A Traitor to Memory

  “That's not the decision she made, Gideon. I can't tell you why.” He squatted and released the clips on the case. He lifted the top. Inside, the Guarneri lay burnished by the light, and the glow of the wood seemed to make an accusation to which I had no simple reply. “So we argued. The three of us argued. And the next time Sonia was difficult, which happened the following day, Katja … took care of the problem.” He lifted the violin from the case and unclipped the bow. He said, and his voice was not unkind and the rims of his eyes were redder than before, “You know the truth now. Will you play for me, son?”

  And I wanted to, Dr. Rose. But I knew that there was nothing within me, nothing of what had previously driven the music from my soul through my body to my arms and my fingers. That is my curse, even now.

  I said, “I remember people in the house the night that … when Sonia … I remember voices, footsteps, my mother calling your name.”

  “We were panicked. Everyone was panicked. There were paramedics. Firemen. Your grandparents. Pitchford. Raphael.”

  “Raphael was there?”

  “He was there.”

  “Doing what?”

  “I don't recall. Perhaps he was on the phone to Juilliard. He'd been trying for months to come up with a way to convince us it was possible for you to attend. He was set on it, more set than you were.”

  “So all this happened round the time of Juilliard?”

  Dad lowered his arms, which had been offering me the Guarneri. The violin hung from one hand and the bow from the other, orphans of my egregious impotence. He said, “Where is this taking us, Gideon? What the hell has this to do with your instrument? God knows I'm trying to cooperate, but you're not giving me anything to measure with.”

  “Measure what?”

  “How do I know if there's progress? How do you know if there's progress?”

  And I could not answer him, Dr. Rose. Because the truth is what he fears and what I dread: I can not tell if this is any good, if the direction I'm heading is the direction that will take me back to the life I once knew and held so dear.

  I said, “The night it happened … I was in my room. I've remembered that. I've remembered the shouting and the paramedics—the sound of them rather than the sight of them—and I've remembered Sarah-Jane listening at the door, inside my room with me, saying that she wouldn't be leaving after all. But I don't remember her planning to leave before Sonia … before what happened.”

  I could see Dad's right hand tighten on the neck of the Guarneri. Clearly, this wasn't the response he'd been looking for when he'd taken the instrument out of its case. He said, “A violin like this needs to be played. It also needs to be stored properly. Look at this bow, Gideon. Look at the condition of its hairs. And when was the last time you put a bow away without loosening it? Or don't you think about that sort of thing any longer, now that you're concentrating all your efforts on the past?”

  I thought of the day that I'd tried to play, the day Libby had heard me, the day that I'd learned for certain what I'd only felt like a premonition before: that my music was gone, and irretrievably so.

  Dad said, “You never used to do this sort of thing. This instrument wasn't just left lying on the floor. It was stored away from the heat and the cold. It wasn't near a radiator, nor was it within six yards of an open window.”

  “If Sarah-Jane was planning to leave before everything happened, why didn't she leave?” I asked.

  “The strings haven't been cleaned since Wigmore Hall, have they? When was the last time you failed to clean the strings after a concert, Gideon?”

  “There wasn't a concert. I didn't play.”

  “And haven't played since. Haven't thought to play. Haven't had the nerve to—”

  “Tell me about Sarah-Jane Beckett!”

  “God damn it! Sarah-Jane Beckett is not the issue.”

  “Then why won't you answer?”

  “Because there's nothing to say. She was sacked. All right? Sarah-Jane Beckett was sacked as well.”

  This was the last answer I'd been expecting. I'd thought he would tell me she'd become engaged or found a better position or decided to make a change in career. But that she, too, had been sacked along with Katja Wolff … I'd not considered that possibility.

  Dad said, “We'd had to cut back. We couldn't keep Sarah-Jane Beckett and Raphael Robson and have a nursemaid for Sonia as well. So we'd given Sarah-Jane two months' notice.”

