For the last four months they hadn't even shared a bed. Mischa had dossed down on the lumpy couch in the same room he painted in. He had stopped smoking soon after their arrival, of his own accord. Just given it up one day without a word.
There were hookers, drug dealers and plenty of other artists outside on the pockmarked pavements of Darlinghurst. It was a countercultural quarter of inner Sydney they had gravitated to, full of Art Deco flats and cramped Victorian terraces, the front doors opening directly on to hilly, narrow lanes lined with plane trees.
Winter had yielded to spring and then the searing heat of December, the first month of summer. But in all that time Greer hadn't seen another person set foot in their little flat, with the sole exception of Marlene, the craggy-faced drag queen who lived in a studio across the landing and befriended Greer.
If it hadn't been for Marlene, a woman imprisoned in a tall man's body, and their afternoon breakfasts in pavement cafés or heart-to-hearts perched on the bed in Marlene's overpowering bed-sitter, Greer thought she might quite likely have gone mad. Marlene's gaudy room, strewn with peacock feathers,stilettos and g-stringed jockstraps,with glitzy Viennese mirrors and '30s Berlin cabaret posters on the walls, had been her only refuge.
They had one other visitor, but as fate would have it Greer had been shut away with Marlene when she arrived. Verity turned up out of the blue, only a couple of days before Christmas. Mischa's reaction was such that she cut her visit very short. She was out of there in next to no time. Greer wouldn't have known a thing about it if she hadn't opened Marlene's door just as Verity was emerging from the flat. She had dived behind Marlene's broad back, and Verity had continued on her way down the stairs.
Verity did have time, however, to see the paintings.They were hard to avoid, being all over the sitting room floor and in deep piles around Mischa's sofa. She would have drawn her own conclusions from those.
Even Josie, when she eventually flew in with her suitcases, had no occasion to step inside the flat.There had been nothing for her to pick up there, because Greer had bought nothing. Of the two sisters, Josie was the practical one, the forward planner. Greer had been in no doubt that Josie would arrive well prepared.
'They were happy to talk about New Year's Eve in Queensland, about Port Douglas, her divorce papers, you name it. I say "they" but it's mainly her, of course. Safely out of the danger zone she becomes almost garrulous. Well, anyhow, compared to how she gets when you approach the no-go area.'
Tony was doing his housekeeping, stripped down to a pair of boxer shorts, stretched out on the bed with his hands behind his head. On the front of the shorts was a red apple with a large bite out of it. He was staring at the ceiling and speaking into his dictaphone.The second recorder was at his side.
'He enjoyed playing with the fire, didn't overcook like people usually do.At dinner I said the fish tasted incredible, which it did – juicy and fresh with a wonderful smoky, herby flavour. I was rewarded with a child-like beaming smile of pure pride. It was quite sweet how he took the whole cooking stuff so seriously. It's probably because it gives him something constructive to do with his hands. Simple yet macho, no fiddling around with measurements and recipes.That would definitely not be the go.
'We stood out there together side by side like a pair of old drinking buddies. I was nearly stupid enough to quip that we were like one of those men's groups where they make campfires in the woods and reconnect with their masculine side. Howl at the moon, and all that stuff.
'I did say nearly.The fire must've made me reckless.Or maybe it was the beer, or even the moon. It was a clear night and a big moon up there. Serendipitous. After I'd broached the subject of Greer's strong feelings I figured it was as good a time as any to raise the Elsa ship from the seabed. I figured it was best to be direct.'
He threw a switch on the other recorder, and listened to himself say, 'So getting out of Prague was a smart move, relationships-wise.'
There was a grunt on the tape. 'It was a smart move everything-wise.'
'Mind if I ask a delicate question?'
Another laugh. 'Try it. I am just capable of being delicate.'
'You left the country pretty smartly after the death threat you assumed – very reasonably, I'd say – was from Elsa's husband, Pavel Montag.' Another grunt. 'There was that, and the political situation, and the whole damn thing with Elsa. Her instability and possessiveness. But in the absence of such a serious threat, would you ever have got around to leaving?'
