So much hangs on the information Charlie has given, or withheld, and not just my place in Mischa's biography or its effect on me. But I must not pursue that line of thought. It leads to uncharted territory. I can't handle it.
She knew that Charlie would have been perfectly within his rights to refuse to speak to the man who was researching a biography of the artist who had run off with his wife. But such a refusal did not square with her knowledge of him. Charlie was never one to sit on the sidelines: he liked his say. Crucially, she felt sure he would have insisted on having his say if he thought he might have any chance of pre-empting the situation.
Meeting Tony would have put Charlie in an exceptionally delicate position. Greer tried to imagine how he might have decided to approach Tony's questioning. He had spent his professional life confronting thorny problems and defending wickets of varying levels of stickiness. This one, however, was in a class of its own.
Charlie was no fool and neither, she believed, was he a vindictive man. In a quandary, his instinct would be to protect the vulnerable. Every actor in this story was vulnerable to a greater or lesser degree, including Charlie himself, but one was arguably at greater risk than the others.There was only one way to find out how Charlie had confronted this dilemma: by speaking with him directly.
There were two obstacles. The first one was almost enough in itself to put paid to the idea. She didn't know any more where Charlie and his family lived. She hadn't had any direct contact with him for twenty-five years. No indirect contact either, come to that. She amended this. There had been one indirect contact, a year or more after she and Mischa left Melbourne. A deafening tattoo on the door at 6.30 am in Port Douglas, Queensland. Mischa had gone to the door spoiling for a fight, only to have Greer summoned from bed and divorce papers thrust into her hands by a surly caricature of a bailiff.
But the last occasion she had heard Charlie's name spoken aloud, until Tony came out with it yesterday, was in Sydney during the five long months she and Mischa had spent alone in that cramped, desolate flat in Darlinghurst.
Those months were a blur in Greer's memory. Immediately they were over she had banished them from her mind. In the same way that Mischa had ceased to think about his time in Prague with Elsa Montag, because it was in the past and done with, she had tried to edit those months out of her life. For a very long time she had managed this quite successfully.
And if it weren't for the biographer's arrival I could have gone on editing them out. Could have, or would have? Just one change of consonant, but a significant, a profound difference. For a quarter of a century, both Mischa and I have conducted ourselves as if those five months and what was going on then had no existential reality. It's almost as if what was happening between us during that time never happened at all.
Looking back, she suspected those months were even harder on Mischa than on her. In all their subsequent years together she couldn't remember him making even one reference to them.
It was at the very end of the five months in Sydney that there had been a conversation in which Charlie was a central but absent player.The conversation was held the day after Christmas, and it had taken place not between Greer and Mischa but between Greer and her elder sister, Josephine.
On Boxing Day Josie made the short flight from Melbourne to Sydney after receiving an urgent summons from Greer. She was intending to come two weeks later, but had changed her plans when the telephone call came and had some trouble getting a flight at such short notice at that time of year. She had not stayed with Greer and Mischa, whose flat was minuscule and crammed with painting materials, but for a few nights – Greer never knew exactly how long – at a small hotel in nearby Paddington.
Greer had a hazy memory of Josie telling her that Charlie had left Melbourne too, soon after Mischa and Greer's precipitate departure, and taken a job in Hong Kong. He'd been headhunted by a US multinational with branches all over South-East Asia. It was a very prestigious post, at least that was a bit of good news, Josie had said at one point, trying to jolly her sister up. Greer thought she remembered her saying that Charlie was initially on a four-year contract, but that there was a strong likelihood of his staying on, if it turned out well, and being posted to other countries in the region.
This information, vague, effectively useless, was twenty-five years out of date.Where on earth was Charlie today? He could be anywhere in the world, working for anyone. At sixty-two, affluent and well-regarded, he might have retired. Greer found she couldn't even recall the name of the American company he had originally joined. She'd had other things on her mind at the time.
