The Biographer

by Virginia Duigan

  An objective reader was, of course, a detached person in full possession of the facts. Until this time only one person came close to fitting this description: the writer herself. But she was personally involved.And now there was a detective abroad, nosing and prying. Who might be hell-bent on putting back in what had been left out.

  Unlike the hot-headed young diarist, the biographer had a balanced narrative to construct. He was unlikely to be wilfully or self-servingly selective. His bias should be neutral and dispassionate, which made it diametrically opposed to hers. Was there any reason why Antony Corbino should view Mischa and herself benignly? Any reason why he would give them, and more particularly her, the benefit of the doubt?

  Greer thought: I'm the only one who is thinking like this. Mischa is obviously and inexplicably not. He seems oblivious. He seems almost wilfully blind. And yet there must be, and there are, because I know about them, assumptions that were made and people he hurt. Certain things in his past that he can't help but regret. Or rather, she amended, things that he might well feel guilty about, if he ever stopped to think about them. Once something was done it was past, gone, out of his head. If it could not be changed he wasted no time regretting it. She envied that.

  A voice in her head added: but nothing he has done, or left undone, is of this order. That's what an objective biographer would surely think, were he to uncover it. It may be Mischa's biography, as Rollo says, but it is my problem.

  At last she'd wandered into Mischa's studio and said something. 'He's going to be observing us all the time. And judging. I can't bear the thought of it.'

  Mischa was playing a cassette of Charles Trenet, one of a dusty collection that had rattled round in the glove box of the car for ages, before they acquired a new car and a CD stacker. He must have salvaged it and brought it into the studio.

  He was intent on mixing three shades of blue with a palette knife. 'What are you talking about?' He didn't look up.

  'You know.The biographer.Antony.'

  'So? Aggie sees us all the time.Roly,Guy.The dogs see us.Who cares about Mr Antony bloody Corbino? We don't know him and he doesn't know us.'

  'But that's the whole point. He'll be spying on us, Mischa.'

  'Rubbish. What is there to spy on? Have you been living a secret life from me all these years, Mrs Smith?'

  Well, in a sense I have, she thought. Doesn't everyone?

  We can't see into each other's heads.Why was it so hard,so impossible to say, of course I don't mean the present. I mean spying on the past. Not yours – ours, Mischa. And mine. Why can't you understand that?

  She sat in an armchair and listened to Trenet singing 'La Mer'. She had always found it an emotional song.

  'This tape's terrible, Mischa, I don't know how you can bear to listen to it.The words are so distorted.'

  He grunted,'I don't need the words. It's the atmosphere I want.'

  She understood what he was saying. She watched him as, slowly and with intense concentration, he drew his brush across the canvas in a long arching line, like a violinist drawing his bow.

  She tried to shut out the scratchy words and concentrate instead on the nostalgic line of the music, but it seemed to her suffused with an almost unbearable melancholy. Mischa's brush reached the end of the line and he swept it skywards, flinging out his arms in a triumphant arc. He held the pose, his eyes on her, willing her, but she would not smile.

  5

  The path from Mischa's studio skirted the laundry at the back of the house. The laundry door stood open, and Greer was pounced on. Several oily stains on the best white tablecloth had been removed successfully, and Agnieszka brimmed with a glee she wished to impart.

  There was no view from the laundry's single small, high window. Helping to fold the newly pristine cloth, Greer missed her chance to spot a compact blue Fiat as it traversed the valley in her direction. It was a rental car driven with unusual circumspection by a young man who now and then took his eyes off the road and checked the map on the empty seat next to him. This was no ordinary map, but a coloured photocopy of a print, decorated in antic style with sketches of gross peasants climbing olive trees, toiling in a vineyard and tilting at wild boar.

  The original had been made over thirty years earlier by Rollo, soon after he and Guy completed their bold purchase of the hilltop hamlet with its collection of abandoned buildings. Copies of the print were regularly faxed to first-time visitors, and later very often framed to be hung as mementoes in studies and sitting rooms around the world. Rollo and Guy liked to tell their guests they lived in such a backwater that the instructions for locating them had not altered a jot in three decades.

