A Traitor to Memory

  2 October

  I didn't tell Dad.

  Why? you ask.

  I couldn't face it.

  Face what?

  His disappointment, I suppose. What it would do to him to know that I can't do what he wants me to do. He's fashioned his entire life round mine, and my entire life has been fashioned round my playing. Both of us are hurtling towards oblivion right now, and it seems an act of kindness if only one of us knows it.

  When I set the Guarneri back into its case, I made my decision. I left the house.

  On the front steps I met Libby, however. She was leaning next to the railing with a bag of marshmallows open on her lap. She didn't appear to be eating them, although she did look as if she were contemplating doing so.

  I wondered how long she'd been sitting there, and when she spoke, I had my answer.

  “I heard.” She got to her feet, looked down at the bag, then stuffed it into the capacious front of her dungarees. “That's what's been wrong, isn't it, Gid? That's why you haven't been playing. Why didn't you tell me? I mean, I thought we were friends.”

  “We are.”

  “No way.”

  “Way,” I said.

  She didn't smile. “Friends help each other out.”

  “You can't help with this. I don't even know what's gone wrong with me, Libby.”

  She looked off bleakly into the square. She said, “Shit. What are we doing, Gid? Why're we flying your kites? Gliding your glider? Why the hell are we sleeping together? I mean, if you can't even talk to me—”

  The conversation was a reenactment of a hundred discussions with Beth, with a slight change in subject. With her, it had been, “Gideon, if we can't even make love any longer …”

  With Libby things hadn't gone far enough to make that a subject, for which I was grateful. I heard her out but had nothing to say. When she had finished talking and realised there would be no reply, she followed me to my car, saying, “Hey! Wait a minute. I'm talking to you. Wait a minute. Wait.” She grabbed my arm.

  “I've got to go,” I told her.

  “Where?”

  “Victoria.”

  “Why?”

  “Libby …”

  “Fine.” And when I'd unlocked the car, she climbed inside. “Then I'm coming with you,” she said.

  To rid myself of her, I would have had to remove her bodily from the car. And there was a set to her jaw and a steeliness in her eyes that told me she wouldn't be removed without putting up a monumental fight. I didn't have the energy or the heart for that, so I started the car and we drove to Victoria.

  The Press Association has its offices just round the corner from Victoria Station on Vauxhall Bridge Road, and that's where I took us. On the way, Libby brought out the marshmallows, which she started to consume.

  I said, “Aren't you on the No-White Diet?”

  “These are coloured pink and green, in case you didn't notice.”

  “You once said white that's coloured artificially counts as white,” I reminded her.

  “I say lots of things.” She slapped the plastic bag against her lap and appeared to reach a decision, because she said, “I want to know how long. And you'd better be totally straight with me.”

  “How long what?”

  “How long not playing. Or playing like that. Just then. Like that. How long?” And then, in a switch that wasn't atypical of her, she said, “Never mind. I ought to have noticed before now. It's because of that bastard Rock.”

  “We can hardly blame your husband—”

  “Ex. Please.”

  “Not yet.”

  “Close enough.”

  “Fine. But we can't blame him—”

  “Loathsome as he is.”

  “—if I'm having a rough time just now.”

  “That's so not what I was talking about,” she said, irritation in her voice. “There's more people on earth than you, Gideon. I was talking about myself. I would've noticed what's been happening with you if I hadn't been so strung out about Rock.”

  But I hardly heard what she said about her husband, because I was struck by her words: more people on earth than you, Gideon, and how they echoed almost exactly Sarah-Jane Beckett's sentiments all those years ago. You're not the centre of the universe any longer. And I couldn't see Libby in the car with me because all I could see was Sarah-Jane Beckett. I can see her still, I can see her eyes peering at me, her face bending over me. It's pinched, that face, with eyes that are narrowed to a band of stubby lashes.

  What's she talking about when she says that? you ask me.

  Yes. That's the question, all right.

