A Traitor to Memory (14 page)

Staircase, you leap. So there's a staircase as well?

Yes. A staircase. Which, we both know, means climbing, rising, elevating, clawing out of this pit … What
of
it?

You see the agitation in my scrawl, don't you? You say, Stay with the fear. It won't kill you, Gideon. Feelings won't kill you. You are not alone.

I never thought that I was, I say. Don't put words in my mouth, Dr. Rose.

2 September

Libby was here. She knows something's not right since she hadn't heard the violin in days and she generally hears it for hours on end when I'm practising. That's largely why I hadn't let the lower ground floor flat once the original tenants left. I thought about it when I first bought and moved into this house in Chalcot Square, but I didn't want the distraction of a tenant coming and going—even by a separate entrance—and I didn't want to have to limit my hours of practise out of concern for someone else. I told Libby all this when she was leaving that day, when she'd zipped herself into her leathers, returned her helmet to her head just outside my front door, and caught sight of the empty flat below through the wrought iron railings. She said, “Wow. Is that for rent or anything?”

And I explained that I left it empty. There was a young couple living there when I first bought the building, I told her. But as they weren't able to develop a passion for the violin at odd hours of the night, they soon decamped.

She cocked her head. She said, “Hey. How old are you anyway? And do you always talk like a bottle's in your butt? When you were showing me the kites, you sounded totally normal. So what's up? Is this about being English or something? Step out of the house and all of a sudden you're Henry James?”

“He wasn't English,” I informed her.

“Well. Sor
ry
.” She began to fasten her helmet's strap, but she seemed agitated because she had trouble with it. “I got through high school on Cliffs Notes, bud, so I wouldn't know Henry James from Sid Vicious. I don't even know why he popped into my head. Or why Sid Vicious did, for that matter.”

“Who's Sid Vicious?” I asked her solemnly.

She peered at me. “Come on. You're joking.”

“Yes,” I said.

And then she laughed. Well, not laughed actually. It was more like a hoot. And she grabbed my arm and said, “You,
you
,” with such an inordinate degree of familiarity that I was both astounded and charmed. So I offered to show her the lower ground floor flat.

Why? you ask.

Because she'd asked about it and I wanted to show her and I suppose I wanted her company for a while. She was so absolutely un-English.

You say, I didn't mean why did you show her the flat, Gideon. I meant why are you telling me about Libby.

Because she was here, just now.

She's significant, isn't she?

I don't know.

3 September

“It's Liberty,” she tells me. “God, isn't that, like, totally the
worst
? My parents were hippies before they were yuppies, which was way before my dad made, like, a billion dollars in Silicon Valley. You
do
know about Silicon Valley, don't you?”

We are walking to the top of Primrose Hill. I have one of my kites. Libby's talked me into flying it this late afternoon, sometime last year. I ought to be rehearsing, since I'm due to record Paganini—the second violin concerto, this is—with the Philharmonic in less than three weeks and the
Allegro maestoso
has been giving me some trouble. But Libby's returned from a confrontation with the acidulous Rock about wages he's withheld from her again, and she's reported his response to her request for her money: “The jerk said, ‘Fly a kite, bitch,’ so I thought I'd take him up on it. Come on, Gideon, you're working too hard anyway.”

I've been at it for six hours, two increments of three with an hour's break to walk over to Regent's Park at noon, so I agree to the plan. I allow her to choose the kite, and she selects a multi-level affair that spins and requires just the right wind velocity to show its best stuff.

We head off. We follow the curve of Chalcot Crescent—more gentrification sourly remarked upon by Libby, who appears to prefer London decaying to London renewed—and dash across Regent's Park Road and thence into the park, where we set off up the side of the hill.

“Too much wind,” I tell her, and I have to raise my voice because the wind gusts fiercely against the kite and the nylon slaps against me. “You've got to have perfect conditions for this one. I don't expect we'll even get it in the air.”

That proves to be the case, much to her disappointment because it seems that she “just totally wanted to
put
it to Rock. The creep. He's threatening to tell whoever it is that gets told”—this with a wave of her hand in the vague direction of Westminster, by which I assume she must be talking about the Government—“that we were never really married in the first place. I mean
physically
married like in doing the deed with each other. Which is, like, just such a crock of shit that you wouldn't
believe
.”

“And what would happen if he told the Government that you weren't really married?”

“Except that we
were
. We are. Jeez, he makes me nuts.”

