That was the key to his longevity as my instructor: He held the reins to my musical training; Dad held the reins to the rest of my life. And Raphael had always accepted this division of their responsibilities towards me.
As an adult, of course, I could have chosen to replace Raphael with someone else to accompany me on my concert tours—apart from Dad, naturally—and to be a partner to my daily sessions of practice on the violin. But at this point with more than two decades of instruction, cooperation, and partnership between us, we knew each other's styles of living and working so well that to bring in someone else had never been a consideration. Besides, when I could play, I liked playing with Raphael Robson. He was—and is—a brilliant technician. There's a spark missing in him, an additional passion that would have long ago forced him to overcome his nerves and to play publicly, knowing that playing is forging a link with an audience, which makes the quadrinomial defined by composer-music-listener-performer complete. But aside from that spark, the artistry and the love are there, as is a remarkable ability to distil technique into a series of critiques, commands, adjustments, assignments, and instructions that are understandable to the neophyte artist and invaluable to the established violinist who seeks to improve himself on his instrument. So I never considered replacing Raphael, despite his obedience to—and loathing of—my father.
I must have always sensed the antipathy between them, even if I never saw it openly. They coped despite their dislike of each other, and it was only now, when they'd begun to seem at such pains to hide their mutual loathing, that I felt compelled to question why it had existed in the first place.
The natural answer was my mother: because of how Raphael may have felt about my mother. But that seemed to explain only why Raphael disliked my father so much, Dad being in possession of what Raphael might have wanted for himself. It didn't explain my father's aversion to Raphael. There had to be something more going on.
Perhaps it came from what Raphael could give you? you offer me as potential answer.
And it's true that my father played no instrument, but I think their dislike came from something more basic and atavistic than that.
I said to Raphael as we moved from the elephants to seek out the koalas, “You were told to get me out of the house today.”
He didn't deny it. “He thinks you're dwelling too much on the past and avoiding the present.”
“What do you think?”
“I trust Dr. Rose. At least I trust Dr. Rose the father. As to Dr. Rose the daughter, I assume she's discussing the case with him.” He glanced at me anxiously as he said the word case, which reduced me to a phenomenon that would doubtless appear in a psychiatric journal at a later date, my name scrupulously withheld but everything else forming neon arrows that all pointed to me as the patient. “He's had decades of experience with the sort of thing you're going through, and that's going to count for something with her.”
“What sort of thing do you think I'm going through?”
“I know what she's called it. The amnesia bit.”
“Dad told you?”
“He would do, wouldn't he? I'm as much involved with your career as anyone.”
“But you don't believe in the amnesia, do you?”
“Gideon, it's not my place to believe or disbelieve anything.”
He led me into the koala enclosure, where simulated eucalyptus trees were formed by crisscrossing branches that rose out of the floor, and the forest in which the bears would have lived in the wild was expressed by a mural painted on a tall pink wall. A single diminutive bear slept in the V of two of the branches, nearby him hanging a bucket that contained the leaves upon which he was supposed to feed. The forest floor beneath the bear was concrete, and there were no bushes, no diversions, and no toys for him. He had no companions to break his solitude either, only the visitors to his enclosure, who whistled and called out to him, frustrated that a creature nocturnal by nature would not accommodate himself to their timetables.
I looked at all this and felt a heaviness settle onto my shoulders. “God. Why do people come to zoos?”
“To remind them of their freedom.”
“To exult in their superiority.”
“I suppose that's true as well. After all, as humans we hold the keys, don't we?”
“Ah,” I said. “I did think there was a greater purpose behind this sojourn to Regent's Park than just getting some air. I've never seen you as interested either in exercise or in animals. So what did Dad say? ‘Show him he ought to count his blessings. Show him how bad life really can be’?”
“There are worse places than a zoo if that was his intention, Gideon.”
“Then what? And don't tell me you thought up the zoo on your own.”
“You're brooding. It's not healthy. He knows it.”
I laughed without humour. “As if what's happened already is healthy?”
“We don't know what's happened. We can only guess. And that's what this amnesia business is. It's a qualified guess.”
“So he's brought you on board. I wouldn't have thought that possible, your past relationship with him considered.”
Raphael kept his gaze on the pathetic koala, a ball of fur unmoving in the embrace of the wood that posed as branches from his native land. “My relationship with your father isn't your concern,” he said steadily, but the pinpoints of perspiration—always his Nemesis—began to sprout on his forehead. Another two minutes and his face would be dripping and he'd be using his handkerchief to mop up the sweat.
“You were in the house the night Sonia drowned,” I said. “Dad told me that. So you've always known everything, haven't you? Everything that happened, what led up to her death, and what followed it.”
“Let's get some tea,” Raphael said.
We went to the restaurant in Barclays Court, although a simple kiosk selling hot and cold drinks would have done as well. He wouldn't say anything until he'd meticulously looked over the mundane menu of grilled everything and ordered a pot of Darjeeling and a toasted tea cake from a middle-aged waitress wearing retro spectacles.