  I've been naughty while she was responsible for me. It's been left to her to determine my punishment, which has been a thorough wigging, Sarah-Jane style. There's a wooden box in Granddad's wardrobe and I've got into it. It's filled with old boot black, shoe polish, and rags, and I've used all this as paints. All along the first-floor corridor I've smeared brown polish and boot black on the walls. Bored, bored, bored, I've thought as I ruined the wallpaper and wiped my hands on the curtains. But I'm not bored, really, and Sarah-Jane knows. That's not why I've done it.

  Do you know why you did it? you ask me.

  I'm not sure now. But I think I'm angry, and I feel afraid. Quite distinctly and very much afraid.

  I see the spark of interest in your face when I tell you this, Dr. Rose. Now we're getting somewhere. Angry and afraid. Emotion. Passion. Something, by God, that you can work with.

  But I have little to add to that. Only this: When Libby said more people on earth than you, Gideon, what I felt distinctly was fear. It was a fear quite apart from the fear of never being able to play my instrument again, however. It was a fear that seemed entirely unrelated to the conversation that she and I were having. Yet I felt it in such a sudden paroxysm that I heard myself cry “Don't!” at Libby, and all the while it wasn't Libby I was talking to at all.

  And what is it you were afraid of? you inquire.

  That, I would have thought, is obvious.

  3 October

  We were directed up to the news library, a storage room where rack after rack of news cuttings are filed in manila folders and catalogued by subject along scores of rolling shelves. Do you know this place? News readers spend their days there, poring through every major paper, clipping and identifying stories which then become part of the library's collection. Nearby, a single table and a photocopier serve members of the public who want to do research.

  I told a poorly dressed, long-haired boy what I was looking for. He said, “You should've rung first. It'll take twenty minutes or so. That stuff's not kept up here.”

  I said that we'd wait, but I found that my nerves were tangled so excessively that I couldn't remain in the library once the young man had gone off on his search. I couldn't breathe, and in short order I found myself sweating as much as Raphael. I said to Libby that I needed some air. She followed me out onto Vauxhall Bridge Road. But I couldn't breathe there either.

  “It's the traffic,” I told Libby, “the fumes,” and I found myself gasping like a winded runner. And then my viscera went into action: stomach clenching and bowels loosening, threatening a humiliating explosion right there on the pavement.

  Libby said, “You look like hell, Gid.”

  I said, “No. No. I'm all right.”

  She said, “You're all right like I'm the Virgin Mary. C'mere. Get out of the middle of the sidewalk.”

  She led me round the corner to a coffee bar and sat me at a table. She said, “Don't move unless you're, like, going to faint, okay? In which case, put your head … somewhere. Where is it you're supposed to put your head? Between your knees?” Then she went to the counter and came back with some orange juice. “When was the last time you ate?” she asked.

  And I—sinner and softspined poltroon—let her believe what she was believing. I said, “Can't remember exactly,” and I downed the orange juice as if it were an elixir that could return to me everything that I have so fa
r lost.

  Lost? you repeat, ever vigilant for triggers.

  Yes. What I've lost: my music, Beth, my mother, a childhood, memories that other people take for granted.

  Sonia? you ask. Sonia as well? Would you have her back if you could, Gideon?

  Yes, of course, is my reply. But a different Sonia.

  And that answer stops me. Because contained within it is a reservoir of remorse for what I'd forgotten about my sister.

  3 October, 6:00 P.M.

  When I was able to get my raging bowels under control and to breathe normally, Libby and I returned to the news library. There, five bulging manila envelopes awaited us, crammed with newspaper cuttings from over twenty years ago. They were roughly clipped from papers and dog-eared; they were musty smelling and discoloured with age.

  While Libby searched out a second chair so that she could join me at the table, I reached for the first envelope and opened it.

