The Biographer (13 page)

'Nothing.'

'How do you mean, nothing?'

'I mean they say nothing.'

'You mean, nothing verbally?'

'That's right.They make a poem or a song.They have a tune, but without words and music. All things do it, Tony, not just nature. Pylons are the same.'

'Electricity pylons? Are you saying that you pick up on things, atmospheres, feelings, which kind of emanate from them?'

'You are saying that.'

Tony stopped the tape.'He'd been using both hands to make big expressive circles, sort of humorously pushing the air around his face. Then he just laughed at me again and shrugged.And then – here's a funny thing – he went over to a high shelf on the wall and reached up for a little glass jar. He took it down and rubbed it, kind of tenderly and abstractedly like it was a magic genie lamp, against his pants. Then he put it away again and produced a bar of chocolate from behind it, threw me a few squares, and went back to the canvas.

'Something told me not to make any comment, but I took a close look at the jar later, when he had his back turned. It was just an old jam jar with some white sand in it and what looked like old faded flower petals.

'I'm picking up on a short attention span here. He'll toy with me, kid along indulgently, and then he loses interest – bang – just like that. He never loses the thread of what he's working at though, there's a powerful force-field of concentration there.You can almost feel it – but then that's his reality, I suspect. I get the impression that life as others live it is perilously close to an irritation, almost an irrelevance, distracting him from his real thing, which is work.'

He made a pencilled note: was it always the case? And how does she cope with that?

'Why does he call you Mrs Smith?'Tony was on his knees between the boxes and the fire, which was throwing out sparks. He'd peeled off his sweater. The knobs of his spine stood out against his straw-coloured shirt. Greer had a mental image of a row of pith helmets on a sandbank.

'That's just a joke. Because of Svoboda being such a common Czech name, like Smith or Brown.'

'But you never bothered to get formally married, right?'

'No.We never bothered.'

'Was that because you didn't want the formality?'

'It was because we didn't need it.'

'You did take his name though?'

From her armchair behind him she thought, he's not looking at me at all. He's
trying not to appear to be interrogating me, while he pretends to study the
material. Probably thinks I'll be more at ease that way. Less on my guard.

'I never took his name, not legally. It just somehow happened that people assumed
I was called Gigi Svoboda. After a while it seemed hardly worth the trouble
of correcting them.'

He said,'It was more convenient, huh?'

She chose not to answer that.

He was persisting with this.'People didn't call you by that name in Melbourne. It's like they lost track of you altogether after you went away.' She caught a breath of hesitation, before the almost absent-minded punchline:'They didn't even know you
were
Gigi, half the time.'

And I'm sure you took pleasure in wising them up. I bet you didn't have to tell Verity though. She would have known.

'Look at this, will you?' He sounded excited, sifting through the earliest papers from the bottom of the first box. He held out two yellowed sheets stapled together. 'The list of paintings and drawings from the first show at the Corbett Gallery.And the reviews.Take a look at those prices.Three hundred dollars. Five hundred dollars.The most expensive is nine-fifty. Oh boy, all you art collectors, eat your hearts out. Typed on one of those early electronic machines and roneoed off, by the look of it.'

'Yes.I typed it.'And Verity invested in a word processor soon afterwards and enrolled me in a three-day training course on my return from holidays, which I never went to.

'Typed by you. Well, there you go. And the old lady, Verity Corbett, told me she had the temerity to buy one of those alarming new computers the week after that sell-out show. She said she felt like she was a hominid standing upright for the first time. Nothing wrong with that mind or memory. I'd like to be that sharp at eighty.'

'Rollo's that sharp at eighty.'

Instead of taking this up, he said,'So how come you got to be Gigi?'

'Oh, that was Mischa, of course. He has nicknames for everyone.'

'Greer Gordon.Was it your initials? G.G.?'

He was sharp, too, at thirty.

'And what do you prefer to be called, Gigi or Greer?'

'I don't really care. Everyone calls me Gigi here.'

'But they're such different names. Opposites. Greer is like, elegant and poised, a tad enigmatic maybe, and Gigi's kinda ditzy, isn't it?'

