A Traitor to Memory

  Interestingly, I can't attach an actual piece of music to Mother the way I can with the others. I'm not sure why. A form of denial, perhaps? Repression of emotion? I don't know. You're the psychiatrist. Explain it to me.

  I still do this with music, by the way. I still associate a person with a piece. Sherrill, for example, is Bartók's Rhapsody, which is what he and I initially played together in public, years ago, at St. Martin's in the Fields. We've never played it since and we were teenagers then—the American and the English wunderkind together made excellent press, believe me—but he'll always be Bartók when I think of him. That's just how it works in my mind.

  And it's the same for people who aren't musical in the least. Take Libby, for instance. Have I told you about Libby? She's Libby the Lodger. Yes, like James and Calvin and all the others except she's of the present, not of the past, and she lives in the lower ground floor flat of my house in Chalcot Square.

  I hadn't thought of letting it till she turned up at my door one day, ferrying a recording contract that my agent had decided had to be signed at once. She works for a courier service, and I didn't know she was a girl till she handed me the paperwork, took off her helmet, and said with a nod at the contracts, “Don't be bugged by this, okay? I just gotta ask. You a rock musician or something?” in that excessively casual and friendly fashion that seems to plague the native Californian.

  I replied, “No. I'm a concert violinist.”

  She said, “No way!”

  I said, “Way.”

  To which she produced such a blank expression that I thought I was dealing with a congenital idiot.

  I won't ever sign contracts without having read them—no matter what my agent claims this reveals about my lack of trust in his wisdom—and rather than have the poor urchin—for so she seemed to me—wait on the front step while I read through the document, I asked her in and we climbed to the first floor, which is where the music room overlooks the square.

  She said, “Oh wow. Sorry. You are somebody, aren't you?” as we climbed because she noticed the art work for the CD covers hanging along the staircase. “I feel like a real dope.”

  I said, “No need,” and walked into the music room with her on my heels and my own head buried in clauses about accompanists, royalties, and time lines.

  “Oh, this is awesome,” she intoned while I went to the window seat where even now I'm writing in this notebook for you, Dr. Rose. “Who's this guy you're with in the picture? This guy with the crutches? Jeez. Look at you. You look seven years old!”

  God. He's possibly the greatest violinist on earth and the girl's as ignorant as a tube of toothpaste. “Itzhak Perlman,” I told her. “And I was six at the time, not seven.”

  “Wow. You actually played with him when you were only six?”

  “Hardly. But he was kind enough to listen to me one afternoon when he was in London.”

  “Very cool.”

  And as I read she continued to wander, murmuring from her rather limited vocabulary of exclamations. She took particular pleasure—so it seemed—in an examination of my earliest instrument, that one-sixteenth that I keep in the music room on a little stand. I also keep the Guarneri there, the violin that I use today. It was in its case, and the case was open because when Libby arrived with the paperwork for me, I'd been in the midst of my morning practise. Obviously unaware of the trespass she was committing, she casually reached down and plucked the E-string.

  She might as well have shot a pistol in the room. I leapt up and bellowed, “Don't touch that violin!” and so startled her that she reacted like a child who's been struck. She said, “Oh my gosh,” and she backed away from the instrument with her hands behind her and her eyes filling. And then she turned away in embarrassment.

  I set my paperwork aside and said, “Look. Sorry. Didn't mean to be a swine, but that instrument's two hundred and fifty years old. I'm rather careful with it, and I usually don't allow—”

  Her back turned to me, she waved me off. She took several deep breaths before she shook her head vigorously, which made her hair puff out—have I mentioned that her hair is curly? Toast coloured, it is, and very curly—and she rubbed her eyes. Then she turned round and said, “Sorry about that. It's okay. I shouldn't have touched it and I totally wasn't thinking. You were right to tell me off, you really were. It's just that, like, for a second you were so totally rock, and I freaked.”