  “When?”

  “Shortly before we found that we'd have to sack Katja Wolff.”

  “So when Sonia died and Katja left …”

  “There was no need for Sarah-Jane to go as well.” He turned and replaced the Guarneri in its case. His movements were slow; his scoliosis made him seem like a man in his eighties.

  I said, “Then Sarah-Jane herself might have—”

  “She was with Pitchford when your sister was drowned, Gideon. She swore to that and Pitchford confirmed it.” Dad straightened from the case and turned back to me. He looked done in. I felt anguish, guilt, and sorrow surge within me to know that I was forcing him to consider matters he'd buried along with my sister. But I had to continue. It seemed that we were making progress for the first time since I'd had the episode at Wigmore Hall—and yes, I use that word deliberately just as you have done, Dr. Rose, an episode—and feeling that progress was being made, I could not back away from it.

  I said, “Why didn't she talk?”

  “I just said she—”

  “Katja Wolff, not Sarah-Jane Beckett. Cresswell-White said that she spoke to the police once and never spoke to anyone else. About the crime, that is. About Sonia.”

  “I can't answer that question. I don't know the answer. I don't care to know. And—” Here he took up the sheet music that I'd left on the stand when I'd thought to play, and he closed it slowly, seeming to put an end to something that neither one of us wanted to name. “I can't understand why you're dwelling on this at all. Hasn't Katja Wolff damaged our lives enough?”

  “It's not Katja Wolff,” I said. “It's what happened.”

  “You know what happened.”

  “I don't know everything.”

  “You know enough.”

  “I know that when I look over my life, when I write about it or talk about it, all I can remember with accuracy is the music: how I came to it, how I proceeded, the exercises that Raphael had me engage in, concerts I gave, orchestras I performed with, conductors, concertmasters, journalists who interviewed me, recordings I made.”

  “That's been your life. That's who you are.”

  But not according to Libby. I could hear her shouting at me once again. I could feel her frustration. I could drown in the wretchedness that flooded her heart.

  And I am adrift, Dr. Rose. I am a man without a country any longer. I once existed in a world I recognised and was comfortable with, a world with definite borders, peopled by citizens all speaking a language I understood. All that is foreign territory to me now, but it is no less foreign than the land I wander in, without a guide or a map, at your instructions.

  11

  YASMIN EDWARDS HAD a busy morning, for which she was grateful. She'd received half a dozen referrals from a women's shelter in Lambeth, and the six women in question all turned up at the shop at once. None of them were needing wigs—these usually went to women undergoing chemo or afflicted with alopecia—but all of them wanted make-overs, and Yasmin was happy to accommodate them. She knew what it felt like to be down and out because of a man, and she wasn't surprised when the women first hung back and spoke in hushed tones about their personal appearance and the changes they hoped Yasmin Edwards could make for them. So Yasmin started out gently, letting them decide for themselves over magazines, coffee, and biscuits.

  “You make me look like this one?” was the question that broke the ice among them. One of the women—who wouldn't see sixty again and who must have tipped the scales at nearly twenty stone—had chosen a picture of a nubile black model with sumptuous breast
s and pouting lips.

  “You look like that when we done, girl, I'm taking up residence in this damn shop,” one of the others said. Soft giggles among them turned to hearty laughter, and everything was easy after that.

  Oddly, it was the scent of the cleaning fluid that Yasmin was using on the work tops after the women left that took her back abruptly to the morning. For a moment, she wondered why, until she recalled that she'd been cleaning the bathtub of the few wig hairs that Daniel hadn't managed to remove after his washing chore on the previous night when Katja came into the bathroom to clean her teeth.

  “You going in to work today?” Yasmin asked her companion. Daniel had already left for school, so they were free to talk openly for the first time. Or at least they were free to make the attempt.

  “Of course,” Katja said. “Why would I not?”

