A Traitor to Memory

  It was a natural progression. One night she made a meal for me at the end of a particularly exhausting day of rehearsals for a concert at the Barbican. I fell asleep on her bed where we'd been sitting, listening to a recording. She covered me with a blanket and joined me under it, and there we remained till morning. Now and again we sleep together still. I suppose we both find it comforting in some way.

  Nurturing, you say.

  In that it feels good to have her there, yes. Then it's nurturing as well.

  Something that was missing during your childhood, Gideon, you point out. If everyone's concentration was on your growth and performance as an artist, it wouldn't be unusual for other more essential needs to have gone both unrecognised and unfulfilled.

  Dr. Rose, I insist upon your accepting what I say: I had good parents. As I've said, my father worked endlessly just to make ends meet. Once it became clear that I had the potential, the talent, and the desire to be … let's call it who I am today, my mother went out and found a job as well to help cover all the expenses incurred. And if I didn't see my parents as often as I might have done because of this, I had Raphael with me for hours each day and when he wasn't there, I had Sarah-Jane.

  Who was she? you ask.

  She was Sarah-Jane Beckett. I don't quite know what to call her, actually. Governess is too anachronistic a term and Sarah-Jane would have sorted you out in fairly short order had you ever called her a governess. So I suppose we'd have to call her my teacher. As I noted earlier, I never attended school once it became apparent that the violin would be my life because regular school hours conflicted with my schedule of lessons. So Sarah-Jane was employed as my teacher. When I wasn't working with Raphael, I was working with her. And because we fitted in lessons where and as we could, she lived with us. In fact, she lived with us for years. She must have arrived when I was five or six—once my parents saw how impossible it was going to be for me to be educated in a traditional fashion—and she stayed until I was sixteen, at which time my education was complete and my schedule of concerts, recordings, rehearsals, and practise periods precluded any further courses of study. But until that point, I had daily lessons with Sarah-Jane.

  Was she a surrogate mother? you want to know.

  Always, always it comes back to my mother. Are you looking for Oedipal connections, Doctor? How about an unresolved Oedipal complex? Mother trots off to work when son is five, leaving him incapable of laying to rest his unconscious desire to jump her? Then Mother disappears when son is eight or nine or ten or however old he was because I do not remember nor do I care to, and she is never heard from again.

  I remember, though, her silence. Odd. It's just come to me now. My mother's silence. And I remember waking up one night while she was still with us and finding her lying in bed with me. She's holding me and it's very difficult to breathe because of the way she's holding me. It's difficult because her arms are round me and she's got my head somehow…. Never mind. I don't remember.

  How is she holding you, Gideon?

  I don't remember. Just that I can't breathe very well but I can feel her breathing and it's very hot.

  Her breath is hot?

  No. Just the feeling. Where I am. I want to escape.

  From her?

  No. Just escape. Run, actually. Of course, this could all be a dream. It was so long ago.

  Did it happen more than once? you want to know.

  I see where you're heading, and I won't go there with you because I refuse to pretend that I remember what you seem to want me to remember. The facts are these: My mother is beside me in my bed, I am held by her, it is hot, I smell her perfume. And there's a weight on my cheek as well. I do feel that weight. It's heavy but inert and it smells of perfume. Odd, that I would recall that smell. I couldn't tell you what it was—her perfume, Dr. Rose—but I expect that if I ever smelled it again, I would know it at once and it would remind me of Mother.

  I expect she was holding you between her breasts, you tell me. That's why you would both feel the weight and smell the perfume. Is it dark in your bedroom or is there a light?

  I don't recall. Just the heat, that weight, the scent. And silence.

  Have you lain that way with anyone else? With Libby perhaps? Or whoever preceded Libby?