  KILLER NANNY CONVICTED leapt out at me, with the unspoken reassurance that little had changed with newspaper headlines in the last two decades. The words were accompanied by a picture, and there she was before me, my sister's killer. The photograph looked as if it had been taken very early on in the legal process, since Katja Wolff had been caught by the lens not at the Old Bailey or in prison somewhere but in the Earl's Court Road as she came out of the Kensington police station in the company of a stubby man in an ill-fitting suit. Just behind him, partially obscured by the doorway, was a figure I would not have been able to make out had I not known the shape of him and the size of him and the general look of him from nearly twenty-five years of daily sessions on the violin: Raphael Robson. I registered the presence of these two men—assuming the former to be Katja Wolff 's solicitor—but what I focused on was Katja herself.

  Much had changed for her since the day of the sunny picture that had been taken in the back garden. Of course, that photograph had been posed while this one had obviously been snapped in that frantic rush that exists between the time a newsworthy figure leaves a building and the time she enters a vehicle which whisks her away. What was evident in the picture was that public notoriety—at least of this sort—hadn't suited Katja Wolff. She looked thin and ill. And whereas the back-garden shot had depicted her smiling up at the camera openly and happily, this shot had captured her trying to conceal her face. The photographer must have got in quite close, because the picture wasn't grainy as one would expect from a telephoto shot. Indeed, every detail of Katja Wolff 's face seemed harshly highlighted.

  Her mouth was pressed shut so her lips were thin. Dark skin formed half-moon bruises beneath her eyes. Her aquiline features had sharpened unappealingly from a loss in weight. Her arms were sticklike, and where her blouse formed a V, her collar bone looked like the edge of a plank.

  I read the copy to find that Mr. Justice St. John Wilkes had passed the mandatory life sentence for murder upon Katja Wolff, with an unusual recommendation made to the Home Office that she serve no less than twenty years. According to the correspondent, who evidently had been present in the courtroom, the defendant had leapt to her feet upon hearing the sentence pronounced and demanded to speak. “Let me tell what happened,” she was reported as saying. But her offer to speak now—after having maintained her right to silence not only through the trial but throughout the investigation as well—smacked of panic and deal-making, and it came too late.

  “We know what happened,” Bertram Cresswell-White, senior Treasury Counsel, declared later to the press. “We heard it from the police, we heard it from the family, we heard it from the forensic laboratory and from Miss Wolff 's own friends. Placed in circumstances which she found increasingly difficult, seeking to vent her anger in a situation in which she felt she was being unfairly disciplined, and given the opportunity to rid the world of a child who was imperfect anyway, she willfully and with malice towards the Davies family shoved Sonia Davies beneath the water in her own bathtub and held her there—despite the child's pathetic struggles—until she drowned. At which point, Miss Wolff raised the alarm. This is what happened. This is what was proved. And it is for this that Mr. Justice Wilkes handed down the sentence required by law.”

  “She'll serve twenty years, Dad.” Yes. Yes. That's what he says to Granddad when my father comes into the room where we are waiting for word: Granddad, Gran, and I. I remember. We are in the drawing room, lined up on the sofa, myself in the middle. And yes, my mother is there as well, and she's crying. As she always is, it seems to me, not just after Sonia's death but after Sonia's birth as well.

  Birth is supposed to be a joyful time, but Sonia's birth could not have been. I finally realised that as I flipped the first news cutting over and looked at the second one—a continuation of the front-page story—that lay beneath it. For there I discovered a photograph of the victim, and to my shame I saw what I had forgotten or deliberately erased from my mind for more than two decades about my younger sister.

  What I'd forgotten was the first thing that Libby noticed and mentioned when she rejoined me with a second chair, towing it along behind her as she came into the news library again. Of course, she didn't know it was my sister's picture since I hadn't told her why we'd come to the Press Association office in the first place. She'd heard me ask for cuttings on the Katja Wolff trial, but that was the extent of it.

  Libby scooted herself to the table, half-turned towards me, and she reached for the picture, saying, “What've you got?” And then when she saw, she said, “Oh. She's Down's Syndrome, right? Who is she?”

  “My sister.”

  “Really? But you've never said …” She looked from the picture to me. She went on carefully, either choosing her words or choosing how far she wished to go with their implications, “Were you, like … ashamed of her or something? I mean … Gosh. It's no big deal. Down's Syndrome, I mean.”