  She still made her W's into V's. Sometimes it seemed to Yasmin that twenty years away from her native language would have been enough to alter Katja's most deeply rooted habits, but that final one still remained. There had been a time when Yasmin had found her companion's way of speaking English appealing, but she did not find it so now. She couldn't determine when the charm had diminished for her. Recently, she thought. But she couldn't afford to put an exact date to the change in her feelings.

  “He said that you'd missed. Four times in twelve weeks is what he said.”

  In the mirror above the basin, Katja's blue eyes fixed on Yasmin's. “You believe that, Yas? He's a copper and you and I are … You know what we are to him: fluff and dagger from inside, back in the street. I saw how he looked at us if you didn't. So why should a man like that tell us what really is when lies will serve to put us apart from each other?”

  Yasmin couldn't deny that there was truth in what Katja was saying. In her experience, police couldn't be trusted with anything. Indeed, no one in the whole legal system could be trusted if it came down to it. In the legal system, plods settled on a story and bent the facts to fit it, presenting those facts to magistrates in such a way that bail was deemed foolhardy and a trial in the Old Bailey followed by a lengthy prison sentence was the only cure for what got called a social ill. Like she had been a disease and Roger Edwards had been what she'd infected instead of what each of them had really been: she nineteen and the longtime plaything of step-fathers, step-brothers, and the friends of both and he a yellow-haired Aussie who'd chased his girlfriend to London where he'd been dumped, with a book of poems tucked under his arm. That was the same book of poems he'd left at the till at Sainsbury's where she rang up his groceries once a week, a book of poems that made her think he was something more than what she was used to.

  And he was, Roger Edwards. He was different and more in so many ways. Just not in the ways that counted.

  It was never simple: what brought a man and a woman together. Oh, it looked that way on the surface—hard cock and hot cunt—but it never was. There was no way to explain it: her history and Roger's, her fears and his mighty desperation, their mutual needs and their unspoken beliefs about what each partner should be to the other. There was only what happened. And what happened was a tedious series of accusations that were the children born of his addictions and an even more tedious series of denials that were never enough, not without proof which was in itself a spur to more accusations. And these were flung with a building paranoia that was itself fueled by the drugs and the drink until she wanted him out of her life, out of their child's life, and out of her flat no matter that their son would go fatherless like so many boys within their community, fatherless despite the promise she'd made to herself that Daniel would not grow up trapped in a web of women.

  Roger wouldn't go, though. He fought against going. He really fought. He fought the way a man fights another man, in silence and with strength and closed fists. But she was the one with the weapon, and she used it.

  Five years she'd served. She'd been arrested and charged. Because she was six feet tall, she was more than five inches taller than her husband, so, gentlemen and ladies of the jury, why had this woman felt it was necessary to use a knife to stop him when he allegedly became abusive? He'd been what was called under the influence of a foreign substance so most of his punches had gone wide or been short or merely grazed her instead of connecting with her dusky flesh, instead of bruising or better yet breaking bones. Yet she used a knife on this unfortunate man, and she managed to connect that knife with his body no less than eight times.

  More blood would have been useful in the subsequent investigation by the local police. Her blood, that is, instead of Roger's. As it was, all she had was the story itself in which an attractive bloke on the rebound catches the eye of a girl who's in hiding from the world. He coaxes her out from beneath her rock; she promises him a cool draught of forget. And if he used a little and he drank a lot, what worry was there in that? Those were, to her, familiar behaviours. It was the descent into squalor and the demand for money that she could earn at night in doorways, in parked cars, or leaning against a tree on the common with her legs spread wide that she hadn't been prepared to accept from Roger Edwards.

  “Get out, get out!” she'd screamed at him. And it was her screaming and those words that she screamed that the neighbours later remembered.

  “Just tell us the story, Mrs. Edwards,” the coppers had said to her over her husband's bloodied and very dead body. “All you need to do is to tell us the story and we'll get all this sorted out straightaway.”

