A Traitor to Memory (119 page)

“Is he
alive
?” she'd cried into the telephone when the voice asked if she was Miss Foster, Miss Jill Foster, the woman whose name Richard carried in his wallet in the event that something …

“My God, what's happened?” Jill had continued.

“Miss Foster, if you'll come to the hospital,” the Voice had said. “Do you need a taxi? Shall I phone one for you? If you'll give me an address, I can ring a minicab.”

The idea of waiting five minutes—or ten or fifteen—for a cab was inconceivable. Jill dropped the telephone and stumbled for her coat.

Her coat. That was it. She'd come into her bedroom in search of her coat. She shoved through the hanging garments in the cupboard till her hands came into contact with cashmere. She jerked this from its hanger and struggled into it. She fumbled with the horn buttons,
miscalculated where they went, and didn't bother to refasten them more precisely when the hem of the coat hung like a lopsided curtain upon her. From her chest of drawers she took a scarf—the first one that came to hand, it didn't matter—and she wrapped this round her throat. She slammed a black wool cap on her head and snatched up her shoulder bag. She went for the door.

In the lift, she punched for the underground car park, and she willed the little cubicle downwards without stopping at any other floors. She told herself that it was a
good
sign the hospital had rung her and asked her to come. If the news was bad, if the situation was—could she risk the word?—fatal, they wouldn't have rung her at all, would they? Wouldn't they instead have sent a constable round to fetch her or to speak with her? So what it meant that they had phoned was that he was alive. He
was
alive.

She found herself making bargains with God as she pushed through the doors to the car park. If Richard would live, if his heart or whatever it was would mend, then she would compromise on the baby's name. They would christen her Cara Catherine. Richard could call her Cara at home behind closed doors, among the family, and Jill herself would call her the same. Then outside, in the world at large, both of them could refer to her as Catherine. They'd register her at school as Catherine. Her friends would call her Catherine. And Cara would be even more special because it would be what only her parents called her. That was fair, wasn't it, God? If only Richard would live.

The car was parked seven bays along. She unlocked it, praying that it would start, and for the first time seeing the wisdom in having something modern and reliable. But the Humber loomed large in her past—her granddad had been its single owner—and when he'd left the vehicle to her in his will, she'd kept it out of love for him and in memory of the countryside drives they'd taken together. Her friends had laughed at it in earlier years, and Richard had lectured her about its dangers—no airbags, no headrests, inadequate restraints—but Jill had stubbornly continued to drive it and had no intention of giving it up.

“It's safer than what's on the streets these days,” she'd declared loyally whenever Richard had attempted to wrestle from her a promise not to drive it. “It's like a tank.”

“Just stay out of it till you've had the baby, and promise me you won't let Cara anywhere near it,” he had replied.

Catherine, she had thought. Her name is Catherine. But that was
before. That was when she thought nothing could happen in an instant the way things happened: things like this that changed everything, making what had seemed so important yesterday less than a bagatelle today.

Still, she'd made the promise not to drive the Humber, and she'd kept that promise for the last two months. So she had added reason to wonder if it would start.

It did. Like a dream. But the increase in Jill's size required her to make an adjustment to the heavy front seat. She reached forward and beneath it for the metal lever. She flipped it up and shifted her weight. The seat wouldn't budge.

She said, “Damn it. Come on,” and tried again. But either the device itself had corroded over the years or something was blocking the track on which the enormous seat ran.

Her anxiety rising, she scrabbled her fingers on the floor beneath her. She felt the lever, then the edge of the lever. She felt the seat springs. She felt the track. And then she found it. Something hard and thin and rectangular was blocking the old metal track, wedged in in such a way as to make it virtually immovable.

She frowned. She pulled on the object. She jockeyed it back and forth when it got stuck. She cursed. Her hands became damp with sweat. And finally, finally, she managed to dislodge it. She slid it out, lifted it, and laid it on the broad seat next to her.

It was a photograph, she saw, a picture in a stark monastic wooden frame.

GIDEON

11 November

I ran, Dr. Rose. I bolted for the music room door and crashed down the stairs. I threw open the door. It slammed back against the wall. I flung myself into Chalcot Square. I didn't know where I was going or what I intended to do. But I had to be away: away from my father and away from what he'd inadvertently forced me to face.

I ran blindly, but I saw her face. Not as she might have looked in joy or innocence or even in suffering, but in losing consciousness as I drowned her. I saw her head turn side to side, her baby's hair fan out, her mouth gulp fishlike, her eyes roll back and disappear. She fought to stay alive, but she couldn't match the strength of my rage. I held her down and held her down, and when Katja and Raphael burst into the room, she was no longer moving or struggling against me. But still my rage was not satisfied.

