It is a limp, grey day; he feels as ragged as the last leaves on the trees. And a chill breeze, it’s in the car, it’s in his bones, he adjusts the thermostat but it makes no difference: the temperature of loss, and it is always cold. He drives to his usual spot, a small intersection near Edwina’s flat, and parks where he can watch unobserved. A few minutes later the door to her balcony opens, at the same time the sun breaks through. She is glistening emerald green in her bathrobe, a halo around the marvellous hair. She leans on the balustrade and sips her coffee. And he knows why he loves her, seeing her like this, lush and silent and with him out of the picture.
He never did anything to harm her. He presented himself whole and with a surgeon’s precision she picked off the pieces. He hates her for what she has made him, but far worse, he hates himself. And still he doesn’t understand how she could have known. She is standing on her balcony gazing towards the bay; there is no malice in her when her guard is down. Perhaps she doesn’t realise what she has done.
She turns to go inside and his heart lurches. How much more of a fool can he be? His fists are pressed hard to his temples. He’s had enough, he wants his old life back, all of it with no Edwina cracking the whip, no Edwina writing the script. He wants her out of his life, he wishes he had never met her. He starts the car, drives down the beach road, parks in a skid of tyres, leaps the wall, lands heavily in the sand. He strides towards the water, and over the squall he shouts and shouts:
‘Bitch! Bitch! Leave me alone bitch!’ Louder and louder, cutting the air and striking the waves.
He only did what any man would have done, he trusted her, fool that he was, yet could not have guessed. But the bitch won’t get the better of him. He remembers when he didn’t love her, remembers when he didn’t even know her. He let her into his life and now he’ll get rid of her. She didn’t love him, will never love him, which is all the more reason not to pay with his life. She’s a bitch, a cold-hearted bitch, but must have her secrets too. His secrets for hers, a fair exchange.
He arrives back at the house pumped up and wronged. The place is newly empty; the kettle in the kitchen is still warm and Cynthia’s perfume lingers in the bedroom. He undresses and packs as if for a short holiday. To the study and a selection of work into a brief-case, then a change of mind and back to the bedroom for a larger case and two more suits. He sits on the edge of the bed and writes to Cynthia — Something has come up. I have to go away. No need to worry, I’ll be in touch. Love you always, A — and rests the note against the telephone. Then to the bathroom, his face reflected in the mirror, and now Edwina’s face and her terrible words: ‘I’ve got you, Alexander, because I know who you are.’ He takes razor and shaving cream, the scraping noise, his beard catching in the blade, the bristles on the white porcelain. He stares down at the basin, and now he is crying, ugly sound it is.
He washes his face, avoiding the clean-shaven image in the mirror, then returns to the bedroom and finishes dressing. Slowly he walks through the house, room by room, looking, touching, arming himself against future longing. He slips a photograph of the family into his brief-case, gathers his luggage, leaves the house and disappears.
CHAPTER ONE
Edwina Frye is standing at the water’s edge, a sea breeze soothes a bullish northerly, murky pools cover her feet. She is avoiding her flat where Alexander Otto waits in folders of notes, as he has these past several months, waiting for her to do him justice. She has written his childhood and the first of the university years, grinding out the sentences evermore slowly. But something is obstructing her — not simply aversion, nor even boredom, there is sabotage at work and it’s wrecking the job.
This is her fourth biography in nine years, and Otto in much the same mould as his predecessors. And he is not unwieldy, in fact, if she were to believe everyone she has interviewed, Alexander Otto is flawless, with a life as spectacular and pristine as a theme park. And what does it matter if he is lying? She’s a professional, she’s dealt with lies before. So why can’t she finish him off and deliver the work to the College of Surgeons? Why this urge to plough a bulldozer through his seemingly unblemished terrain?
Something is awry and the problem — how she wishes it were otherwise — resides not with Alexander Otto but herself. The trenches of her dark centre are filling; she senses a wrestling at her foundations, something raucous and reckless is hobbling the smooth conduct of her life. She wants to write Alexander Otto into hell.
She grinds her feet into the sand; if only it were Otto underfoot, faultless Otto who should slide off her pen with ease, dedicated Otto who is too good to be true. Her own black panic is pointing the bone and it sees something suppurating in him. She wants him gone, she wants the job finished, but the end is not in sight. She loiters at the beach when she should be at work, she cooks elaborate meals that rot in the fridge, she squanders hours over coffee with friends, and slinks past her study with eyes averted. As for Otto, he keeps remembering inane details and additional people she should contact — ‘For the personal touch,’ he says, ‘to soften the image of the medical man.’ But if it were soft he was wanting he should have chosen another biographer. Yet the habits of a lifetime dictate that even Alexander Otto must be satisfied, so she follows his leads and records the new details, and his goodness accumulates in such abundance that it oozes out of him like pus.
Alexander describes himself as fortunate, yet a man who has known only good fortune would, Edwina thinks, be hostile to anything less. For every win there is a loss, for every winner a loser, so what has Otto destroyed in order to achieve so much? Edwina has searched and searched, not to use the information, the men at the College were quite clear in their instructions, but for her own curiosity.
Edwina Frye writes very specific biographies. She delivers to the commissioning body — the Retail Association, North-West Mining, the Church of Universal Connection, and soon, she hopes, the College of Surgeons — a pile of manuscript as neat and clean as newly laundered linen. But neat and clean is not necessarily the whole story, and neither is it enough to sustain her for the duration of the job. It is fortunate then, that for every prominent man there is always a submerged narrative. Long ago, Edwina discovered that as a man rises, the public face comes to obscure and eventually blot out not only the regrettable events that inscribe a life but any shoddy personal attributes as well. But peel back the edges of the great man, peel them back with the patient probing of a mother, and the pockmarks are still there — or so it was with Otto’s predecessors. Edwina has applied herself to Alexander’s edges, but the seal is suspiciously secure. As for goodness, it is easy to appear good, Edwina has been quite a success at it herself, but a good heart is quite a different matter, and disturbingly uncommon.
She is buried mid-calf in sucking wet sand, two girls dash past, deliberately close and threatening. She yells at them and they tell her to fuck off, two school-aged kids and she old enough to be their mother. She pulls her feet free and heads towards Port Melbourne. But it’s no use, like the girls she shouldn’t be at the beach at one o’clock on a Thursday, she should be home and at her computer putting Alexander Otto in order. But order has deserted her. She finds herself sticking pins into his perfect childhood, she makes him a cheat and a bully, she runs him off the rails. She flies with her creation and it’s a wonderful feeling, and the next day, returned to grey and sober mood, she reverts with guilty vigour to the main story. The work has become a voodoo doll, she sticks in the pins but the one who winces is herself.
These stirrings are not new, but like stray cats fossicking in suburban garbage have been easily placated. It was mid-way through her first biography that she chanced on the solution. She found herself writing two lives: