The Biographer (19 page)

Tony answered in the same throwaway fashion.'It's just background, but useful,
I guess, because you and he were an item when you ran into Mischa. On that
red-letter day.' He produced an engaging smile. 'Charlie has a minor supporting
role, a bit-part. He's only an adjunct to the main drama.'

'He's a two-bit actor, do you mean? Or a rung up from that?'

A grin.'At least one rung,but probably not three.'

'What can I tell you?' Is there anything you don't know? Or would you rather hear me incriminate myself in my own words?

'Let's trawl back in time to your first meeting, for starters.When and where was that?'

'We met in London. At a party, the usual thing. He'd been working over there for a few years, at McKinsey's. I was twenty-five, I'd been based in London for three years too, sharing flats, saving money from endless temp jobs and then racing off to do Europe on the cheap.'

'Young and fancy-free. Sounds like fun.'

'It was on the whole, yes.'

'But tough too? A bit of a roller-coaster ride?'

'There were highs and lows, inevitably. But it was a good experience, to be independent and away from home on the other side of the world.We couldn't afford to phone home in those days – long-distance was far too expensive.'

'And no texting or emails either. Things were a whole lot different then, huh? It must have been character-building, overall.'The blue eyes betrayed only polite interest.

'Oh, it was exceptionally character-building.'

It was really quite an art, how inscrutable he contrived to be. And the picture of languid contentment. He leant back, tilting his hat against the sun.

'Then, after three years of this, you met Charlie McNicoll. Can you give me a verbal portrait of Charlie?'

This was the point at which she could say, why ask that? When I'm almost certain you have already met him yourself and formed your own opinion.

She considered saying this. She hadn't heard Charlie's name spoken out loud by anyone for years. Nor had she said it very often to herself in the privacy of her own mind. Nonetheless, her image of him was as clear, as pristine, as it had ever been.

'He stood out. He was rather classical-looking – tall and dark.' She hesitated. 'Charlie was kempt, as opposed to Mischa, who is definitely unkempt.'

Tony nodded. 'Uh-huh. That's a neat summation. Do you have any photos I could take a look at? From the time you knew him?'

'I may have kept one.' She felt a surge of antagonism. 'But I'm sure you don't need me to tell you what he looks like.' She thought, that's put paid to the matey little thing you thought we had going.

'We're talking thirty years ago, Greer. I'm interested in how he appeared to you, back then. Give me a thumbnail sketch.' His voice was conciliatory but surprisingly firm.

She replied with peremptory speed, ticking the items off her fingers.

'He was sporty, a rower and fast bowler. He came from an old Western District family – that's a rich farming area in the state of Victoria. He was estranged from his family. He'd been to Harvard Business School, he was thirty-one, six years older than me. He was quite worldly, knew his way round menus and wine, had friends with country houses and villas in Provence. Is that enough for you?'

Tony was unfazed.'He didn't get on with his family?'

'He'd refused to take over the business, the family farm. It caused a rift.'

'What did you think of his parents?'

'I never met them.' She had suspicions about this line of questioning.

'He was earning good money in London, I guess?'

'Yes, he was already very successful.'

'An impressive kind of guy. Not surprising you fell for each other.'

Encrypted here, she could tell, was a glib romantic cameo Tony had drawn up for himself.After leading a fairly rackety existence for three years, the young and susceptible Greer Gordon encounters the well-off, sophisticated Charles McNicoll, a distinct cut above the shabby crew she's been associating with, and eligible to boot. She snaps him up, tout de suite.

She felt an urgent need to correct this Mills & Boon scenario, not only for her own sake but for Charlie's dignity. At least let him be the initial instigator of his fate, rather than a pawn to be duped twice over.She said more gently,'It was not quite like that, actually.'

There was a distinct beat before Tony turned his head and looked at her.'It wasn't? How was it,then?'

At least he had the grace to acknowledge the unspoken sequence of images in his mental viewfinder. She turned it over in her mind. It was Charles who had fallen head over heels for her, not the other way round, who had pursued her single-mindedly for the next four years, who had brought up the m word very early on.And who,eventually,had worn her down.Well, that was one way of putting it.

'Charlie was – still is, I expect – an exceptional person,' she said. 'That scarce commodity: a genuinely
good
man, if you know what I mean.'

She made rare eye contact with Tony as she delivered this light but potentially insulting remark. Would he have any idea what a genuinely good man was like? He was nodding. The spruce, photogenic face that Guy found so cute wore an earnest expression.

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 convincing 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.'