“What are you saying?”
“You know what I'm saying. It's over. Or it will be once I collect the money to pay Katja Wolff her four hundred thousand pounds.”
“No! You don't owe her … For God's sake, think. She may well have been the person who ran over your mother!”
I stared at him. My mouth said the word, “What?” but my voice did not. And my brain could not take in what he was saying.
He continued to talk, saying words that I heard but did not assimilate. Hit-and-run, I heard. No accident, Gideon. A car ploughing over her twice. Three times. A deliberate death. Indeed, a murder.
“I didn't have the money to pay her,” he said. “You didn't know who she was. So she would have tracked down your mother next. And when Eugenie hadn't the money to pay her … You see what happened, don't you? You do see what happened?”
They were words falling against my ears, but they meant nothing to me. I heard them, but I didn't comprehend. All I knew was that my hope for deliverance from my crime was gone. For if I had been unable to believe anything else, I did believe in her. I did believe in my mother.
Why? you ask.
Because she left us, Dr. Rose. And while she might indeed have left us because she couldn't come to terms with her grief over my sister's death, I believe that she left us because she couldn't come to terms with the lie she'd have had to live should she have stayed.
20 November, 2:00 P.M.
Dad departed when it became apparent that I had finished talking. But I was alone ten minutes only—perhaps even less—when Raphael took his place.
He looked like hell. Blood red traced a curve along his lower eyelashes. That and flesh in a shade like ashes were the only colours in his face.
He came to me and put his hand on my shoulder. We faced each other and I watched his features begin to dissolve, as if he had no skull beneath his skin to hold him together but, rather, a substance that had always been soluble, vulnerable to the right element that could melt it.
He said, “She wouldn't stop punishing herself.” His hand tightened and tightened on my shoulder. I wanted to cry out or jerk back from the pain, but I couldn't move because I couldn't risk even a gesture that might make him stop talking. “She couldn't forgive herself, Gideon, but she never—she never, I swear it—stopped thinking of you.”
“Thinking of me?” I repeated numbly as I tried to absorb what he was saying. “How do you know? How do you know she never stopped thinking …?”
His face gave me the answer before he spoke it: He'd not lost contact with my mother in all the years that she'd been gone from our lives. He'd never stopped talking to her on the phone. He'd never stopped seeing her: in pubs, restaurants, hotel lounges, parks, and museums. She would say, “Tell me how Gideon is getting on, Raphael,” and he would supply her with the information that newspapers, critical reviews of my playing, magazine articles, and gossip within the community of classical musicians couldn't give her.
“You've seen her,” I said. “You've seen her. Why?”
“Because she loved you.”
“No. I mean, why did you do it?”
“She wouldn't let me tell you,” he said brokenly. “Gideon, she swore she would stop our meetings if she ever learned that I'd told you I'd seen her.”
“And you couldn't bear that, could you,” I said bitterly, because finally I understood it all. I'd seen the answers in those long-ago flowers he'd brought to her and I read them in his reaction now, when she was gone and he could no longer entertain the fantasy that there might be something of significance that would bloom one day between them. “Because if she stopped seeing you, then what would happen to your little dream?”
He said nothing.
“You were in love with her. Isn't that right, Raphael? You've always been in love with her. And seeing her once a month, once a week, once a day, or once a year had nothing to do with anything but what you wanted and hoped to get. So you wouldn't tell me. You just let me believe she walked out on us and never looked back, and never cared to look back. When all the time you knew—” I couldn't go on.
“It's the way she wanted it,” he said. “I had to honour her choice.”
“You had to nothing.”
“I'm sorry,” he said. “Gideon, if I'd known … How was I to know?”
“Tell me what happened that night.”
“What night?”
“You know what night. Don't let's play the happy idiot now. What happened the night my sister drowned? And don't try to tell me that Katja Wolff did it, all right? You were with her. You were arguing with her. I got into the bathroom. I held Sonia down. And then what happened?”
“I don't know.”
“I don't believe you.”
“It's the truth. We came upon you in the bathroom. Katja began screaming. Your father came running. I took Katja downstairs. That's all I know. I didn't go back up when the paramedics arrived. I didn't leave the kitchen till the police turned up.”
“Was Sonia moving in the bathtub?”
“I don't know. I don't think so. But that doesn't mean you harmed her. It never meant that.”
“For Christ's sake, Raphael, I held her down!”
“You can't remember that. It's impossible. You were far too young. Gideon, Katja had left her alone for five or six minutes. I'd gone to talk to her and we began to argue. We stepped out of the room and into the nursery because I wanted to know what she intended to do about …” He faltered. He couldn't say it, even now.
I said it for him. “Why the hell did you make her pregnant when you were in love with my mother?”
“Blonde,” was his miserable, pathetic reply. It came after a long fifteen seconds in which he did nothing but breathe erratically. “They both were blonde.”
“God,” I whispered. “And did she let you call her Eugenie?”
“Don't,” he said. “It happened only once.”
