A Traitor to Memory

  I said, “I know why my mother left us. I know what happened. Do you understand me? Say something, Dad. It's time for the truth. I know what happened.”

  I could hear Jill's voice in the background. I could hear her question, and both the tone and the manner of her question—“Richard? Darling, who on earth is it?”—told me something of Dad's reaction to what I was saying. So I was not surprised when he said harshly, “I'm coming over there. Don't leave the house.”

  How he got to me so quickly, I don't know. All I can say is that when he entered the house and came up the stairs at a decisive pace, it seemed that mere minutes had passed since I had rung off from our conversation.

  But I'd seen the two of them in those minutes: Katja Wolff, who grabbed at life, who used a deadly threat to get out of East Germany, and who would have used death itself if necessary to achieve the end that she had in mind; and my father, who had impregnated her, perhaps in the hope of producing a perfect specimen to carry on a family line that began with himself. He, after all, discarded women when they failed to produce something healthy. He'd done that to his first wife, and he'd been more than likely setting up to do the same to my mother. But he hadn't been moving fast enough for Katja. Katja Katja, who grabbed at life and who did not wait for what life provided her.

  They argued about it.

  When will you tell her about us, Richard?

  When the time is right.

  But we have no time! You know we have no time.

  Katja, don't act like an hysterical fool.

  And then, when the moment came when he could have taken a stand, he wouldn't speak up to defend her, excuse her, or commit himself as my mother confronted the German girl with the fact of her pregnancy and with the fact of her failure to perform her duties towards my sister because of her pregnancy. So Katja had finally taken matters into her own hands. Exhausted with arguing and with attempting to defend herself, ill from her pregnancy, and feeling deeply betrayed on all sides, she had snapped. She had drowned Sonia.

  What did she hope to gain?

  Perhaps she hoped to free my father from a burden she believed was keeping them apart. Perhaps she saw drowning Sonia as her way of making a statement that needed to be made. Perhaps she wished to punish my mother for having a hold on my father that seemed unbreakable. But kill Sonia she did, and then she refused, by means of a stoic silence, to acknowledge her crime, my sister's brief life, or what sins of her own had led to the taking of that life.

  Why, though? Because she was protecting the man she loved? Or because she was punishing him?

  All this I saw, and all this I thought of as I waited for my father's arrival.

  “What is this cock, Gideon?”

  Those were his first words to me as he strode into the music room, where I was sitting in the window seat, fighting off the first tentative stabs in my gut that proclaimed me frightened, childish, and cowardly as the time for our final engagement approached. I gestured to the notebook I'd been writing in all these weeks, and I hated the fact that my voice was strained. I hated what that strain revealed: about myself, about him, about what I feared.

  “I know what happened,” I said. “I've remembered what happened.”

  “Have you picked up your instrument?”

  “You thought I wouldn't work it out, didn't you?”

  “Have you picked up the Guarnerius, Gideon?”

  “You thought you could pretend for the rest of your life.”

  “Damn it. Have you played? Have you tried to play? Have you even looked at your violin?”

  “You thought I'd do what I've always done.”

  “I've had enough of this.” He began to move, but not to the violin case. Instead, he walked to the stereo system, and as he did so he removed a new CD from his pocket.

  “You thought I'd go along with anything you told me because that's what I've always done, right? Throw out something that resembles an acceptable tale and he'll swallow it: hook, line, and sinker.”

  He swung round. “You don't know what you're talking about. Look at yourself. Look what she's done to you with all this psycho-mumbo-jumbo of hers. You've been reduced to a puling mouse afraid of his shadow.”

  “Isn't that what you've done, Dad? Isn't that what you did back then? You lied, you cheated, you betrayed—”

  “Enough!” He was battling to free the CD from its wrapping, and he tore at it with his teeth like a dog, spitting the shreds of cellophane onto the floor. “I'm telling you now that there's one way to deal with this, and it's the way you should have dealt with it from the first. A real man faces his fear head-on. He doesn't turn tail and run from it.”

