'I could ask you the selfsame thing.'
'It's only just after five. Obscenely early. Shouldn't you be tucked up in bed sleeping the sleep of the just?'
'Indeed it is. Shouldn't you?'
'I have been. I've finished.'
'Well, so have I. Do you want some coffee?'
When they repaired to the kitchen terrace with a fresh pot she told him, on impulse, about the dream. He rated it highly.
'It's rather profound, in its way. And quite sexy. I'm impressed. And envious: I don't think I've ever had a profound dream. Or at least not a profoundly sexy one.'
'Nor had I. It could be a first.'
'What prompted it? Tony raking up your libidinous past with his probing archeological excavations?'He yawned again.
She let him think she considered.'Maybe that was it.'
'Or is it guilt? You're not having it off with the versatile Antonio, are you?' He favoured her with a droll look from under drooping eyelids.
'Not on your life. It's too crowded in there already.Who knows what you might trip over.'
After Guy had gone she wandered, on impulse again, over to Mischa's studio. She passed the big cypress close to the sitting room window, where her nesting doves were cooing. It had several little recalcitrant branches jutting out at right angles and disturbing the symmetry.This happened to some cypresses, but not all. It was caused by snow, Guy claimed. Sometimes they were self-correcting, and the branches would fold back up into the sinuous body of the tree all by themselves.
She put her shoulder to the main door. She hadn't bothered to bring the key. It had a businesslike iron padlock which Mischa had left unlocked, as he usually did unless they were going away or there had been a recent visit from the insurance company. She crossed the floor and went up the stairs to the main studio. She had a good idea by now what she was heading for.
Tony's masonite sheets were laid out on a trestle table under the soaring windows of the south wall. The studio was still dimly lit, but without switching on the lights she could see at once that he had completed his chapter headings and posted new illustrations. Most of these were paintings, but there was a significant quota of new photos attached to some sections. She wasn't interested in those. She only had eyes for the chapter Tony had already brought to her attention.'Chapter Four:The Australian Period'.
She skimmed along the row of images. Mischa at his first Melbourne exhibition; Mischa with Verity at the opening; Greer herself on the Isle of Pines; she and Charlie at the Flower Drum restaurant. Her eyes came to rest on the head shot of Josie, in the orange top and turquoise beads, with her stylishly bobbed hair. Tony had appended a new, single-line caption to this photo. It read: 'Josephine (Josie) McNicoll, née Gordon, Hong Kong, 1983'.
Greer took in the brief words. For a second or two it was almost as if she had written them herself, there was such an inevitability in the message they carried. She thought, so this was what they did. This was their solution. Why am I not surprised? My reaction is quite unambiguous. First and foremost, above anything else, it is pleasure. I think it is true to say that I feel unalloyed pleasure, for my sister and for Charlie. And yes, there is also unalloyed relief. It's what I would have wanted, what I'd hardly have dared hope for, let alone put into words.
And yet, if I'm to be honest, I think the germ of the idea was always there, in the far recesses, and not only from the moment I unleashed the plan on Josie.
Josie must surely have made a better wife for Charlie. In Greer's mind Josie was always the one he should have fallen for. He had just happened to meet the less suitable one first.
Josie was the practical sister, always immaculately turned out, whatever the occasion or time of day.The one who had a weekly appointment at the hairdresser.The social one who loved entertaining and devising grand celebrations. It was Josie who did all the organising for Greer's twenty-first birthday party, right down to matching corsages for the sisters and their mother. Later, Greer had thrown away her wilted flowers while Josie had pressed hers into an album.
A sequence of pictures arrived unbidden in Greer's mind. Engraved invitations on a mantelpiece for 'At Homes' and cocktail parties. Josie and Charlie hosting a formal dinner at a long table with lashings of silver cutlery and sparkling crystal. The two of them dolled up to the nines in a late-model convertible with the top down, en route to some smart business engagement or other, or perhaps to a ball.
Their wedding. Greer's mother, Lorna, had been circumspect in her letters, but she would not have withheld such information as this. The marriage must have been arranged soon after Lorna's death.Where had it taken place? In Hong Kong? She saw Charlie in a dinner suit and Josie in an off-the-shoulder gown with a veil and train.
Charlie's preference was always for a full-blown, traditional church affair. He agreed to the registry office to appease me. Well, he would have agreed to anything. This time around, though, the bride and groom would have been of one mind. The groom was divorced, of course. Perhaps the ceremony had been held out of doors on someone's sweeping lawns with a view of the sea.
There was another aspect to Josie's personality. From childhood Greer had always been aware of it, because she had so often been on the receiving end. Josie liked to look after people. She was a nurturer. If there was such a thing as a defining characteristic, this was hers. She was the kind of traditional young woman everyone tended to describe as slightly old-fashioned. As maternal. Which was a painful irony, because Josie had known since her teenage years that she could never bear a child.
I grew up knowing she was a deeply maternal person, Greer thought, and with the knowledge that her biology had dealt her a killer blow. I was able to make use of both halves of that information for my own ends.
