A Traitor to Memory (118 page)

He swung round. “You don't know what you're talking about.
Look
at yourself. Look what she's done to you with all this psycho-mumbo-jumbo of hers. You've been reduced to a puling mouse afraid of his shadow.”

“Isn't that what you've done, Dad? Isn't that what you did back then? You lied, you cheated, you betrayed—”

“Enough!” He was battling to free the CD from its wrapping, and he tore at it with his teeth like a dog, spitting the shreds of cellophane onto the floor. “I'm telling you now that there's
one
way to deal with this, and it's the way you should have dealt with it from the first. A real man faces his fear head-on. He doesn't turn tail and run from it.”

“You're running. Right now.”

“Like bloody God damn
hell
I am.” He punched the button to open the CD player. He jammed the compact disk inside. He hit play and twisted the volume knob. “You listen,” he hissed. “You bloody well
listen
. And act like a man.”

He'd turned up the sound so high that when the music started, I didn't know what it was at first. But my confusion lasted only for a second, because he'd chosen
it
, Dr. Rose. Beethoven.
The Archduke
. He'd chosen it.

The Allegro Moderato began. And it swelled round the room. And over it I could hear Dad's shout.

“Listen.
Listen
. Listen to what's unmade you, Gideon. Listen to what you're terrified to play.”

I covered my ears. “I can't.” But still I heard. It. I heard it. And I heard him above it.

“
Listen
to what you're letting control you. Listen to what you've let a simple bloody piece of music do to your entire career.”

“I don't—”

“Black smudges on a damn piece of
paper
. That's all it is. That's what you've given your power to.”

“Don't make me—”

“Stop it.
Listen
. Is it impossible for a musician like you to play this piece? No, it's not. Is it too difficult? It is not. Is it even challenging? No, no, no. Is it mildly, remotely, or vaguely—”

“Dad!” I pressed my hands to my ears. The room was going black. It was shrinking to a pinpoint of light and the light was blue, it was blue, it was
blue
.

“What it is is weakness made flesh in you, Gideon. You had a bout of nerves and you've transformed yourself into flaming Mr. Robson. That's what you've done.”

The piano introduction was nearly complete. The violin was due to begin. I knew the notes. The music was in me. But in front of my eyes I saw only that door. And Dad—my father—continued to rail.

“I'm surprised you haven't started sweating like him. That's where you'll be next. Sweating and shaking like a freak who—”

“Stop it!”

And the music. The music. The
music
. Swelling, exploding, demanding. All round me, the music that I dreaded and feared.

And in front of me the door, with
her
standing there on the steps that lead up to it, with the light shining down on her, a woman I wouldn't have known on the street, a woman whose accent has faded in time, in the twenty years she has spent in prison.

She says, “Do you remember me, Gideon? It is Katja Wolff. I must speak with you.”

I say politely because I do not know who she is but I have been taught through the years to be polite to the public no matter the demands they make upon me because it is the public who attend my concerts who buy my recordings who support the East London Conservatory and what it is trying to do to better the lives of impoverished children children like me in so many ways save for the circumstances of birth … I say, “I'm afraid I have a concert, Madam.”

“This will not take long.”

She descends the steps. She crosses the bit of Welbeck Way that separates us. I've moved to the red double doors of the artists' entrance to Wigmore Hall and I'm about to knock to gain admittance, when she says she says oh God she says, “I've come for payment, Gideon,” and I do not know what she means.

But somehow I understand that danger is about to engulf me. I clutch the case in which the Guarneri is protected by leather and velvet, and I say, “As I said, I do have a concert.”

“Not for more than an hour,” she says. “This I have been told in the front.”

She nods towards Wigmore Street, where the box office is, where she apparently has gone at first to seek me out. They would have told her that the performers for the evening had not yet arrived, Madam, and that when they do arrive, they use the back entrance and not the front. So if she cared to wait there, she might have the opportunity to speak to Mr. Davies, although the box office couldn't guarantee that Mr. Davies would have the time to speak to her.

She says, “Four hundred thousand pounds, Gideon. Your father claims he does not have it. So I come to you because I know that you must.”