  The driver passed an acute-angled turn to the right, on a bend in the road and concealed by two massive cypress trees, immediately realised his mistake and executed a smart U-turn. He repositioned the map on the steering wheel with one hand and headed inwards along a bumpy road that wound through an unruly scrub of turkey oak and strawberry trees, hawthorn bushes and ilex, the glossy evergreen oak.

  Ignoring two rutted laneways off to the right and a narrow intersection, he proceeded steeply upwards until, at precisely 2.3 kilometres from the turn-off, a second pair of sinuous cypresses flanked a well-used gravel track to the left. He was in among the vineyards now, the vines still bare and skeletal, marked by the proprietorial symbol he recognised: the leccio, acorn, fruit of the ilex tree. Another kilometre further and, just as the map depicted, a white gate and the sign: Castello di Monte Leccio.

  The driver unlatched the gate and drove in, pausing again to shut it behind him.The track meandered across the slope of the hill through more vineyards, these ones slightly more advanced and coming into bud, and then an extensive olive grove. There were signs of activity, men with trucks and a bonfire.A short distance ahead,at the crest of the rise, he saw clearly the first of the group of buildings that comprised the hamlet.

  He drove through a second gate, propped wide open, and followed the track around to a large gravelled area bordered with showy rows of purple iris.A two-storey stone house faced him, with a low wing extending out to the right.An iron roof was attached to this wall,with three cars parked in its shade.A fourth car and another truck stood in the open. He pulled up next to the truck, switched off the engine and opened the driver's door. But instead of getting out he removed a small dictaphone from the back pocket of his jeans and at once began speaking into it.

  'April fourteen. First impressions. I reach the Castello at 5.15 pm. It's a two-hour drive from Pisa, quite hidden away until you get there, invisible from the road except for occasional glimpses of the watchtower from about 5 miles back. (NB Check with Mischa: the cypresses guarding the entrance gate are the ones in the Guardians picture in Tate Modern?) I can see the three handsome stone houses and an artistically ruined tower – which must be Mischa's studio – all well separated from each other and grouped around a wide central courtyard. A parking lot at one side and a number of outbuildings, well maintained, including a barn-like structure attached to the right-hand house, which could be the winery.'

  He climbed out of the car and continued to speak while walking forwards.

  'On my left is a bigger house facing the other two.This would be Rollo Sonabend's. It's square with fine, almost Georgian proportions, tall windows below, shorter ones above, all with dark green shutters, walls artistically clad in a spidery climber – Virginia creeper? – still bare but a few buds. A vine-covered terrace extends the full length of the house and a good 20 feet beyond.There's a long rustic table under the terrace, a bunch of chairs, a small lawn and a luxuriant garden at the side, with pergolas on all sides.'

  He came closer.

  'It's a longer house than I thought. It has a side building stepped down, joining it to the vestry maybe, and a small attached church which would be Sonabend's studio – yeah, next to a neat little war memorial. The whole set-up is pretty damn gorgeous. House opposite must be Svoboda's, with masses of blue wisteria coming out on the wall facing me,
and scarlet geraniums and other plants in pots on the side steps and window boxes.The sun on the mottled stone walls and terracotta roofs, the crumbling tower against the blue sky, a sense of ancient stillness and isolation – your classic artists' retreat. I wouldn't mind living here, it's almost too perfect to be true.Where are they all?'

  At that moment his eye was caught by a flurry from his left. A small, extremely thin woman in jeans and a pink t-shirt had emerged from the big house and was galloping towards him, shouting and energetically flapping her hands. Behind her, two black pugs waddled a few steps, barked and then sat down.

  He replaced the dictaphone in his pocket. Had she not, in addition to the shouting and waving, been distinctly smiling, he might have stepped back in alarm. She closed in, and he began to decipher a series of disconnected phrases. 'Are here . . . today, no next week – computer it lost – accident – perfect!'

  She almost skidded to a halt in front of him, sentences rushing on unabated. 'You like it see the rooms, and you choose which one you like?'

