A Traitor to Memory (31 page)

“I can't.”

“I'll be with you. I'll be next to you, holding you upright or whatever you want. But you've got to do it.”

We stared at each other, Dr. Rose. I could feel him
willing
me out of that shed where I make my kites, out of the garden, and into the house.

He said, “You won't know if you've made progress with her, Gideon, unless you pick up the instrument and try.”

By that he meant you, Dr. Rose. He meant these hours of writing I've been doing. He meant this sifting through the past we've engaged in which, it appeared, he was willing to assist me in … if I only gave him a demonstration that at the very
least
I could pick up the violin and scrape the bow across the strings.

So I said nothing, but I left the shed and went back to the house. In the music room, I walked not to the window seat, where I've done most of this notebook writing, but to the violin case instead. The Guarneri lay there, its top and its purfling gleaming, the repository of two hundred and fifty years of music-making shimmering from its F holes, its sides, and its pegs.

I can do this.
Twenty-five years do not vanish in an instant. Everything I've learned, everything I know, every natural talent I ever possessed, may be obscured, may be buried under a landslide I cannot yet identify, but all of it is there.

Dad stood next to me at the violin case. He put his hand on my elbow as I reached for the Guarneri. He murmured, “I won't leave you, son. It's all right. I'm here.”

And just at that moment, the phone began to ring.

Dad's fingers tightened on my elbow like a reflex. He said, “Leave it,” in reference to the phone. And since that's what I've been doing for weeks, I had no trouble accommodating him.

But it was Jill's voice that spoke into the answer machine. When she said, “Gideon? Is Richard still there? I must speak to Richard. Has he left? Please pick up,” Dad and I reacted identically. We both said, “The baby,” and he strode to the phone.

He said, “I'm still here. Are you all right, darling?” And then he listened.

There was no simple yes or no in her reply. As she made it, Dad turned from me and said, “What sort of phone call?” He listened to another lengthy response and he finally said, “Jill …
Jill
… Enough. Why on earth did you answer it?”

She responded at length again. At the end of her reply, Dad said, “Wait. Hang on. Don't be silly. You're working yourself into a real state … I can hardly be responsible for an unsolicited and unidentified call when—” His face darkened suddenly as she apparently interrupted him. “God damn it, Jill. Listen to yourself. You're being completely irrational.” And the tone in which he spoke those final words was one I'd heard him use before to dismiss a subject he didn't wish to pursue. Glacial, it was. Dismissive, superior, and in control.

But Jill was not one to release a topic so lightly. She went on again. He listened again. His back was to me, but I could see him stiffening. It was nearly a minute before he spoke.

“I'm coming home,” he told her brusquely. “We're not having this discussion over the phone.”

He rang off then, and it sounded to me as if she were in midsentence when he did so. He turned round and said with a glance at the Guarneri, “You've had a reprieve.”

“Everything all right at home?” I asked him.

“Nothing's right anywhere,” was his curt reply.

26 September, 11:30 P.M.

The fact that I'd failed to play for him was undoubtedly what Dad shared with Raphael in the square when he left me, because when Raphael joined me not three minutes after he and Dad parted, I could see the information incised on his face. His glance went to the Guarneri in its case.

“I can't,” I said.

“He says you won't.” Raphael touched the instrument gently. It was a caress that he might have given to a woman had any woman ever found him an object of sexual attraction. But no woman had done, as far as I knew. Indeed, it seemed to me as I watched him that I alone—and my violin—had prevented Raphael from leading a completely solitary life.

As if to confirm my thoughts, Raphael said, “This can't go on forever, Gideon.”

“If it does?” I asked him.

“It won't. It can't.”

“Do you take his side, then? Did he ask you out there”—here I nodded at the window—“to demand that I play for you?”

Raphael looked out at the square, at the trees whose leaves were beginning to change now, dressing themselves in the colours of early autumn. “No,” he said. “He didn't ask that I force you to play. Not today. I dare say his mind was on other things.”

I wasn't sure I believed him, considering the passion I'd witnessed in my father as he'd spoken to Raphael in the square. But I seized on the idea of “other things” and I used that to turn the conversation. “Why did my mother leave us?” I asked. “Was it because of Katja Wolff?”

Raphael said, “This isn't a subject for you and me.”

“I've remembered Sonia,” I told him.

He reached for the latch on the window, and I thought he meant to open it, either to let in the cool air or to climb outside onto the narrow balcony. But he did neither. He merely fumbled with the mechanism uselessly, and it came to me, watching him, how that simple gesture said so much about the lack in every interaction he and I had had that did not involve the violin.