'Well, maybe I'm a ditzy kinda dame.'

He looked up at her then, with an easy grin. 'Is that right?'

When she proffered only a tight smile in response, he said, 'I think I'd be more comfortable with Greer. That's if it's all the same to you, of course.'

'Whatever makes you more comfortable is fine with me.'

'Verity said you were the very model of a resourceful, insightful personal assistant. And super-bright. But her warm and fuzzy feelings for you flew out the window when you shot through, I have to say. She was mad at you, she told me, livid. And ropeable. I never heard that word before. I like it.'

I should have told her in advance. Even at the time I knew perfectly well that I should have confided in her, but I couldn't bring myself. It was a very unwise thing to do, to make an enemy of someone like Verity. Both unwise and unnecessary.

'She said Mischa rang her from a public callbox the morning after you left, but you didn't give her any notice. You just didn't show up.' There was an implied question here, an upward inflection.

'Yes, that's right. I didn't.'

Was he going to ask why?

'You were anxious to get out of there, I guess.' It was a plain statement of understanding, giving no indication of what shoals might lie beneath. She nodded.

He added,'She blames you more than him,I'm afraid.'

'He could have lit bonfires in the gallery and trashed it like a rock star and she wouldn't have blamed him. She was fifty-five or so, but I think he swept her off her feet, in a way.'

Again she saw Mischa whirling Verity in her severe navy suit around the floor of the gallery to his exuberantly improvised 'Blue Danube' waltz, until she was out of breath and giggling like a schoolgirl.

'How would you describe his relationship with her?'

'He flirted shamelessly.And the amazing thing was she responded. He brought out something unexpected in her, something rather awkward and – arch.Well, it was amazing to me at the time. It was quite sweet, when I think about it now.'

'Sweet?'

'Well, touching. I suppose I'd always thought of her as dessicated and virginal. Not lesbian but definitely sexless.'

Somewhere in the conversation he had switched on his tape. Should she be going on like this? Would he quote her, for Verity to read? Perhaps it was a sound tactic to divert him with a few indiscretions that were comparatively immaterial.

Tony rocked back on his heels.'People have said that at the same time she treated him like a favourite son.'

'She certainly indulged him.'

'How did she do that?'

'She was a bit of an autocrat, Verity. Headmistressy towards all her other artists. Mischa got away with things they were never allowed to do, like hanging his pictures wherever he chose,eating and smoking in the gallery.Putting his arm round her – no one else would have dared do that. She was always strictly untouchable.'

'Were you at all jealous of their relationship?'

'Jealous?' He had swivelled round to look at her. She stared at him.'Not in the least.I was amused,if anything.'

'It never occurred to you to wonder if there'd been anything between them?'

She felt her face going hot with annoyance. 'That's absurd.You've met Verity.'

'OK, but you know how it is when you meet somebody new and they're eighty years old? It's kind of hard to envision how they might have been.'

'Well,I knew Verity how she was.'

'And how was that?'

'She was, very categorically, chaste.'

He grinned.

She was incredulous.'Did someone really cast aspersions about Verity and Mischa?'

'You know what folks are like with those wretched aspersions.They'll cast them
about anyone, given half a chance.'

Or given half an invitation.

'People also say that she treated you like a favoured daughter.'

Who were all these people? 'I think she was fond of me, yes.'

'She feels you stole something from her, the greatest artistic discovery of her career. Perhaps the only one. She still thinks Mischa would have stayed in Melbourne if you hadn't run away with him.'

'And did you interrogate Verity on the subject of her possible dalliance with
Mischa?'The idea was so preposterous that she found herself on the verge of
laughing.

'I kinda danced around it. It's a tough call to raise that type of subject with a touchy old lady her age, as I expect you can appreciate.'

'Oh, I can see it might well be delicate for you. Just as well it's not so touchy to raise with me, eh?'

'You're a lot younger than she is, Greer.' He threw her an almost skittish glance. She thought, and you're younger than me by not much more than Mischa was younger than Verity,Tony.

'What about Mischa? Did you raise this intriguing subject with him?'

'Well, yeah, I had a shot at it, and he just laughed at me.'