She said, “Got it, luv,” and waited for my order, tapping her pencil against her pad. I ordered the same although I wasn't hungry. She took herself off to fetch it.
It wasn't a mealtime, so there were few people in the restaurant and no one at all near our table. We were next to a window, though, and Raphael directed his attention outside, where a man was struggling to unhook a blanket from the wheels of a push chair while a woman with a toddler in her arms gesticulated and gave him instructions.
I said, “It feels like night in my memory, when Sonia drowned. But if that's the case, what were you doing at the house? Dad told me you were there.”
“It was late afternoon when she drowned, half past five, nearly six. I'd stayed to make some phone calls.”
“Dad said you were probably contacting Juilliard that day.”
“I wanted you to be able to attend once they'd made you the offer, so I was lining up support for the idea. It was inconceivable to me that anyone would think of turning down Juilliard—”
“How had they heard of me? I'd done those few concerts, but I don't remember actually applying to go there. I just remember being invited to attend.”
“I'd written to them. I'd sent them tapes. Reviews. A piece that Radio Times did on you. They were interested and invited the application, which I filled out.”
“Did Dad know about this?”
Again, the perspiration speckled his forehead, and this time he used one of the napkins on the table to mop it up. He said, “I wanted to present the invitation as a fait accompli because I thought that if I had the invitation in hand, your father would agree to your attending.”
“But there wasn't the money, was there?” I concluded grimly. And just for a moment, oddly enough, I felt it again, that searing disappointment bordering on fury to know as an eight-year-old that Juilliard was not and would never be available to me because of money, because in our li
ves there never was nearly enough money to live.
Raphael's next words surprised me, then. “Money was never the issue. We would have come up with it eventually. I was always certain of that. And they'd offered a scholarship for your tuition. But your father wouldn't hear of your going. He didn't want to separate the family. I assumed his main concern was leaving his parents, and I offered to take you to New York on my own, allowing everyone else to remain here in London, but he wouldn't accept that solution either.”
“So it wasn't financial? Because I'd thought—”
“No. Ultimately, it wasn't financial.”
I must have looked either confused or betrayed by this information, because Raphael continued, saying quickly, “Your father believed you didn't need Juilliard, Gideon. It's a compliment to us both, I suppose. He thought you could get the instruction you needed right here in London, and he believed you'd succeed without a move to New York. And time proved him right. Look where you are today.”
“Yes. Just look,” I said ironically, as Raphael fell into the same trap that I'd fallen into myself, Dr. Rose.
Look where I am today, huddled pathetically into the window seat in my music room where the last thing made in the room is the music that defines my life. I'm scribbling random thoughts in an effort that I don't quite believe in, trying to recall details that my subconscious has judged as better forgotten. And now I'm discovering that even some of the details that I do dredge up out of my memory—like the invitation to Juilliard and what prevented me from accepting it—are not accurate. If that's the case, what can I rely on, Dr. Rose?
You'll know, you answer quietly.
But I ask how you can be so sure. The facts of my past seem more and more like moving targets to me, and they're scurrying past a background of faces that I haven't seen in years. So are they actual facts, Dr. Rose, or are they merely what I wish the facts to be?
I said to Raphael, “Tell me what happened when Sonia drowned. That night. That afternoon. What happened? Getting Dad to talk about it …” I shook my head. The waitress returned with our tea and tea cakes spread across a plastic tray that, in keeping with the overall theme of the zoo, was painted to look like something else, in this case wood. She arranged cups, saucers, plates, and pots to her liking, and I waited till she was gone before I went on. “Dad won't say much. If I want to talk about music, the violin, that's fine. That looks like progress. If I want to go in another direction … He'll go, but it's hell for him. I can see that much.”
“It was hell for everyone.”
“Katja Wolff included?”
“Her hell came afterwards, I dare say. She couldn't have been anticipating the judge recommending she serve twenty years before parole.”
“Is that why at the trial … I read that she jumped up and tried to make a statement once he'd passed sentence.”
“Did she?” he asked. “I didn't know. I wasn't there on the day of the verdict. I'd had enough at that point.”
“You went with her to the police station, though. In the beginning. There was that picture of the two of you coming out.”
“I expect that was coincidence. The police had everyone down for questioning at one time or another. Most of us more than once.”
“Sarah-Jane Beckett as well?”
“I expect so. Why?”
“I need to see her.”
Raphael had buttered his tea cake and raised it to his mouth, but he didn't take a bite. Instead, he watched me over the top of it. “What's that going to accomplish, Gideon?”
“It's just the direction I think I should go. And that's what Dr. Rose suggested, following my instincts, looking for connections, trying to find anything that will jar loose memories.”
“Your father's not going to be pleased.”
“So take your telephone off the hook.”
Raphael took a substantial bite of the tea cake, no doubt covering his chagrin at having been found out. But what else would he expect me to assume other than that he and Dad are having daily conversations about my progress or lack thereof? They are, after all, the two people most involved with what has happened to me, and aside from Libby and you, Dr. Rose, they are the only two who know the extent of my troubles.
