After that Josie sort of lost heart in the argument for the defence (if that's what it was. Prosecution seems more apt) & I thought I could detect a subtle change in her.A glimmering.
We began to get down to the nuts and bolts of how it could be managed.And what will happen afterwards.
Had she really, really not told anyone, Josie demanded again. No one except Charlie? And he had kept it to himself? No one but Charlie and he'd been sworn to secrecy from the outset,Greer was able to say.I hadn't even got round to telling Mum.And not even bloody Verity either,she added,as a tease. And, oh God, not even Mischa, yet. She'd felt a sickening spasm of anxiety then. Josie had shaken her head.You really are mad, she'd said again.You've no idea how he'll take this.
The secret should continue to be kept, they agreed. Kept watertight between them, primarily for Charlie's sake. That meant there was no time to lose. Literally.
Josie was a librarian. She would organise her summer break so that she could leave home immediately on receiving Greer's urgent summons.
'Or it could be Mischa's,' Josie suggested, but Greer was certain Mischa would not want anything to do with this.
'He may not even want to be with me any more,' she had added, almost blithely.
Where will you go, Josie had asked. They agreed on Sydney. A big city not too far from Melbourne, suitably anonymous, quickly and easily accessible by air. It would be a simple enough matter to disappear in Sydney.They knew virtually no one there.
Josie was adamant about one thing. If she went ahead with this crazy scheme, if this scary proposal ever came to fruition, Greer would have to relinquish all contact with her former life and friends.
'For a judicious interval. Or –?'They tested this, tossed it back and forth. In the end the conclusion was inescapable: the fewer people in the know the safer it was, with the most room for manoeuvre.That meant Greer, Josie, their mother (unavoidable, they agreed, but she could keep secrets) and Charlie.
'And with any luck,Mischa,'Greer said.'Not that luck's an appropriate word,' she added, before Josie could, 'in the circs.'
But this brought Josie back to the basics, which were nothing at all to be light-hearted about. It seemed inevitable, and most vital of all, that Greer should sever contact with her husband and with Josie herself. And not just for a judicious interval. As far as those two were concerned, for the foreseeable future at least, Greer needed to disappear off the face of the earth.
What happens after Sydney is, hey presto, I do the disappearing act and vanish into thin air. For the duration.
Josie said,through tears:'It's terrible,but I couldn't go through with it otherwise. Do you see what I mean? Do you see why I'm saying that? Do you understand? Do you promise?'
They were weeping now, both of them, and embracing. Yes, Greer promised, she did understand. She would become ex-directory.Vaporise. It was far better that way. Better for everyone.
Talking about the future, let alone the conversation itself, had an air of unreality about it. In her sister's pale yellow sitting room, gazing out through the bay window at the grey Melbourne sky and spindly trees, it hadn't seemed such a momentous thing to promise to vanish into thin air. Her sister was shifting a weight of responsibility from Greer's shoulders to her own, and handing over the golden key to freedom in return.
Greer thought: and I agreed to disappear, just like that. Perhaps I would have agreed to anything at that moment. In spite of the tears, it was almost insouciantly that I signed myself out of certain commitments and certain people's lives. For the duration.
How long is that?
She snatched the nearest pen to hand and wrote, at the bottom of the page:
18th April 2006
We thought that this would be in everyone's best interests. Josie certainly believed that it was. But I fear now that it may have been a deeply misguided thing.
She lifted the pen, twisting her hair around it. The happy photos of the close little family of four remained as she had laid them out, in rows in front of her on the desk.
She added seven more words:
I fear it was an insupportable thing.
The diary entry for 4 August 1979 wasn't quite over.There was a brief addendum:
P.S. I'm in a café. I'm wrecked. Stage one is done. Now I have to spill beans to M. and C. (separately, & different species of beans).
What am I doing, making pathetic jokes? It's like in wartime, going through the Blitz, using humour to stave off the fear.
