The Biographer (16 page)

Was it her imagination, or had there been a faint emphasis there?

Grete had put Tony in touch with a very old retired schoolmaster whose voice, when he could be induced to speak about Mischa, still quivered with aggravation.

'He told me some good stories though,'Tony said.'Your man was a full-on nightmare student, you'll be amazed to hear. I think the thing was he always did what
he
wanted, which usually was to make pictures, instead of what they wanted. I don't mean he was a really delinquent guy or anything like that. He just –'

'Preferred to please himself?' She had to smile.

'And it drove his parents and teachers completely and utterly bananas, through his entire childhood. And beyond as well, am I right?' He flashed her a grin. 'He had no time for authority figures telling him what to do, basically. Regarded them as muscling in on his turf and making irrelevant demands. But then, on that score, it makes no odds if we're talking sixty years ago, today or tomorrow, does it?'

These were cheeky signals that they were on the same wavelength, sharing mischief.

She opted to play ball.'It definitely does not.'

'So does he talk to you much,' he went on, 'about the old days? His old life?'

'Not at all.' It struck her, suddenly, where he was heading. He likes to lull
me, she thought, before he strikes. She repeated, as if to stonewall him, 'Mischa
never dwells on the past. It simply doesn't interest him. Especially nostalgia
for misspent youth. I actually believe he finds nostalgia nauseating.'

'Sorry, I wasn't talking about nostalgia here. Anything but, I guess. I mean, you know, past relationships. Significant predecessors.'

She toyed with the idea of feigning ignorance, but his intonation was unmistakeably – as Rollo might say – site-specific.

'You mean Elsa.'

'Elsa Montag, yes.'

'Did you speak to her?'

'Yeah, I met with her. She wasn't too hard to locate. Although I admit, to give the disapproving Grete her due, she wasn't the one who pointed me in her direction.'

Doubtless there would have been plenty of volunteers happy to point him that way. Elsa Montag was the young woman Mischa had left behind in March of 1969, when he skied across the border into Austria.

'I got on to her via her former husband, actually, Pavel. You can always count on a cuckolded politician to hold a grudge.'

'Her husband's a politician now?' She realised her mistake immediately.

'Still is, yeah. He's a survivor. It's Machiavellian how those guys manage to dig themselves in. Old Pavel Montag's quite a big shot in the government these days. Mischa never mentioned his little brush with the underworld of politics Pavel-style?'

She said shortly, to terminate this,'I wouldn't remember if he had. Mischa loathes politics and we haven't mentioned Elsa or Pavel Montag for years. I told you, he doesn't like to talk about the old days, or about her.'

She could have added, we don't talk about sensitive subjects too much,I suppose.I'm used to it.Quite comfortable with it, to use one of your phrases. From the start, neither of us wanted to revisit the past. We didn't see the need for mutual psychoanalysis.We communicated very well in other ways.

In his bedroom Tony wielded the iron on a pair of brown moleskins. The rust-coloured shirt he planned to team with them, on which he had just done a touch-up job, hung over the back of a chair. As he ironed the crease out of the trousers he spoke into his dictaphone, which was balanced on the end of the ironing board.

'I knew I had to tread on eggshells with her, but I got such a buzz when I found she'd done the drawing the day they made their getaway, that very night, I nearly got ahead of myself and trashed the whole thing. I had to backtrack quick smart.

'She's incredibly nervous and jumpy. Like, she'll be saying virtually nothing,
giving one-word answers, then out of nowhere she'll come up with a heap of
superfluous detail. All that guff about the dishes they had at the Chinese
restaurant their first night on the road. I'm kind of feeling my way with her,
approaching things and then backing off a bit, and then having another shot
from a different angle.'

He shook the trousers out, examined them and switched off the iron.

'When I introduced the Shadow period she shied right away. She wasn't about to go there, no way. But those pictures have to've been made as a direct reaction to Sydney. And there's the whole question of her portraits too, why she didn't pursue her art. She wasn't going there either. She'd concocted some half-assed story about it being too difficult, what with the travelling and Mischa and life in general.

'She wasn't so averse to talking about his past, although she couldn't tell me anything I didn't already know. She knew about Elsa but had clearly never heard of Pavel Montag. So she's no help on that score. Interesting he didn't tell her the whole story there though.

'It's a helluva grind talking to her. Frustrating. I get stuff, but it's monochrome, it's all dry and pedestrian. I can see all these other things going on in her head and I can't get through to them.'

'You're saturated.Why didn't you take your coat?'

Mischa came stamping in from the terrace outside the kitchen, wet trousers clinging to his legs, hair dripping onto his shoulders and trickling down his neck. He carried a lantern torch with a powerful beam.

'I came to get some food.Then I've got to go back.'

She rubbed his hair with a towel. He submitted to this with his eyes closed.

'If you had a mobile phone you could have called me.' This was a recurrent theme. 'Take off these sodden things first and put on something dry.' She knew this would be ignored, but had a compulsion to say it. His dislocated expression was familiar. He was in another world.