  “You're running. Right now.”

  “Like bloody God damn hell I am.” He punched the button to open the CD player. He jammed the compact disk inside. He hit play and twisted the volume knob. “You listen,” he hissed. “You bloody well listen. And act like a man.”

  He'd turned up the sound so high that when the music started, I didn't know what it was at first. But my confusion lasted only for a second, because he'd chosen it, Dr. Rose. Beethoven. The Archduke. He'd chosen it.

  The Allegro Moderato began. And it swelled round the room. And over it I could hear Dad's shout.

  “Listen. Listen. Listen to what's unmade you, Gideon. Listen to what you're terrified to play.”

  I covered my ears. “I can't.” But still I heard. It. I heard it. And I heard him above it.

  “Listen to what you're letting control you. Listen to what you've let a simple bloody piece of music do to your entire career.”

  “I don't—”

  “Black smudges on a damn piece of paper. That's all it is. That's what you've given your power to.”

  “Don't make me—”

  “Stop it. Listen. Is it impossible for a musician like you to play this piece? No, it's not. Is it too difficult? It is not. Is it even challenging? No, no, no. Is it mildly, remotely, or vaguely—”

  “Dad!” I pressed my hands to my ears. The room was going black. It was shrinking to a pinpoint of light and the light was blue, it was blue, it was blue.

  “What it is is weakness made flesh in you, Gideon. You had a bout of nerves and you've transformed yourself into flaming Mr. Robson. That's what you've done.”

  The piano introduction was nearly complete. The violin was due to begin. I knew the notes. The music was in me. But in front of my eyes I saw only that door. And Dad—my father—continued to rail.

  “I'm surprised you haven't started sweating like him. That's where you'll be next. Sweating and shaking like a freak who—”

  “Stop it!”

  And the music. The music. The music. Swelling, exploding, demanding. All round me, the music that I dreaded and feared.

  And in front of me the door, with her standing there on the steps that lead up to it, with the light shining down on her, a woman I wouldn't have known on the street, a woman whose accent has faded in time, in the twenty years she has spent in prison.

  She says, “Do you remember me, Gideon? It is Katja Wolff. I must speak with you.”

  I say politely because I do not know who she is but I have been taught through the years to be polite to the public no matter the demands they make upon me because it is the public who attend my concerts who buy my recordings who support the East London Conservatory and what it is trying to do to better the lives of impoverished children children like me in so many ways save for the circumstances of birth … I say, “I'm afraid I have a concert, Madam.”

  “This will not take long.”

  She descends the steps. She crosses the bit of Welbeck Way that separates us. I've moved to the red double doors of the artists' entrance to Wigmore Hall and I'm about to knock to gain admittance, when she says she says oh God she says, “I've come for payment, Gideon,” and I do not know what she means.

  But somehow I understand that danger is about to engulf me. I clutch the case in which the Guarneri is protected by leather and velvet, and I say,
“As I said, I do have a concert.”

  “Not for more than an hour,” she says. “This I have been told in the front.”

  She nods towards Wigmore Street, where the box office is, where she apparently has gone at first to seek me out. They would have told her that the performers for the evening had not yet arrived, Madam, and that when they do arrive, they use the back entrance and not the front. So if she cared to wait there, she might have the opportunity to speak to Mr. Davies, although the box office couldn't guarantee that Mr. Davies would have the time to speak to her.

  She says, “Four hundred thousand pounds, Gideon. Your father claims he does not have it. So I come to you because I know that you must.”

  And the world as I know it is shrinking shrinking disappearing entirely into a single bead of light. From that bead grows sound, and I hear the Beethoven, the Allegro Moderato, The Archduke's first movement, and then Dad's voice.

  He said, “Act like a man, for the love of God. Sit up. Stand up. Stop cowering there like a beaten dog! Jesus! Stop sniveling. You're acting like this is—”

  I heard no more because I knew suddenly what all of this was, and I knew what this had always been. I remembered it all in a piece—like the music itself—and the music was the background and the act that went with that music as background was what I had forced myself to forget.