Perched steeply to Greer's left was a hilltop town, and on a spur in the filmy void, a mere smudge on the skyline, another medieval watchtower.The ancient occupants of that tower once warned this little community when peril was imminent. They would have alerted the lookouts in the tower where Mischa was now working to the approach of an enemy. But they were watching for invading armies. Would they have identified a single stealthy infiltrator, with his camera and laptop, his notebooks and recording devices? With his slick,inveigling charm? Would they have identified these disparate items as weapons?
Below her was the sight, reassuring in its ordinariness, of Guy in a well-worn sloppy joe stealing a look through his telescope on the terrace outside the former chapel that was now Rollo's studio. While Greer and Rollo, according to Guy, were away with the fairies a lot of the time, he considered himself a man of the soil, well grounded in reality. He had set up his telescope on a tripod near the little war memorial and the low stone wall, where the land plummeted into the valley. We do a good class of view around here, Guy would tell their wine buyers, but this is the eye-candiest, the bobby-dazzler. This is the g-spot. You can almost drink this view.
Once, after he had observed what a crying shame it was that all the bloody clichés had been used up, they'd launched an ongoing competition to invent some more. It was a tough game – they found it surprisingly difficult to come up with something new, a phrase so pictorial and apt that others cannibalised it and it became a fixture.
Guy claimed this was because the treasure chest of visual clichés was finite. Its emptiness bore witness to the erosion of truth and beauty in their time.They were living through the decline and perilously close to the fall of Western civilisation.
'If we were in the Bronze Age or especially pre-biblical,' he said, 'or even pre the wretched nineteenth century, we could go to town.The cypresses standing like sentinels.The honey-coloured stones.The wine-dark sea.'
There was something about the elegance of their surroundings, he maintained, that invited rhetorical flourish. The reason for this was simple: the land they inhabited was the apogee, the ideal Platonic form of landscape that was a foundation of Western culture.
There was a brief period in which the cliché game had run rampant and made them so self-conscious that it interfered with ordinary speech. It became impossible to say anything about anything at all, since whatever was said sounded crude or platitudinous. The game had reached a natural conclusion soon after this, when Guy came up with what he declared was the ultimate one-word cliché:Tuscany. This perfectly proper noun had been made into something corny by writers, mainly English and mainly recent, who had a lot to answer for. Provence was another.
Greer's kitchen terrace overlooked the valley. On the far side the land sloped away at a steep angle from the thickly wooded floor. Beyond, narrow ridges extended in linear succession to the horizon. She stood out on the terrace and tried to dismiss everything from her mind but this view. She knew it so intimately, so completely, yet it was always surprising.
The countryside surrounded and enveloped her, as it had done since she first laid eyes on it. She always thought of it as her territory, a diorama tilted on its axis, an independent world unfolding in waves. It resembled a landscape painting, complete in itself and self-sufficient, containing a balance of wilderness and cultivation. She and Rollo agreed that it held within its layout everything necessary for beauty, variety and surprise in correct artistic proportion.
Landmarks revealed themselves only gradually
. A farm-house on the near ridge, encircled with bright fields. Slopes of vines in lucid, typewritten rows. A range of barren-looking mountains beyond, and in their foothills the ribbon of another settlement. On an escarpment to the south a classic silhouette of cypresses and umbrella pines.
At this time of year the air was bluish and hazy, blurred on the horizon, a little clearer but still indistinct in the middle distance. Only the foreground was well defined. Our lives have a similar perspective, she thought: the present moment alone is crisp and unambiguous.Yet the present as a concept is riddled with contradictions.
She retrieved as if from nowhere something Charlie had said on their last night together:'I believe there is no word for "have" in Hebrew.You can't say, I "have" a wife.'This, he said, was because, strictly speaking, there was no way of capturing the present. The moment you tried to speak or write or even think of the moment, it had moved backwards in time and become the past. I feel I have a new affinity with Hebrew, Charlie had added, even if the language won't allow me to express it.