There was a pause.Tony interposed,'He shunted some things around the grill, then made direct eye contact.'
Mischa's voice said,'Yes.I had to leave anyhow.'
'I guess in that situation there was a whole bunch of reasons to choose from, right?'
Tony hit the off button.'That was a dumb thing to say. I could tell he wasn't about to hand over any free points. So I made a daring executive decision. Nearly made me break out in a rash.'
He flicked it back on. 'Did you know she – Elsa – was supposed to have gone away and had a child after you left?'
A pause.'Supposed?'
'It was rumoured. Strongly.'
'Later I heard about that rumour.'
'Do you mind if I ask if it could have been yours?'
'You can ask that.'
'OK then, Mischa, could it have been your child?'
'How do I know? The mother would know better than me.'
'She denied everything. Screamed at me. Broke down in tears, wouldn't listen or say anything on the subject. But enough people told me about it that I had to ask you.They said she'd been pressuring you to marry and have a child. It hadn't happened with Pavel. She suspected he was sterile. That seems to have been pretty much confirmed later on, in his other marriages.'
Tony had paused at that point. There was nothing on the tape but the sound of cooking food sizzling and spitting.
'You've always been very open, right, about not wanting to be tied down with kids. I guess Greer accepted that.' Another silence followed.
'People who knew you said what Elsa was doing was blatant moral blackmail. I should tell you they said it was a daughter.They all said the word was she had a baby girl.'
Mischa had not responded. Tony looked at the second hand of his watch. It had moved more than three-quarters of the way round the face before he heard his own voice again.'I guess I have to ask this,though.Did you know she was pregnant before you left?'
'That was not a conversation I wanted to have.'
'You mean, you refused to talk about it?'
'I mean, she knew my feelings on the subject.'
'So she knew better than to bring it up?'
'What does she say?'
'She doesn't, you see. She gets hysterical, claims it didn't happen.The thing is, Mischa, I don't think I believe her.'
'Just write what you like then.'
'I want to get things right.'
Tony stopped the tape again there. 'He shrugged and downed his beer. He's of the old school. He wasn't about to tell me she was neurotic and devious and chronically smothering.You have to admire him for that. Most guys his age would've just said she was a bitch.'
He picked up the master tape and strolled around the room speaking into it. 'Did she or didn't she? It could be like, say, she's already told him, he gets the death threat, and he takes the heaven-sent opportunity to get the hell out of there. Maybe she's told Pavel, or Pavel finds out somehow.
'Or, and what I'm leaning towards is this, she doesn't get around to telling him. She's been putting it off, she knows only too well what his reaction would be. Then, after hearing from Pavel, he exits from her life in a hurry, and she's lost her chance.
'Whatever, she goes to another city, has the kid and gives it up for adoption. Or finds an orphanage. And that's when she loses it, in both senses of the word. She has her first breakdown.'
He put the dictaphone down, then picked it up again.
'He was quite cool and impassive throughout this, but with one exc
eption.When I said it was rumoured to be a baby girl I sneaked a look at his face in the firelight, and I think I saw a tiny reaction there, a little twitch of the mouth, like that ghosting on his new pictures. Maybe, and I think just maybe, he was struck, like for the first time, by the completely revolutionary idea that he might have a grown-up daughter. Momentarily struck dumb with it.'
He passed a hand over his face. 'And just maybe not entirely displeased in spite of himself? In spite of it flying in the face of everything he's always said? Secretly, that is. He was never going to let on to me. He didn't say or do anything at all for quite a stretch. Just stood there staring into the fire and poking at it, and moving the veggies around. But there was a kind of relaxing, like a softening of his features – I wasn't imagining it.
