times?'
He had followed that up with a laugh, quite a hearty one, but Greer had not joined in.
His voice altered.'I know you used a post office box for your address, but you had a little flat in Darlinghurst in inner Sydney,right?'
Greer's reply was inaudible.
'You didn't see many people. Was it a happy time for you,overall?'
He switched it off again. 'Her expression changes. It's like she's suddenly twigged this guy she's standing next to is a carcinogen. And recoils from me like she might catch something terminal.'
14
6th August
'Tis done. We ran away. 'Twere done in a hurry.
Only twelve laconic words at the top of the page.Ten, if you allowed the abbreviations.The third sentence was something of an understatement. Greer assumed it was a lazy play on the line in Macbeth. 'If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done quickly.' She had no memory of putting the words on the page, but she remembered only too well the night with Charlie after she had spilt the beans.
At the time she had thought it the worst night of her life. She was to revise this rating as less extreme on the scale of badness fairly soon afterwards, and on more than one occasion.
She turned the page, but there was nothing more.The date of the next diary entry was early the following year. It was hard to believe that she could have written so perfunctorily, in such a throwaway fashion, about something so momentous. And, more reprehensibly, not only in her own life.The effect on the lives of others, more devastating in the short term, was also more farreaching.
She thought, actually it would have been sometime the next day when I took the trouble to scribble those inadequate words. I must have been spaced out. Completely off my trolley, as Tony might say. But the truer explanation, I suspect, is more prosaic and discreditable. I couldn't bring myself to pick up a pen and describe events that reflected on me so badly.
At least, however, she could remember most of what happened. She hadn't repressed those memories, deliberately or otherwise.They were all there, burnt into the hard drive, ripe for retrieval. She picked up the pen, thought better of it and switched to a pencil. It could be rubbed out.This was never going to be easy.
19th April 2006
I left Josie's flat and sat in a café.Then I drove through the city and the afternoon rush hour to Mischa's r
oom in St Kilda. He was painting, still working on what I assumed was the same nude of me sprawled across a bed. I told him without preamble that I was going to leave Charlie...
Without preamble was putting it mildly. She had angered another driver by cutting her off and roaring into a parking space round the corner, charged up the rickety stairs three steps at a time and burst into Mischa's room.
A picture lay on a table under the windows to catch whatever grimy light could filter through. He was standing in front of it, his back to the door, swathed in a beanie, scarf and woollen gloves with the fingertips cut out. It was perishingly cold, although she noticed a paraffin heater that hadn't been there last time.
She herself was disguised in a heavy overcoat. She said unsteadily,'Is that painting me?'
He didn't turn round. His hand froze on the canvas.
'Of course it's you. Have you come back to me?'
'Of course I have.You knew I would.'
'Come here then and don't cry.'
'But I've got a condition to make, first.'
He turned round then and looked her over in her black swagger coat and peaked urchin's cap.'All right. I agree to it.'
She thought, nobody in my life has ever grinned at me so impishly, with such pure and lascivious delight. If that is not a contradiction in terms. She said, laughing through the renewed film of tears,'But you don't know what it is yet.'
. . . on condition that we run away as soon as possible. I said I wanted to cut all ties with Melbourne and move to Sydney. It was a big metropolis and we could lose ourselves there.The reasons I gave Mischa for wanting to get away from Melbourne were practical and symbolic, to do with ending my relationship with my husband and minimising the hurt to him. I pointed out that Sydney would be new to me as well. It would be a level playing field for both of us.
I didn't give him any other reason.
Mischa's reaction was . . .
She paused, pencil suspended. How had Mischa reacted? As if she had belatedly come to her senses, that was how. He'd been unsurprised. He was raring to go. She saw now that the way he had regarded it as a bit of a lark, as nothing to make a song and dance about, had made it easier for her. But then, at that juncture, he had only been privy to the half of it.
She told Mischa she would feel much happier if they left Melbourne altogether, because her working life had been there and too many people knew her. She didn't want to run the risk of bumping into mutual friends or, more particularly, her husband every time they went out. It would be less humiliating for Charlie if the runaways, as she was already thinking of the two of them, made a fresh start in a town that was an unknown quantity. That way she and Mischa would be in the same boat, immigrants together.
Besides, Sydney was larger and the art scene was arguably bigger there. She had even said, disingenuously, lying through her teeth, that she was sure Verity would gladly recommend a good Sydney dealer and there was no reason why she shouldn't continue to handle Mischa's Melbourne sales anyway – once Verity bounces back, Greer had added, from the double whammy of losing her star artist and her valued assistant.
She needn't have bothered with all this specious mustering of reasons. It was overkill and quite uncalled for. Mischa had accepted what she proposed without comment or qualification; with zealous enthusiasm and without listening to the detail, most likely, because he was also trying energetically to get her into bed then and there, and was indignant when she refused. Her explanation – that she had not yet told her husband and had to go home to get it over with – did succeed in pulling him up short.
'But that is the only excuse I will accept from now on.'
He thrust her away at arm's length, and they had looked into each other's eyes for a long moment. She'd finally said, with fingers surreptitiously crossed,'That's just as well then, because this will be its only outing.'
She had put her hand into her capacious coat pocket and encountered a bulging plastic bag.
