A Traitor to Memory

  “What the hell are you getting at?”

  “I've remembered my mother talking to you about Katja. I've remembered her suspicions.”

  “You've remembered rubbish.”

  “Sarah-Jane Beckett says James Pitchford wasn't interested in Katja. She says he wasn't actually interested in women at all. That leaves him out of the equation, Dad, which brings it down to you or Granddad, the only other men in the house. Or Raphael, I suppose, although I think both you and I know where Raphael's true affections lay.”

  “What are you implying?”

  “Sarah-Jane says Granddad was fond of Katja. She says he hung about when she was nearby. But somehow I can't see Granddad managing more than calf-love. And that leaves you.”

  “Sarah-Jane Beckett was a jealous cow,” Dad replied. “She set her sights on Pitchford the day she walked into the house. One pear-shaped syllable out of his heavily tutored mouth and she thought she'd encountered the Second Coming. She was a social climber of the first order, Gideon, and before Katja entered our lives, nothing stood between her and the top of the mountain, which was that fool Pitchford. The last thing she'd have wanted was to see a relationship developing where she herself wanted one. And I assume you have enough basic human psychology under your belt to be able to think that one through.”

  I was forced to do just that, sifting back through my time in Cheltenham to weigh what Sarah-Jane had said, placing it in the balance against what Dad was claiming now. Had there been a vindictive satisfaction in Sarah-Jane's comments about Katja Wolff? Or had she simply tried to accommodate a request that I myself had made? Surely, had I called upon her with no desire other than to re-establish a connection with her, she wouldn't have brought up Katja or that period of time on her own. And didn't the very cause of jealousy dictate that the object of the passion be derided at every opportunity? So if it was base jealousy that she felt, wouldn't she have sought to bring up the subject of Katja Wolff herself? And no matter what Sarah-Jane had felt for Katja Wolff twenty years ago, why would she still be wallowing in that feeling now? Tucked away in Cheltenham in her smartly decorated house, wife, mother, collector of dolls, painter of competent if not inspired water colours, she had little need to dwell on the past, hadn't she?

  Into my thoughts, Dad said roughly, “This has gone on long enough, Gideon,” in a tone that brought an abrupt end to my reflections.

  “What?” I said.

  “This mucking about. This contemplation of your navel. I'm at my limit with it all. Come with me. We're going to deal with this head-on.”

  I thought he meant to tell me something I'd not yet heard, so I followed him. I expected him to take me into the garden, the better to have a confidential talk far out of earshot of Jill, who remained in the kitchen contentedly setting up paint samples along the window sill. But instead he went to the door of the flat, and from there to the street. He strode to his car that was parked midway between Braemar Mansions and Gloucester Road. He said, “Get in,” as he unlocked it. And when I hesitated, “God damn it, Gideon. You heard me. Get the hell in.”

  I said, “Where are we going?” as he started the engine.

  He jerked the car into reverse, negotiated his way out of the space, and gunned the motor. We shot up Gloucester Road in the direction of those wrought iron gates that mark the entrance to Kensington Gardens. “We're going where we should have gone in the first place,” he replied.

  He headed east along Kensington Road, driving in a way that I'd never seen him do. He veered round taxis and buses and once leaned on the horn when two women dashed across the street near the Albert Hall. A sharp left at Exhibition Road took us into Hyde Park. He gained even more speed along South Carriage Drive. It wasn't until we'd got beyond Marble Arch that I realised where he was taking me. But I said nothing till he'd finally parked the car in the Portman Square underground car park, where he always went when I performed nearby.

  “What's the point in this, Dad?” I asked him, trying for patience where I had fear.

  “You're going to get past this nonsense,” he told me. “Are you man enough to come with me, or have you lost your bollocks along with your nerve?”

  He shoved open his door and stood waiting for me. I felt my in-sides go liquid at the thought of what the next few minutes might hold. But I got out of the car anyway. And we walked side by side along Wigmore Street, heading in the direction of Wigmore Hall.