'With any other guy, and I mean any other guy, I'd never in a million years dream of broaching such a sensitive subject just before we were about to sit down for a cosy meal together. But Mischa, well, it's like she says, he's not an ordinary guy in any respects. A few minutes after that little exchange, in which he gets confirmation that he's most likely got a daughter running around somewhere, here we are, a homey little trio, sitting round the kitchen table making carefully oblique references to the cathartic little interlude in the tropics when they began to have sex again.'
He paused before adding,'It's not exactly admirable,his attitude, he's not going to win the Nobel Prize for ethics – well, neither is she, for that matter, no fucking way – but you have to admit it's pragmatic. There's nothing he can do about it now, is how he sees it. It's water under the bridge.'
Tony switched everything off and went into the bathroom to clean his teeth. He unscrewed the tube, squeezed some brilliant blue gel on to an electric toothbrush and set to work on the outside top row. Halfway along he stopped and wiped some splashes off his chin, returned to the other room and retrieved the recorder.
'What's really, really interesting will be if he decides to try and track her down. He's got more of a chance than me. But it wouldn't be easy, it mightn't work out, and the very idea could be anathema to him. I wouldn't want to predict which way he'll turn on this.Well,that makes two of them, doesn't it?'
Greer and Mischa had pulled themselves together after what Tony identified as their cathartic little interlude in the tropics. They pushed on further north, beyond Capricorn, and dug in for an extended period in languid, luminous Port Douglas, just below the sixteenth parallel.
There in the tranquil aftermath of Sydney Mischa threw himself back into productive work while Greer made a few futile attempts of her own. She wasn't unduly worried at that stage. At that stage an extended holiday was all she felt capable of. She thought of that time as the honeymoon she'd never had.
Their landlord bought Mischa's second painting, which set the ball rolling. There was a lot of disposable income floating around in that corner of Far North Queensland. Many pictures were sold on the spot, as they were painted. Private commissions came in. There was never enough surplus to send down to Melbourne.Verity never did get her follow-up exhibition.
'We were irresponsible,' Greer had admitted to Tony, aware of Mischa's glad eye on her. And full of the joys of spring, she did not say, and the bliss of being young and in love and highly sexed. Newfound freedom was a big part of that, she did decide to add. Verity, through no fault of her own, had become a symbol of apron strings and the unlamented past.
But it was a notably bad move, Greer conceded aloud, to put an already smouldering Verity so drastically offside,to let her down again with such cavalier disregard. Tony verified this.It was adding insult to injury.He said Verity had felt herself shoved offside with a capital O.
'And I'm afraid it was categorically due to your evil influence, Greer. Not only did you spirit Mischa away, you also made him sever his links with the gallery. You had nothing to do with any of it, in her eyes, Mischa. She was still besotted with you. She'd have given her right arm, she told me, to have those Queensland pictures.'
He gave Greer a teasing look. 'But she was remarkably balanced and even-handed where the works were concerned. I truly believe she wouldn't have minded one itsy little bit if the whole lot had happened to be of you.'
To begin with Greer had found it disquieting, the disconnect between their laid-back life in the sun and the sometimes confronting subjects of Mischa's paintings. In Sydney there had been a stark correspondence between what was going on and the nature of his work. She had assumed this would always be the case, and was disconcerted when their comparatively idyllic days in Far North Queensland threw up uneasy images.
At first Mischa had painted Greer, but nearly always obliquely, in backward or sidelong glimpses and partial reflections, often in veiled or washed-out light. And following on from that came the period, not an extended one but intense, of dishevelled figures with shadows, long and looming or distorted, and then, unnervingly, detached and unrelated.
Over the years Greer had come to think of each picture as having two distinct, separate provenances: its coming into being and its subsequent history. She saw the products of Mischa's creativity as mysterious, independent entities with lives of their own, just as she knew Rollo did with his own works. Rollo blamed his pictures for his episodes of painter's block, accusing them of sabotaging him. He boasted that at other times they were capable of being charmingly amenable and co-operative.