  Language from another planet. I said, “Totally rock?”

  She said, “Rock Peters. Formerly Rocco Petrocelli and currently my estranged husband. I mean, as estranged as he'll let us be since he holds the purse strings and he's not exactly into loosening them to help me get established on my own.”

  I thought she looked far too young to be married to anyone, but it turned out that, despite her looks and what appeared to be a rather charming prepubescent plumpness, she was twenty-three years old and two years married to the irascible Rock. At the moment, however, I said, “Ah.”

  She said, “He's got, like, this hair-trigger temper among other things, such as not knowing monogamy is usually part of the marriage deal. I never knew when he was going to blow a fuse. After two years cowering round the apartment, I called it quits.”

  “Oh. Sorry.” I admit that I felt uneasy with her unburdening of personal details. It's not that I'm unused to such displays. This tendency to confession and contrition seems peculiar to all the Americans I've ever known, as if they've somehow become acculturated to disbosoming themselves along with learning to salute their flag. But being used to something isn't exactly akin to welcoming it into your life. What, after all, is one to do with someone else's personal data?

  She gave me more of it. She wanted a divorce; he did not. They continued to live together because she could not come up with the cash to break away from him. Whenever she came close to the amount she needed, he simply withheld her wages until she'd spent whatever nest egg she'd managed to accumulate. “And why he even wants me there is, like, the major mystery of my life, you know? I mean the man is totally governed by the herd instinct, so what's the point?”

  He was, she explained, a womaniser without peer, an adherent to the philosophy that groups of females—“the herd, get it?”—should be dominated and serviced by a single male. “But the problem is that the entire female sex is the herd in Rock's mind. And he's got to hump them all just to keep them happy.” Then she clapped her hand over her mouth and said, “Oops. Sorry.” And then she grinned. And then she said, “Anyway. Gosh. Look at me. I'm, like, totally running off at the mouth. Got those papers signed?”

  Which I hadn't. Who'd had an opportunity to read them? I said I'd sign them if she wouldn't mind waiting. She took herself to a corner and sat.

  I read. I made one phone call to clarify a clause. I signed the contracts and returned them to her. She shoved them into her pouch, said thanks, and then cocked her head at me and asked, “Favour?”

  “What?”

  She shifted her weight and looked embarrassed. But she plunged ahead and I admired her for it. She said, “Would you … I mean, it's like, I've never actually heard a violin in person before. Would you please play a song?”

  A song. She was indeed a philistine. But even a philistine is educable, and she'd asked politely. What would it hurt? I'd been practising anyway, working on Bartók's solo sonata, so I gave her part of the Melodia, playing it as I always play: putting the music before myself, before her, before everything. By the time I'd reached the end of the movement, I'd forgotten she was there. So I went on to the Presto, hearing as usual Raphael's injunction: “Make it an invitation to dance, Gideon. Feel its quickness. Make it flash, like light.”

  And when I was finished, I was brought back to an abrupt awareness of her presence. She said, “Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow. I mean, you are so totally excellent, aren't you?”

  I looked her way to see that sometime during the playing she'd begun to cry, because her cheeks were wet and she was digging round in her leathers, looking—
I presume—for something on which to wipe her dribbling nose. I was pleased to have touched her with the Bartók, and even more pleased to see that my assessment of her educability had been on target. And I suppose it was because of that assessment that I asked her to join me in my regular cup of midmorning coffee. The day was fine, so we took it in the garden, where, under the arbour, I'd been creating one of my kites on the previous afternoon.

  I haven't mentioned my kites before this, have I, Dr. Rose? Well, there's nothing to them, actually. They're just something I do when I feel the need to take a break from the music. I fly them from Primrose Hill.

  Ah yes. I can see that you're searching for meaning there, aren't you? What does creating and flying kites symbolise in the patient's history and in his present life? The unconscious mind speaks in all our actions. The conscious mind merely has to grasp the meaning behind those actions and wrestle it into comprehensible form.

