A Traitor to Memory (105 page)

Are he and Katja lovers at the time? Or do they both just think about it then, each of them waiting for some sign from the other that will express an interest that cannot yet be spoken? And when it happens between them for the first time, who makes the move and what is the move that signals the direction they will soon be taking?

She goes out for a breath of air on a stifling night, the kind of August night in London when a heat wave hits and there's no escaping the oppressive atmosphere created by bad air hanging too long over the city, which is daily heated by the scorching sun and further poisoned by the diesel lorries that belch exhaust fumes along the streets. Sonia is asleep at long last, and Katja has ten precious minutes to herself. The darkness outside makes a false promise of deliverance from the heat trapped inside the house, so she walks out into it, out into the garden behind the house, which is where he finds her.

“Terrible day,” he says. “I'm burning up.”

“I, too,” she replies, and she watches him steadily. “I too burn, Richard.”

And that is enough. That final statement and especially the use of his Christian name constitute implicit permission, and he needs no other invitation. He surges towards her, and it begins between them, and this is what I see from the garden.

20

L
IBBY
N
EALE HAD
never been to Richard Davies' flat, so she didn't know what to expect when she drove Gideon there from the Temple. Asked about it, she might have guessed that he'd be living high out of very deep pockets. He'd been making such a deal about Gideon's not playing the violin for the past four months, it seemed reasonable to conclude that he needed a hefty income that only cash from Gideon on a regular basis could provide.

So she said, “This is
it
?” when Gideon told her to pull to the kerb at a parking space on the north side of a street called Cornwall Gardens. She looked at the neighbourhood with a vague sense of disappointment, taking in buildings that were—okay—
genteel
enough but dilapidated to the max. True, there were some decent-looking places crammed in here and there, but the rest of them looked like they'd seen better days in another century.

It got worse. Gideon, without replying to her question, led the way to a building that looked like prayers were holding it up. He used a key on a front door so warped away from the jamb that using a key in the first place seemed like an unnecessary courtesy applied to spare the door's feelings. A credit card would have done as well. When they were inside, he led her upstairs to a second door. This one wasn't warped, but someone had decorated it with a trail of green spray paint in the shape of a Z, like an Irish Zorro had come to call.

Gideon said, “Dad?” as he swung the door open and they entered his father's flat. He said to Libby, “Wait here,” which she was glad to do as he ducked into a kitchen that was just off the living room. The place gave her the major creeps. It was so not the kind of place she'd thought Richard Davies would've set himself up in.

First off, what was with the colour scheme? Libby wondered. She was no decorator—leave that to her mom and her sister, who were into Fêng Shui in a major way. But even she could tell that the colours in this place were guaranteed to make anyone want to take a leap from the nearest bridge. Puke-green walls. Diarrhoea-brown furniture. And weirdo art like that nude woman shown from neck to ankles with pubic hair looking like the inside of a toilet going through the flush cycle. What did
that
mean? Above the fireplace—which for some reason was filled with books—a circular display of tree branches had been pounded. These looked like they'd been made into walking sticks because they were sanded down and had holes punched through them and leather thongs threaded through the holes like wrist straps. But how weird to have them there in the first place.

The only thing in the room that Libby saw and had expected to see were pictures of Gideon. There were tons of those. And they were all unified by the same boring theme: the violin. Surprise, surprise, Libby thought. Richard couldn't
possibly
have a shot of Gideon doing something he might
like
to do. Why show him flying kites on Primrose Hill? Why catch him landing his glider? Why take a picture of him helping some kid from the East End learn how to hold a violin if he
himself
wasn't holding it, playing it, and making a bang-up salary for doing so? Richard, Libby thought, needed his butt kicked. He was so
not
helping Gideon get better.

She heard a window in the kitchen creak open, heard Gideon shout for his father in the direction of the garden that she'd seen to the left of the building itself. Richard obviously wasn't out there, though, because after thirty seconds and a few more shouts, the window closed. Gideon came back through the living room and headed down the hall.

He didn't say, “Wait here,” this time, so Libby followed him. She'd had enough of the creepoid living room.

He worked through the place back to front, saying, “Dad?” as he opened a bedroom door and then a bathroom door. Libby followed. She was about to tell him it was sort of obvious that Richard wasn't at home, so why was Gideon yelling for him like he'd lost his hearing in the last twenty-four hours when he shoved on another door, swung it wide, and revealed the icing on the cake of the flat's overall weirdness.

Gideon ducked through the doorway, and she trailed him, saying, “Whoops! Oh, sorry,” when she first caught a glimpse of the uniformed soldier standing just inside. It took her a moment to realise the soldier wasn't Richard playing dress-up with the hope of spooking the hell out of them. It was, instead, a mannequin. She approached it gingerly and said, “Jeez. What the hell …?” and glanced at Gideon. But he was already at a desk at the far side of the room, and he had its fold-down front opened and was rooting through all its cubbyholes, looking so intense that she figured he wouldn't hear her even if she asked what she wanted to ask, which was what the hell Richard was
doing
with this weirdo piece of crap in his house and did Gid think Jill knew about it?