He surprised her by opening his eyes and saying, 'I'm sick of Tony. He's not here, is he?'

'Of course he isn't. Roly and Guy borrowed him for dinner.'

'How much longer is he around?'

'He hasn't been around long. It was you who wanted him to come.' She felt a sharp spurt of anger.

He grunted.'That was a major mistake,maybe.He talks all the time and prevents me from working.'

'Nothing prevents you from working. It's nearly seven o'clock and you're still going back to work.'

'If I didn't have all his interruptions I would be finished and we could have a proper dinner.' Greer bit off a retort. It was pointless now. He stood brooding over the flames, his clothes steaming. Now and then he looked at her.

Greer took a bowl of thick and garlicky bean soup from the fridge and heated it in the microwave. She put together a quick salad and set it on the table. Mischa's idea of a proper dinner was meaty and substantial, two courses at least. But if he was grappling with something, and it came to a choice between food and work, work would always prevail. She knew that the something might be as modest as the precise placement of two or three brushstrokes.

She selected a bottle of red. He pulled the cork and poured two glasses. They sipped in silence and warmth as the windows rattled against an onslaught of rain.

A high wind had barrelled across the valley soon after Tony had taken his leave. She had stoked the fire, then sat and watched the cold front looming, a bank of nimbus with a glowering, anvil-shaped storm cloud in the vanguard.

'Did Tony tell you he found out where Elsa Montag was living?'

Mischa shrugged.'That had to happen.'

'He said he found her through her ex-husband. I don't think you ever told me Pavel Montag was a politician.'

'He wasn't. He was on the edge of politics trying to get in. He was a nasty piece of work. I didn't want to speak his name one more time.'

He seemed unmoved, drizzling olive oil and grating mounds of parmesan into his soup, and hoeing into it.

'Tony said you had a skirmish with him.What happened?'

'He threatened to have me eliminated from the planet.'

'
Eliminated
? You mean killed?' It was so unlike Mischa to use a euphemism that she realised he must have read it in a note or a letter. He nodded indifferently and went on eating.

'Could he really have done that? Was that why you left Elsa?' She found this second question deeply important.

Mischa looked up from his bowl. 'He was capable of that. He was quite a raving madman. But mainly it was a very good excuse to get the hell out of there, and I took it.' She was familiar with the way he could suddenly switch on and give her his entire attention. His eyes, expressive, intensely serious, met and held hers.

The way he blazed into a state of full alert always made her think of an electrical
rush, a power surge. She knew that in spite of appearances he was never unaware
of what was going on.While he tended to toy with many conversations in a desultory
fashion, what she called his spontaneous combustion, a habit of emerging abruptly
from apparent detachment and engaging fierily with the subject under discussion,
could be dramatic for those who weren't expecting it.When he had got something
off his chest he was just as liable to disengage again.

As she was considering what he had just said he added, 'Elsa was temporary, like the others until you. It was a practice relationship that had run its course and was driving me crazy. I told her not to leave him but she did.That was the important thing.You know all that part.'

This was quite true. One of their fervent, cathartic conversations in the car on the way up to Sydney had been about Elsa. It sounded like a clear case of entrapment, and Greer had already known, and known within minutes of meeting him, that Mischa was not one to be trapped.

She asked,'Does Tony know about the death threat?'

'Probably. He's good at digging.' He looked down again briefly.'One or two people knew about it.I didn't order them to shut up when I left.'He shrugged his shoulders.'It doesn't matter, it's a good story, if the lawyers don't muck it up.'

'Did Tony say anything to you about Elsa,how she was?'

He shook his head.

'But didn't you ask if her husband had taken her back?'

'I didn't want to know. I doubt if he did. I can read it in the book if I have to.'

'You don't mind?'

'Mind what?' He had subsided again.

'That it'll all come up.' She felt the well-known exasperation rising, exacerbated
by more complex recent feelings. And by irritation that she should still feel
exasperated, or even surprised, after all these years.'She's bound to say angry
things, very angry things.'

'So, she slags me off. Maybe I deserve it. It makes the book more interesting.'

'But shouldn't you at least try to find out what she's told him?' She put down her spoon, feeling anxiety building.'He may be unaware of the emotional blackmail. She could have said anything, exaggerated, made it sound worse. She could have lied and said you promised to marry her. I think you need to put your side.'

Mischa reached across the table for her hand and covered it with his own.'Whatever she says will be true in her eyes. My side was to get out of there fast. If I didn't get out of there, I didn't meet you. So don't worry about it.'

Worrying won't change anything. It was an ingrained mantra and most of the time she welcomed it, together with his attitude to life: straightforward, uncomplicated, the polar opposite of neurotic. It could also strike her as maddening, illogical and simplistic. That was the flip side. There were times in the past when she had thrown things at him.

She said, 'I didn't ask him either. I don't know why I didn't, I would have liked to hear about her, how she was. He must think we're very odd.'