“What do you expect to gain from seeing Sarah-Jane Beckett, assuming you can even find her?”
“She's in Cheltenham,” I told him. “She's been there for years. I get a card from her on my birthday and at Christmas. Don't you?”
“All right. She's in Cheltenham,” he said, ignoring my question. “How can she help?”
“I don't know. Maybe she can tell me why Katja Wolff wouldn't talk about what happened.”
“She had a right to silence, Gideon.” He placed his tea cake on his plate and took up his cup, which he held in both hands as if warming them.
“In court, right. With the police, right. She didn't have to talk. But with her solicitor? With her barrister? Why not talk to them?”
“She wasn't fluent in English. Someone might have explained her right to silence and she could have misunderstood.”
“And that brings up something else I don't understand,” I told him. “If she was foreign, why did she serve her time in England? Why wasn't she sent back to Germany?”
“She fought repatriation through the courts, and she won.”
“How do you know?”
“How could I help knowing? It was in all the newspapers at the time. She was like Myra Hindley: Every legal move she made from behind bars was scrutinised by the media. It was a nasty case, Gideon. It was a brutal case. It destroyed your parents, it killed both your grandparents within three years, and it damn well might have ruined you had not every effort in the world been made to keep you out of it. So to dig it all up now … all these years afterwards …” He set down his cup and added more tea to it. He said, “You aren't touching your food.”
“I'm not hungry.”
“When did you last have a meal? You look like hell. Eat the tea cake. Or at least drink the tea.”
“Raphael, what if Katja Wolff didn't drown Sonia?”
He put the tea pot back on the table. He took the sugar and added a packet to his cup, following this with the milk. It came to me then that he did it all in reverse of the usual order.
He said once the pouring and sugaring was done, “It hardly makes sense that she'd keep quiet if she hadn't killed Sonia, Gideon.”
“Perhaps she suspected that the police would twist her words. Or the Crown Prosecutors, should she have stood in the witness box.”
“They might have done, all of them, yes. Indeed. But her solicitor and her barrister would have been unlikely to twist her words should she have seen fit to give them any.”
“Did my father make her pregnant?”
He'd lifted his cup, but he set it back on its saucer. He looked out of the window, where the couple with the push chair had now unloaded it of a bag, two baby bottles, and a pack of disposable nappies. They'd turned the chair on its side and the man was attacking the wheel with the heel of his shoe. Raphael said quietly, “That has nothing to do with the problem,” and I knew he was not speaking about the blanket that continued to make the push chair impossible to roll forward.
“How can you say that? How can you know? Did he make her pregnant? And is that what destroyed my parents' marriage?”
“Only the people within a marriage can say what destroyed it.”
“All right. Accepted. And as to the rest? Did he make Katja pregnant?”
“What does he say? Have you asked him?”
“He says no. But he would do, wouldn't he?”
“So you've had your answer.”
“Then who?”
“Perhaps the lodger. James Pitchford was in love with her. The day she walked into your parents' house, James fell hard and he never recovered.”
“But I thought James and Sarah-Jane … I remember them together, James the Lodger and Sarah-Jane. From the window, I saw them heading out in the evening. And w
hispering together in the kitchen, like intimates.”
“That would have been before Katja, I expect.”
“Why?”
“Because after Katja arrived, James spent most of his free hours with her.”
“So Katja displaced Sarah-Jane in more than one way.”
“You could say that, yes, and I see where you're heading. But she was with James Pitchford when Sonia drowned. And James confirmed that. He had no reason to lie for her. If he was going to lie for anyone back then, he would have lied for the woman he loved. In fact, had Sarah-Jane not been with James when Sonia was murdered, I expect James would have gladly given Katja an alibi that would have made her seem merely derelict in her duties and consequently responsible for a tragic death but not a malevolent one.”
“And as it was, it was murder,” I said reflectively.
“When all the facts were presented, yes.”
GIDEON
25 October
When all the facts were presented, Raphael Robson said. And that's what I'm looking for, isn't it, an accurate presentation of the facts.
You don't reply. Instead, you keep your face expressionless as you no doubt were instructed to do as a psychiatric intern or whatever it was that you were as a student, and you wait for me to offer an explanation for why I have veered so decidedly into this area. Seeing this, I flounder for words. In floundering, I begin to question myself. I examine my motivation for what might prompt me to engage in displacement—as you would call it—and I admit to every one of my fears.
What are they? you ask.
You already know what they are, Dr. Rose.
I suspect, you say, I consider, I speculate, and I wonder, but I do not know. You're the only one who knows, Gideon.
All right. I accept that. And to show you how wholeheartedly I accept that, I'll name them for you: fear of crowds, fear of being trapped in the Underground, fear of excessive speed, complete terror of snakes.
All fairly common fears, you note.
As are fear of failure, fear of my father's disapproval, fear of enclosed spaces—
You raise an eyebrow at that, a momentary lapse in your lack of expression.