There were display cases as well, the kinds that you saw in museums. And these were filled with letters, medals, commendations, telegrams, and all sorts of junk that upon inspection appeared to have come from World War II. On the walls were pictures from the same era, all showing a dude in the Army. Here he was on his stomach, squinting down the barrel of a rifle like John Wayne in a war movie. There he was running alongside a tank. Next he was seated cross-legged on the ground, at the front of a pack of similar dudes with their weapons slung over their bodies all casual, like having an AK-47—or whatever it had been in those days—across your shoulder was pretty much par for the course. It wasn't what
anyone
with a grain of sense would show himself doing today. Not unless he was part of some neo-Nazi freedom fighter let's-get-rid-of-everyone-who's-not-a-WASP group.

Libby felt queasy. Getting out of this place in the next thirty seconds didn't seem like such a bad idea.

This thought was reinforced when she saw the last set of pictures, which showed the same guy as before but this time in completely different circumstances. He looked like someone from a Nazi death camp. He must have weighed about fifteen pounds, and his body was one big scab and approximately three million oozing sores. He was lying on a pallet in what looked like a jungle hut, and his eyes were so sunken into his head that it seemed they might burn right through his skull.

Behind Libby, drawers slammed shut and other drawers opened. Paperwork shuffled. Things flopped to the floor. She turned and watched what Gideon was doing, thinking, Richard's
really
going to blow a fuse over this one, but then, not much caring because Richard was reaping what Richard had spent a long time sowing.

She said, “Gideon. What are we looking for?”

“He's got her address. He has to have it.”

“That doesn't make sense.”

“He knows where she is. He's seen her.”

“Did he tell you that?”

“She's written to him. He
knows
.”

“Gid, did he
tell
you that?” Libby didn't think so. “Hey, why would she write to him? Why would she try to see him? Cresswell-White said she can't contact you guys. Her parole will be screwed up if she does. She's just spent twenty years in the joint, right? You think she wants to go back for three or four more?”

“He knows, Libby. And so do I.”

“Then what are we doing here? I mean, if
you
know …” Gideon was making less and less sense by the hour. Libby thought fleetingly of his psychiatrist. She knew the shrink's name, Dr. Something Rose, but that was all. She wondered if she should phone every Dr. Rose in the book—how many could there be?—and say, Look, I'm a friend of Gideon Davies’. I'm getting freaked out. He's acting too weird. Can you help out?

Did psychiatrists make house calls? And more to the point, did they take it seriously if a friend of a patient called and said it looked like things were getting out of hand? Or did they then think the friend of the patient should be the next patient? Shit. Hell.
What
should she do? Not call Richard, that's for sure. He wasn't exactly playing the rôle of Mr. Sympathy By The Bucketful.

Gideon had dumped out each of the desk drawers on the floor and had done a thorough job of searching through their contents. The only thing left was a letter holder on top of the desk, which for some bizarre reason—but by then, who was counting them?—he went for last, opening envelopes and throwing them onto the floor after glancing at their contents. But the fifth one he came to, he read. Libby could see it was a card with flowers on the front and a printed greeting inside along with a note. His hand dropped hard as he read the message.

She thought, He's found it. She crossed the room to him. She said, “What? She, like,
wrote
to your dad?”

He said, “Virginia.”

She said, “What? Who? Who's Virginia?”

His shoulders shook and his fist grabbed onto the card like he wanted to strangle it and he said again, “Virginia.
Virginia
. God damn him. He lied to me.” And he began to cry. Not tears but sobs, heaves
of his body like
everything
was trying to come up and out of him: the contents of his stomach, the thoughts in his mind, and the feelings of his heart.

Tentatively, Libby reached for the card. He let her take it from him and she ran her gaze over it, looking for what had caused Gideon's reaction. It said:

Dear Richard:

Thank you for the flowers. They were much appreciated. The ceremony was a brief one, but I tried to make it something Virginia herself would have liked. So I filled the chapel with her finger paintings and put her favourite toys round her coffin before the cremation.

Our daughter was a miracle child in many ways. Not only because she defied medical probability and lived thirty-two years but also because she managed to teach so much to anyone who came into contact with her. I think you would have been proud to be her father, Richard. Despite her problems, she had your tenacity and your fighting spirit, no poor gifts to pass on to a child.

Fondly
,

Lynn

Libby re-read the message and understood.
She had your tenacity and your fighting spirit, no poor gifts to pass on to a child.
Virginia, she thought. Another kid. Gideon had another sister and she was dead, too.

She looked at Gideon, at a loss for what to say. He'd been taking so many body blows in the past few days that she couldn't even begin to think where to start with the psychic salve that might soothe him.