They continued to eat without talking. Greer thought, Mischa's expression hasn't
altered a jot. And yet his mind is not empty, it's sharply focused. It's just
that the focus is elsewhere. He has this uncanny ability to carry on a conversation
using his peripheral vision, mentally speaking. He husbands his resources.
I suspect this is quite unconscious, and a way of conserving his energies.
I suppose I should mention that to Tony.

She had one more go at the subject, without much confidence.

'Tony didn't volunteer any details either, then, to you or me. Don't you think that's odd too?'

Mischa had speared a lump of bread and was using it to mop up the remains of the soup. 'What of it? He plays his game, we play ours.'

He went on steering the bread like a racing car around his bowl. Greer conceded, as she had done countless times before: even when he's driving on autopilot using the periphery of his mind, I should never underestimate him.

Mischa went back to the studio, rugged up this time in a hooded rain jacket lined with sheepskin. She had begun to run a bath when the phone rang. The answering machine was not switched on and she was tempted to let the phone ring out, thinking it might be Stella again wanting the low goss she hadn't managed to get last time. The goss on the biographer.

But this time it was Rollo, slightly out of sorts and out of breath, inviting her to dinner post-haste. He had lined up five friends to meet the biographer: Larry and June, a Bostonian academic couple renting a holiday villa up the road for Easter, and three unaccompanied women, Barbara, Dottie and Benedetta. The Yanks had just called – right at the last
minute
, darling, can you believe it? What if we were having
portions
instead of the lamb – to ask if they could drag along their teenage son. Rollo, a stickler for proprieties such as balancing the sexes at table, was put out. Could she bear to make up the numbers?

'Well, I would, Roly, but we've eaten early. Mischa's just gone back to the studio.'

'Just a skerrick on the plate, darling. We can pretend you've got an eating disorder.Anorexia,or bulimia nervosa.' Rollo liked to read the lurid covers of celebrity magazines at the local newsagent.

'Honestly, I couldn't eat another thing. And I'm tired. I seem to have had Tony coming at me all day.'

'I promise not to put you next to Tony. He'll be up the other end, you won't have to talk to him at all. June and Larry are good value,you'll like them.And you always enjoy seeing Benedetta and Barbara, don't you? And you love Dottie.'

'But I was about to fall into a bath.' It sounded plaintive.

'All right then, we'll compromise. Have a nice quick bath and then pop over.' She heard the hope in his voice.

She said with a spark of mischief,'But the whole point of the dinner was to talk about Mischa and me in our absence.'

'Did His Majesty leak that? He's so mendacious these days.Well, and wasn't he always? Listen, the clincher is, we're having Maria Paola's chestnut cake for pudding.' He paused for effect, and then added in a meaningful and discernibly crafty tone, 'It might be wise to keep a weather eye on young Tony.'

Drinks were copious at Rollo's dinners. Guy was a dab hand at cocktails, deceptively
strong and geared to get the evening off to a flying start.Wine flowed like
water. Conversations were likely to become indiscreet.

How might Tony behave? How incautiously might he talk under such persuasive circumstances?

Greer made a quick decision. She would join them in time for the main course.

'Don't worry, I'll make sure we've finished talking about you by the time you get here,' Rollo was saying reassuringly as she hung up.

She remembered the bath. It was still running. She reached it just as the water was about to surge over the rim, and plunged her hand down to let some out.There should have been a chain attached to the old-style plug, but it had come adrift last summer and neither she nor Mischa, who in spite of occasionally still making his own easels was no handyman, had got around to fixing it.

Her hand and arm were scalded painfully red up to the elbow from the hot water. Mischa always professed to be horrified at the depth and heat of her baths. She made a mental note to get Agnieszka's husband, Angelo, to come and attend to this and a few other chores, as she added some expensive vanilla and mandarin bath cream from a bottle brought by Stella on her last visit. She decided to wash her hair as well.

As she expected, Mischa was still at work in the studio when she emerged. She wrote a note for him. Outside, the rain continued unabated, slamming in gusty squalls against the windows. She hurried to close the bedroom shutters. Smudges of light glimmered from the house across the courtyard: the lights of Rollo and Guy's kitchen and dining room, where the dinner was certainly in full swing.

Tony would be in place at one end of the table, leaning back sociably in an armchair, legs crossed perhaps, his fair skin flushed from the wine and his blond hair boyishly tousled. Greer fancied she could hear the strains of a violin carried by the wind, and then a burst of laughter, fading into the night like a shower of sparks.

She started to dry her hair. She had a powerful urge to monitor Tony's behaviour, to inhibit him with her presence.

Guy was in the process of topping up Tony's glass. Everyone was in agreement:
the '99 Brunello was a delectable drop. Only a month ago the
Financial Times
' Jancis Robinson had described it as 'beguiling' and likened a good Brunello
to semi-dried plums. But then, as Guy let them know, rhapsodic wine writers
had linked Brunellos in recent years with a range of other flavours such as
vanilla and morello cherries, licorice, marzipan and dried fruit. The nose
of a fine specimen might carry whiffs of pipe tobacco and sandalwood and, yet
more resourcefully, nuances of the forest floor.