  God, no! And this is not about my mother! All right. Yes. Of course I know that her desertion of me—of us—looms large. I'm not an idiot, Dr. Rose. I come home from Austria, my mother is gone, I never see the woman again, never hear her voice, never read so much as a sentence in her handwriting addressed to me…. Yes, yes, I know the song: This is a Very Big Incident. And since I never heard from her again, I also see the logical connection that I would make as a child: It was my fault. Perhaps I make that connection when I am eight or nine or however old I was when she left, but it is not a connection that I recall making and it's not a connection that I make now. She left. End of story.

  What do you mean, end of story? you ask.

  Just that. We never spoke of her. Or at least I never spoke of her. And if my grandparents and father did, and if Raphael or Sarah-Jane or James the Lodger—

  He was still there when she left?

  He was there … Or was he? No. He couldn't have been. It was Calvin, wasn't it? Didn't I say earlier it was Calvin? Calvin the Lodger trying to phone for help in the midst of Granddad's episode after Mother left us … So James had long ago decamped as well.

  Decamped, you say. There's a secrecy implied in decamped, you tell me. Was there secrecy behind James the Lodger's leaving?

  There is secrecy everywhere. Silence and secrecy. That's how it seems. I walk into a room and a hush falls on it and I know they've been talking about my mother. And I am not allowed to speak of her.

  What happens if you do?

  I don't know because I never test the rule.

  Why not?

  The music is central. I have my music. I still have my music. My father, my grandparents, Sarah-Jane, and Raphael. Even Calvin the Lodger. We all have my music.

  Is this rule stated? The rule about not asking after your mother? Or is it implied?

  It must be … I don't know. She's not there to greet us when we return from Austria. She's gone but no one acknowledges that fact. The house has been wiped so clean of her that it's as if she never lived there in the first place. And no one says a word. They don't pretend she's taken a trip somewhere. They don't pretend she's suddenly died. They don't pretend she ran off with another man. They act as if she never existed. And life goes on.

  You never asked about her?

  I must have known that she was one of the subjects that we just didn't talk about.

  One? There were others?

  Perhaps I didn't miss her. I don't actually recall missing her. I don't even remember much about what she looked like. Except that her hair was blonde and she covered it with head scarves, the sort you always see the Queen wearing. But this would have been in church.

  And yes, I do remember being with her in church. I remember her crying. Crying in church at morning Mass with the nuns lined up in the first few pews of that chapel of theirs in Kensington Square. They're on the other side of this rood screen affair, the nuns, except it's not really a rood screen but more like a fence to keep a separation between them and the rest of the public except there's no one else there to be the rest of the public at early morning Mass. There's just Mother and I. And the nuns are in front in those special pews giving responses, and one of them is dressed in that old way, in a habit, but all the rest are done up normally but very plain and with crosses on their chests. And during Mass, my mother kneels, always kneels, with her head resting on her hands. She weeps the whole time. And I don't know what to do.

  Why is she weeping? you want to know, of course.

  She is always weeping, it seems. And this one nun—the one dressed in the old way—comes up to Mother after Communion but before the end of Mass and she takes us both to a sitting room of some kind in the convent next door and there she and
Mother talk. They sit in one corner of the room. I am in the other corner, the far corner, where I've been given a book to read and told to sit. I'm impatient to be back home, though, because Raphael's assigned me a set of exercises to master and if I master them to his liking, we're to go to the Festival Hall as a reward. A concert. Ilya Kaler will be performing. He is not yet twenty years old but already he has won the Grand Prize at the Genoa Paganini Competition and I want to hear him because I intend to be far greater than Ilya Kaler.

  How old are you? you want to know.

  I must be six. Seven at the oldest. And I am impatient to go home. So I leave my corner and I approach my mother and I pull on her sleeve and say, “Mum. I'm bored,” because that's what I always say, that's how I communicate. Not: I've got to practise for my lesson with Raphael, Mum. But: I'm bored and it's your duty as my mother to deal with my boredom. But Sister Cecilia—and yes, that's her name, I've remembered her name—disengages my hand from my mother's sleeve and leads me back to the corner and says, “You'll be stopping right here till you're called for, Gideon, and no nonsense about it,” and I'm surprised because no one ever talks to me that way. I'm the prodigy, after all. I am—if there can be degrees of it—more unique than anyone within my universe.

