A Traitor to Memory (104 page)

Barbara took the photos that Sister Cecilia offered her. In them she saw that the nun had maintained a pictorial record of the child's life. Jeremy was fair and blue-eyed, although the blond hair of his childhood had darkened to pine in his adolescence. He'd gone through a gawky period round the time his family had taken him and his siblings to Australia, but once he'd passed through that, he was handsome enough. Straight nose, square jaw, ears flat against his skull, he would do for an Aryan, Barbara thought.

She said, “Katja Wolff doesn't know that you have these?”

Sister Cecilia said, “As I told you, she wouldn't ever see me. Even when it came time to arrange for Jeremy's adoption, she wouldn't speak with me. The prison acted as our go-between: The warden told me Katja wanted an adoption and the warden told me when the time had arrived. Sure, I don't know if Katja ever
saw
the baby. All I know is that she wanted him placed with a family at once, and she wanted me to see to it as soon as was possible after the birth.”

Barbara handed the pictures back, saying, “She didn't want him to go to the father?”

“Adoption was what she wanted.”

“Who was the dad?”

“We didn't speak—”

“Got that. I know. But you
knew
her. You knew all of them. So you must have had an idea or two. There were three men in the house that we know of: the Granddad, Richard Davies, and the lodger, who was a bloke called James Pitchford. There were four if you count Raphael Robson, the violin teacher. Five if you want to count Gideon and think Katja might have liked to have at them young. He was precocious in one way. Why not in another?”

The nun looked affronted. “Katja was not a child molester.”

“She might not have seen it as molestation. Women don't, do they, when they're initiating a male. Hell, there are tribes where it's
customary
for older women to take young boys in hand.”

“Be that as it may, this was not a tribe. And Gideon was certainly
not
the father of that baby. I doubt”—and here the nun blushed hotly—“I doubt that he would have been capable of the act.”

“Then whoever it was, he must have had reason to keep his part in it under wraps. Else why not come forward and lay claim to the kid once Katja got her twenty-year sentence? Unless, of course, he didn't want to be known as the man who put a killer in the club.”

“Why does it have to be someone from the house at all?” Sister Cecilia asked. “And why is it important to know?”

“I'm not sure it is important,” Barbara admitted. “But if the father of her baby is somehow involved with everything else that happened to Katja Wolff, then he might be in danger right now. If she's behind two hit-and-runs.”

“Two
… ?”

“The officer who headed the investigation into Sonia's death was hit last night. He's in a coma.”

Sister Cecilia's fingers reached for the crucifix she wore round her
neck. They curled round it and held on fast as the nun said, “I cannot believe Katja had anything to do with that.”

“Right,” Barbara said. “But sometimes we end up having to believe what we don't want to believe. That's the way of the world, Sister.”

“It is not the way of my world,” the nun declared.

GIDEON

6 November

I've dreamed again, Dr. Rose. I'm standing on the stage at the Barbican, with the lights blindingly bright above me. The orchestra is behind me, and the maestro—whose face I cannot see—taps on his lectern. The music begins—four measures from the cellos—and I lift my instrument and prepare to join in. Then from somewhere in the vast hall, I hear it: A baby has begun crying.

It echoes through the hall, but I'm the only person who seems to notice. The cellos continue to play, the rest of the strings join them, and I know that my solo will be fast upon us.

I cannot think, I cannot play, I cannot do anything but wonder why the maestro won't stop the orchestra, won't turn to the audience, won't demand that someone have the simple courtesy to take the screaming child out of the auditorium so that we can concentrate on our playing. There is a full measure's rest before I'm to begin my solo, and as I wait for it to arrive, I keep glancing out to the audience. But I can see nothing because of the lights, and they are far more blinding than lights ever are in an actual auditorium. Indeed, they're the sort of lights one imagines to be shined upon a suspect who is under interrogation.

When the strings reach the full measure's rest, I count the time. I know somehow that I won't be able to play what I'm supposed to play while the distraction continues, but I feel that I must. I will thus have to do what I've never done before: As ludicrous as it sounds, I will have to fake it, to improvise if necessary, to maintain the same key but to play
anything
if I have to in order to get myself through the ordeal.

I begin. Of course, it isn't right. It isn't in the right key. To my left, the concertmaster stands abruptly and I see that he's Raphael Robson. I want to say, “Raphael, you're playing! With an audience, you're playing!” but the rest of the violins follow his lead and leap to their feet as well. They begin to protest to the maestro, as do the cellos and the basses. I hear all their voices. I try to drown them out with my playing and I try to drown the baby out, but I cannot. I want to tell them that it's not me, it's not my fault, and I say, “Can't you hear? Can't you hear it?” as I continue to play. And I watch the maestro as I do so, because he's continuing to direct the orchestra as if they'd never stopped playing in the first place.