Josie would certainly know where Charlie was living. But Greer had no idea of her sister's whereabouts either. She hadn't seen or spoken to her since Josie's flying visit to Sydney. Since that particular Boxing Day, in fact. Like Charlie's name, but for a different reason, she had not pronounced the name of her sister aloud to anyone for twenty-five years. To protect herself from the pain of loss, Greer had tried never to think about Josie.
After Sydney, when they headed north to Queensland, she had sent her mother, Lorna, their next address in tropical Port Douglas. Lorna had kept in touch, but her letters were reticent. Her mother had found Greer's behaviour incomprehensible and deeply shocking, although she stopped short of cutting the lines of communication. Beyond confirming they were well, she supplied no further news of the immediate family. Neither had Greer asked any questions.
She had stayed in reasonably regular if distant contact with her mother for the first two years, until Lorna's sudden death from a cancer she had first mentioned in a letter that for four critical months had not reached Greer, who was on the move between Bali and Thailand. Since her mother's death there were no Australian entries in her address book. From the day she absconded with Mischa she had cut off all contact with her old friends in Melbourne.
There was, of course, the biographer.Tony would have Charlie's telephone number, no question about that. It would be the easiest thing in the world to ask him for it.
But the second, the insuperable obstacle to contacting Charlie at all was the thought of picking up the telephone and dialling his number without any prior warning. The very thought of having to announce her name to whoever answered the phone was enough to make Greer's blood run cold.
4th August
I've done it. I've spoken to Josie, and she's on side. Kind of.
I bought some brunch things & took them round to her flat – it seemed safer than going out. Plus some champers (& orange juice) – I thought it might be needed. It was, altho' J. tried to stop me on the grounds that it was inappropriate.We made scrambled eggs & talked for a good 4 hours.
Josie twigged practically right away. She's always intuitive. Well, I hadn't seen her for a few weeks. I wasn't at all sure how she'd react, I was worried she might burst into tears but she didn't cry at all, she was good. She would have been pleased if she hadn't pretty smartly seen that it wasn't welcome.
As soon as I got inside the door I dived straight to the point without putting it off, there was nothing else I could think of to say.At first she had a complete fit.She thought I must be joking. Her first reaction was to reject it out of hand. She said it was impossible, out of the question & I must be out of my mind.
I told her about M.The lot.That is, the bits fit to print (not that that's much). She said I must be crazy, kept repeating that I'd hardly spent any time with him, how could I seriously contemplate running away with him, it was absurd. Ludicrous. Etc. etc. But of course she's never been in love, she's never plunged off that precipice, and she hasn't a clue.What she had with Richard was a lot like me and Charlie.
Then she got on her high horse.What was I thinking of, it was so irresponsible & abnormal.When Charlie was so perfect to me & had done nothing wrong.
Greer, I can't believe you're saying this, it's unnatural, Josie had said at first, almost frantically, and then kept repeating it, her eyes round and appalled. You simply cannot let this infatuation, yo
ur obsession with this man, lead you to do an irrevocable thing you will certainly regret.
Charlie was popular with her mother and elder sister. Greer was well aware of their view, held jointly and voiced often: she had strung him along in a typically irresponsible and wilful fashion. Her mother and Josie were alike in some ways.There was an affinity between them, as there had been between Greer and her father.
Think of Charlie, Josie had said, over and over. He's a copybook husband. How could you do this, after keeping him dangling for so many years? How could you do it so soon after you've finally made an honest man of him? When this produced an involuntary splutter from her sister, Josie had blinked and stammered out: it's immoral, Greer, really. If I were at all religious I'd say it was a sin.
Greer had been reminded of her recent encounter with Jean-Claude. The intense tête-à-tête with the young Frenchman on the white beach on the Isle of Pines had led directly to this confrontation with her sister in Josie's characteristically tidy and tasteful sitting room in East Melbourne, overlooking the Flagstaff Gardens. Some of the things Josie was coming out with replicated Greer's own initial responses to Jean-Claude's proposition, practically word for word.