Greer had read about recent research that suggested there was a significant benefit to the mental health of people exposed to trees and nature, even in cities. But as she stared fixedly at the landscape she knew so well it seemed to ripple and change its nature before her eyes. She gripped the railings of the terrace wall. It was almost as if she had momentarily lost her bearings in a world which was not quite as it had been, its landmarks no longer safely familiar.
She thought, what can we do if the present is not here long enough to protect us? When there is a veil that hangs over everything beyond it, even over the day after this one? When all living beings are trapped in the same predicament and no exceptions are made? The truth is, no one can have more than a suspicion of what lies further away.There are no safe bets on the future. It's all guesswork, a bewildering maze of untrodden ways.
She had never imagined the future as a fearful place. Living with someone who inhabited the here and now with such alacrity, such intensity, the future hardly rated as an abstract idea. It was not a presence in her life or Mischa's, not in the way that most of her friends were constantly preoccupied with it.
But a different concept was beginning to assemble itself in her mind.A more concrete way of looking at the future, as an organic entity with visceral links to the past and to the present. It was a disturbing notion fraught with implications she would not, could not, think about.Was this, indeed, how others routinely saw it? Had her inability to do so been a wilful failure of the imagination?
You could influence the present, and through it the future,but you could do nothing about the past.Alone of the three the past was irrecoverable. It could not be changed, and it was potentially merciless.
I know about the past and its tentacles, she thought, but I have been blind. How have I never allowed for the possibility that the future, indecipherable though it surely is, might conceivably exert an influence over the present?
She felt herself caught up in a momentum she was helpless to influence, as if she were on the cusp of a volcanic river, rushing towards the mouth of a distant sea. The forbidden territory that beckoned from the outer reaches of her mind lay in the direct path of the boiling, heaving waters. The amorphous shapes were massed there in the dark, awaiting. She felt as if she were being borne bodily forwards, propelled towards them.
This was the future. It came to her like a blow to the heart.
13
Greer and Guy watched four men unloading huge logs from a lorry in the drive. It was cool today but not cold. A good day for replacing the wormy old pergola that ran half the length of Rollo and Guy's house and along the side garden. It had seen decades of service providing leafy shade, but now it was buckled and in imminent danger of collapse. It would be a tricky operation to save the equally timeworn grapevine it supported.
In charge and the brawniest was Agnieszka's husband, Angelo, a barrel-chested larrikin with a dirty, infectious laugh.The men were lugging chestnut beams 30 feet long. Chestnut was the hardworking wood they called the oak of Italy. It was used when something was built to last.This will see us out, Guy said, and our posterity what inherits it from us.Whatsoever that may be.
'Who am I going to leave this to?' he remarked to Greer,who was standing next to him.'The feckless crew of nieces and nephews, I suppose. But don't worry, I'll bequeath you something if I pop off before you. What would you like? The winery?'
'That would be most acceptable.' Greer had had a conversation along these lines some years before with Rollo. Guy would be his chief beneficiary, of course, but he had promised to leave her something special. From time to time he pointed out items he was setting aside for her: his Californian Bauer pottery, for instance, his Matisse odalisque and the exquisite pair of Gallé vases.
'Who are you going to leave your lot to?' Guy demanded inquisitively.'Assuming Mischa falls off the perch first, which is a reasonable assumption. Haven't you got a sister?'
'Yes,I have.Somewhere.'A bleak wind seemed to blow around the words.
'I thought so.Tony said you and Mischa both had sisters, and I'd forgotten.You'd lost touch with yours, he said, and so, coincidentally, had M.To lose one is accidental but two looks like carelessness, he said.'
'When did he tell you this?'
'Oh, the other night. Last night, in point of fact.We had a nightcap together.As it were.'
'Did you?' She was galvanised. 'What else did he tell you?'
'Nothing much else, though I was pumping him.' He gave her a sly look. 'It was only a short talk we had. It was rather late.'
'Did he . . .?' She stopped, then made herself continue. 'Did he say whether he'd seen my sister? Did he tell you if he'd seen Josie?'
'No, I don't think he did. Say, I mean.You can ask him yourself, he won't bite you.'