  Kites. Air. Freedom. But freedom from what? What need do I have to be free when my life is full and rich and complete?

  Let me complicate the skein you've been commissioned to unravel by telling you that I fly gliders as well. No, not the gliders you sail into the air from a hilltop, watching as the currents take them. But gliders that you pilot up in the air, towed by a plane and released to find those same currents yourself.

  My father finds this a particularly horrifying hobby. Indeed, it's become a subject so sore that we no longer discuss it. When he finally realised that I'd moved beyond his ability to influence me with regard to what few leisure hours I actually have, he shouted, “I wash my hands of you, Gideon!” and the topic became taboo between us.

  It seems dangerous, you tell me.

  No more than life, I reply.

  And then you ask, What is it you like about gliding? The silence? The technical mastery of something so different to your chosen profession? Or is it the escape that you're seeking, Gideon? Or perhaps the inherent risks?

  And I say that there is danger in digging too deeply for meaning when something can be so simply explained: As a child and once my talent became apparent, I was not allowed a single activity that might injure my hands. Designing and creating kites, flying gliders … My hands are quite safe from harm.

  But you do see the relevance of activities associated with the sky, don't you, Gideon? you ask me.

  I see only that the sky is blue. Blue like the door. That blue blue door.

  GIDEON

  28 August

  I did what you suggested, Dr. Rose, and I've nothing to report apart from the fact that I felt a real fool. Perhaps the experiment would have turned out differently had I cooperated and done it in your office as you asked, but I couldn't get my mind round what you were talking about, and it seemed absurd. More absurd, even, than spending hours at this notebook when I could be practising my instrument as I used to. As I want to.

  But I still haven't touched it.

  Why?

  Don't ask the obvious, Dr. Rose. It's gone. Can't you see that and what it means? The music is gone.

  Dad was here this morning. He's only just left. He came round to see if I'd improved at all—for that you can read Have I tried to play again?—although he was good enough not to ask the question directly. But then, he didn't actually need to ask it since the Guarneri was in the position he'd left it when he brought me home from Wigmore Hall. I haven't even had the nerve to touch the case.

  Why? you ask.

  You know the answer. Because at the moment I lack the courage: If I can't play, if the gift, the ear, the talent, the genius, or whatever else you wish to call it is moribund or gone from me entirely, how do I exist? Not how do I go on, Dr. Rose, but how do I exist? How do I exist when the sum and substance of who I am and who I have been for the last twenty-five years is contained in and defined by my music?

  Then let's look at the music itself, you say. If each person in your life is indeed associated in some way with your music, perhaps we need to examine your music much more carefully for the key to unlock what's troubling you.

  I laugh and say, Did you intend that pun?

  And you gaze at me with those penetrating eyes. You refuse to engage in levity. You say, So that final Bartók you were writing about, the solo sonata … Is that what you associate with Libby?

  Yes, I associate the sonata with Libby. But Libby's nothing to do with my present problem. I assure you of that.

  My father found this notebook, by the way. When he came round to check on me, he found it on the window seat. And before you ask, he wasn't nosy-parkering. My dad might be an insufferably single-minded bastard, but he isn't a spy. He's merely given the last twenty-five years of his life to supporting his only child's career, and he'd like to see that career stay afloat and not go swimming down the toilet.

  His only child not for long, though. I'd forgotten all about that in these last few weeks. There's Jill to consider. I can't imagine having a new brother or sister at my age, let alone a stepmother less than ten years my senior. But these are the days of elastic families, and the course of wisdom suggests that one stretch with the changing definitions of spouse, not to mention of father, mother, and sibling.

  But yes, I think it a little odd, this bit about my father and his production of a new family. It's not that I expected him to remain a divorced single man forever. It's just that after nearly twenty years in which he never to my knowledge even had a date with a woman—let alone a relationship whose depth might suggest the sort of physical intimacy that produces children—it's all come as something of a shock to me.