'There you are then.'

'I just thought, you know, it might have been one of the reasons why you left Melbourne.To get him away from her.'

The casual, quick-fire audacity of this took her breath away. He had his head down, his hands carefully sifting through folded papers, reviews and invitations, and creased newspaper photographs.

Did he seriously expect her to address the line of inquiry that followed on from the dismissal of that leading question?

In the pause that followed, various responses went through her mind. It had been a light, almost throwaway remark. There was nothing to differentiate it in tone from what had gone before. Did he even know what he was saying?

In the end she merely dryly stated,'That never entered my mind,' leaving the coda 'as I'm sure you well know' unspoken, yet quite as surely understood by both.

A few minutes later, Guy looked in on his return from lunching with more wine buyers.

'I've had far too much to drink, G., you were well advised not to come,' he declaimed as he strode through the kitchen.'Have you got the dreaded biographer here?'

At the sight of Guy,Tony sprang to his feet. Greer introduced them.They shook
hands.

'Rollo's told me all about you. He ordered me to summon you to our place for
dinner tomorrow. He specifically said not to invite
you
,' he looked at Greer,'so we can gossip about you and Mischa with maximum impunity.
Aggie's doing her lamb with artichokes, it's very good. Has he run into Aggie
yet?' He turned to Tony. 'You'd know if you had.'

'Would that be Agnieszka, the diminutive Polish dynamo? Absolutely, we had a
memorable encounter yesterday and she escorted me over here.Thanks. I'd love
to join you and the lamb.'

He dropped on to the floor and sat cross-legged, his back against the sofa. Again, Greer noticed the easy way he fell into conversation with a new acquaintance. She also observed, with a mental nod to Rollo's acumen, that his manner had become just a little heightened.

'You'd better
dress
, I'm afraid,' Guy said, selecting Mischa's rocking chair to sit in and positioning it directly opposite Tony. 'His Lordship will insist on parading you before some toffy friends. I don't mean tie, just no frayed denim. He's got a queenie thing about jeans, probably because his bum's too big to wear them himself.'

He rocked backwards.'Now,I'm not going to disrupt your session, I'm going straight home for a little siesta any minute now. By the way, G., I saw my two hoopoes on the lawn again this morning, I really think they may be here to stay.'

ToTony,again,'Are you up to speed on hoopoes?'

'Not to speed.They're birds,aren't they?'

'Adorable birds. Handsome, with an
erectile
crest of pink feathers and black and white splashes, is how the book describes them.There's going to be a plague of cuckoos this year, I've never heard as many this early.We're quite good at wildlife here, Tony. Buzzards, porcupines, wild boar, Giulia . . .'

'Ah, I had an encounter with Giulia too. A brief encounter – Agnieszka was somewhat over-protective of my virtue. But she offered to show me around the winery tomorrow.'

Guy's eye met Greer's.

'You'd better watch your back with her, or perhaps more to the point your front. She eats men, our Giulia.'

Greer demurred.'She's a perfectly normal twenty-four-year-old.'

'She's lethal, but Gigi's feminine solidarity won't allow her to admit it. Just don't let her lure you behind the wine barrels,Tony.Especially the thirty hectolitre brutes.'

'If it comes to that, there's a bunch of barrels lying on the ground outside my house.Would they be Giulia's rejects?'

'Those are our
botti
.' Guy grinned at Greer. 'Svelte Slovenian oak casks bound for the knackery, waiting to be picked up.They've reached the end of their working lives. Their tannins are exhausted and they're being put out to grass.'

He yawned and stretched with the slow, sensuous deliberation that informed all
his movements. 'This is what we find so satisfyingly allegorical and anthropomorphic
about wine. It follows the same life cycle we're all prisoners of, only it's
bottled. Callowness of youth, through to prime of life and eventual senility.'

Greer added, 'Of course, one should always exercise responsible altruism and drink the bottle before senility kicks in.'

'Which in wine circles is known as compassionate euthanasia.'

The crackling fire underpinned their joviality. The soughing of the wind in the cypresses and the soft cooing of doves, a change of pace, rose above it. Guy cocked an ear.