A Traitor to Memory (27 page)

What stops you from saying it, then? you ask, with those sombre sad sincere eyes on mine.

Nothing
stops me, except uncertainty.

If you say it, you'll be able to test how it feels, to see if it fits.

All right, then. All right. Raphael Robson has impregnated my mother and together they have produced this child, Sonia. My father realises he's been cuckolded—God, where did
that
word come from? I feel like I'm taking part in a Jacobean melodrama—and the shouting that ensues behind closed doors is his reaction. Granddad hears this, puts together the pieces, and is sent round the bend and on his way to another episode. Gran reacts to the chaos between Mother and Dad as well as to the potential of another episode. Sarah-Jane and the lodger are all agog with the excitement. Sister Cecilia is brought in to attempt to mediate the dispute, but Dad can't bear to live in the same house with a constant reminder of Mother's infidelity, and he demands that the baby be sent away somewhere, adopted or something. Mother can't bear the thought of this and she weeps in her room.

And Raphael? you ask.

He's the proud father, isn't he? Bearing flowers like every proud father before him.

How does that feel? you want to know.

It makes me want to have a shower. And not because of the thought of my mother “in the rank sweat of an unseamèd bed”—if you'll pardon the obvious allusion—but because of
him
. Because of Raphael. Yes, I do see that he may have loved my mother and hated my father for possessing what he himself wanted. But that my mother would have returned his love … would have thought of taking that sweaty and perpetually sun-incinerated body into her bed or wherever else they might have accomplished the act … this thought is too incredible to be embraced.

But children, you point out to me, always find the contemplation of their parents' sexuality abhorrent, Gideon. This is why the actual sight of intercourse—

I did not witness intercourse, Dr. Rose. Not between my mother and Raphael, not between Sarah-Jane Beckett and the lodger, not between my grandparents, not between my father and anyone.
Anyone
.

Your father and anyone? you are quickly upon it. Who is
anyone
? Where does
anyone
come from?

Oh God. I don't know. I don't
know.

15 September

I went to see him this afternoon, Dr. Rose. Ever since unearthing Sonia and then having the recollection of Raphael and those obscene flowers and the chaos in the house in Kensington Square, I've felt that I needed to talk to my father. So I went down to South Kensington and found him in the garden next to Braemar Mansions, which is where he's lived for the past few years. He was in the little greenhouse that he's commandeered from the rest of the residents of the building, and he was doing what he usually does with his free time. He was hovering over his infant hybrid camellias, examining their leaves with a magnifying glass, looking for either entomological intruders or incipient buds. I could not tell which. It's his dream to create a bloom worthy of the Chelsea Flower Show. Worthy of a prize at the show, I should say. Anything less would be a waste of his time.

From the street, I saw him inside the greenhouse, but as I don't have a key to the garden gate, I entered through the building. Dad has the first floor flat at the top of the stairs, and because I could see that the door was ajar up there, I headed up with the thought of securing it. But I found Jill inside at Dad's dining table, working on her laptop with her feet propped up on a hassock she'd brought in from the sitting room.

We exchanged pleasantries—what exactly does one say to one's father's young, pregnant mistress?—and she told me what I already knew, specifically that Dad was in the garden. She said, “He's nurturing the rest of his children,” with one of those long-suffering rolls of the eyes that are intended to convey fond exasperation. But that phrase
the rest of his children
seemed heavily laden with meaning today, and I couldn't put it from my mind as I left her.

I realised that I'd failed to notice something before that was obvious to me as I made my way back through the flat. Walls, chest tops, table tops, and bookshelves announced a single bald fact that had never once touched upon my consciousness, and that fact was what I first dealt with when I entered the greenhouse, because it seemed to me that if I could wrest a truthful answer from my father, I would be one step closer to understanding.

Wrest
? You seize upon that word, don't you, Dr. Rose? You seize upon it and everything it implies. Is your father less than truthful, then? you ask me.

I'd never thought him so. But now I wonder.

And what will you understand? you want to know. Wresting the truth from your father will take you one step closer to understanding what?

To understanding what has happened to me.

It's connected to your father?

I don't want to think so.

When I walked into the greenhouse, he didn't look up, and I thought about how his body has begun to suit him for this current employment, bending over small plants. His scoliosis seems to have worsened over the past few years, and although he's just sixty-two years old, he seems older to me because of his growing curvature. Looking at him, I wondered how Jill Foster—nearly thirty years his junior—had come to see him as a sexual object. What draws human beings together is a puzzle to me.

I said, “Why are there no pictures of Sonia in your flat, Dad?” An unexpected frontal assault seemed most likely to garner results. “You've got me from every angle at every age, with violin and without; but you haven't got Sonia. Why?”