Jean-Claude seemed to know all about passion. He and Greer were convinced they had that elemental knowledge in common. It was what made the idea, this unnatural proposition, imaginable to them. Josie, however, in Greer's opinion, had never taken the plunge off the precipice.To her such a plan was, initially at least, unimaginable.
Why didn't you do something, Josie had asked, tight-lipped, before it came to this? Why didn't you do something about it earlier? Then you wouldn't have ... She had stopped short, unable or unwilling to finish.
I did do something, Greer pointed out. I got married. Josie's look told her that this had been a truly mad course of action. But she already knew that.
After a while she simmered down a fraction, and I could see that there was a sliver of hope. She was starting to think about it more rationally, rather than as a categorical negative. But she continued to bring C. into it, envisaging endless difficulties. She couldn't conceive of any chance of him accepting the idea.
Tucked away at the back of a drawer in Greer's writing desk was a manila envelope containing a bundle of family photos. They were mainly in black and white because her father, a keen photographer, had preferred it. She retrieved the envelope now and laid the photographs out in chrono-logical order in parallel rows. She had never put them into an album, nor had she taken them out of the envelope for a long time.
Her father and mother, Bill and Lorna, dark and fair, tall and short, playful and serious. Those were the obvious differences that would strike an onlooker. But she knew they were merely surface characteristics that became almost irrelevant once one's knowledge of a person went beyond the superficial. You could have such a deep and intimate knowledge of certain individuals that it verged on the encyclopaedic, and yet to claim you knew everything about them was manifestly absurd. She would never claim that of Mischa, whom she knew inside out and back to front.The source of Mischa's boundless creative life was a private mystery, inaccessible to others and even, she suspected, to himself.
She thought now, for the first time: how well do I really know him? What I know about the thirty-eight years of his life before he met me is negligible.And what of it? I would never have thought much of it,if it hadn't been for Tony.He has brought it home to me lately, rather forcibly.
The photographs were bookended by pictures from two weddings. The first, in black and white, was her parents' wartime wedding in 1944, with the two young people in air force uniforms, holding hands shyly for the camera, carnations in their buttonholes.The last one was the most recent. It was in colour, but still twenty-five years old: Greer's own registry office wedding, no frills by her own request, to Charlie McNicoll.
Her mother, Lorna, was in this snap as well, standing next to the bride.Thirty-five years older than she had been at her own wedding but hardly looking it in her smart turquoise dress and jacket. She also wore a wide smile in which Greer read more than a tinge of relief. Josie stood on Charlie's other side, holding a posy of yellow roses. She too looked delighted that her stubborn younger sister had finally bitten the bullet.
Greer and Charlie wore suits, his a dark lounge and hers a sharp white pants suit teamed with a straw boater.They looked as carefree as the other two, Greer's hat tilted at an angle.
We're both smiling, Greer thought. Charlie has a spray of wattle in his buttonhole and I have an impudent red bottlebrush. Our smiles appear to testify to an identical level of happiness, and no secrets.What can photographs tell you? Less than two months after this was taken, I was gone.
There was a fifth person in the line-up, on Josie's left. A trim woman in her fifties in a maroon coat and skirt, pepper-and-salt hair drawn tightly back in a formal French roll. Verity Corbett. She too looked pleased to be there. Her precise, angular features and sharp retroussé nose were relaxed and directed towards the wedding couple.
Verity was really quite a handsome woman, Greer conceded, in an ascetic way.This comes as a surprise but I can see it now, now I have reached the age she was. I must have invited Verity to be a witness at my wedding, and to the slap-up lunch afterwards at Florentino's, but I had almost forgotten she was there.
Greer looked closely at the photo, recalling Tony's recent remarks, the aspersions he claimed to have heard about Verity and Mischa. Tried to picture this immaculately groomed spinster-ish woman with the younger Mischa, rumbustious and unkempt. However much she tried to steer her mind into this groove, it remained stubbornly risible as a theory.
