We grind against each other, then, which is probably the way it happens when a man and a woman are trying to preserve a connection that's already been severed. And in that grinding, we wear each other away until what we had is so distant a memory that we can no longer sift through the discord of our present to locate the harmony that defined our past. And it ends. We end. She goes on to find another man whom she marries twenty-seven months and one week later. I remain as I am.
So when Libby spoke of next levels, I felt my spirit shudder. And yet I knew it would always come down to this same conversation between me and a woman, as long as I allowed any woman into my life.
The shouldn'ts began their bows in my mind. I shouldn't have shown her the lower ground floor flat. I shouldn't have agreed to let it to her. I shouldn't have taken her out for coffee. I shouldn't have bought her a meal, played that first concerto on her stereo, flown kites from Primrose Hill with her, taken her soaring in the glider, eaten at her table, fallen asleep with her spooned into my body and her nightshirt accidentally hiked up so that I could feel her naked arse warm and soft resting against my flaccid penis.
That should have told her the tale: that flaccidity. That unchanging, indifferent, Laodicean flaccidity. But it did not. Or if it did, she did not wish to draw the conclusion implied by that lifeless piece of flesh.
I said, “It feels good, having you here like this.”
She said, “It could feel better. We could have more.” And she moved her hips three times in that way women have that unconsciously mimes the rotation against which a normal man wants to thrust.
But I, as we know, am not a normal man.
I knew that I was supposed to desire at least the act if not the woman herself. But I did not. Nothing stirred in me except, perhaps, the ice. And what came over me was stillness and shadow and that disembodied feeling of being outside myself, above myself, looking down on this pitiful excuse for a man and wondering what the hell it was going to take, for God's sake, to move the bastard.
Libby said, her cool hand on my hot cheek again, “What's wrong, Gideon?” And she became quite still on the bed next to me. She didn't move away, however, and the fear that a precipitate movement on my part might give her an idea I did not wish her to have prompted me to remain immobile as well.
I said, “I've been to the doctor. I've had all the tests. There's nothing to account for them, Libby. It happens.”
“I'm not talking about the migraines, Gid.”
“Then what?”
“Why aren't you playing? You always play. You're like a clock. Three hours every morning, three hours every afternoon. I've seen Rafe's car in the square every day, so I know he's been here, but I haven't heard either of you guys playing.”
Rafe. She has that American tendency to give everyone a nickname. Raphael became Rafe the first time she met him. Nothing could suit him less, if you ask me, but he doesn't appear to mind the sobriquet.
And he has been here every day, as she pointed out. Sometimes for an hour, sometimes for two or three. He mostly paces while I sit in the window seat and write. He sweats, he mops his forehead and his neck with a handkerchief, he casts apprehensive looks in my direction, and he no doubt projects us into a future in which my anxiety state prematurely terminates an otherwise brilliant career and in which his reputation as my musical Rasputin is summarily ruined. He pictures himself as a footnote in history, one written in typescript so infinitesimal as to require a magnifying glass to be read.
I have been his hope for immortality-by-proxy. There he has been for fifty-whatever years, a man incapable of rising even to the level of concertmaster despite his talent and his every best effort, condemned by a reservoir of stage fright that has unloosed its floodgates in a deluge of terror whenever he's had a chance to audition. The man's a brilliant musician in a family of equally brilliant musicians. But unlike the rest of them—all playing in one orchestra or another, right down to his sister, who for twenty-some years has played electric guitar in a hippie band called Plated Starfire—Raphael has excelled only at passing his artistry on to others. Public performance has defeated him.
And I have been his claim to fame and the means by which he's attracted, like a benevolent Pied Piper, a following of hopeful prodigies and their parents for more than two decades. But that's all set to be sacrificed if I don't get a grip on what's gone wrong in my head. Never mind that Raphael has never once bothered to get a grip on what's wrong in his head—it can't be normal for one man to sweat through three shirts and one suit jacket every day of his life, can it?—I am to devote all my waking hours to getting a grip on what's wrong in mine.
Raphael, as I've said, is the person who tracked you down initially, Dr. Rose. Or at least, he tracked your father down once the neurologists decided that there is nothing physically wrong with me. So he has a vested interest in my recovery that's dual: Not only has he been significant in bringing me into your care, which might well put me into his debt in a very large way should you and I overcome my problem, but also my continued career as a violinist will mean his continued career as my muse. So Raphael would very much like to see me get well.
You're thinking of this as cynicism, aren't you, Dr. Rose? A new wrinkle in the blanket of my character. But remember that I have experienced Raphael Robson for years, so I know how he thinks and what he intends, probably better than he knows himself.
For example, I know that he dislikes my father. And I know that Dad would have sacked him a dozen times throughout the years had Raphael's style of instruction—allowing the student to develop his own method rather than imposing a preformed method upon him—not been exactly what I needed to thrive.
Why does Raphael dislike your father? you ask me curiously, unsure if this animosity between them is what's at the root of my present difficulty.