  “Or something,” I said. “I was or something. Something contemptible. Something bad.”

  “What, then?”

  “I couldn't remember her. Or any of this.” I gestured to the files. “I couldn't remember any of this. I was eight years old, someone drowned my sister—”

  “Drowned your—”

  I clutched her arm to stop the rest. I had no need for the staff of the news library to know who I was. Believe me, my shame was great enough without having my identity attached to it openly.

  “Look,” I told Libby tersely. “Look for yourself. And I couldn't remember her, Libby. I couldn't remember the first bloody thing about her.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  Because I didn't want to.

  3 October, 10:30 P.M.

  I expect you to leap upon that admission with a warrior's triumph, Dr. Rose, but you say nothing. You merely watch me, and while you have schooled your features to betray nothing, you have little power over the light that comes to your eyes, dark though they might be. I see it there for just an instant—that spark again—and it tells me you wish me to hear what I myself have just said.

  I couldn't remember my sister because I didn't want to remember her. That must be the case. We don't want to remember, so we choose to forget. Except isn't the truth that sometimes we simply don't need to remember. And other times we are told to forget.

  Here's what I can't understand, though. My grandfather's episodes were the Great Unspoken in Kensington Square, and yet I remember them clearly. I have vivid memories of what led up to them, of the music that my grandmother used in an attempt to forestall them, of their occurrences and the chaos that accompanied them, and of the aftermath in which tears flowed as attendants fetched him for a spell in the country to rid him of them. Yet we never spoke of his episodes. So why do I remember them—and him—but not my sister?

  Your grandfather figures larger in your life than your sister, you tell me, because of your music. He plays a leading part in the drama that is your musical history, even if a segment of his rôle takes place within the fiction that is the Gideon Davies Legend. To repress him as you've apparently re
pressed the memory of Sonia—

  Repressed? Why repressed? Are you agreeing that I haven't wanted to have memories of my sister, Dr. Rose?

  Repression isn't a conscious choice, you tell me, and your voice is quiet, compassionate, calm. It's associated with an emotional, psychological, or physical state too overwhelming for someone to handle, Gideon. For example, if as children we witness something terrifying or incomprehensible to us—sexual intercourse between our parents is a good illustration—we shove it out of our conscious awareness because at that age we have no tools to deal with what we've seen, to assimilate it in a fashion that makes sense to us. Even as adults, people who suffer horrific accidents generally have no memory of the catastrophe simply because it is horrific. We don't actively make the choice to shove an image from our mind, Gideon. We simply do it. Repression is how we protect ourselves. It's how our mind protects itself from something it isn't yet prepared to face.

  Then what—what—can I not face about my sister, Dr. Rose? Although I did remember Sonia, didn't I? When I was writing about Mother, I remembered her. I'd blocked just one detail about her. Until I saw the picture, I didn't know she was Down's.

  So the fact that she was Down's figures in all this, doesn't it? It must, because it's the one detail that had to be revealed to me. I couldn't dredge it up. Nothing led me to it.

  You weren't able to dredge up Katja Wolff either, you point out to me.

  So Down's and Katja Wolff are connected, aren't they, Dr. Rose? They must be.

  5 October

  I couldn't remain in the news library once I saw that picture of my sister and heard Libby voice what I myself could not say. I wanted to remain there. I had five envelopes of information in front of me, all detailing what had happened to my family twenty years ago. No doubt I would also have discovered within those envelopes every significant name of every person who had been involved in the investigation and the legal proceedings that followed it. But I found that I couldn't read any further once I saw that picture of Sonia. Because seeing that picture allowed me to visualise my sister under the water: with her so-round head turning side to side and her eyes—those eyes which even in a newspaper photograph show that she was born anomalous—looking looking always looking because they cannot keep themselves from looking upon her killer. This is someone she trusts, loves, depends upon, and needs, who is holding her down beneath the water, and she doesn't understand. She is only two years old, and even if she had been a normal child, she would not have understood what was happening. But she isn't normal. She wasn't born normal. And nothing in the two years that comprise her short life has ever been normal.