  He began lamely to introduce himself, but she interrupted. 'Yes, yes, I know, I know who, Antony the writer from America, but not from America this time, from London, come to do the job on Mr Mischa.That is good! My name is Agnieszka.You get it luggage and I take you to your house over there where you stay, and then I tell Gigi. You know Gigi?'

  'No,I just got here.We didn't meet yet.'He hoisted his canvas holdall and a hard-topped suitcase from the boot and dumped them on the gravel.

  'You no meet? Oh. But Mr Mischa you know.' She reached for the computer case, but he slung it over his shoulder.

  'Thanks,I'll take it.No,not even Mr Mischa.Although we have talked.'

  'Oh,you talk.But you like it know everything about him, very soon, because you write nice big book all about him and everybody read!'

  They both laughed. She chatted on, observing him with lively curiosity as they walked the short distance to the guest house.The building alongside the car park butted up against it. She followed his gaze.

  'In old day before that was dirty old shed with machines, now new winery inside. Beautiful, very modern with all steel.Very clean.Tidy, you know, and very nice?' She made emphatic horizontal gestures with her outstretched hands. 'No messy with bits and books in piles, like in all these people houses. Big, very big barrels, you don't believe me, filled up with wine that Gigi make with Mr Guy, but waiting, not ready for drink yet. If you like it see, you go through office, underneath your house. Gigi can show it.'

  He saw that the ground floor of the house was an office, complete with shelving, files, computer table and a classical beauty with dark waving hair, all clearly visible through the wide-open French doors. The young woman was fetching her coat and bag, saw them and emerged.Agnieszka sketched an openly reluctant and pointedly one-sided introduction.

  'Mr Antony just arrive from London.'The dark-haired girl flashed an interested smile. 'I quickly show him house, then he must go straightaway to Mr Mischa.'

  The girl put out her hand.'Hello,I'm Giulia.'

  'Hi, Giulia.You work in the winery here?'

  Agnieszka interrupted,'She do Gigi job while Gigi tell you everything you want to know about Mr Mischa.'

  The girl added,'Everything you always wanted to know but were afraid to ask.'

  'Hey, how come your English is so good?'

  'Oh, I studied in the UK, at Bristol.'

  Agnieszka, transparently irritated, had already bounded up the steps to the first floor. She called down in a loud, reproving voice,'Say goodbye, Giulia, Mr Antony must wash and unpack clothes and meet his people before it dark, he no like it waste time now.'

  He winked, and was treated to a merry look.'I think she wants to protect you. Or keep you for herself.'

  'Well, how very flattering. If you're around this week, maybe I could take a look at the winery?'

  She was locking the office doors with two keys from a big bunch.'Sure, I'm here every day because of you. Come in, you know where to find me. Ciao.'

  The heavy door to the apartment upstairs had a cumbersome latch but appeared to be unlocked. Agnieszka threw it open and ushered him in. She tugged the door shut behind them and shook her head.

  'That Giulia, she very naughty girl, she have two good boys in love with her.' She spoke in a low, confidential tone, although they were demonstrably out of anyone's hearing. 'Each boy think they get married, but she holding them on string. She not marry either of them, I think so, and Gigi think too.'

  'What does Mr Mischa think?'

  'He?' She gave a dismissive trill of amusement. 'He no think anything! He very famous man. He no very interest in people, interest only in painting.'

  'And in Gigi?'

  She nodded impatiently. 'He need her very much and he love her, oh yes of course, but he no understand proper talking, or communicate. He no nice young modern man like you.'

  Before he could ask what she meant by nice modern man, she was off on another tack, beckoning him through the sitting room.

  'You have all these bags, for the clothes?'

  'Just one for the clothes. The hard one's got all my research material.'

  She gave him a satisfied nod.'You are very good travelling, only one bag for the clothes, but you stay long time. Easy for the man. He take one pair shoes, do for everything. The woman need different shoes for each thing – jacket, evening, skirt, trouser. Swimming. Jeans. It not so easy travelling for the woman, you don't believe me.'

  'Oh, I believe you all right. All those shoes. What a nightmare.'

  They laughed again. 'You are lucky boy, wine men all gone and you have nice big house for yourself.This is good big sitting room, fireplace here with wood, very comfortable for listen to music, or read magazine. Bedrooms up there.'