  I'd met Jill at the BBC when I was previewing a rough cut of that documentary they filmed at the East London Conservatory. This was several years ago, just before she produced that outstanding adaptation of Desperate Remedies—Did you see it, by the way? She's quite a Thomas Hardy buff—and she was working in their documentary division then, if that's what it's called. Dad must have met her as well at that time, but I don't recall ever seeing them together and I can't say at what point they became each other's partner. I do recall being invited round to Dad's flat for a meal and finding her there in the kitchen, stirring away at something on the cooker, and while I was surprised to see her, I simply assumed she was there because she'd brought along a final copy of the documentary for us to preview. I suppose that might have been the start of their relationship. Dad became slightly less available to me after that evening, now I come to think about it. So perhaps everything began that night. But as Jill and Dad have never lived together—although Dad says that's being arranged for shortly after the baby's birth—I really had no reason to conclude there was anything at all between them.

  And now that you know? you ask me. How do you feel? And when did you learn about them and the baby? And where?

  I see the direction you're taking. But I have to tell you it's something of a non-starter.

  I learned about my father's situation with Jill some months ago, not on the day of the concert at Wigmore Hall, not even during the week or the month of the concert, in fact. And there was no blue door anywhere in sight when I was given the news about my future half sibling. You see, I knew where you were heading, didn't I?

  But how did you feel? you persist in asking. A second family for your father after all these years—

  Not a second family, I hasten to tell you. A third.

  His third family? You look at the notes you've been taking during our sessions and you see no reference to an earlier family, before my own birth. But there was one and there was a child from that family, a girl who died in infancy.

  She was called Virginia, and I don't know exactly how she died or where or how long after her death my father ended his marriage to her mother or even who her mother was. In fact, the only reason I know about her existence at all—or about my father's earlier marriage—is that Granddad began shouting about it during one of his episodes. It was in the same vein as his “you're no son of mine” curses as he was being taken from the house. Except this time it
was along the lines of Dad's not being any son of Granddad's because all he could ever produce was freaks. And I suppose I was given a hasty explanation by someone—Was it Mother who told me or was she gone by then?—since I must have assumed that, in shouting about freaks, Granddad meant me. So Virginia must have died because there was something wrong with her, a congenital condition perhaps. But I don't actually know what it was, because whoever it was who told me about her in the first place didn't know or wouldn't say and because the subject never came up again.

  Never came up? you query.

  But you know the dance, Doctor. Children don't mention topics that they associate with chaos, tumult, and contention. They learn quite early the consequences of stirring a pot best left alone. And I assume you can make the leap from there yourself: Since the violin was my sole concentration, once I was assured of my grandfather's esteem, I thought no more of the subject.

  The subject of the blue door, however, is something else entirely. As I said when I began, I did exactly as you asked me to do and as we tried to do in your office. In my mind I recreated that door: Prussian blue with a silverish ring in its centre serving as a knob; two locks, I think, done in silver like the ring; and perhaps a house number or a flat number above the knob.

  I darkened my bedroom and stretched out on my bed and closed my eyes and visualised that door; I visualised my approach to it; I visualised my hand grasping the ring that served as its knob and my fingers turning keys in the locks, the lower lock first with one of those old-fashioned keys with large and easily duplicated teeth, the upper lock next, which is modern, burglar proof, and safe. With the locks disengaged, I put my shoulder against the door, gave a slight push, and … Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

  There is nothing there, Dr. Rose. My mind is a blank. You want to make interpretive leaps based on what I find behind that door, or what colour it is, or the fact that it has two locks, not one, and a ring for a knob—Could he be fleeing from commitment? you ask your-self—while I'm inspired by this exercise to tell you bloody sod all. Nothing has been revealed to me. Nothing lurks ghoul-like behind that door. It leads to no room that I can conjure up, it merely sits at the top of a staircase like—