A Traitor to Memory (132 page)

“You think I don't know it?”

“Didn't say that,” he said. “But whether you like me or hate me, I c'n be his friend. I'd like to do that.”

“Do what?”

“Be somebody to your boy. He likes me. You c'n see that yourself. I take him out and about now and then, he gets a chance to mix it up with someone who's playing it straight. With a man who's playing it straight, Missus Edwards,” he hastened to add. “A boy his age? He needs that pretty bad.”

“Why? You had it yourself, you saying?”

“I had it, yeah. Like to pass it along.”

She snorted. “Save it for your own kids, man.”

“When I have them, sure. I'll pass it to them. In the meanwhile …” He sighed. “It's this: I like him, Missus Edwards. When I got the free time, I'd like to spend it with him.”

“Doing what?”

“Don't know.”

“He doesn't need you.”

“Not saying he needs me,” Nkata told her. “But he needs someone. A man. You c'n see it. And the way I'm thinking—”

“I don't care what you're thinking.” She pressed the button and the sound came on. She raised it a notch lest he miss the message.

He looked in the direction of the bedrooms, wondering if the boy would wake up, would walk into the sitting room, would show by his smile of welcome that everything Winston Nkata was saying was true. But the increase in volume didn't penetrate the closed door, or if it did, to Daniel Edwards it was just another sound in the night.

Nkata said, “You got my card still?”

Yasmin didn't reply, her eyes fastened on the television screen.

Nkata took out another and set it on the coffee table in front of her. “You ring me if you change your mind,” he said. “Or you c'n page me. Anytime. It's okay.”

She made no reply, so he left the flat. He closed the door quietly, gently, behind him.

He was below in the car park, crossing its puddle-strewn expanse to reach the street, before he realised that he'd forgotten his promise to himself to stop at Mr. Houghton's flat, show his warrant card, and apologise for the ruse that had gained him admittance. He turned back to do so and looked up at the building.

Yasmin Edwards, he saw, was standing at her window. She was watching him. And she was holding in her hands something he very much wanted to believe was the card he'd given her.

30

G
IDEON WALKED
. A
T
first he'd run: up the leafy confines of Cornwall Gardens and across the wet, narrow strip of traffic that was Gloucester Road. He hurtled into Queen's Gate Gardens, then up past the old hotels in the direction of the park. And then mindlessly he ducked to the right and dashed past the Royal College of Music. He hadn't actually known where he was till he'd veered up a little incline and burst out into the well-lit surroundings of the Royal Albert Hall, where an audience was just pouring out of the auditorium's circumference of doors.

There, the irony of the location had hit him, and he'd stopped running. Indeed, he'd stumbled to a complete halt, chest heaving, with the rain pelting him, and not even noticing that his jacket was hanging heavy with the damp upon his shoulders and his trousers were slapping wetly against his shins. Here was the greatest venue for public performance in the land: the most sought-after showplace for anyone's talent. Here, Gideon Davies had first performed as a nine-year-old prodigy with his father and Raphael Robson in attendance, all three of them eager for the opportunity to establish the name Davies in the classical firmament. How appropriate was it, then, that his final flight from Braemar Mansions—from his father, from his father's words and what they did and did not mean—should bring him to the very
raison d’être
of everything that had happened: to Sonia, to
Katja Wolff, to his mother, to all of them. And how even more appropriate was it that the very
raison d’être
behind the other
raison d’être
—the audience—did not even know that he was there.

Across the street from the Albert Hall, Gideon watched the crowd raise their umbrellas to the weeping sky. Although he could see their lips moving, he did not hear their excited chatter, that all-too-familiar sound of ravenous culture vultures who were sated for the moment, the happy noise of just the sort of people whose approbation he'd sought. Instead, what he heard were his father's words, like an incantation within his brain:
For God's sake I did it I did it I did it
Believe
what I say I say I say She was
alive
when you left her you left her I held her
down
in the bath the bath I was the one who
drowned
her who drowned her. It wasn't you Gideon my son my
son.

Over and over the words repeated, but they called forth a vision that made a different claim. What he saw was his hands on his sister's small shoulders. What he felt was the water closing over his arms. And above the repetition of his father's declaration, what he heard was the cries of the woman and the man, then the sound of running, the
blam
of doors closing, and the other hoarse cries, then the wail of sirens and the guttural orders of rescue workers going about their business where rescue was futile. And everyone knew that save the workers themselves because they were trained to one job only: maintaining and resuscitating life in the face of anything that stood in life's way.

But
For God's sake I did it I did it I did it Believe what I say I say I say.

Gideon struggled for the memory that would allow this belief, but what he came up with was the same image as before: his hands on her shoulders and added to that now the sight of her face, her mouth opening and closing and opening and closing and her head turning slowly back and forth.

His father argued that this was a dream because
She was alive when you left her when you left her
. And even more importantly because
I held her down in the bath in the bath.