I said, “I've
remembered
her, Raphael. I've remembered Sonia. And Katja Wolff as well. Why has no one ever spoken of them?”

He looked pained, and I thought he meant to avoid answering me. But just as I was ready to challenge his silence, he said, “Because of what happened to Sonia.”

“What? What happened to Sonia?”

His voice contained wonder when he replied. “You really don't remember, do you? I always thought you never spoke of it because the rest of us didn't. But you don't remember.”

I shook my head, and the shame of that admission swept through me. She was my
sister
and I could not remember a single thing about her, Dr. Rose. Until you and I began this process, I'd completely forgotten she'd ever existed. Can you begin to imagine how that feels?

Raphael went on, using great kindness to excuse the obsessive self-interest that had erased my younger sister from my mind. He said, “But you weren't even eight years old then, were you? And we never spoke of it once the trial was over. We barely spoke of it during the trial, and we agreed not to speak of it afterwards. Even your mother agreed, although she was broken by everything that happened. Yes. I can see how you might have wiped it all from your mind.”

I said although my mouth was dry, “Dad told me that she drowned, that Sonia
drowned
. Why was there a trial? Who was tried? For what?”

“Your father didn't tell you more?”

“He didn't say anything other than Sonia drowned. He seemed so … He looked like he was paying a price just to tell me
how
she died. I didn't want to ask him for more. But now … a trial? That must mean … a
trial
?”

Raphael nodded, and all the possibilities implied by what I've recalled so far swarmed into my mind at once before he went on: Virginia died young, Granddad had episodes, Mother is weeping and weeping in her room, someone has taken a picture in the garden, Sister Cecilia is in the hall, Dad is shouting, and I'm in the sitting room, kicking at the legs of the sofa, upending my music stand, hotly and defiantly declaring that I
will
not play those infantile scales.

“Katja Wolff killed your sister, Gideon,” Raphael told me. “She drowned her in her bath.”

28 September

He wouldn't say more. He simply shut off, shut down, or whatever it is that people do when they've reached the limit of what they can force themselves to speak of. When I said, “Drowned?
Deliberately?
When? Why?” and felt the apprehension that attended those words streak cold fingers down my spine, he said, “I can't say more. Ask your father.”

My father. He sits on the edge of my bed and he watches me and I am afraid.

Of what? you ask me. How old are you, Gideon?

I must be young, because he seems so big, like a giant, when actually he's much the same size as I am now. He puts his hand on my forehead—

Are you comforted by the touch?

No. No, I shrink away.

Does he speak?

Not at first. He just sits with me. But after a moment he moves to place his hands on my shoulders as if he expects me to rise and wishes to hold me still where I lie so I might listen to him. So that's what I do. I lie there and we gaze at each other and then finally he starts to speak.

He says, “You're safe, Gideon.
You
are safe.”

What's he talking about? you ask. Have you had a bad dream? Is that why he's there? Or is it something more? Katja Wolff, perhaps? Are you safe from her? Or is this something from further back, Gideon, from the time before Katja lived at your house?

There've been people at the house. I remember that. I've been sent to my room in the company of Sarah-Jane Beckett, and she's talking talking talking to herself in a voice that I'm not meant to hear. She's pacing, talking, and pulling at her fingernails as if she wants to tear them off. She's saying, “I
knew
it. I could see this coming.” She's saying, “Bloody little whore,” and I know those are bad words, and I'm surprised and frightened because Sarah-Jane Beckett doesn't use bad words. “Thought we wouldn't know,” she says. “Thought we wouldn't
notice
.”

Notice what?

I don't know.

Outside my bedroom, there are footsteps and someone is crying, “Here! In here!” I recognise the voice as barely my father's because it is tinged with so much panic. Above his cries, I hear my mother, and she's saying, “Richard! Oh my God, Richard! Richard!” Granddad is raving, Gran is keening, and someone is calling for everyone to “clear the room, clear the room.” This last is a voice I don't recognise, and when Sarah-Jane hears it, she stops pacing and murmuring and she waits with her head bent, standing next to the door.

And there are other voices—more strangers' voices—that I hear. One asks a series of sharp questions beginning with
how
.

And there are more footsteps, constant movement, metal toolboxes hitting the floor, orders being barked by a man, other tense male voices responding, and through it all, someone is crying out, “No! I do not leave her alone!”

That must be Katja, because she says
do
instead of
did
, which might be what someone unfamiliar with English would say in a moment of panic. And when she says this, weeping as she says it, Sarah-Jane Beckett puts her hand on the doorknob and says, “Little bitch.”