My feet pounded the pavement as I tore along the square. I did not head for Primrose Hill, for Primrose Hill is exposed, and exposure to anything, anyone, any longer, was an unbearable thought to me. So I thundered in another direction, veering round the first corner I came to, charging through the silent neighbourhood till I burst into the upper reaches of Regent's Park Road.

Moments later, I heard him shouting my name. As I stood panting at the junction where Regent's Park and Gloucester Roads meet, he came round the corner, holding his side against a stitch. He raised his arm. He shouted, “Wait!” I ran again.

What I thought as I ran was a simple phrase:
He's always known
. For I remembered more, and I saw what I remembered as a series of images.

Katja screams and shrieks. Raphael pushes past her to get to me. Shouts and footsteps rise up the stairs and along the corridor. A voice cries out, “God
damn
it!”

Dad is in the bathroom. He tries to pull me away from the tub, where my fingers have dug and dug and dug into my sister's fragile shoulders. He shouts my name and slaps my face. He yanks me by the hair, and I finally release her.

“Get him out of here!” he roars, and for the first time he sounds just like Granddad and I am frightened.

As Raphael jerks me across the corridor, I hear others on their way. My mother is calling, “Richard? Richard?” as she runs up the stairs. Sarah-Jane Beckett and James the Lodger are talking to each other as they hurry down from above. Somewhere Granddad is bellowing, “Dick! Where's my whisky? Dick!” And Gran is calling out fearfully from below, “Has something happened to Jack?”

Then Sarah-Jane Beckett is with me, saying, “What's happened? What's going on?” She takes me from Raphael's fierce grip saying, “Raphael, what are you
doing
to him?” and “What on earth is
she
going on about?” in reference to Katja Wolff, who is weeping and saying, “I do not leave her. For a minute only,” to which comment Raphael Robson is adding nothing at all.

After that I am in my room. I hear Dad cry, “Don't come in here, Eugenie. Dial nine-nine-nine.”

She says, “What's
happened
? Sosy! What's happened?”

A door shuts. Katja weeps. Raphael says, “Let me take her below.”

Sarah-Jane Beckett goes to stand at the door to my room, where she listens, her head bent, and there she remains. I sit against the headboard of the bed, arms wet to the elbows, shaking now, finally aware of the terrible enormity of what I have done. And all along the music has played, that same music, the cursed
Archduke
that has haunted and pursued me like a relentless demon for the last twenty years.

That is what I remembered as I ran, and when I crossed the junction, I did not attempt to avoid the traffic. It seemed to me that the only mercy would be if a car or lorry struck me.

None did. I made it to the other side. But Dad was hard on my heels, still shouting my name.

I set off again running, running away from him, running into the past. And I saw that past like a kaleidoscope of pictures: that genial ginger-haired policeman who smelled of cigars and spoke in a kindly paternal voice … that night in bed with my mother holding me holding me holding me and my face pressed firmly into her breasts as if she would do to me what I had done to my sister … my father sitting on the edge of my bed, his hands on my shoulders as my hands were on hers … his voice saying, “You're quite safe, Gideon, no one will harm you” … Raphael with flowers, flowers for my mother, flowers of sympathy to assuage her grief … and always hushed voices, in every room, for days on end …

Finally Sarah-Jane leaves the door where she has stood motionless, waiting and listening. She walks to the tape player, where the violin in the Beethoven trio is executing a passage of doublestops. She punches a button and the music blessedly ceases, leaving behind a silence so hollow that I wish only for the music again.

Into this silence comes the sound of sirens. They grow louder and louder as the vehicles approach. Although it's probably taken them minutes, it seems like an hour since Dad yanked on my hair and forced me to release the grip I had on my sister.

“Up here, in here,” Dad shouts down the stairs as someone lets the paramedics into the house.

And then begins the effort to save what cannot be saved, what I know cannot be saved, because I was the one who destroyed her.

I can't bear the images, the thoughts, the sounds.

I ran blindly, wildly, without caring where I was going. I crossed the street and came to my senses directly in front of the Pembroke Castle pub. And beyond it I saw the terrace where the drinkers sit in summer, the terrace that was empty now, but bordered by a wall, a low brick wall onto which I leapt, along which I ran, and from which I sprang, sprang without thinking onto the iron archway of the pedestrian footbridge that spans the railway line thirty feet beneath it. I sprang thinking, This is how it will be.

I heard the train before I saw it. In the hearing, I took my answer. The train wasn't traveling fast, so the engineer would well be able to stop it and I would not die … unless I timed my jump with precision.