A Traitor to Memory (126 page)

“How the hell can you accuse me of that?”

“Because I see it. Because I understand. Because how would Granddad have reacted, Dad, to the news that his freak of a granddaughter had just been drowned by her freak of a brother? And that's what it must have come down to in the end: Keep the truth from Granddad no matter what.”

“She was a willing participant because of the money. Twenty thousand pounds for admitting to a negligent act that led to Sonia's death. I explained all that. I told you that we didn't expect the press's reaction to the case or the Crown Prosecutor's passion to put her in prison. We had no idea—”

“You did it to protect me. And all your talk about leaving Sonia in the bath to die—of holding her down yourself—is just that: talk. It serves the same purpose as letting Katja Wolff take the blame twenty years ago. It keeps me playing the violin. Or at least it's supposed to.”

“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

R
ICHARD 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—”