In Greer's opinion Mischa's images did not reflect his state of mind in any direct external way, although you could (and critics did) analyse them and make plausible cases for psychological expressionism. But not always, or even that often. Some subjects she was at a loss to relate to anything. Mischa's artistic preoccupations appeared, apparently from nowhere, and vanished or went into abeyance with the same quixotic spontaneity.
He himself did not change according to the mood of the work in progress,Greer informed Tony.She could see he was resoundingly unconvinced. And nor, she told him, did Mischa's own mood impinge on what he produced.
Always excepting, of course, and this she did not tell Tony, the time in Sydney. The Sydney period of Mischa's career was an exception to every rule. Not that it was ever identified as such, since it had to all intents and purposes ceased to exist.This was because there was no evidence for it. In the canon of Mischa's work, there were no extant paintings to bear witness to any Sydney period.
18
21st April 2006
Last night I dreamt of two men. I was with Mischa, it was now, in the present time, and nothing was changed. But unbeknown to him I was having a wild, tumultuous affair with a much younger man.
The mood of the dream was frenetic. High anxiety alternating with electric excitement. I was mired in terrible guilt, yet felt powerless to end this affair. I rushed to see my lover in secret, when our intense erotic encounters were punctuated by urgent talk. He was pressuring me to leave Mischa and run away with him, and part of me desperately wanted to do this. I felt pulled and torn between the two, unable to imagine leaving Mischa, and yet intoxicated with the rediscovery of passion.
Then it came to me suddenly in the dream with a shocking, revelatory force: I am in love with the two of them. And with that, just as I was half aware of emerging from the dream, I was hit by a second, almost simultaneous realisation: they are not two different men at all. They are the same man. They are Mischa now, and Mischa as he was.
Greer lay in bed alongside Mischa in the immediate aftermath of this dream, unable to move, at once drained and exhilarated by the feverish emotion of it. She closed her eyes and tried to draw back the mental curtain, to re-enter the roller-coaster journey with its searing, conflicting feelings. She tried to envisage again the face and hands of her younger lover, who was also Mischa, but they were not be retrieved.
She felt she must tell it, write it down, before it faded away or vanished entirely in the way that most dreams did. She ran in nightdress and bare feet from the bedroom to her study, unlocked the desk drawer and wrote rapidly at the end of the diary on on
e of the empty pages that followed her last entry. Quite why she felt compelled to make a record of it she did not know. Neither did she feel the need to analyse anything – the dream or her intentions. It was enough to put what she could of the story of the dream on paper while she still marvelled at it.
It sounds odd to say this, perhaps, but in the drama of this dream there was something poetic. It was like a duel, a choreography involving the mind and body, with a wholly unexpected denouement that tied up all the ends. It had been such a frantic, high-octane ride, and its final mood contained an enormous component of relief – the realisation that I did not need to leave at all.When the dream ended and I came down from it, I was not in the least depressed, but instead strangely uplifted.
Mischa slumbered on unaware of any of this, but it was already dawn and Greer found herself disinclined to return to bed. The scent of wisteria surged through the open windows and she felt energised, better than she had felt for the past few weeks, since well before the biographer's arrival. It was a novelty, this giddy sensation of wellbeing. It had become unfamiliar. She thought, why am I feeling like this? There's no reason for it. He is still here. Nothing has changed. It can't possibly last.
She threw on jeans and an old t-shirt and sweater, aware that for the first time in weeks she had not thought about dressing for Tony's benefit. It was too early to fetch the paper and mail from the village but the temperature was mild. She made coffee and drank it outside on the steps,listening to the birdsong and watching the tepid light creep over the grass.
Some instinct – not a noise – made her look across to the neighbouring cottage, Casanova,Tony's house. She was in time to see Guy emerge from the front door and run down the steps with his loose, loping stride. He saw her, inevitably, and executed a little pantomime, an exaggerated start with finger to the lips. He came over.
'G.What on earth are you doing abroad at this ungodly hour?' He dropped down beside her on the step, yawning.
The Biographer Page 26