Raphael then approaches the maestro, who turns to me. And he is my father. “Play!” he snarls. And I'm so surprised to see him there where he should not be that I back away and the darkness of the auditorium envelops me.

I begin to search for the screaming baby. I go up the aisle, feeling my way in the dark, until I hear that the crying is coming from behind a closed door.

I open this door. Suddenly, I am outside, in daylight, and in front of me is an enormous fountain. But this is not an ordinary fountain, because standing in the water are a minister of some sort dressed all in black and a woman in white who is holding the yowling infant to her bosom. As I watch, the minister submerges them both—the woman and the child that she holds—in the water, and I know that the woman is Katja Wolff and that she's holding my sister.

Somehow, I know I must get to that fountain, but my feet become too heavy to lift. So I watch, and when Katja Wolff emerges from the water, she emerges alone.

The water makes her white dress cling to her, and through the material her nipples show, as does her pubic hair, which is thick, dark as night, and coiling coiling coiling over her sex, which still glistens through the wet dress she's wearing as if she's not wearing a dress at all. And I feel that stirring within me, that rush of desire I haven't felt in years. The throb begins and I welcome it and I no longer think of the concert I've left or the ceremony I've witnessed in the water.

My feet are freed. I approach. Katja cups her breasts in her hands. But before I can reach the fountain and her, the minister blocks my way and I look at him and he is my father.

He goes to her. He does to her what I want to do, and I am forced to watch as her body draws him in and begins to work him as the water slaps languidly against their legs.

I cry out, and I awaken.

And there it was between my legs, Dr. Rose, what I hadn't been able to manage in … how many years? … since Beth. Throbbing, engorged, and ready for action, all because of a dream in which I was nothing but a voyeur of my father's pleasure.

I lay there in the darkness, despising myself, despising my body and my mind and what both of them were telling me through the means of a dream. And as I lay there, a memory came to me.

It is Katja, and she has come into the dining room where we're having dinner. She's carrying my sister, who is dressed for bed, and it's very clear that she's excited about something, because when Katja Wolff is excited, her English becomes more broken. She says, “See! See you must what she has done!”

Granddad says irritably, “What is it
now?
” and there's a moment that I recognise as tension while all the adults look at each other: Mother at Granddad, Dad at Gran, Sarah-Jane at James the Lodger. He—James—is looking at Katja. And Katja is looking at Sonia.

She says, “Show them, little one,” and she sets my sister on the floor. She puts her on her bum but she doesn't prop her up as she's had to do in the past. Instead, she balances her carefully and removes her hands, and Sonia remains upright.

“She sits alone!” Katja announces proudly. “Is this not a dream?”

Mother gets to her feet, saying, “Wonderful, darling!” and goes to cuddle her. She says, “Thank you, Katja,” and when she smiles, her face is radiant with delight.

Granddad makes no comment at all because he doesn't look to see what Sonia has managed to do. Gran murmurs, “Lovely, my dear,” and watches Granddad.

Sarah-Jane Beckett makes a polite comment and attempts to draw James the Lodger into conversation. But it's an attempt that is all in vain: James is fixated on Katja the way a starving dog might fixate on a rare piece of beef.

And Katja herself is fixated on my father. “See how lovely is she!” Katja crows. “See what learns she and how quickly! What a good big girl is Sonia, yes. Every baby can thrive with Katja.”

Every baby
. How had I forgotten those words and that look? How had it escaped me till now: what those words and that look really meant? What they
had
to have meant, because everyone freezes the way people freeze when a motion picture is reduced to a single frame. And a moment later—in the breath of a second—Mother picks up Sonia and says, “We're all quite sure that's the case, my dear.”

I saw it then, and I see it now. But I didn't understand because what was I, seven years old? What child that young can comprehend the full reality of the situation in which he's living? What child that young can infer from a single simple statement graciously said a woman's sudden understanding of a betrayal that has occurred and is continuing to occur within her own home?

9 November

He kept that picture, Dr. Rose. Everything I know goes back to the fact that my father kept that single picture, a photograph that he himself must have taken and hidden away because how else could it possibly have come to be in his possession?

So I see them, on a sunny afternoon in the summer, and he asks Katja to step into the garden so that he can take a photo of her with my sister. Sonia's presence, cradled in Katja's arms, legitimises the moment. Sonia serves as an excuse for the picture-taking despite the fact that she is cradled in such a way that her face isn't visible to the camera. And that's an important detail as well, because Sonia isn't perfect. Sonia is a freak, and a picture of Sonia whose face bears the manifestations of the congenital syndrome that afflicts her—oblique palpebral fissures, I have learned they are called, epicanthal folds, and a mouth that is disproportionately small—will serve as a constant reminder to Dad that he created for the second time in his life a child with physical and mental imperfections. So he doesn't want to capture her face on film, but he needs her there as an excuse.