Read Online The Biographer by Virginia Duigan - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Virginia Duigan
Ads: Link
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
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
Similar Books