'I nearly forgot. Close your eyes and open your hands. I've got a present for you.'
She pulled it out and spilt a slender arc of ivory sand and a cloud of fluttering tropical petals, scarlet and gold and purple, into the capacious bowl of his cupped hands.
'The sand was very important to me. It brought back the feeling of being with you, for some reason.' She caught his eye.'It was so silky and soft,but that's got nothing whatsoever to do with it.'
He looked down at the pyramid of sand and petals and closed his eyes again,'It is my first and best present.'
She was reminded of the look on his face the day she had first met him.That afternoon he'd been loudly singing and gazing at his own painting of an Aboriginal girl on a piano in a paddock. He had the same expression now. In her diary she had called it beatific, a look of blissful happiness.
'It can't be the best if it's also the first.'
'Yes it can, and don't argue. It is the first proper present I have ever been given.Therefore it is also the best.'
On the point of leaving, she had looked over at the painting on the table under the window.'Do you always take this long to finish something?'
'Are you always so non-observant?'
'Unobservant, if you don't mind.'
Only then did she see that all along the balcony wall, under the frowzy French windows where he had rubbed a few cursory holes in the dust, the floor was littered with discarded drawings. Limbs, breasts, buttocks, hair, torsos, crossed out, drawn and redrawn, and finally a face she knew. Her face. She circumnavigated them in growing amazement.
'Are all these body parts mine?'
'Don't you know what yours look like yet?'
'Not necessarily. Not from the back I don't. I haven't got eyes in the back of my head.'
'Half of them are necessarily from the front.'
'Why is there only one of my face?'
'Because I can do your face already. I saw it plenty of times in the gallery.The rest always had clothes all over it. Nice white, I mean nice cream suits.'
'Not completely always it didn't.' She gazed at his unrepentant face. He was tipping the sand and petals very slowly and carefully into a dusty jam jar.'All right,it usually did.'
He looked up. 'I prefer that it usually doesn't, do you understand?'
He screwed a lid on the glass jar, and rubbed the dust off against his trousers.
Two finished nudes were stacked against the wall in the corner. One was a charcoal drawing, the other she recognised as the original – the one Mischa had made after their first night together. Their only night together, up to that point.
The work in progress, she saw now she approached it, was radically different. Here the unclothed figure was reclining on her side confronting the onlooker directly, the spine fluidly arched, one leg propped up with the knee bent and the other lying flat and folded inwards from knee to groin. The line of the body and the creamy flesh tones were liquid and voluptuous, but it was the conjunction of body and face that riveted the attention. He had been working on the face. It was soft in repose but alive with a sensuously transported intelligence.
Greer had stood silently in front of it. She thought, he has set himself the riskiest, the most demanding of tasks, to capture the principal components of desire, the physical and the mental, and astonishingly he has pulled it off. She had shivered, but not from the cold, her arms crossed tight around her ribs.
'Well? Do you approve of yourself?'
She had sought for adequate words.'I think it's the first intellectually erotic nude that I've ever seen.'
'Is that a compliment or an insult?'
'Mischa, it's the most heartfelt tribute to your nerve and technique that I can come up with, right at this moment.'
She had the pleasure of watching his face light up. He had blown her kisses as she drove away on the icy street.All the way home in the car, as she drove to tell her husband their short marriage was over, she held in her mind the beatific smile that she, and no one else, had generated.
I
suppose Mischa's reaction was a mirror image of mine: that a future together had been inevitable since we met. Morality did not enter into it. It was how things simply had to be.We both felt gripped at that stage – gripped and energised – by an uplifting kind of fatalism, as if it was predestined for us to be together. I can only think that this somehow cushioned me from the enormity of the blow I was about to bring down on Charlie's head.
I did not return to the gallery that day. I knew I'd cleared my desk and left everything in order before I went away on holiday.Verity had managed without me for three weeks; she would find someone to take my place. It wasn't that I couldn't face her. I hardly gave her a second thought.We did intend to tell her we were going – just not yet.
A kind explanation might be that I was suffering from mental and emotional overload.An unkind and perhaps truer one might be that I had one end in view, and for this all means were justified.
Greer got up abruptly and walked away from her desk into the kitchen. She felt a headache coming and dropped three soluble aspirins in a glass of water. Tony was outside again chatting to, or more likely up, the team of muscular men working on the pergola. They had knocked off and were getting stuck into a tray of beers. She saw Agnieszka emerge from the laundry underneath her house and belt across the parade ground at full tilt. Her body language suggested strongly that she had issues with her husband. Greer watched as she confronted Angelo. Her head did not quite come up to his brawny shoulder.
The little pantomime put her in mind, as it had often done, of a feminist Punch & Judy show in which Judy was the aggressor. The outcome followed the usual pattern. Angelo who-is-no-angel-o did his impersonation of a baboon. He swilled down his beer and capered bow-legged after his wife to the car park, making ribald gestures at her back for the benefit of his workmates.
Greer looked at her watch. It was already 6 pm. She observed Tony stroll across to Rollo's studio, knock on the door and disappear inside.
She returned slowly to her desk. She thought, how inadequate a diary is. It is as difficult to be honest now as it was easy to prevaricate then.
The Biographer Page 21