A Traitor to Memory

  He asks me if I know what happened to my sister. I say I know something bad happened to Sosy. There were lots of people in the house, I tell him, and they took her to hospital.

  “Your mum's told you that she's with God now, hasn't she?” he asks.

  And I say yes. Sosy's with God.

  He asks me if I know what that means, to be with God.

  I tell him that it means Sosy died.

  “Do you know how she died?” he asks me.

  I lower my head. I feel my feet bounce against the front of the sofa. I say that I'm meant to practise my instrument for three hours, that Raphael has told me I must master something—an Allegro, is it?—if I want to meet Mr. Stern next month. Mother reaches down and stops my feet bouncing. She says that I'm to try to answer the policeman.

  I know the answer. I've heard the tramp of footsteps running up the stairs and into the bathroom. I've been a witness to the cries in the night. I've listened to the whispered conversations. I've walked in on questions being asked and accusations being made. So I know what happened to my little sister.

  In the bath, I tell him. Sosy died in the bath.

  “Where were you when Sosy died?” he asks me.

  Listening to the violin, I say.

  Mother speaks then. She says that Raphael has given me some music to listen to twice each day because I'm not playing it as well as I should.

  “So you're learning to play the fiddle, are you?” the policeman asks me kindly.

  “I'm a violinist, not a fiddler,” I reply.

  “Ah,” the policeman says, and he smiles. “A violinist. I stand corrected.” He settles more comfortably into his chair, rests his hands on the tops of his thighs, and says, “Lad, your mum tells me that she and your dad haven't yet told you exactly how your little sister died.”

  In the bath, I repeat. She died in the bath.

  “True. But, lad, it wasn't an accident. Someone hurt the little girl. Someone meant to hurt her. Do you know what that means?”

  I picture sticks and stones, and that's what I say. Hurt means throwing rocks, I tell him. Hurt means putting out a foot in front of someone, hurt means hitting or pinching or biting. I think of all those things happening to Sosy.

  The policeman says, “That's one kind of hurting. But there's another sort, a sort done by an adult to a child. Do you know what I mean by that?”

  Getting spanked, I say.

  “More than that.”

  And this is when Dad comes into the room. Has he just got home from work? Has he been at work at all? How long after Sonia's death is this? I'm trying to place the recollection in a context, but the only context I have is that if the police are asking the family questions, it must be before Katja was charged with anything.

  Dad sees what's going on and he puts a stop to it. I remember that. And he's angry: both at Mother and at the policeman. He says, “What's going on here, Eugenie?” as the policeman gets to his feet.

  She says, “The inspector wanted to ask Gideon some questions.”

  He says, “Why?”

  The policeman says, “Everyone must be questioned, Mr. Davies.”

  Dad says, “You aren't assuming that Gideon—”

  And Mother says his name. She says it in the same way Gran says Jack when she's hoping to forestall an episode.

  Dad tells me to go to my room, and the policeman says that he's only prolonging the inevitable. I don't know what that means, but I do as I'm told—as I always do when Dad is the one giving the or-ders—and I leave the room. I hear the inspector say, “This only makes the situation more frightening for the lad,” and I hear Dad say, “Now, you listen to me—” as Mother says, “Please, Richard,” in a voice that breaks.

  Mother weeping. I should be used to this by now. Wearing grey or black, grey of face as well, she has wept for more than two years, it seems. But weeping or otherwise, she isn't able to alter the circumstances of that day.

  From the mezzanine, I see the policeman leave. I see Mother show him to the door. I see him speak to her bent head, watch her intently , reach out to her then withdraw his hand. Then Dad calls out Mother's name and she turns. She doesn't see me as she goes back to him. Dad shouts at her behind the closed door.

  Then hands are on my shoulders and I'm pulled back from the railing. I look up to see Sarah-Jane Beckett standing over me. She crouches down. She puts her arm round my shoulders just as my mother did, but neither her arm nor her body is shaking. We stay just like that for several minutes—and all the while Dad's voice is loud and sharp and Mother's is tentative and afraid. “… No more of this, Eugenie,” Dad says, “I won't have it. Do you hear me?”