I don't have an answer to that question, Dr. Rose, at least not an answer that's both lucid and complete. But I expect it has to do with my mother.
Raphael Robson and your mother? you clarify, and you look at me so intently that I wonder what nugget I've offered you.
So I dig into my mind. I try to see what is there. And I make a logical connection from examining everything I've been able to dredge out thus far because those words placed all in a row just now—Raphael Robson and my mother—have stirred something within me, Dr. Rose. I can feel an uneasiness creeping outward from my gut. I've chewed and swallowed something rotten, and I feel the consequences roiling round in me.
What have I inadvertently unearthed? Raphael Robson has disliked my father for twenty-plus years because of my mother. Yes. I feel something like truth in this. But why?
You suggest that I take myself back in time to a moment when they are together, perhaps. Raphael and my mother. But the canvas is there, that damned black canvas and if they are on it, the paint has long ago been obscured.
And yet you've placed their names together, Raphael's and your mother's, you point out to me. For their names to be linked, other links must exist, even if only within the subconscious mind. You're thinking of them together, you tell me. Do you see them together as well?
See them? Together? The idea is preposterous.
Which part? you ask. The seeing part or the together part, Gideon?
And I know where you're heading with both those alternatives. Don't think I don't. I'm to choose between Oedipal conflicts and the primal scene. That's where we're going, isn't it, Dr. Rose? Little Gideon can't abide the fact that his music instructor a le béguin pour sa mère. Or, what's worse, little Gideon walked in on sa mère et l'amoureux de sa mère in flagrante delicto, with l'amoureux de sa mère being Raphael Robson.
Why the coy switch to French? you ask me. What does using English do to the facts? How does using English feel, Gideon?
Absurd. Ridiculous. Outrageous. Raphael Robson and my mother as lovers? What a ludicrous notion. How could she cope with his sweat? Even twenty years ago he sweats enough to water the garden.
12 September
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The garden. Flowers. God. I've remembered those flowers, Dr. Rose. Raphael Robson coming to the house with an enormous spray of flowers. They're for my mother, and she's there in the house, so it's either night time or she hasn't gone into work that day.
Is she ill? you ask me.
I don't know. But I see the flowers. Dozens of them. All different kinds, so many different kinds that I can't even name them. It's the largest bouquet I've ever seen and yes, yes, she must be ill because Raphael takes the flowers to the kitchen and arranges them himself in a number of vases that Gran digs out for him. But Gran can't stay to help him with the flowers because Granddad must be watched for some reason. For days and days we've had to keep an eye on Granddad, and I don't know why.
An episode? you ask me. Is he having a psychotic episode, Gideon?
I don't know. Just that everyone is out of sorts. Mother is ill. Granddad is being confined upstairs with music playing all the time to calm him. Sarah-Jane Beckett keeps huddling in corners with James the Lodger and if I get too close to them, she tightens her mouth and tells me to get back to my school prep when I haven't actually been given a lesson that's generated any prep in the first place. I've caught Gran weeping on the stairs. I've heard Dad shouting somewhere: behind a closed door, I think. Sister Cecilia has called in, and I've seen her talking to Raphael in the upstairs corridor. And then there are all those flowers. Raphael and flowers. Scores of flowers that I can't even name.
He takes them to the kitchen and I'm required to wait in the sitting room, where he has provided an exercise for me to master. And I remember that exercise even today. It is scales. Scales, which I loathe and which I feel are far beneath me. So I refuse to do them. I kick over my music stand. I shout that I'm bored, bored, bored with this stupid music and I won't play it a minute more. I demand the telly. I demand biscuits and milk. I demand.
And Sarah-Jane is there in a flash. She says—and I do remember exactly what she says, Dr. Rose, because it is so foreign to my ears—“You're not the centre of the world any longer. Behave yourself.”
Not the centre of the world any longer? you muse. So this must be after Sonia was born.
It must be, Dr. Rose.
Can you make any connections, then?
What sort of connections?
Raphael Robson, the flowers, your grandmother weeping, Sarah-Jane Beckett and the lodger gossiping—
I didn't say that they are gossiping. They're just talking together, their heads together, sharing a secret perhaps? I wonder. Are they lovers?
Yes, yes, Dr. Rose. I see how I return to the theme of lovers. No need to point it out to me. And I know where you're heading, in an inexorable process that takes us towards my mother and Raphael. I see where that process is going to end if we examine the clues with rational calm. The clues are these: Raphael with those flowers, Gran crying and Dad shouting, Sister Cecilia in attendance, Sarah-Jane and the lodger tittering in a corner … I see where this takes us, Dr. Rose.
What stops you from saying it, then? you ask, with those sombre sad sincere eyes on mine.
Nothing stops me, except uncertainty.
If you say it, you'll be able to test how it feels, to see if it fits.