Before leaving the studio she looked over Mischa's works in progress.There were two large examples of what were already being called his Displacement pictures. One showed a crowd of people massed in the foreground and disappearing into the distance. All were staring in different directions, wildly. Since early last year Mischa had been drawing more than usual on paper, in crayon, charcoal or pen and ink. Here he was employing marks, impressionistic but emphatic, to blur the boundaries between static and moving images. Lines and ghosting in pale wash around the bodies suggested movement of limbs, fluidity and flux.
He had sketched a rough, idealised cityscape around and among the figures. It appeared to be partly in ruins and partly a futuristic metropolis.Just off-centre was a blank area,almost like a gaping hole in the canvas.
In the second picture on the west wall two characters, not identifiably male or female, were looking from right to left and appearing to age before the viewer's eyes.The facial contours were in segments, Cubist-style, fragmented yet not spacially detached from each other. Behind them in the background strange shapes and shadowy figures were looming. In front of them, again near the middle of this picture, was an empty area of nothingness.
As with others in the series a seething sense of transience and loss pervaded the scene. Standing in the studio, as the sun's rays intensified by the minute and spilled through the east windows, Greer tried to pin down exactly why this was. Was it the restless interplay of line and medium that created this feeling, or an urgent, tensile quality that was intrinsic to both compositions? They seemed to be in suspension between points of essential information, rather like the stop-start narrative of a dream. The gaps in the pictures were suggestive of dreamscapes, too.
Greer looked at the shadowy shapes massed in the back-ground of the second picture. She had not seen that one before. He must have started on it yesterday.
The whole studio was bathed in rosy morning light as she descended the stairs and pulled the heavy door closed behind her. Dew was all around, glittering on the leaves and grass and sparkling off the planes of gravel on the path. She and Guy had visited the local gravel pit late last winter, after torrential rains turned the path to Mischa's studio and sections of their access lanes into rutted quagmires.
Greer walked across the parade ground on the springy grass dotted with daisies, poppies and buttercups. Her feet in their rubber-soled sneakers were sodden with dew. It was still too early for anyone else to be about – only the birds, which were in full harmonic voice. The energy that had possessed her since she awoke from the dream of the two men who were the same man was still there, but it was tempered since the visit to the studio with impulses that were less clear-cut.She glanced behind at Tony's cottage.His bedroom window was open, but the front door that Guy had eased back on the latch remained tightly closed.
She skirted the side of the chapel and took the track that clung to the ridge, heading north alongside rows of twenty-year-old olive trees, then down a little pathway to the swimming pool tucked into the side of the hill. It boasted a grotto, which showed off a bronze sculpture of an athletic youth, made early on in their tenure by Rollo at a studio in Rome.
A single magisterial olive tree presided over the pool in the lee of the hill, one of only a handful to survive the freak winter of 1985. It was four hundred years old, and known to them all as the grey eminence. Greer leant against it, running her hands over its extraordinary trunk, a work of art in itself, furrowed and twisted into fantastical shapes and protuberances.
The four full-time human residents of the Castello would describe themselves as irreligious, perhaps profoundly so, yet she suspected even Mischa if put on the spot might not deny a spiritual connection with this tree.To Greer and Rollo it had the status of a tribal elder, a fellow owner-occupier with its own legitimate claim to the land. It was a living being with the wisdom of age and a personality – quirky, dispassionate – clearly defined. She sometimes climbed it, just as she had swarmed up trees incessantly in her childhood, with Josie craning to get a glimpse at her through the foliage. But this morning she had something else in mind.
The pool was still covered with a tarpaulin.This would be removed as soon as the unpredictable spring weather settled a little more. Then the deckchairs and loungers would be carried out from the pool house (which was more accurately a shed) and placed around the green water. It was green because of the colour of the tiles Rollo had chosen to line the original excavation. He thought green was cooler and more allusive than the usual blue. He told Greer that he realised much later he'd had a subliminal vision of Marvell's 'green thought in a green shade' when he set about creating a garden pool.
Guy had planted a clump of umbrella pines after the concrete was poured and the tiles laid.The trees had grown up now at the far end of the pool and the water reflected their slender outlines and elliptical crowns. It was a generously sized pool, long enough to swim laps.To Greer and to many visitors, especially in the height of summer, the place had the indolent aura of a sacred site.
She left it and followed the path as it wound upwards again, skirting the olive orchards and then joining a narrow road that descended into a hollow. She arrived at a high-walled enclosure guarded by a pair of lofty, rusted iron gates. This was the cemetery, and Greer never came here without thinking of The Secret Garden, a book she and Josie had read aloud incessantly on one country holiday.
She pushed open the gates, which were never locked. Marking each corner of the cemetery and presiding over it were four majestic and very old cypresses. When they first arrived at the Castello Mischa had painted them in a series of pictures known as 'The Guardians'.