  The surprise of being disciplined in such a way and by such a woman in such a costume is perhaps what keeps me in my corner for another few minutes as Sister Cecilia and my mother huddle together at their end of the room. But then I begin kicking at a bookshelf to entertain myself and I kick too hard and books topple to the floor and a statue of the Virgin falls and breaks on the lino. We leave soon afterwards, my mother and I.

  I excel at my lesson that morning. Raphael takes me to the concert as he's promised. He's arranged for me to meet Ilya Kaler and I've brought my violin and we play together. Kaler is brilliant, but I know I'll exceed what he has accomplished. Even then, I know this.

  What happens to your mother? you ask.

  She spends much of her time upstairs.

  In her bedroom?

  No. No. In the nursery.

  In the nursery? Why?

  And I know the answer. I know the answer. Where has it been for all these years? Why have I suddenly remembered now?

  My mother's with Sonia.

  8 September

  There are gaps, Dr. Rose. They exist in my brain like a series of canvases painted by an artist but incomplete and coloured only black.

  Sonia is part of one of those canvases. I remember the fact of her now: that there was a Sonia, and that she was my younger sister. She died at a very early age. I remember this as well.

  So that would be why my mother was weeping all those mornings at early Mass. And Sonia's death must have been one of the subjects we did not speak about. To speak about her death would be to bring on a new torrent of Mother's terrible grieving and we wished to spare her that.

  I've been trying to conjure up a picture of Sonia, but nothing is there. Just the black canvas. And when I try to summon her up to take part in a specific memory—Christmas, for instance, or Guy Fawkes Night, or the annual taxi ride with Gran to Fortnum and Mason for a birthday lunch in the Fountain … anything … anything at all … nothing is there. I don't even remember the day that she died. Nor do I recall her funeral. I know just the fact that she died because suddenly she wasn't there any longer.

  Just like your mother, Gideon? you ask me.

  No. This is different. This must be different because this feels different . And all I know for certain is that she was my sister, that she died young. Then Mother was gone. Whether she left us soon after Sonia died or whether it was months or years later, I couldn't say. But why? Why can't I remember my sister? What happened to her? What do children die of: cancer, leukaemia, cystic fibrosis, scarlet fever, influenza, pneumonia … what else?

  This is the second child to die, you point out to me.

  What? What do you mean? The second child?

  The second child of your father's to die, Gideon. You've told me about Virginia …?

  Children die, Dr. Rose. That's what happens sometimes. Every day of the week. Children fall ill. Children die.

  3

  “I DON'T REALLY see how the caterer managed to cope in here, do you?” Frances Webberly asked. “Of course, it's quite good enough for us, this kitchen. I can't see that we'd actually use a dishwasher or a microwave even if we had one. But caterers … They're used to all the mod cons, aren't they? What a surprise it must have been for the poor woman to arrive and find us living practically in the Middle Ages.”

  At the table, Malcolm Webberly made no reply. He'd heard his wife's deliberately cheerful words, but his mind was elsewhere. To deflect a potential conversation that he didn't want to have with anyone, he'd set about polishing his shoes in the kitchen. He assumed that Frances, having known him for more than thirty years and thus being well aware of his aversion to doing two things at once, would see him at this modest industry and leave him to himself.

  He very much wanted to be left to himself. He'd wanted that from the instant he'd heard Eric Leach say, “Malc, sorry it's so late, but I've got some news,” and go on to tell him of Eugenie Davies' death. He needed the time alone to sort through his feelings, and while a sleepless night with his wife snoring lightly beside him had given him a number of hours to consider how the words hit-and-run actually affected him, he'd found that all he'd been able to do was to picture Eugenie Davies as he'd last seen her: with the river wind tossing her bright blonde hair. She'd covered that hair with a scarf the moment she'd stepped from her cottage, but during their walk the scarf had loosened and it was while she removed it, refolded it, and replaced it on her head that the wind flicked locks of hair round her shoulders.