As it turns out, she's afraid that her status in the country will change if her estranged husband has his way. And because she's moved from his doubtless—to my imagination—insalubrious home in Bermondsey to the lower ground floor flat in Chalcot Square, he's afraid that he's losing her for good, which he apparently doesn't wish to do despite his continued womanising. So they've had yet another row, the end of which was his directive to her about kite flying.

Sorry not to be able to accommodate her, I invite her for a coffee instead. It's over coffee that she tells me the name for which Libby is merely a diminutive: Liberty.

“Hippies,” she says again of her parents. “They wanted their kids to have totally
far out
names”—this with a mock inhalation of an imaginary cannabis cigarette. “My sister's is even worse: Equality, if you can believe it. Ali for short. And if there'd been a third kid in the family …”

“Fraternity?” I say.

“You got it,” she rejoins. “But I should be excessively glad they went for abstract nouns. I mean, God, it could be totally worse. My name could be Tree.”

I chuckle. “Or perhaps just a type of tree: pine, oak, willow.”

“Willow Neale. I could get behind that.” She fingers through the packets of sugar on the table to find the dieters' sweetener. She is, I have discovered, a chronic dieter whose pursuit of bodily perfection has been “the rip tide in the otherwise peaceful ocean of my existence,” she's said. She dumps the sweetener into her non-fat caffèlatte and says, “What about you, Gid?”

“Me?”

“Your parents. What are they like? Not former flower children, I bet.”

She hadn't yet met my father, you see, although he had seen her from the music room late one afternoon when she returned home from work on her Suzuki and parked it in her accustomed place on the pavement, right next to the steps that lead down to the lower ground floor flat. She roared up and gunned the engine two or three times, as is her habit, creating a ruckus that caught Dad's attention. He went to the window, saw her, and said, “I'll be damned. There's an infernal cyclist actually chaining his motorbike to your front rails, Gideon. See here …” and he began to open the window.

I said, “That's Libby Neale. It's fine, Dad. She lives here.”

He turned slowly from the glass. “What? That's a
woman
out there? She
lives
here?”

“Below. In the flat. I decided to let it out. Did I forget to tell you?”

I hadn't done. But my failure to mention Libby and the flat hadn't been so much a deliberate omission as a subject that hadn't come up. Dad and I talk every day, but our conversations are always about our professional concerns, like an upcoming concert, a tour he might be organising, a recording session that hadn't gone well, a request for an interview, or a personal appearance. Witness the fact that I didn't know a thing about his relationship with Jill until
not
mentioning it became more awkward than mentioning it: The sudden appearance of an obviously pregnant woman in one's life will demand some sort of explanation, after all. But otherwise, we've never had a chummy father-and-son relationship. We've both been absorbed with my music since my childhood, and this concentration on both our parts has precluded the possibility—or perhaps obviated the necessity—of the sort of soul baring that appears to be the hallmark of closeness between people these days.

Mind you, I don't regret for an instant that Dad and I have the sort of connection with each other that we have. It's firm and true, and if it's not the sort of bond that makes us want to hike the Himalayas together or paddle up the Nile, it's still a relationship that strengthens and supports me. Truth be told, if it were not for my father, Dr. Rose, I would not be where I am today.

4 September

No
. You will not catch me with that.

Where are you today, Gideon? you ask me blandly.

But I refuse to participate. My father plays no part in this, in whatever
this
is. If I cannot bring myself to even pick up the Guarneri, it is not my father's fault. I refuse to become one of those gormless pulers who lay the blame for their every difficulty at the feet of their parents. Dad's life was rough. He did his best.

Rough in what way? you want to know.

Well, can you imagine having Granddad for a father? Being sent off to school when you were six? Growing up with a steady diet of someone's psychotic episodes to feed you when you
were
at home? And always knowing that there was never a hope in hell that you could fully measure up no matter
what
you did because you were adopted in the first place and your father never let you forget it? No. Dad's done the best he could as a father. And he's done better than most as a son.

Better than yourself as a son? you ask me.

You'll have to get that information from Dad.

But what do you think about yourself as a son, Gideon? What comes first to your mind?

Disappointment, I say.

That you've disappointed your father?

No. That I mustn't. But that I might.

Has he let you know how important it is not to disappoint him?

Never once. Not at all. But …

But?

He doesn't like Libby. I somehow knew that he wouldn't like her or at least wouldn't like her being there. He would consider her a potential distraction or, worse, an impediment to my work.

You ask, Is that why he said, “It's that girl, isn't it?” when you had your blackout in Wigmore Hall? He leapt right to her, didn't he?