Yet the only person who might have confirmed that story—was dead herself, Gideon thought. And what did that mean? What did that tell him?

That she didn't know the truth herself, his father told him insistently, as if he walked at Gideon's side in the wind and the rain. She didn't know because I
never
admitted it, not then when it counted, not then when I saw another far easier way to resolve the situation. And when I finally told her—

She didn't believe you. She knew that I'd done it. And you killed
her to keep her from telling me that. She's dead, Dad. She's dead, she's dead.

Yes. All right. Your mother is dead. But she's dead because of me, not because of you. She's dead because of what I'd led her to believe and what I'd forced her into accepting.

Which was what, Dad?
What?
Gideon demanded.

You
know
the answer, his father replied. I let her believe you'd killed your sister. I said
Gideon was in here in here in the bathroom he was holding her down I pulled him off her but my God my God Eugenie she was gone.
And she believed me. And that's why she agreed to the arrangement with Katja: because she thought she was saving you. From an investigation. From a juvenile trial. From a hideous burden that would weigh upon you for the rest of your life. You were Gideon Davies, for the love of God. She wanted to keep you safe from scandal, and I
used
that, Gideon, to keep everyone safe.

Except Katja Wolff.

She
agreed
. For the money.

So she thought that I—

Yes, she thought. She thought, she
thought
. But she did not know. Any more than you know right now. You were not in the room. You were dragged away, and she was taken downstairs. Your mother went to phone for help. And that left me alone with your sister. Don't you see what that means?

But I remember—

You remember what you remember because that's what happened: You held her down. But holding her down and keeping her down are not the same. And you know that, Gideon. By God, you
know
it.

But I remember—

You remember what you did as far as you did it. I did the rest. I stand guilty of
all
the crimes that were committed. I am the man, after all, who could not bear to have my own daughter Virginia in my life.

No. It was Granddad.

Granddad was simply the excuse I used. I dismissed her, Gideon. I pretended she was dead because I wanted her dead. Don't forget that. Never forget that. You know what it means. You
know
it, Gideon.

But Mother … Mother was going to tell me—

Eugenie was going to perpetuate the lie. She was going to tell you what I'd let her
believe
was the truth for years. She was going to explain why she'd left us without a word of goodbye, why she'd taken every picture of your sister with her, why she'd stayed away for nearly twenty
years…. Yes. She was going to tell you what she thought was the truth—that you drowned your sister—and I refused to let that happen. So I killed her, Gideon. I murdered your mother. I did it for you.

So now there's no one left who can tell me—

I
am telling you. You can believe me and you must believe me. Am I not a man who killed the mother of his own children? Am I not a man who hit her on the street, who drove a car over her, who removed the picture she'd brought to town with her to sustain your guilt? Am I not a man who drove off quietly and felt
nothing
afterwards? Am I not a man who went happily home to his young lover and got on with his life? So am I not thus also a man who is fully capable of killing a sickly worthless cretin of a child, a burden to us all, a living illustration of my own failure? Am I not that man, Gideon? Am I not that man? The question echoed through the years. It forced upon Gideon a hundred memories, He saw them flicker, unspooling before him, each asking the same question: Am I not that man?

And he was. He was. Of course. He was. Richard Davies had
always
been that man. Gideon saw it and read it in every word, nuance, and gesture of his father over the last two decades. Richard Davies was indeed that man.

But an admission of the fact—a final embracing of it—did not produce one gram of absolution.

So Gideon walked. His face was streaked with rain, and his hair was painted onto his skull. Rivulets ran like veins down his neck, but he felt nothing of the cold or the damp. The path he followed felt aimless to him, but it was not so despite the fact that he barely recognised when Park Lane gave way to Oxford Street and when Orchard Street turned into Baker.

From the morass of what he remembered, what he had been told, and what he had learned emerged a single point that he clung to at the last: Acceptance was the only option available because only acceptance allowed reparation finally to be made. And he was the one who had to make that reparation because he was the only one left who could do so.

He could not bring his sister back to life, he could not save his mother from destruction, he could not give Katja Wolff back the twenty years she'd sacrificed in the service of his father's plans. But he could pay the debt of those twenty years and at least in that one way he could make amends for the unholy deal his father had struck with her.

And there was indeed a way to pay her back that would also close the circle of everything else that had happened: from his mother's
death to the loss of his music, from Sonia's death to the public exposure of everyone associated with Kensington Square. It was embodied in the long and elegant inner bouts, the perfect scrolls, and the lovely perpendicular F holes crafted two hundred and fifty years ago by Bartolomeo Giuseppe Guarneri.

He would sell the violin. Whatever price it fetched at auction, no matter how high, and it
would
be astronomical, he would give that money to Katja Wolff. And in taking those two specific actions, he would in effect be making a statement of apology and sorrow that no other effort on his part would permit him to make.

He would allow those two actions to serve to close the circle of crime, lies, guilt, and punishment. His life would not be the same thereafter, but it would be his own life at last. He wanted that.