  How did that feel? you ask me. What were you experiencing, Gideon?

  I was experiencing heading there that night. Only that night I'd been alone because I'd come directly from Chalcot Square.

  I'm walking along the street, and I haven't a clue what's in store for me. I'm nervous, but not more than usual before a performance. I've mentioned that, haven't I? My nerves? Funny, I can't remember having nerves when I ought to have had them: performing in public the very first time as a six-year-old, performing several times thereafter as a seven-year-old, playing for Perlman, meeting Menuhin … What was it about me, then? How was I so capable of taking things in my stride? I lost that naïve confidence somewhere along the line. So this night on the way to Wigmore Hall is no different to all those other nights I've lived through, and my expectation is that the nervous anticipation that precedes this concert will pass as it usually does, the moment I lift the Guarneri and the bow.

  I walk along, and I think about the music, revisiting it in my head as I usually do. I haven't had a flawless rehearsal of this piece—never have had one—but I'm telling myself that muscle memory will guide my playing past the sections that have given me difficulty.

  Particular sections? you ask. The same sections each time?

  No. That's what's always been so peculiar about The Archduke. I never know which part of the piece is going to trip me up. It's been a field not cleared of landmines, and no matter how slowly I've progressed over the rough terrain, I've always managed to encounter an explosive.

  So I move along the street, dimly hear the after-work crowd at one of the pubs I pass, and think about my music. My fingers actually find the notes, although I carry the Guarneri in its case, and in doing this, they somewhat calm my anxiety, which I mistakenly take as a sign that all will be well.

  I arrive ninety minutes early. Just before I round the corner to access the artists' entrance behind the concert hall, I can see up ahead extending over the pavement the covered-glass entry of the hall itself, peopled at this moment only by pedestrians hurrying home from work. I run through the first ten measures of the Allegro. I tell myself what a simple good thing it is, really, to play music with two friends like Beth and Sherrill. I have no idea of what will happen to me in those ninety minutes that are left of my career. I am, if you will, an innocent lamb on his way to be slaughtered, without a sense of peril and somehow lacking the ability to scent blood in the air.

  On the way to the hall with Dad, I recalled all this. But there was no real immediacy to my trepidation because I knew already how the next few minutes would play out.

  As I did that night, we rounded the corner into Welbeck Street. We hadn't spoken since emerging from the underground car park. I took Dad's silence to mean grim determination. He probably took mine as acquiescence to the plan instead of resignation to what I knew would be the outcome.

  At Welbeck Way, we turned again, walking towards the red double doors above which the words artistes entrance are hewn into the stone pediment. I was thinking about the fact that Dad hadn't pondered his plan quite through. There would probably be people in the ticket booth at the front of the hall, but at this time of day the artists' entrance would be locked with no one near it to open it should we knock. So if Dad really wanted me to relive that night of The Archduke, he was going at it wrong, and he was about to be thwarted.

  I was on the point of telling him this when my steps faltered, Dr. Rose. First they faltered, then they stopped altogether, and nothing on earth could have prompted me to continue walking.

  Dad took my arm and said, “Y
ou won't get anywhere by running away, Gideon.”

  He thought I was afraid, of course, overcome by anxiety, and unwilling to place myself into the jeopardy that the music ostensibly represented. But it wasn't fear that paralysed me. It was what I saw right in front of me, what I couldn't believe I hadn't been able to dredge out of my mind before this moment, despite the number of times that I had played at Wigmore Hall in the past.

  The blue door, Dr. Rose. The same blue door that has flashed periodically in my memory and in my dreams. It stands at the top of a flight of ten stairs, right next to the artists' entrance for Wigmore Hall.

  1 November, 10:00 P.M.

  It's identical to the door I've seen in my mind: bright blue, cerulean blue, the blue of a Highland summer sky. It has a silver ring in the centre, two security locks, and a fanlight above it. Beneath that window is a lighting fixture, mounted centrally above the door. There is a railing along the stairs, and this is painted like the door itself: that bright, clear, unforgettable blue that I had forgotten nonetheless.