  I sense more than anger in those words. I sense violence, Granddad's kind of violence, violence that is forged on the wheel of a mind collapsing. I am afraid.

  I look up at Sarah-Jane, seeking … what? Protection? Affirmation of what I'm hearing below? Distraction? Any of it, all of it. But she is rapt by the drawing room door, and her gaze is fixed to its dark panels. She watches that door, unblinking, and her fingers tighten on my shoulder, taking me to the threshold of pain. I whimper and glance down at her hand and see that her fingernails are bitten and torn, with angry hangnails that are chewed and bleeding. But her face is glowing and her breathing is deep and she doesn't move till the conversation below us ceases and footsteps fire against the parquet floor. Then she takes my hand and pulls me along in her wake, up the stairs to the second floor, past the door of the nursery—closed now—and back to my room where the school books have been re-opened to the Amazon River that crawls like a poisonous serpent across a continent.

  What's happening between your parents? you ask me.

  And the answer seems obvious to me now. Blame.

  11 October

  Sonia's dead and there must be a reckoning. This reckoning must be made not only in a courtroom of the Old Bailey, not only in the courtroom of public opinion, but also in the courtroom of the family itself. For someone must take the burden of responsibility for Sonia: first for her birth—imperfect as she was—then for the scores of medical problems that plagued her short life, and last for her violent and premature death. I know this now, although I could not have known it then: There is no surviving what occurred in that bathroom in Kensington Square if blame cannot be assigned somewhere.

  Dad comes to me. Sarah-Jane and I have finished our lesson, and she's left with James the Lodger. I've watched them from my window as they cross the flagstones at the front of the house and go out through the gate. Sarah-Jane has stepped back to let James the Lodger hold the gate open for her, and she's waited for him on the other side and taken his arm. She's leaned into him that way women do, so that he might feel her nearly non-existent breasts press against his arm. But if he's felt them, he's given no sign. Instead, he's started walking in the direction of the pub, and she's taken care to match her steps to his.

  I've put on a piece of music assigned by Raphael. I'm listening to it when my father joins me. I'm trying to feel the notes as well as to hear them, because only if I feel the notes will I be able to find them on my instrument.

  Dad searches me out where I sit on the floor in a corner of the room. He squats in front of me and the music swirls round us. We live in the music till the movement is over. Dad turns off the stereo. He says, “Come here, son,” and he sits on the bed. I go to him and stand before him.

  He studies me, and I want to wriggle away, but I don't. He says, “You live for the music, don't you?” and he smooths his hand through my hair. “You concentrate on the music, Gideon. Just on the music and nothing else.”

  I can smell the scent of him: lemons and starch, so completely unlike the scent of cigars. I say, “He asked me how Sosy died.”

  Dad draws me to him. He says, “She's gone now. No one can harm you.”

  He's talking about Katja. I've heard her leave. I've seen her in the company of the nun, so perhaps she's returned to the convent. Her name isn't mentioned within our little world.
Neither is Sonia's. Unless the policeman brings one of them up.

  I say, “He said someone hurt Sosy.”

  Dad says, “Think of the music, Gideon. Listen to the music and master it, son. That's all you have to do just now.”

  But that turns out not to be the case, because the policeman instructs my father to bring me to the station on the Earl's Court Road, where we sit in a small, brightly lit room, in the company of a woman who wears a suit like a man and listens watchfully to the questions I'm asked, like a guardian who's there to protect me from something. Asking the questions is Ginger Hair himself.

  What he wants to know is something simple, he tells me. “You know who Katja Wolff is, don't you, lad?” I look from my father to the woman. She wears spectacles and when the light hits them, the lenses reflect it and hide her eyes.

  Dad says, “Of course he knows who Katja Wolff is. He isn't an idiot. Get to the point.”