  Five years in prison had been the consequence of her telling her story to the police. Five years in prison had been their way of getting things sorted out straightaway. She'd lost those years with her son, she'd come out with nothing, and she'd spent the next five years working, planning, begging, and borrowing, making it up to them both. So Katja was right, and Yasmin knew it. Only a fool trusted anything a copper had to say.

  But there was more than just the detective's words about Katja's absences—from work, from the flat, from anywhere at all—that she had to contend with. There was also the car. And no matter whether the black man could be trusted, the car itself could not lie to her.

  Yasmin said, “Headlamp on the car got itself broke, Katja. He looked that over, the plod, last night. He asked how it broke.”

  “Are you asking me the same?”

  “S'pose.” Vigorously, Yasmin wiped the cleanser into the old bathtub, as if doing so and in such a manner could rub away the spots where the porcelain had worn through to the metal lining beneath it. “I didn't hit anything that I recall. You?”

  “Why did he want to know? What business is it of his how a headlamp was broken?” Katja had finished with her teeth and she leaned forward into the mirror, inspecting her face as she always did, as Yasmin herself had done for months upon her final release from prison, checking to see that she was really there, in this particular room, guard-less, wall-less, lock-and-key-less, with what was left of her life in front of her and trying not to be completely terrified of that empty, unstructured stretch of years.

  Katja washed her face and patted it dry. She turned from the basin and leaned against it, watching Yasmin finish with the tub. When the taps were turned off, Katja spoke again. “What is he after us for, Yas?”

  “You,” Yasmin said. “He's not after me. It's you. How'd that headlamp get busted?”

  “I didn't know it was broken,” Katja said. “I haven't looked … Yas, how often do you look at the front of the car? Did you know it was broken before he pointed it out to you? No? It could have been broken for weeks. How badly is it broken? Do the lights still work? Someone probably reversed into it in the car park. Or in the street.”

  True, Yasmin thought. But wasn't there something too quick, too anxious to be believed about Katja's words? And why didn't she ask which headlamp? Wouldn't it be logical for her to want to know which of the headlamps it was?

  Katja added, “It could have happened when you were driving it, since neither one of us knew it was broken.”

  “Yeah,??
? Yasmin admitted. “I see that.”

  “Then—”

  “He wanted to know where you were. He went to where you work and he asked about you.”

  “So he says. But if he really talked to them, and if they really told him I'd missed four days, why did he give that information only to you and not to me as well? I was standing there, right in the room with the two of you. Why did he not ask me for my excuse? Think about that.”

  Yasmin did so. And she saw that what Katja was pointing out did bear weight. The detective constable hadn't asked Katja about her absences from work when the three of them were in the sitting room together. Instead, he'd confided the information in Yasmin, just exactly like they were long-lost mates.

  “You know what that means,” Katja said. “He wants to tear us apart because it'll serve his purposes. And if he manages to do it—to tear us apart—he won't waste much effort putting us back together. Even if he gets what he wants … whatever it is.”

  “He's investigating something,” Yasmin said. “Or someone. So …” She took a breath that was deep, that hurt. “'S there something you're not telling me, Katja? Something you hiding from me?”

  “This is just how it works,” Katja said. “This is just exactly how he wants it to work.”

  “But you're not answering, are you?”

  “Because I've nothing to say. Because I have nothing to hide from you or from anyone else.”

  Her eyes held Yasmin's. Her voice was firm. And they both made promises, those eyes and that voice. They also reminded Yasmin of the history between them, the solace that had been offered by one and grasped by the other, and what had finally grown from that solace to sustain them both. But nothing from the heart was indestructible. Experience had taught Yasmin Edwards that. She said, “Katja, you'd say if …”

  “If what?”

  “If …”

  Katja knelt on the floor next to the bathtub, next to Yasmin. Gently, she ran her fingers round the curve of Yasmin's ear. “You waited five years for me to get out,” she said. “There is no if, Yas.”