  I am in my room. Raphael is displeased, more displeased than he has ever been, and he has been displeased, on edge, anxious, nervous, and irritable for days. I have been petulant and uncooperative. Juilliard has been denied me. Juilliard has been listed amongst the impossibilities that I am growing used to hearing about. This isn't possible, that isn't possible, trim here, cut there, make allowances for. So I'll show them, I decide. I won't play this stupid violin again. I won't practise. I won't have lessons. I won't perform in public. I won't perform in private, for myself or for anyone. I will show them.

  Raphael marches me to my room. He puts on the recording of The Archduke and says, “I'm losing patience with you, Gideon. This is not a difficult piece. I want you to listen to the first movement till you can hum it in your sleep.”

  He leaves me, shuts the door. And the Allegro Moderato begins.

  I say, “I won't, I won't, I won't!” And I upset a table and kick over a chair and slam my body into the door. “You can't make me!” I shout. “You can't make me do anything!”

  And the music swells. The piano introduces the melody. All is hushed and ready for the violin and cello. Mine is not a difficult part to learn, not for someone with natural gifts like myself. But what will be the point of learning it when I cannot go to Juilliard? Although Perlman did. As a boy, he went there. But I will not. And this is unfair. This is bloody unfair. Everything about my world is unfair. I will not do this. I will not accept this.

  And the music swells.

  I fling open my door. I shout “No!” and “I won't!” into the corridor. I think someone will come, will march me somewhere and administer discipline, but no one comes because they are all busy with their own concerns and not with mine. And I'm angry at this because it is my world that is being affected. It is my life that is being moulded. It is my will that is being thwarted, and I want to punch my fist into the wall.

  And the music swells. And the violin soars. And I will not play this piece of music at Juilliard or anywhere else because I must remain here. In this house, where we're all prisoners. Because of her.

  The knob is under my hand before I realise it, the panels of the door inches from my face. I will burst in and frighten her. I will make her cry. I will make her pay. I will make them pay.

  She isn't frightened. But she is alone. Alone in the tub with the yellow ducklings bobbing nearby and a bright red boat that she's slapping at happily with her fist. And she deserves to be frightened, to be thrashed, to be made to understand what she's done to me, so I grab her and shove her beneath the water and see her eyes widen and widen and widen and feel her struggle to sit up again.

  And the music—that music—swells and swells. On and on it goes. For minutes. For days.

  And then Katja is there. She screams my name. And Raphael is right behind her yes, because yes, I understand it all now: They have been talking the two of them talking, which is why Sonia has been left alone, and he has been demanding to know if what Sarah-Jane Beckett has whispered is true. Because he has a right to know, he says. He says this as he enters the bathroom on Katja's heels. It is what he's saying as he enters and she screams. He says, “… Because if you are, it's mine and you know it. I do have the right—”

  And the music swells.

  And Katja screams, screams for my father and Raphael shouts, “Oh my God! Oh my God” but I do not release her. I do not release her even then because I know that the end of my world began with her.

  24

  JILL STAGGERED TO her bedroom. Her movements were clumsy. She was hampered by her size. She flung open the cupboard that held her clothes, thinking only, Richard, oh my God, Richard, and coming round to wonder wildly what she was doing standing incoherently in front of a rack of garments. All she could think was her lover's name. All she could feel was a mixture of terror and a profound self-hatred at the doubts she'd had, doubts that she'd been harbouring and nursing at the very moment that … that what? What had happened to him?

  “Is he alive?” she'd cried into the telephone when the voice asked if she was Miss Foster, Miss Jill Foster, the woman whose name Richard carried in his wallet in the event that something …

  “My God, what's happened?” Jill had continued.

  “Miss Foster, if you'll come to the hospital,” the Voice had said. “Do you need a taxi? Shall I phone one for you? If you'll give me an address, I can ring a minicab.”