With its high stone walls the cemetery was a suntrap. Even now, on a mid-April morning, the sun was starting to heat the headstones scattered over the ground. Some of the graves were plain stones, modest and nameless. Others were iron crosses. Many had inscriptions that Greer could recite with her eyes closed. 'Here lies the dear soul of Amadio Nardi, la famiglia inconsolabile'. Emilia Brogi was described as 'honest and hardworking'. Her family was also inconsolable. Assunta, 1922, was 'an exemplary mother and spouse'. Another woman was described as 'a generous Italian mother loved by her children and friends'.
Some of the letters were flattened, the inscriptions obliterated by time and weather. Marianna had died young, her family desperately hoped to meet again their darling daughter. Ernesto Belloni was an affectionate husband and adoring father who had died unexpectedly – moro improvisamente.
One Franco Cebrun had a big, rough-hewn chunk of granite for his headstone. Greer always pictured him as a hearty fellow on the obtuse side, rather like Agnieszka's spouse,Angelo.All the same,Franco had a long inscription: 'My love, amore per te, ti amo, tua per sempre. Death will neither separate us nor diminish my great love for you'. Signed only P. Next to it on a small simple stone, 'To my father with love, Lucrezia'.
A husband and wife had their sepia photograph attached to their tombstone. On the large oblong tomb at one corner a family mourned the irreparable loss of their husband and father. His photo was still mounted there, a grave, pudgy-faced man, dui sio ricordo prosero.
Greer sat down on a flat, warm stone empty of writing. She peeled off her sweater. Already the air hummed with bees, a hint of the somnolent summer to come. If she were to die suddenly, what would they write on her headstone?
When she had a spare hour or so and the weather was warm she sometimes brought a book down to the cemetery. She found it a tranquil spot for reading, and its simple record of loss and devotion touching.There was no room for equivocation here, just emotion expressed in a few words. Or feelings revealed by omission, or not at all. These people came from families who had spent their days in close proximity. Living cheek by jowl in a hamlet far smaller in area than a village, they must have known one another intimately.
Too well, perhaps? Was there room for secrets? Personal ones, certainly.The stone walls were thick and soundproof, and forgiving. She had cause to be grateful for that. But the consequences of certain bigger secrets would soon have been visible to all and impossible to hide. Feuds, sickness, broken bones. Love, reciprocated or unrequited. A fact of life, such as a death. Or a conception.
In this confined place milestones such as these could not be concealed successfully for long. Most of those who now lay beneath these stones had passed their whole lives here. Sloughing off a former life and leaving the family behind was not an option for them, in the main.They were obliged to keep their emotional baggage with them because there was nowhere else to leave it, and only when they died was it allowed to slip away.
These former residents had more blood relatives living close by, but probably no more close friends than their successors in this hamlet.There would have been far fewer names listed in their address books, if they had such things. But most of the people whose names they did know, and not necessarily friends or relatives, they must have known through and through.
In fact, Greer thought, they probably knew more people intimately, in the sense of seeing them constantly and following their life stories, than any of us do now. These days, instead, people pore over the synthetic lives of celebrities they will never meet.
She looked from one grave to another. The little inscriptions bravely defied the years and tried to confer a measure of immortality.The death of one member of this tiny community must have affected them all. For better or worse, for richer or poorer, it would have had some impact on everyone.
How many important people had she lost in her life? How many were there of whom she could truthfully say, I loved you, and I am inconsolable for your loss? It was not a difficult question; the answer came instantly. Her parents, an aunt, and the one grandmother she had known well. Four people only.
And in the future, for whom might she grieve? Whose were the names, announced in the night after a knock on the door, or i
n a quiet phone call from a hospital? Whose were the names with the power to take her breath away? This was not hard to answer either. Two names with that power came up immediately. Mischa and Rollo. Guy too, most probably.
And a fourth name stepped forward from the past to claim her sure and certain place on the list. Although she had not seen or spoken to her sister for more than twenty-five years, Greer had no doubt that Josie's name would have that power.
But there was another name. There was someone else, someone to whom she was intimately related, yet whose given name she did not even know. Someone to whom she was more closely related than anyone in the world, more closely even than to Josie.
Sitting on the stone that had become hard and cold, Greer knew she had scaled the perimeter fence. She had left the safe house far behind and was out there, exposed and open, in the area of dark formless shapes and shadows without identities. She had set foot in the forbidden territory of her mind.
She was aware of a single piercing thought. It was unguarded and she knew at once, and with absolute clarity, that it contained the nucleus of her fears.
All the surrounding horrors were real enough – they were profound problems and she had instigated them – but they were essentially red herrings.They might appear to be intractable, but like all human outcomes they were not set in stone.Things were not immutable – that was their nature. There were influences that might be brought to bear. One of these, she thought, surely the greatest of these, whatever its testimony, was the truth of the matter.
Greer saw now that her dread had been of something else altogether. Something so specific and shocking that to have been unaware of it, to have thrust it away for so long, seemed nearly beyond comprehension. She told herself: I will now confront this fear. Because there is now no alternative, I know that. I must do it because there is nothing else to do.
No, those are not the reasons. Because I am, at long last, ready. Because I cannot resist it any more. Because it is irresistible.And because I want to do it more than anything. These, and only these, are the reasons.
The Biographer Page 27