All right, then. All right. Raphael Robson has impregnated my mother and together they have produced this child, Sonia. My father realises he's been cuckolded—God, where did that word come from? I feel like I'm taking part in a Jacobean melodrama—and the shouting that ensues behind closed doors is his reaction. Granddad hears this, puts together the pieces, and is sent round the bend and on his way to another episode. Gran reacts to the chaos between Mother and Dad as well as to the potential of another episode. Sarah-Jane and the lodger are all agog with the excitement. Sister Cecilia is brought in to attempt to mediate the dispute, but Dad can't bear to live in the same house with a constant reminder of Mother's infidelity, and he demands that the baby be sent away somewhere, adopted or something. Mother can't bear the thought of this and she weeps in her room.
And Raphael? you ask.
He's the proud father, isn't he? Bearing flowers like every proud father before him.
How does that feel? you want to know.
It makes me want to have a shower. And not because of the thought of my mother “in the rank sweat of an unseamèd bed”—if you'll pardon the obvious allusion—but because of him. Because of Raphael. Yes, I do see that he may have loved my mother and hated my father for possessing what he himself wanted. But that my mother would have returned his love … would have thought of taking that sweaty and perpetually sun-incinerated body into her bed or wherever else they might have accomplished the act … this thought is too incredible to be embraced.
But children, you point out to me, always find the contemplation of their parents' sexuality abhorrent, Gideon. This is why the actual sight of intercourse—
I did not witness intercourse, Dr. Rose. Not between my mother and Raphael, not between Sarah-Jane Beckett and the lodger, not between my grandparents, not between my father and anyone. Anyone.
Your father and anyone? you are quickly upon it. Who is anyone? Where does anyone come from?
Oh God. I don't know. I don't know.
15 September
I went to see him this afternoon, Dr. Rose. Ever since unearthing Sonia and then having the recollection of Raphael and those obscene flowers and the chaos in the house in Kensington Square, I've felt that I needed to talk to my father. So I went down to South Kensington and found him in the garden next to Braemar Mansions, which is where he's lived for the past few years. He was in the little greenhouse that he's commandeered from the rest of the residents of the building, and he was doing what he usually does with his free time. He was hovering over his infant hybrid camellias, examining their leaves with a magnifying glass, looking for either entomological intruders or incipient buds. I could not tell which. It's his dream to create a bloom worthy of the Chelsea Flower Show. Worthy of a prize at the show, I should say. Anything less would be a waste of his time.
From the street, I saw him inside the greenhouse, but as I don't have a key to the garden gate, I entered through the building. Dad has the first floor flat at the top of the stairs, and because I could see that the door was ajar up there, I headed up with the thought of securing it. But I found Jill inside at Dad's dining table, working on her laptop with her feet propped up on a hassock she'd brought in from the sitting room.
We exchanged pleasantries—what exactly does one say to one's father's young, pregnant mistress?—and she told me what I already knew, specifically that Dad was in the garden. She said, “He's nurturing the rest of his children,” with one of those long-suffering rolls of the eyes that are intended to convey fond exasperation. But that phrase the rest of his children seemed heavily laden with meaning today, and I couldn't put it from my mind as I left her.
I realised that I'd failed to notice something before that was obvious to me as I made my way back through the flat. Walls, chest tops, table tops, and bookshelves announced a single bald fact that had never once touched upon my consciousness, and that fact was what I first dealt with when I entered the greenhouse, because it seemed to me that if I could wrest a truthful answer from my father, I would be one step closer to understanding.
Wrest? You seize upon that word, don't you, Dr. Rose? You seize upon it and everything it implies. Is your father less than truthful, then? you ask me.
I'd never thought him so. But now I wonder.
And what will you understand? you want to know. Wresting the truth from your father will take you one step closer to understanding what?
To understanding what has happened to me.
It's connected to your father?
I don't want to think so.
When I walked into the greenhouse, he didn't look up, and I thought about how his body has begun to suit him for this current employment, bending over small plants. His scoliosis seems to have worsened over the past few years, and although he's just sixty-
two years old, he seems older to me because of his growing curvature. Looking at him, I wondered how Jill Foster—nearly thirty years his junior—had come to see him as a sexual object. What draws human beings together is a puzzle to me.
I said, “Why are there no pictures of Sonia in your flat, Dad?” An unexpected frontal assault seemed most likely to garner results. “You've got me from every angle at every age, with violin and without; but you haven't got Sonia. Why?”
He did look up then, but I think he was buying time, because he took a handkerchief from the back pocket of his jeans and he used it to polish the magnifying glass. He refolded the handkerchief, stowed the lens in a chamois sack, and took the sack to a shelf at the end of the greenhouse, where he keeps his gardening tools.
“Good afternoon to you as well,” he said. “You had more of a greeting for Jill, I hope. Is she still on the computer?”
“In the kitchen.”
“Ah. The screenplay proceeds apace. She's doing The Beautiful and Damned. Have I mentioned that? Ambitious to offer another Fitzgerald to the BBC, but she's determined to prove that an American novel about Americans in America can be made palatable for the British viewing public. We shall see. And how is your own American these days?”