  I saw that the door appeared to lead to a residence: There were windows next to it, with curtains hanging in them, and from below in Welbeck Way I could see that there were pictures of some sort hanging high on the walls. I felt a surge of excitement the likes of which I haven't felt in months—perhaps in years—as I realised that behind that door might very well lie the explanation for what had happened to me, the cause of my troubles, and the cure.

  I jerked myself out of Dad's grasp and bounded up those steps. Just as you have told me to do in my imagination, Dr. Rose, I tried that door, although I could see before I did so that it could be opened only from the exterior by means of a key. So I knocked upon it. I pounded upon it.

  There my hopes for rescue ended. For the door was opened by a Chinese woman so small that at first I thought she was a child. I also thought she was wearing gloves till I saw that her hands were covered in flour. I had never seen her before.

  She said, “Yes?” and looked at me politely. When I said nothing, her gaze shifted down to my father, who waited at the foot of the steps. “May I help you?” she asked, and she moved subtly as she spoke, placing her hip and the bulk of her weight—what little of it there was—behind the door.

  I had no idea what to ask her. I had no idea why her front door had been haunting me. I had no idea why I'd gone bolting up the steps so sure of myself, so damnably certain that I was nearing an end to my troubles.

  So I said, “Sorry. Sorry. There's been a mistake,” although I added in what I already knew was a fruitless possibility, “Do you live here alone?”

  Certainly, I knew this was the wrong question the moment after I asked it. What woman in her right mind is going to tell a strange man on her doorstep that she lives alone even if she does? But before she could offer a reply to the question, I heard a man's voice asking from somewhere behind her, “Who is that, Sylvia?” and I had my answer. I had more than that, because a moment after he asked the question, the man swung the door open wider and peered out. And I didn't know him any more than I knew Sylvia: a large, bald gentleman with hands the size of most people's skulls.

  “Sorry. Wrong address,” I told him.

  “Who d'you want?” he asked.

  “I don't know,” I replied.

  Like Sylvia, he looked from me to my father. He said, “Not the way it sounded from the thrashing you gave to the door just now.”

  “Yes. I'd thought …” What had I thought? That I was about to be given the gift of clarity? I suppose so.

  But there was no clarity in Welbeck Way. And when I said to Dad later, once the blue door was closed upon us, “It's part of the answer. I swear that it's part,” his reply was a thoroughly disgusted, “You don't even know the damn question.”

  18

  “LYNN DAVIES?” BARBARA Havers produced her warrant card for the woman who'd answered the door of the yellow stucco building. It stood at the end of a line of terraced houses in Therapia Road, a split-level Victorian conversion in an East Dulwich quadrant that Barbara had discovered was defined by two cemeteries, a park, and a golf course.

  “Yes,” the woman replied, but she said the word as a question, and she cocked her head to one side, puzzled, when she looked at Barbara's identification. She was Barbara's own height—which made her short—but her body looked fit under her simple clothing of blue jeans, trainers, and a fisherman's sweater. She would be the sister-in-law of Eugenie Davies, Barbara concluded, for Lynn looked about the same age as the dead woman, although the wiry hair that spilled round her shoulders and down her back was only just beginning to grey.

  “Could I have a word?” Barbara asked her.

  “Yes, yes, of course.” Lynn Davies opened the door wider and admitted Barbara into an entrance whose floor was covered by a small hooked rug. An umbrella stand stood in a corner there, next to it a rattan coat rack from which two identical rain slickers hung, both bright yellow and edged in black. She led Barbara to a sitting room, where a bay window overlooked the street. In the alcove that the window comprised, an easel held a heavy sheet of white paper that bore smears of colour in the unmistakable style of finger painting. More sheets of paper—these completed works of art—hung on the walls of the alcove, stuck higgledy piggledy with drawing pins. The sheet on the easel was not a finished work, but it was dry, and it looked as if the artist had been startled in the midst of its creation, for three fingers of paint lurched down towards one corner while the rest of the piece was done in happy, irregular swirls.