And the world as I know it is shrinking shrinking disappearing entirely into a single bead of light. From that bead grows sound, and I hear the Beethoven, the Allegro Moderato,
The Archduke
's first movement, and then Dad's voice.

He said, “Act like a man, for the love of God. Sit up. Stand up. Stop cowering there like a beaten dog! Jesus! Stop
sniveling
. You're acting like this is—”

I heard no more because I knew suddenly what all of
this
was, and I knew what
this
had always been. I remembered it all in a piece—like the music itself—and the music was the background and the act that went with that music as background was what I had forced myself to forget.

I am in my room. Raphael is displeased, more displeased than he has ever been, and he has been displeased, on edge, anxious, nervous, and irritable for days. I have been petulant and uncooperative. Juilliard has been denied me. Juilliard has been listed amongst the impossibilities that I am growing used to hearing about. This isn't possible, that isn't possible, trim here, cut there, make allowances for. So I'll show them, I decide. I won't play this stupid violin again. I won't practise. I won't have lessons. I won't perform in public. I won't perform in private, for myself or for anyone.
I
will show them.

Raphael marches me to my room. He puts on the recording of
The Archduke
and says, “I'm losing patience with you, Gideon. This is not a difficult piece. I want you to listen to the first movement till you can hum it in your sleep.”

He leaves me, shuts the door. And the Allegro Moderato begins.

I say, “I won't, I won't, I
won't
!” And I upset a table and kick over a chair and slam my body into the door. “You can't make me!” I shout. “You can't make me do anything!”

And the music swells. The piano introduces the melody. All is hushed and ready for the violin and cello. Mine is not a difficult part to learn, not for someone with natural gifts like myself. But what will be the point of learning it when I cannot go to Juilliard? Although Perlman did. As a boy, he went there. But I will not. And this is unfair. This is
bloody
unfair. Everything about my world is unfair. I will not do this. I will not accept this.

And the music swells.

I fling open my door. I shout “No!” and “I won't!” into the corridor. I think someone will come, will march me somewhere and administer discipline, but no one comes because they are all busy with their own concerns and not with mine. And I'm angry at this because it is
my
world that is being affected. It is
my
life that is being moulded. It is
my
will that is being thwarted, and I want to punch my fist into the wall.

And the music swells. And the violin soars. And I will not play this piece of music at Juilliard or anywhere else because I must remain here. In this house, where we're all prisoners. Because of her.

The knob is under my hand before I realise it, the panels of the door inches from my face. I will burst in and frighten her. I will make her cry. I will make her pay. I will make them pay.

She isn't frightened. But she is alone. Alone in the tub with the yellow ducklings bobbing nearby and a bright red boat that she's slapping at happily with her fist. And she deserves to be frightened, to be thrashed, to be made to understand what she's done to me, so I grab her and shove her beneath the water and see her eyes widen and widen and widen and feel her struggle to sit up again.

And the music—
that
music—swells and swells. On and on it goes. For minutes. For days.

And then Katja is there. She screams my name. And Raphael is right behind her yes, because yes, I understand it all now: They have been talking the two of them talking, which is why Sonia has been left alone, and he has been demanding to know if what Sarah-Jane Beckett has whispered is true. Because he has a right to know, he says. He says this as he enters the bathroom on Katja's heels. It is what he's saying as he enters and she screams. He says, “… Because if you are, it's mine and you know it. I do have the right—”

And the music swells.

And Katja screams, screams for my father and Raphael shouts, “Oh my God! Oh my God” but I do not release her. I do not release her even then because I know that the end of my world began with her.

24

J
ILL STAGGERED TO
her bedroom. Her movements were clumsy. She was hampered by her size. She flung open the cupboard that held her clothes, thinking only, Richard, oh my God,
Richard
, and coming round to wonder wildly what she was doing standing incoherently in front of a rack of garments. All she could think was her lover's name. All she could feel was a mixture of terror and a profound self-hatred at the doubts she'd had, doubts that she'd been harbouring and nursing at the very moment that … that what? What had
happened
to him?