A Traitor to Memory (12 page)

She went to work. She'd been a constant presence for my first four years, but once it became clear that she had a child of exceptional talent that needed fostering, which was going to be not only time-consuming but hideously expensive, she took a job to help out with the costs. I was given into the care of my grandmother—when I was not practising my instrument, having lessons with Raphael, listening to the recordings he brought for me, or attending concerts in his company—but my life had altered so appreciably from what it had been before that day I first heard the music in Kensington Square, I hardly noticed her absence. Prior to that, however, I do remember accompanying her—it seemed like every day—to early morning Mass.

She'd struck up a friendship with a nun at the convent in the square, and between them they'd arranged that my mother could attend the daily Mass that was said for the sisters. She was a convert to Catholicism, my mother. But as her own father was an Anglican minister, I wonder now how much her conversion had to do with devotion to a different dogma and how much it had to do with slapping her father in the face. He wasn't, as I was given to understand it, a very nice fellow. Other than that, I don't recall him.

This is not the case for my mother, but she's a shadowy figure for me because she left us. When I was nine or ten—I can't remember which—I arrived home from a concert tour of Austria to find that my mother had quit Kensington Square, leaving not a trace of herself behind. She took every article of clothing she possessed, each one of her books, and a number of family photographs. And off she went, like a figurative thief in the night. Except it was the day, I've been told. And she called a taxi. She left no note and no forwarding address, and I never heard from her again.

My father had been with me in Austria—Dad always traveled with me, and Raphael often accompanied us as well—so he was as much in the dark about where Mother had gone and why she had gone as I myself was. All I know is that we came home to find Granddad having an episode, Gran weeping on the stairs, and Calvin the Lodger trying to find the appropriate phone number with no one to help him.

Calvin the Lodger? you ask me. The earlier lodger—James, is that right?—he was gone?

Yes. He must have left the year before. Or the year before that. I don't remember. We had a number of lodgers over time. We had to, in order to make ends meet, as I've already noted.

Do you remember them all? you want to know.

I don't. Just those who figure large, I suppose. Calvin because he was there that night when I first learned my mother had gone. James because he was present when everything began.

Everything? you ask.

Yes. The violin. The lessons. Miss Orr. Everything.

26 August

I associate everyone with music. When I think of Rosemary Orr, I think of Brahms, the concerto that was playing the first time I met her. When I think of Raphael, it's the Mendelssohn. Dad is Bach, the solo violin sonata in G minor. And Granddad will always be Paganini. The twenty-fourth caprice was his favourite. “All those notes,” he would marvel. “All those perfect notes.”

And your mother? you ask me. What about her? Which piece of music do you associate with your mother?

Interestingly, I can't attach an actual piece of music to Mother the way I can with the others. I'm not sure why. A form of denial, perhaps? Repression of emotion? I don't know. You're the psychiatrist. Explain it to me.

I still do this with music, by the way. I still associate a person with a piece. Sherrill, for example, is Bartók's Rhapsody, which is what he and I initially played together in public, years ago, at St. Martin's in the Fields. We've never played it since and we were teenagers then—the American and the English
wunderkind
together made excellent press, believe me—but he'll always be Bartók when I think of him. That's just how it works in my mind.

And it's the same for people who aren't musical in the least. Take Libby, for instance. Have I told you about Libby? She's Libby the Lodger. Yes, like James and Calvin and all the others except she's of the present, not of the past, and she lives in the lower ground floor flat of my house in Chalcot Square.

I hadn't thought of letting it till she turned up at my door one day, ferrying a recording contract that my agent had decided had to be signed at once. She works for a courier service, and I didn't know she was a girl till she handed me the paperwork, took off her helmet, and said with a nod at the contracts, “Don't be bugged by this, okay? I just gotta ask. You a rock musician or something?” in that excessively casual and friendly fashion that seems to plague the native Californian.

I replied, “No. I'm a concert violinist.”

She said, “No way!”

I said, “Way.”

To which she produced such a blank expression that I thought I was dealing with a congenital idiot.

I won't ever sign contracts without having read them—no matter what my agent claims this reveals about my lack of trust in his wisdom—and rather than have the poor urchin—for so she seemed to me—wait on the front step while I read through the document, I asked her in and we climbed to the first floor, which is where the music room overlooks the square.

She said, “Oh wow. Sorry. You
are
somebody, aren't you?” as we climbed because she noticed the art work for the CD covers hanging along the staircase. “I feel like a real dope.”

I said, “No need,” and walked into the music room with her on my heels and my own head buried in clauses about accompanists, royalties, and time lines.

“Oh, this is awesome,” she intoned while I went to the window seat where even now I'm writing in this notebook for you, Dr. Rose. “Who's this guy you're with in the picture? This guy with the crutches? Jeez. Look at you. You look seven years old!”

God. He's possibly the greatest violinist on earth and the girl's as ignorant as a tube of toothpaste. “Itzhak Perlman,” I told her. “And I was six at the time, not seven.”