He did look up then, but I think he was buying time, because he took a handkerchief from the back pocket of his jeans and he used it to polish the magnifying glass. He refolded the handkerchief, stowed the lens in a chamois sack, and took the sack to a shelf at the end of the greenhouse, where he keeps his gardening tools.

“Good afternoon to you as well,” he said. “You had more of a greeting for Jill, I hope. Is she still on the computer?”

“In the kitchen.”

“Ah. The screenplay proceeds apace. She's doing
The Beautiful and Damned
. Have I mentioned that? Ambitious to offer another Fitzgerald to the BBC, but she's determined to prove that an American novel about Americans in America can be made palatable for the British viewing public. We shall see. And how is your own American these days?”

That's what he's taken to calling Libby. She has no name other than “your American,” although sometimes she becomes “your little American” or “your charming American.” She's particularly my charming American when she commits a social solecism of some kind, as she does with what seems like religious fervour. Libby does not stand on ceremony, and Dad has not forgiven her for referring to him by his Christian name when I first introduced them. Nor has he forgotten her immediate reaction to Jill's pregnancy: “Holy shit. You knocked up a
thirty
-year-old? Great going, Richard.” Jill's older than thirty, of course, but that was a small matter next to the effrontery of Libby's mentioning the great gap in their ages.

“She's fine,” I said.

“Still riding her motorcycle round London, then?”

“She's still working for the courier service, if that's what you mean.”

“And how is she liking her Tartini these days? Shaken or stirred?” He removed his glasses, crossed his arms, and studied me in that way he always does, the way that says, “Steady on or I'll sort you out.”

That look has managed to derail me on more than one occasion, and in combination with his comments about Libby, it probably should have derailed me then. But having a sister pop into my mind where there had been no sister before was enough to bolster me to face whatever attempt at obfuscation he might make. I said, “I'd forgotten Sonia. Not just how she died, but that she'd ever existed in the first place. I'd completely forgotten I ever
had
a sister. It's like someone took a rubber to my mind and erased her, Dad.”

“Is that why you've come, then? To ask about pictures?”

“To ask about her. Why don't you have any pictures of her?”

“You're looking for something sinister in the omission.”

“You have pictures of me. You have an entire exhibit of Granddad. You have Jill. You even have Raphael.”

“Posing with Szeryng. Raphael was secondary.”

“Yes. All right. But that begs the question. Why is there nothing of Sonia?”

He observed me for a good five seconds before he moved. And then he merely turned and began cleaning off the potting bench where he'd earlier been working. He picked up a brush and used it to sweep loose leaves and the remains of soil into a bucket, which he took from the floor. This done, he sealed the soil bag, capped a bottle of fertiliser, and returned his gardening tools to their respective cubby holes. He cleaned each tool as he put it away. Finally, he removed the heavy green apron he wore when working with his camellias, and he led the way out of the greenhouse and into the garden.

There's a bench at one side, and he made his way over to it. It sits beneath a chestnut tree, long the bane of my father's existence. “Too much God damn shade,” he always grouses. “What the hell is supposed to grow in shadow?”

Today he seemed to welcome the shade, though. He sat and winced a little, as if he had a pain in his back, which he might well have had because of his spine. But I didn't want to ask about that. He'd avoided my question for long enough.

I said, “Dad, why is there—”

He said, “This comes of that doctor, doesn't it? That woman … what's her name?”

“You know it. Dr. Rose.”

He muttered, “Shite,” and pushed himself off the bench. I thought he was going to return to the house in a temper rather than talk about a subject that he clearly didn't want to address, but he eased himself to his knees and began pulling at weeds in the flower bed that lay before us. He said, “If I had my way, residents who don't take proper care of their plots would have their plots confiscated. Just look at this muck.”

It was hardly that. True, too much water had produced mould and moss on the border stones, and weeds tangled with an enormous fuchsia that appeared to want trimming. But there was something appealing about the natural look of the plot, with its central birdbath overgrown with ivy and its stepping-stones sunk deeply into greenery. “I rather like it,” I said.

Dad gave a derisive snort. He continued pulling weeds, tossing them over his shoulder and onto the gravel path. “Have you touched the Guarnerius yet?” he asked. He objectifies the violin that way, always has done. I prefer to call it by its maker's name, but Dad has melded the maker into the instrument, as if Guarneri himself had no other life.

“No. I haven't.”

He leaned back on his heels. “That's brilliant, then. That's bloody brilliant. That's the great plan come to nothing, isn't it? Tell me, what's this gaining us? What exact advantage are you being blessed with as you and the good doctor take your shovels to the past? It's the present where our problem is, Gideon. I wouldn't think you'd need reminding of that.”

“She's calling it psychogenic amnesia. She says that—”