He was summoned over to the men, where an animated conversation to do with the preservation of the grapevine ensued in Italian. He smirked at her over his shoulder.
Greer heard a crunch on the gravel and her name called. It was Tony. He wanted to show her something, he said, looking pleased with himself. Something that might interest her. He waved a jaunty hand at Guy.
Tony led her to the upstairs floor of Mischa's studio in the tower, where he had set up three plywood sheets. Attached with double-sided tape were photographs of Mischa's paintings, all the works Tony planned to refer to and illustrate.The photos were divided into sections under separate chapter headings, with the current location of each picture and the permission of its owner neatly listed on an attached card.
'These are amateurish pics, mostly. I took them as an aide-mémoire.The galleries provide professional transparencies for publication.'
He was still waiting on some of these from various sources.A photographer would be coming in from Florence next week, he told her, if that was OK, to shoot some atmospheric stuff in the studio and surroundings. There were folders of photos still to put up.
Tony took the first sheet of plywood and laid it out flat on one of the trestle tables. 'Chapter One: Karlovy Vari, 1940–1957' had no pictures attached to it, unsurprisingly, but Greer saw four still photographs taken from life.Three of these were blow-ups from original tiny black and white snaps, Tony told her, old and creased but perfectly clear. Greer resisted the temptation to snatch them from the board and pore over them.They were the first images she had ever seen from Mischa's childhood.
She saw a frowning, plump-cheeked baby in a bonnet and long, enveloping gown held vertically aloft for the camera by a grave young woman with a square face and strong jaw, and deep-set dark eyes. Mischa's eyes, but with arched, feminine eyebrows.
'That's Mischa in the embroidered frock with his nice-looking mum,'Tony said.'He was always known as Mikhal, of course, within the family. Wasn't he a cutie? Don't you just love that grouchy expression? Grete said he was woken up for the photo, and it shows. He was a war baby, so they were probably snatching the moment. And it was probably taken to show him off to his dad, don't y
ou think?'
The next picture had obviously been taken in a photographic studio. It showed Mischa as a small boy seated in front of an older girl standing in a long skirt. Both children were heavily and rather fustily dressed and appeared to be staring intently at something behind the camera. The girl had her hands on Mischa's shoulders.
'That's Grete, forcing him down. He's six years of age here, so it's soon after the war and she's sixteen, but I swear you can already see the word "battleaxe" imprinted on her features.'
Greer scrutinised the image but saw only a stocky girl with a doughy, rather indeterminate face. She looked closely at the well-scrubbed little boy, who was recognisably a prototype of Mischa, only a less emphatic and tidier version. The lower lip jutted out, the eyes were black and bellicose.
The qualities were intensified in the third picture, another formal family group but this time expanded to six members: their father and mother with Mischa and Grete, Grete's Russian husband, who had a look of Prokofiev, and their toddler son. Mischa was a hefty teenager now, with a Brylcreemed quiff.He looked,as Tony remarked,like one hell of a handful. His parents shared similar pronounced Slavic features. His father was broad-shouldered and burly, with keen eyes under bushy brows like Mischa's and a soft, sensual mouth.
Grete's hair was pulled severely upwards revealing, as Tony didn't hesitate to point out, her high autocratic forehead and pleasure-averse countenance.This person you are talking so disparagingly about is the de facto sister-in-law I have never met, Greer thought. Has it occurred to you that I might find that offensive? Or was that your intention?
'Mischa's seen these?' she asked.
Mischa was working some distance from them near the south windows, apparently oblivious to the vista with its blandishments as well as to the intruders in his studio. He was humming to himself a tune from Pal Joey as he assembled lengths of cedar into a stretcher – what he and Rollo called the cross-and-bracing work. Both artists enjoyed a running dialogue about the practical aspects of their craft, the French papers and Belgian linens, the relative merits of different suppliers and raw materials. Greer never failed to find these discussions, and the obsessive devotion with which they were conducted, riveting.
The Biographer Page 19