“And you couldn't afford to let anyone know, could you? Neither of you could afford that. She couldn't afford to let anyone know she'd left Sonia alone as long as five minutes and you couldn't afford to let anyone know you'd got her pregnant while pretending you were fucking my mother.”
“She could have got rid of it. It would have been easy.”
“Nothing,” I said, “is that easy, Raphael. Except lying. And that was easy for all of us, wasn't it?”
“Not for your mother,” Raphael said. “That's why she left.”
He reached for me again, then. He put his hand on my shoulder, tightly, as he had done before. He said, “She would have told you the truth, Gideon. You must believe your father in this. Your mother would have told you the truth.”
21 November, 1:30 A.M.
So that is what I'm left with, Dr. Rose: an assurance only. Had she lived, had we had the opportunity to meet, she would have told me everything.
She would have taken me back through my own history and corrected where my impressions were false and my memory incomplete.
She would have explained the details I recall. She would have filled in the gaps.
But she is dead, so she can do nothing.
And what I'm left with is only what I can remember.
27
RICHARD SAID TO his son, “Gideon. What are you doing here?”
Gideon said, “What's happened to you?”
“Someone tried to kill him,” Jill said. “He thinks it's Katja Wolff. He's afraid she'll come after you next.”
Gideon looked at her, then he looked at his father. He seemed, if anything, inordinately puzzled. Not shocked, Jill concluded, not horrified that Richard had nearly died that day, but merely puzzled. He said, “Why would Katja want to do that? It would hardly get her what she's after.”
“Gideon …” Richard said heavily.
“Richard thinks she's after you as well,” Jill said. “He thinks she's the one who pushed him into the traffic. He might have been killed.”
“Is that what he's telling you?”
“My God. That's what happened,” Richard countered. “What are you doing here? How long have you been here?”
Gideon didn't answer at first. Instead, he appeared to make a mental catalogue of his father's injuries, his gaze going first to Richard's leg, then to his arm, then coming back to rest on his face.
“Gideon,” Richard said. “I asked you how long—”
“Long enough to find this.” Gideon gestured with the card he held.
Jill looked at Richard. She saw his eyes narrow.
“You lied to me about this as well,” Gideon said.
Richard's attention was fixed on the card. “Lied about what?”
“About my sister. She didn't die. Not as a baby and not as a child.” His hand crumpled the envelope. It dropped to the floor.
Jill looked down at the photograph she was holding. She said, “But, Gideon, you know that your sister—”
“You've been going through my belongings,” Richard cut in.
“I wanted to find her address, which I expect you have squirreled away somewhere, haven't you? But what I found instead—”
“Gideon!” Jill held out the picture Richard intended for his son. “You're not making sense. Your sister was—”
“What I found,” Gideon went doggedly on, shaking the card at his father, “was this, and now I know exactly who you are: a liar who couldn't stop if he had to, Dad, if his life depended on telling the truth, if everyone's life depended upon it.”
“Gideon!” Jill was aghast not at the words but at the glacial tone in which Gideon spoke them. Her horror momentarily drove from her thoughts her own affront at Richard's behaviour. She pushed from her mind that Gideon was speaking the truth at least as it applied to her own life if not to his: In never mentioning Sonia's condition, Richard had indeed lied to her, if only by omission. Instead, she dwelt on the intemperance of what the son was saying to the father. “Richard was nearly killed less than three hours ago.”
“Are you sure of that?” Gideon asked her. “If he lied to me about Virginia, who's to know what else he's willing to lie about?”
“Virginia?” Jill asked. “Who—”
Richard said to his son, “We'll talk about this later.”
“No,” Gideon said. “We're going to talk about Virginia now.”
Jill said, “Who is Virginia?”
“Then you don't know either.”
Jill said, “Richard?” and turned to her fiancé. “Richard, what's this all about?”
“Here's what it's all about,” Gideon said, and he read the inside of the card aloud. His voice carried the strength of indignation although it trembled twice: once when he read out the words our daughter and a second time when he came to lived thirty-two years.
For her part, Jill heard the echo of a different two phrases reverberating round the room: She defied medical probability was one, and the other comprised the first three words of the final sentence: Despite her problems. She felt a wave of sickness rise up in her, and a terrible cold worked its way into her bones. “Who is she?” she cried. “Richard, who is she?”
“A freak,” Gideon said. “Isn't that right, Dad? Virginia Davies was another freak.”
“What does he mean?” Jill asked, although she knew, already knew and couldn't bear the knowing. She willed Richard to answer her question, but he stood like granite, bent-shouldered, crooked-backed, with his eyes fixed steadily on his son. “Say something!” Jill implored.
“He's thinking how to shape an answer for you,” Gideon told her. “He's wondering what excuse he can make for letting me think my older sister died as a baby. There was something badly wrong with her, you see. And I expect it was easier to pretend she was dead than to have to accept that she wasn't perfect.”