  The policeman won't be hurried. He talks to me as if Dad were not there. He takes me from Sosy's birth, through Katja's coming to live with us, to the care that Sosy received at her hands. Dad protests at this. “How is an eight-year-old boy supposed to answer these sorts of questions?”

  The policeman says that children are observant, that I will be able to tell them more than Dad imagines possible.

  I've been given a can of Coke and a biscuit studded with nuts and sultanas, and they sit before me on the table like a three-dimensional exclamation mark. I watch the moisture form its beadwork on the can, and I run my finger through it to shape a treble clef on the curving side. I'm missing my three-hour morning practice to be here in the police station. This makes me restless, anxious, and difficult. I am already quite afraid.

  Of what? you ask me.

  Of the questions themselves, of giving the wrong answers, of the tension that I sense in my father which, now that I consider it, seems so at odds with my mother's grief. Shouldn't he have been prostrate with sorrow, Dr. Rose? Or at least desperate to get to the bottom of what happened to Sonia? But he isn't sorrowful, and if he's desperate, it seems like a feeling born of an urgency that he hasn't explained to anyone.

  Do you answer the questions despite your fear? you ask.

  I answer them as well as I can. They lead me through the two years that Katja Wolff has lived in our home. For some reason, they seem to focus primarily on her relationship with James the Lodger and Sarah-Jane Beckett. But at long last they veer to her care of Sosy and to one particular point in that care.

  “Did you ever hear Katja shout at your little sister?” the policeman asked.

  No, I had not.

  “Did you ever see her discipline Sonia if she misbehaved?”

  No, I had not.

  “Did you ever see her do anything a little bit rough with Sonia? Shake her a bit when she wouldn't stop crying? Smack her bottom when she didn't obey? Pull on her arm to get her attention? Grab her leg to move her about when she changed her nappies?”

  Sosy cried a lot, I tell him. Katja got out of bed in the night to take care of Sosy. She talked German to her—

  “In an angry voice?”

  —and sometimes she cried as well. I could hear her from my room, and once I got up and looked into the corridor and saw her walking up and down, holding Sosy on her shoulder. Sosy wouldn't stop crying, so Katja put her back in her cot. She took a set of plastic baby keys and jangled them over Sosy's head and I heard her say, “Bitte, bitte, bitte” which is German for please. And when the keys didn't make Sosy stop crying, she grabbed the side of the cot and gave it a shake.

  “You saw this?” The policeman leans towards me across the table. “You saw Katja do this? Are you certain, lad?”

  And something in his voice tells me I've given an answer that's pleasing. I say I'm certain: Sosy cried and Katja shook the side of the cot.

  “I think we're getting somewhere now,” the policeman says.

  12 October

  How much of what a child reports is the stuff of his memory, Dr. Rose? How much of what a child reports is the stuff of his dreams? How much of what I say to the detective in those hours in the police station comes from what I actually witnessed? How much grows from sources as diverse as the tension I feel between my father and the policeman and my desire to please them both?

  It isn't much of a leap from shaking the side of a cot to shaking a child. And from there, it is the work of a moment to fancy having seen a small arm twisted, a small body jerked upright to put a coat on, a small round face squeezed and pinched when someone spits her food on the floor, a tangle of hair yanked through a comb, and legs wrenched into a pair of pink dungarees.

  Ah, you say. Your voice is noncommittal and carefully, scrupulously without judgement, Dr. Rose. Your hands, however, rise, pressed together in an attitude that resembles prayer. You place them just beneath your chin. You don't avert your gaze but I avert mine.

  I see what you're thinking, and I'm thinking it as well. My answers to that policeman's questions were what sent Katja Wolff to prison.

  But I didn't give evidence at her trial, Dr. Rose. So if what I said was so important, why wasn't I called to give evidence? Anything less than the whole truth sworn to in a court of law was like an article appearing on the front page of a tabloid: something to be taken at face value only, something suggesting that further investigation into the matter by professionals might be required.