“Wow. You actually
played
with him when you were only
six
?”

“Hardly. But he was kind enough to listen to me one afternoon when he was in London.”

“Very cool.”

And as I read she continued to wander, murmuring from her rather limited vocabulary of exclamations. She took particular pleasure—so it seemed—in an examination of my earliest instrument, that one-sixteenth that I keep in the music room on a little stand. I also keep the Guarneri there, the violin that I use today. It was in its case, and the case was open because when Libby arrived with the paperwork for me, I'd been in the midst of my morning practise. Obviously unaware of the trespass she was committing, she casually reached down and plucked the E-string.

She might as well have shot a pistol in the room. I leapt up and bellowed, “Don't
touch
that violin!” and so startled her that she reacted like a child who's been struck. She said, “Oh my gosh,” and she backed away from the instrument with her hands behind her and her eyes filling. And then she turned away in embarrassment.

I set my paperwork aside and said, “Look. Sorry. Didn't mean to be a swine, but that instrument's two hundred and fifty years old. I'm rather careful with it, and I usually don't allow—”

Her back turned to me, she waved me off. She took several deep breaths before she shook her head vigorously, which made her hair puff out—have I mentioned that her hair is curly? Toast coloured, it is, and very curly—and she rubbed her eyes. Then she turned round and said, “Sorry about that. It's okay. I shouldn't have touched it and I totally wasn't thinking. You were right to tell me off, you really were. It's just that, like, for a second you were so totally rock, and I freaked.”

Language from another planet. I said, “Totally rock?”

She said, “Rock Peters. Formerly Rocco Petrocelli and currently my estranged husband. I mean, as estranged as he'll let us be since he holds the purse strings and he's not exactly into loosening them to help me get established on my own.”

I thought she looked far too young to be married to anyone, but it turned out that, despite her looks and what appeared to be a rather charming prepubescent plumpness, she was twenty-three years old and two years married to the irascible Rock. At the moment, however, I said, “Ah.”

She said, “He's got, like, this hair-trigger temper among other things, such as not knowing monogamy is usually part of the marriage deal. I never knew when he was going to blow a fuse. After two years cowering round the apartment, I called it quits.”

“Oh. Sorry.” I admit that I felt uneasy with her unburdening of personal details. It's not that I'm unused to such displays. This tendency to confession and contrition seems peculiar to all the Americans I've ever known, as if they've somehow become acculturated to disbosoming themselves along with learning to salute their flag. But being used to something isn't exactly akin to welcoming it into your life. What, after all, is one to
do
with someone else's personal data?

She gave me more of it. She wanted a divorce; he did not. They continued to live together because she could not come up with the cash to break away from him. Whenever she came close to the amount she needed, he simply withheld her wages until she'd spent whatever nest egg she'd managed to accumulate. “And why he even
wants
me there is, like, the major mystery of my life, you know? I mean the man is
totally
governed by the herd instinct, so what's the point?”

He was, she explained, a womaniser without peer, an adherent to the philosophy that groups of females—“the herd, get it?”—should be dominated and serviced by a single male. “But the problem is that the entire female sex is the herd in Rock's mind. And he's got to hump them all just to keep them happy.” Then she clapped her hand over her mouth and said, “Oops. Sorry.” And then she grinned. And then she said, “Anyway. Gosh. Look at me. I'm, like, totally running
off
at the mouth. Got those papers signed?”

Which I hadn't. Who'd had an opportunity to read them? I said I'd sign them if she wouldn't mind waiting. She took herself to a corner and sat.

I read. I made one phone call to clarify a clause. I signed the contracts and returned them to her. She shoved them into her pouch, said thanks, and then cocked her head at me and asked, “Favour?”

“What?”

She shifted her weight and looked embarrassed. But she plunged ahead and I admired her for it. She said, “Would you … I mean, it's like, I've never actually heard a violin in person before. Would you please play a song?”

A song. She was indeed a philistine. But even a philistine is educable, and she'd asked politely. What would it hurt? I'd been practising anyway, working on Bartók's solo sonata, so I gave her part of the
Melodia
, playing it as I always play: putting the music before myself, before her, before everything. By the time I'd reached the end of the movement, I'd forgotten she was there. So I went on to the
Presto
, hearing as usual Raphael's injunction: “Make it an invitation to
dance
, Gideon. Feel its quickness. Make it flash, like light.”

And when I was finished, I was brought back to an abrupt awareness of her presence. She said, “Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh
wow
. I mean, you are so totally excellent, aren't you?”

I looked her way to see that sometime during the playing she'd begun to cry, because her cheeks were wet and she was digging round in her leathers, looking—I presume—for something on which to wipe her dribbling nose. I was pleased to have touched her with the Bartók, and even more pleased to see that my assessment of her educability had been on target. And I suppose it was because of that assessment that I asked her to join me in my regular cup of midmorning coffee. The day was fine, so we took it in the garden, where, under the arbour, I'd been creating one of my kites on the previous afternoon.