In between the wedding photos was a visual record of a family, not vastly different from most family snapshots.The original wartime couple, and then, around a year later, the joyous arrival of a baby.That was Josie. Josie crawling, then walking. Josie on her first day at kindergarten, clutching her mother's hand. Then another fair, chubby-cheeked baby crawling and walking.That was Greer.
The sisters in the garden with their pet rabbit and later on their Siamese cat and blue heeler puppy. Making funny faces, wearing the gingham summer dresses of their girls' private boarding school. Greer had loved it; Josie had been homesick and eventually switched to a day school. Birthday parties.Teenage parties.The family in swimsuits, on holidays at Aireys Inlet. Josie at her end-of-school formal, long dark hair in waves, slinky dress of blue Thai silk, looking far prettier than she (or Greer, gawky at the time) had any inkling of. The four of them picnicking with friends on another summer holiday at Portsea.
Her father dropped out of the snaps after Greer turned twenty-one.The last photo of him was taken at her twenty-first outside a flower-bedecked marquee in their Camberwell garden. Bill was standing between his daughters, his arms round their shoulders, smiling at Lorna, who held the camera.A week later he was dead of a heart attack.
Her father, mother and Josie were the three people Greer had once known best in the world. Of the three, only Josie was left. People could disappear off the face of the earth without warning. Life was like that, she had seen it happen. People you once loved vanished from your life. People you loved now, and those who were inextricably linked to you, even if you never saw them. People linked by blood.
She herself had vanished from the lives of people she loved. Greer pressed her hands against her face. They were cold to the touch, she could feel the pads of her fingers making white indentations in her cheeks.
Josie was her blood relative, and she was surely still here. Not here, she amended that, but somewhere in the world. Where was that, and more to the point, who was Josie with? Who were the most important people in Josie's life? Greer rocked back in her chair. She thought, I have stifled the anguish of years.
Her sister was her primary point of contact. How had she allowed herself to lose touch completely and absolutely with Josie, of all people?
But that had been part of the plan, hadn't it?
I doused my fears & insist
ed that C. wouldn't be a problem. It's not as if he doesn't like Josie, or she's a complete stranger. But it does depend totally on him, she's dreadfully right.When I spelt it out to her, voiced the plan aloud for the first time since Jean-Claude & I nutted it out, I saw how much rests on Charlie's co-operation. I will have to convince him it's the best way. I know him so well, I think he will see the logic of it. It does make things a whole lot easier, from every angle.
Josie could see that too, once she could bring herself to get beyond the standard objections. She started to see that for everyone it provides a viable way out of an unfortunate situation. Being a management consultant, C. is bound to appreciate that.
How confident that sounds. Inexplicably so, in retrospect. Did I seriously imagine I was going to convince a man such as Charlie that it was 'the best way'? That he would see 'the logic of it'? The doubts are there, I can feel them, below the surface, between the lines. Would anyone else see I was racked with them?
Not my poor sister. I wasn't going to admit them to her. Or to myself, either. Well, I was intent on getting my way, wasn't I, and Charlie was never going to stop me. I think Josie could see that.
I started thinking we were home and hosed, then she brought up Mother. I said Mum would accept it as the least worst alternative, in fact a vastly preferable outcome to anything else. J. said yes, maybe so, but there was another outcome Mum would like a whole lot better. She had to retreat when I repeated that was not to be mentioned again, it was not on the negotiating table, it was a non-outcome.
Then suddenly she started on Verity. Of all the possible objections that has to be the looniest. She went on about how Verity depends on me, how she trusts me, how could I not take her into my confidence, etc. etc. I said I was only an employee of bloody Verity, for God's sake, I wasn't married to her. J. shrieked at that, but it more or less threw cold water on the V. offensive.
The Biographer Page 18