  If I said that Katja Wolff harmed my sister, all that would have come from that is their looking into the allegation. Isn't that the case? And if corroboration existed for what I told them, they would have found it.

  That has to be what happened, Dr. Rose.

  15 October

  I might have truly seen it. I might have been a witness to those things which I declared as having occurred between my little sister and her nanny. If so many sections of my mind are blank when it comes to the past, how illogical is it to assume that somewhere on that vast canvas reside images too painful to be remembered accurately?

  Pink dungarees are fairly accurate, you tell me. They come either from memory or from embellishment, Gideon.

  How could I embellish with such a detail as the colour of her overalls if she didn't wear those overalls?

  She was a little girl, you say with a shrug that's not dismissive so much as inconclusive. Little girls often wear pink.

  So you're saying I was a liar, Dr. Rose? Simultaneously a child prodigy and a liar?

  They're not mutually exclusive, you point out.

  I reel from this and you see something—anguish, horror, guilt?—on my face.

  You say, I'm not labeling you a liar now, Gideon. But you might have been then. Circumstances may have required you to lie.

  What sort of circumstances, Dr. Rose?

  You have no answer to give me other than this: Write what you remember.

  17 October

  Libby found me at the top of Primrose Hill. I was standing before that metal engraving that allows one to identify the buildings and monuments that one can see from the summit, and I was forcing myself to look from the engraving to the view—working from east to west—in order to pick each one out. From the corner of my eye, I saw her coming up the path, dressed in her black leathers. She'd left her helmet elsewhere, and the wind whipped her curls round her face.

  She said, “Saw your car in the square. I thought I'd find you here. No kite?”

  “No kite.” I touched the metal surface of the engraving, my fingers resting on St. Paul's Cathedral. I studied the skyline.

  “What's up, then? You don't look so great. Aren't you cold? What're you doing out here without a sweater?”

  Looking for answers, I thought.

  She said, “Hey! Anyone home? I'm, like, talking to you here.”

  I said, “I needed a walk.”

  She said, “You saw the shrink today, didn't you?”

  I wanted to say that I see you even when I don't see you, Dr. Rose. But I thought that she would misunderstand and take the comme
nt for a patient's obsession with his doctor, which I do not have.

  She came round the engraving to face me, blocking my view. She reached across the sheet of metal and touched her palm to my chest, saying, “What's wrong, Gid? How can I help?”

  Her touch reminded me of all that isn't happening between us—of all that would have been happening between a woman and a normal man—and the weight of this idea was suddenly too much to bear in conjunction with what was already plaguing me. I said, “I may have sent a woman to prison.”

  “What?”

  I told her the rest.

  When I had finished, she said, “You were eight years old. A cop was asking questions. You did the best you could in a bad situation. And you might have seen that stuff, too. There've been studies on this, Gid, and they say that kids don't make things up when it comes to abuse. Where there's smoke, there's fire. And anyway, someone must have confirmed what you said if you didn't testify in court.”

  “That's just it. I'm not so sure that I didn't testify, Libby.”

  “But you said—”

  “I said I'd managed to remember the policeman, the questions, the station: all of them aspects of a situation that I'd blocked from my mind. What's to say I haven't also blocked from my mind giving evidence at Katja Wolff 's trial?”

  “Oh. Yeah. I see.” She looked out at the view and tried to tame her hair, sucking in on her lower lip as she thought about what I'd said. Finally, she declared, “Okay. Let's find out what really went on, then.”

  “How?”

  “How tough can it be to dig up what happened at a trial that was probably covered by every newspaper in the country?”

  19 October

  We started with Bertram Cresswell-White, the barrister who'd prosecuted Katja Wolff for the Crown. Finding him, as Libby had promised, presented no problem. He had a room in chambers in the Temple, at Number Five Paper Buildings, and he agreed to see me once I managed to get him on the phone. He said, “I remember the case perfectly. Yes. I'm happy to speak with you about it, Mr. Davies.”