Richard finally spoke. “You don't know what you're talking about,” he said as Jill's thoughts began to spin wildly out of control: another Down's Syndrome, the voices shouted inside her skull, a second Down's Syndrome, a second Down's Syndrome or something else something worse something he couldn't bring himself even to mention and all the while her precious Catherine was at risk for something God only knew what that the antenatal tests had not identified and he stood there just stood there and stood there and stood there and looked at his son and refused to discuss … She was aware that the picture she was holding was becoming slick in her hands, was becoming heavy, was becoming a burden she could hardly manage. It slipped from her fingers as she cried out, “Talk to me, Richard!”
Richard and his son moved simultaneously as the picture clattered on the bare wood floor and Jill stepped past it, stepped around it, feeling she couldn't bear her own impossible weight a moment longer. So she stumbled to the sofa, where she became a mute onlooker to what then followed.
Hastily, Richard bent for the picture, but his actions were hampered by the plaster on his leg. Gideon got there first. He snatched it up, crying, “Something else, Dad?” and then he stared down at it with his fingers whitening to the colour of bone upon the wooden frame. He said hoarsely, “Where did this come from?” He raised his eyes to his father.
Richard said, “You must calm down, Gideon,” and he sounded desperate and Jill watched both of them and saw their tension, Richard's held like a whip in his hand, Gideon's coiled and ready to spring.
Gideon said, “You told me she'd taken every picture of Sonia with her. Mother left us and she took all the pictures, you said. She took all of the pictures except that one you kept in your desk.”
“I had a very good reason—”
“Have you had this all along?”
“I have.” Richard's eyes bored into his son's.
“I don't believe you,” Gideon said. “You said she took them and she took them. You wanted her to take them. Or you sent them to her. But you didn't have this, because if you'd had it, on that day when I wanted it, when I needed to see her, when I asked you, begged you—”
“Rubbish. This is bollocks. I didn't give it to you then because I thought you might—”
“What? Throw myself onto the railway tracks? I didn't know then. I didn't even suspect. I was panicked about my music and so were you. So if you'd had this then, on that day, Dad, you'd have handed it over straightaway. If you thought for a moment it would get me back to the violin, you would have done anything.”
“Listen to me.” Richard spoke rapidly. “I had that picture. I'd forgotten about it. I'd merely misplaced it among your grandfather's papers. When I saw it yesterday, I intended at once to give it to you. I remembered you wanted a picture of Sonia … that you'd asked about one….”
“It wouldn't be in a frame,” Gideon said. “Not if it was yours. Not if you'd misplaced it among his papers.”
“You're twisting my words.”
“It would have been like the other. It would have been in an envelope or stuffed into a book or placed in a bag or lying somewhere loose, but it wouldn't—it wouldn't—have been in a frame.”
“You're getting hysterical. This is what comes of psychoanalysis. I hope you see that.”
“What I see,” Gideon cried, “is a self-involved hypocrite who'd say anything at all, who'd do anything at all if that's what it took—” Gideon stopped himself.
On the sofa, Jill felt the atmosphere between the two men suddenly become electric and hot. Her own thoughts were charging round madly in her head, so at first when Gideon spoke again, she didn't comprehend his meaning.
“It was you,” he said. “Oh my God. You killed her. You had spoken to her. You had asked her to support your lies about Sonia, but she wouldn't do that, would she? So she had to die.”
“For the love of God, Gideon. You don't know what you're saying.”
“I do. For the first time in my life, I do. She was going to tell me the truth, wasn't she? You didn't think she would, you were so certain she'd go along with anything you planned, because she did at first, all those years ago. But that's not who she was and why the hell did you think it might be? She'd left us, Dad. She couldn'
t live a lie and live with us, so she walked out. It was too much for her, knowing that we'd sent Katja to prison.”
“She agreed to go. She was party to it all.”
“But not to twenty years,” Gideon said. “Katja Wolff wouldn't have been party to that. To five years, perhaps. Five years and one hundred thousand pounds, all right. But twenty years? No one expected it. And Mother couldn't live with it, could she? So she left us and she would have stayed away forever had I not lost my music at Wigmore Hall.”
“You've got to stop thinking that Wigmore Hall is connected to anything but Wigmore Hall. I've told you that from the first.”
“Because you wanted to believe it,” Gideon said. “But the truth is that Mother was going to tell me that my memory wasn't lying to me, wasn't she, Dad? She knew I killed Sonia. She knew I did it alone.”
“You didn't. I've told you. I explained what happened.”
“Tell me again, then. In front of Jill.”
Richard said nothing, although he cast a look at Jill. She wanted to see it as a look that begged for her help and her understanding. But she saw instead the calculation behind it. Richard said, “Gideon. Let's put this aside. Let's talk about it later.”
“We'll talk about it now. One of us will. Shall I be the one? I killed my sister, Jill. I drowned her in her bath. She was a millstone round everyone's neck—”
“Gideon. Stop it.”
“—but especially round mine. She stood in the way of my music. I saw the world revolving round her, and I couldn't cope with that, so I killed her.”
“No!” Richard said.
“Dad wants me to think—”
“No!” Richard shouted.
“—that he was the one, that when he came into the bathroom that evening and saw her underwater in the tub, he held her there and finished the job. But he's lying about that because he knows that if I continue to believe I killed her, there's a very good chance I'll never pick up the violin again.”