  Lynn Davies said nothing as Barbara gave a look towards the alcove. She merely waited quietly.

  Barbara said to her, “You're related to Eugenie Davies by marriage, I expect.”

  To which Lynn Davies said, “Not quite. What's this about, Constable?” and her brow furrowed in apparent concern. “Has something happened to Eugenie?”

  “You're not Richard Davies' sister?”

  “I was Richard's first wife. Please. Tell me. I'm getting rather frightened. Has something happened to Eugenie?” She clasped her hands in front of her, tightly, so that her arms made a perfect V along her torso. “Something must have done, because why else would you be here?”

  Barbara readjusted her thinking, from Richard's sister to Richard's first wife to everything implied by Richard's first wife. She watched Lynn closely as she explained the whys and wherefores of New Scotland Yard's visit.

  Lynn was olive-skinned, with darker crescents like coffee stains under her deep brown eyes. This skin paled slightly when she learned about the details of the hit-and-run in West Hampstead. She said, “Dear God,” and walked to an ancient three-piece suite. She sat, staring in front of her but saying to Barbara, “Please …” then nodding to the armchair next to which stood a neat pile of children's books, How the Grinch Stole Christmas placed seasonably on the top.

  “I'm sorry,” Barbara said. “I can see it's a shock.”

  “I didn't know,” Lynn said. “And it must have been in the papers, mustn't it? Because of Gideon. And because of … of how you say she died. But I didn't see them—the papers—because I've not been coping as well as I thought I would and … Oh God. Poor Eugenie. To have it all end like this.”

  This didn't seem at all to be the reaction of an embittered first wife thrown over for a second. Barbara said, “You knew her quite well, then.”

  “I've known Eugenie for years.”

  “When did you see her last?”

  “Last week. She came to the service for my daughter. That's why I haven't seen … why I didn't know …” Lynn rubbed the palm of her right hand hard against her thigh, as if this action could quell something within her. “Virginia, my daughter, died quite suddenly last week, Constable. I knew it could happen at any time. I'd known that for years. But somehow one is never quite as prepared as one hopes to be.”

  “I'm sorry,” Barbara said.

  “She was painting as she did each afternoon. I was in the kitchen making our tea. I heard her fall. I came
running out. And that was … What do they call it, Constable? It. The great, long-expected visitation arrived, and I wasn't with her. I wasn't even there to say goodbye.”

  Like Tony, Barbara thought, and it jolted her to have her brother shoot into her mind when she hadn't prepared herself to greet him. It was just like Tony, who had died alone without a single member of the family at his bedside. She didn't like to think about Tony, about his lingering death or the hell that his death had brought into her family. She said only, “Kids aren't meant to die before their parents, are they,” and she felt an attendant tightness in her throat.

  “The doctors said she was dead before she hit the floor,” Lynn Davies told her. “And I know they mean to comfort me. But when you've spent most of your life caring for a child like Virginia—always and forever a little one no matter how large she grew—your world is still wrenched to pieces when she's taken, especially if you've simply stepped out of the room to see to her tea. So I haven't been able to read a paper—much less a novel or a magazine—and I haven't turned on the telly or the radio because although I 'd like to distract myself, if I do that there's a chance I'll stop feeling and what I feel right now—at this moment, if you can understand what I'm saying—is how I stay connected to her. If you can understand.” Lynn's eyes filled as she spoke.

  Barbara gave her a moment as she herself adjusted to what she was learning. Among the information she was indexing in her mind was the unimaginable fact that Richard Davies had apparently fathered not one but two disabled children. For what else could Lynn Davies possibly mean when she described her daughter as “forever a little one”? “Virginia wasn't—” There had to be a euphemism somewhere, Barbara thought with frustration, and if she were from America—that great land of political correctness—she would probably have known it. “She wasn't well?” she settled on saying.