  She collected a jug of tulips the colour of fresh cream from the mantelpiece of the living room and moved a yellow pottery vase of irises into the centre.'You start writing your book in one room and sleeping in the other, and if you have friend come there is still one more left over. I show you.' She darted ahead of him up three stairs.

  Antony listened to a running commentary on the pluses and minuses of the three bedrooms. Realising that a prompt but considered response was expected, he selected the one whose two wide-open windows overlooked the valley.

  'I'll take the middle-sized room with a view,' he said.

  Agnieszka deposited the shiny green jug of tulips on a chest of drawers. She looked pleased.

  'This one I like, good big bed, very nice, very good choice.Very warm today, you like it turn off heating?' He was about to answer, but there was no pause. 'I think better wait, it still cold in night and maybe rain again tomorrow. Now, you want it little time for unpack and shower before you like it meet Gigi?' She patted his luggage. 'You put on nice clean shirt after journey, no problem, and I wash tomorrow. Only five minutes for unpack – not many shoes.'

  When he came down twenty minutes later he saw a group of men in shirtsleeves emerging from the winery, stretching and moving slowly in the slanting, late afternoon light. Agnieszka was scurrying across the courtyard towards him, carrying a stack of folded white towels.

  'You have shave. Look better!' She eyed his sweatshirt in khaki cotton and olive green chinos, and gave him an approving pat on the arm. 'Very nice trouser – no creased from packing.'

  'Ah, well, you see, I did a secret touch-up.'

  'You do iron yourself?'

  He grinned. 'Oh, yeah. I'm a nice modern man, remember? I do the iron real good.'

  Tony lay on his bed, arms folded behind his head. He was stripped to the waist, the dictaphone balanced on his pectorals.

  'Eleven pm. Day One: the names made flesh. Greer slash Gigi first. I am escorted into her presence by Agnieszka, one deeply bizarre and hyper Polish housekeeper. Early to mid forties, does for all of them, which is promising. Over-familiar and decidedly chatty – also promising. Complained about the number of shoes women have to pack – Polish sense of humour? Dished some
dirt on Giulia, the Botticelli siren who works in the office on the ground floor of my house, who gave me the eye. Agnieszka seemed to approve of me too. Says Giulia is two-timing a pair of beaux. File them both under: to be cultivated.

  'Greer slash Gigi.Not at all what I expected.First thought was: she reminds me a bit of Virginia Woolf. A dishevelled version thereof.That elongated, horsey face and narrow, high-bridged nose. Not unattractive for her age, horsey as in thoroughbred,not cart.Good bones.Blue-grey eyes.Would've been a looker. But unexpectedly refined really. Hard to reconcile with things. But that's mostly the case when you come face to face with people for the first time in their middle age. They generally don't give their past away. It's not written on the face, contrary to received wisdom.

  'And she doesn't give much away at all. Greeted me politely but not warmly.Wasn't keen to be alone with me. She watched me a lot during dinner, when she thought I wasn't looking. Seemed to be studying my face.That follows – she used to do portraits. Wary, is how she was. Guarded. When she did speak to me she avoided making eye contact. Well, is that surprising or not?

  'Mischa's her polar opposite. Like he's always described, a big,grizzly bear of a guy,messy,no dress sense,pronounced Czech accent, excitable, up-front emotional. He presents as totally straightforward and spontaneous, unlike her. I'd say she's heavily into self-censorship, won't let anything out without giving it a mental makeover. Whereas he just lets rip, couldn't care less what he says. I get the impression political correctness doesn't get much of a look-in with him, or with Rollo Sonabend either, for that matter.

  'Mischa's never still, always fiddling with objects.Within minutes he'd picked the wine cork to bits then set about building little heaps of cork and breadcrumbs. At dinner he was making patterns with the salt, chewing matches, drawing.The moment we sat down they brought out butcher's paper, covered the tablecloth with it for him to doodle. And a box of crayons.They obviously do that for him every time, like he's a kid with hyperactivity syndrome. Or their tame Picasso.They're very proud of him and Rollo, that's obvious.