  Quickly, he'd said to her, “Why not leave it off? The light in your hair makes you look …” What? Beautiful? he'd wondered. But she'd never been a great beauty in all the years that he'd known her. Young? They were both a decade past their prime. He'd supposed the word he wanted was actually peaceful. The sunlight in her hair made an aureole round her head, which reminded him of seraphim, which spoke of peace. But as those thoughts came to him, he'd become conscious of the fact that he'd never seen Eugenie Davies truly at peace and that at the moment—despite that trick of the halo created by light and wind—she was not at peace still.

  These thoughts in his mind once again, Webberly smeared polish industriously on his shoe. As he did so, he became aware that his wife was still talking to him. “… a lovely job, though. But thank heavens it was dark when the poor woman arrived because Lord knows how she would have functioned had she got a good look at our garden.” Frances laughed ruefully. “‘I'm still holding out for my pond and my lilies,' I told our Lady Hillier last night. She and Sir David are actually thinking of putting a hot tub in their conservatory. Did you know? I told her a conservatory hot tub is perfectly well and good if you like that sort of thing, but as for me, a little pond is all I've ever wanted. ‘And we'll have it someday,' I told her. ‘Malcolm says we'll have it, so we will.’ Naturally, we'll have to find someone to scythe through the weeds and cart off that old lawn mower out there, but I didn't mention that to our Lady Hillier—”

  Your sister Laura, Webberly thought.

  “—as she'd hardly understand what I was talking about. She's had that gardener of hers since … I don't know how long. But when the time's right and the money's there, you and I will have our little pond, won't we?”

  “I expect so,” Webberly said.

  Frances eased behind the table in the cramped little kitchen and gazed from the window into the garden. She'd stood there so often in the past ten years that she'd worn a shoe-sized place in the lino, and there were finger grooves in the window sill where she'd spent hours clutching onto the wood. What did she think as she stood there hour after hour every day? her husband wondered. What did she try—and fail—to do? A moment later he had his answer:

  “The day looks quite fine,” she told him. “Radio One cla
imed there's going to be more rain by this afternoon, but I think they've got it wrong. You know, I believe I'll go out and do some work in the garden this morning.”

  Webberly looked up. Frances, apparently feeling his eyes on her, swung round from the window, one hand still on the sill and the other tight on the lapel of her dressing gown. “I think I can do it today,” she said. “Malcolm, I think I can do it.”

  How many times had she said that before? Webberly wondered. One hundred? One thousand? And always with that same mixture of hope and delusion. She was going to work in the garden, Malcolm, she was going to walk to the shops this afternoon, she would definitely sit on a bench in Prebend Gardens or take Alfie for a romp or try the new beautician that was so well-spoken-of … so many good and honest intentions coming to naught at the final moment when the front door stood implacably in front of Frances and, try as she might and God knows she tried, she couldn't force her right hand up far enough to grasp onto the knob.

  Webberly said, “Frannie—”

  She cut in anxiously. “It's the party that's made all the difference. Having our friends in … being surrounded like that. I feel as right as … well, as right as can be.”

  Miranda's appearance at the kitchen door saved Webberly from having to make a reply. With an “Ah. Here you are,” she dropped her trumpet case onto the floor along with a weighty rucksack, and she went to the cooker, where Alfie—the family's Alsatian mix—was having a lengthy post-party lie-in on his blanket. She gave the dog a brisk rub between his ears, which he responded to by rolling over and offering his stomach for her ministrations. She cooperated, pausing to plant a kiss on his head and to accept a wet dog kiss in return.

  “Darling, that's terribly unhygienic,” Frances said.

  “That's doggy love,” Miranda replied. “Which, as we know, is the purest kind. Isn't it, Alf?”

  Alfie yawned.

  Miranda said, over her shoulder to her parents, “I'm off, then. I've two papers to hand in next week.”