  The idea of waiting five minutes—or ten or fifteen—for a cab was inconceivable. Jill dropped the telephone and stumbled for her coat.

  Her coat. That was it. She'd come into her bedroom in search of her coat. She shoved through the hanging garments in the cupboard till her hands came into contact with cashmere. She jerked this from its hanger and struggled into it. She fumbled with the horn buttons, miscalculated where they went, and didn't bother to refasten them more precisely when the hem of the coat hung like a lopsided curtain upon her. From her chest of drawers she took a scarf—the first one that came to hand, it didn't matter—and she wrapped this round her throat. She slammed a black wool cap on her head and snatched up her shoulder bag. She went for the door.

  In the lift, she punched for the underground car park, and she willed the little cubicle downwards without stopping at any other floors. She told herself that it was a good sign the hospital had rung her and asked her to come. If the news was bad, if the situation was—could she risk the word?—fatal, they wouldn't have rung her at all, would they? Wouldn't they instead have sent a constable round to fetch her or to speak with her? So what it meant that they had phoned was that he was alive. He was alive.

  She found herself making bargains with God as she pushed through the doors to the car park. If Richard would live, if his heart or whatever it was would mend, then she would compromise on the baby's name. They would christen her Cara Catherine. Richard could call her Cara at home behind closed doors, among the family, and Jill herself would call her the same. Then outside, in the world at large, both of them could refer to her as Catherine. They'd register her at school as Catherine. Her friends would call her Catherine. And Cara would be even more special because it would be what only her parents called her. That was fair, wasn't it, God? If only Richard would live.

  The car was parked seven bays along. She unlocked it, praying that it would start, and for the first time seeing the wisdom in having something modern and reliable. But the Humber loomed large in her past—her granddad had been its single owner—and when he'd left the vehicle to her in his will, she'd kept it out of love for him and in memory of the countryside drives they'd taken together. Her friends had laughed at it in earlier years, and Richard had lect
ured her about its dangers—no airbags, no headrests, inadequate restraints—but Jill had stubbornly continued to drive it and had no intention of giving it up.

  “It's safer than what's on the streets these days,” she'd declared loyally whenever Richard had attempted to wrestle from her a promise not to drive it. “It's like a tank.”

  “Just stay out of it till you've had the baby, and promise me you won't let Cara anywhere near it,” he had replied.

  Catherine, she had thought. Her name is Catherine. But that was before. That was when she thought nothing could happen in an instant the way things happened: things like this that changed everything, making what had seemed so important yesterday less than a bagatelle today.

  Still, she'd made the promise not to drive the Humber, and she'd kept that promise for the last two months. So she had added reason to wonder if it would start.

  It did. Like a dream. But the increase in Jill's size required her to make an adjustment to the heavy front seat. She reached forward and beneath it for the metal lever. She flipped it up and shifted her weight. The seat wouldn't budge.

  She said, “Damn it. Come on,” and tried again. But either the device itself had corroded over the years or something was blocking the track on which the enormous seat ran.

  Her anxiety rising, she scrabbled her fingers on the floor beneath her. She felt the lever, then the edge of the lever. She felt the seat springs. She felt the track. And then she found it. Something hard and thin and rectangular was blocking the old metal track, wedged in in such a way as to make it virtually immovable.

  She frowned. She pulled on the object. She jockeyed it back and forth when it got stuck. She cursed. Her hands became damp with sweat. And finally, finally, she managed to dislodge it. She slid it out, lifted it, and laid it on the broad seat next to her.

  It was a photograph, she saw, a picture in a stark monastic wooden frame.

  GIDEON

  11 November

  I ran, Dr. Rose. I bolted for the music room door and crashed down the stairs. I threw open the door. It slammed back against the wall. I flung myself into Chalcot Square. I didn't know where I was going or what I intended to do. But I had to be away: away from my father and away from what he'd inadvertently forced me to face.