A Traitor to Memory (30 page)

“A virtuoso in the making,” I was called.

But I didn't want
making
. I wanted
made
.

23 September

I don't go to Juilliard as things turn out, despite the honour and what it can mean to my development as an international musician. Because of the history of the place, scores of people three times my age would have done anything to have the same opportunity, to experience the endless possibilities that could come from having this extraordinary transcendent invaluable experience…. But there is no money, and even if there were, I am far too young to go that distance by myself, let alone to live there. And since my family cannot move there en masse, the opportunity passes me by.

En masse. Yes. I somehow know that en masse is the only way Juilliard will happen to me, money or not. So I say, Please
please
let me go, Dad, I must go, I want to go to New York because even then I know what it means in my present and can mean to my future. Dad says, Gideon, you know we can't go. You can't be there alone, and we can't go as a group. Naturally, I demand to know why. Why why why can't I have what I want when until this moment I have always had it. He says—and yes, I remember this well—Gideon, the world will come to you. I promise you that, I swear it, son.

But it's clear that we can't go to New York.

For some reason I
know
this even as I ask again and again and again, even as I bargain, beg, behave as badly as I've ever done, as I kick the music stand, fling myself into my grandmother's treasured demilune table and crack two of its legs … even then I
know
there will be no Juilliard no matter what I do. Alone, with my family, with one of my parents, accompanied only by Raphael, or with Sarah-Jane dogging my heels as my shadow or protector, I will not be going to that Mecca of music.

Know
, you point out to me. Know before you ask, know as you ask, know despite everything you do to change … what, Gideon? What are you trying to change?

Reality, obviously. And yes, Dr. Rose, I know that's an answer that takes us nowhere. What's the reality that I already understand as a seven-or eight-year-old?

It appears to be this: We are not a rich family. Oh yes, we live in an area that not only indicates but also requires money, but the family's owned that house for generations and the only reason the family
still
owns it is due to the lodgers, to Dad's two jobs, to Mother's going to work, and to Granddad's pittance from the Government. But money is not something we ever discuss. Talk of money is like speaking of bodily functions at the dinner table. Yet I know I won't go to Juilliard and I feel a tightening inside me as I know this. It starts in my arms. It moves to my stomach. It rises upwards into my throat till I shout oh I shout and I remember what I shout, “It's because she's here!” And that's when I kick and pound and fling. That's when, Dr. Rose.

She's here?

She. Of course. It must be Katja.

26 September

Dad was here again. He came for two hours and was replaced by Raphael. They wanted to make it look as if they weren't taking shifts at a death watch, so I had at least five minutes alone between the time Dad left and Raphael arrived. But what they don't know is that I saw them from the window. Raphael came walking into Chalcot Square from the direction of Chalcot Road, and Dad intercepted him in the middle of the garden. They stood on either side of one of the benches and they talked. At least, Dad talked. Raphael listened. He nodded and did what he always does: ran his fingers left to right on his scalp to arrange the fretwork that's left of his hair. Dad was passionate. I could tell that much from the way he gestured, one hand up at the level of his chest and closed into a fist like a punch withheld. The rest I didn't need to interpret because I knew what he was passionate about.

He'd come in peace. No mention of anything regarding my music. “Had to get away from her for a while,” he sighed. “I've come to believe that women the world over in the last months of pregnancy are all the same.”

“Jill's moved in, then?” I asked him.

“Why tempt fate?”

Which was his way of saying that they're sticking to their original plan: Have the baby first, combine their households second, and marry when the dust settles on the first two events. It's the fashion these days to go at relationships in that way, and Jill is an adherent to fashion. But I sometimes wonder how Dad feels about an arrangement so foreign to his other marriages. He's a traditionalist at heart, I believe, with nothing so important as his family and with only one way in mind to make a family. Once he learned Jill was pregnant, I can't see him doing anything but dropping hastily to one knee in order to claim her. Indeed, that's what he did with his first wife, although he doesn't know that I learned that from Granddad. He met her while he was on leave from the Army—his intended career, by the way—he got her pregnant, and he married her. That he's not gone the same route with Jill tells me it's Jill's agenda being followed.

“She sleeps when she can now,” he told me. “It's always like that in the last six weeks or so. They're so blasted uncomfortable and if the baby's decided to be awake from midnight till five A.M….” He brushed his hand through the air dismissively. “Then you've got what you've been waiting for for years: a nightly chance to read
War and Peace
.”

“Are you staying with her now?”

“I'm doing time on the sofa.”

“Not good for your back, Dad.”

“Don't remind me.”

“Have you settled on the name?”

“I still want Cara.”

“She still wants—” and the import dawned upon me so suddenly that I scarcely said it but I forced myself to go on. “She's holding fast for Catherine?”

He and I locked eyes, and she was there between us, as if she were corporeal, immediate, and eternally that captivating girl in the picture. I said, even though my palms were damp and my gut was beginning to feel the first spark of a fire to come, “But that would remind you of Katja, wouldn't it? If you called the baby Catherine?”

His response was to get up and make coffee, and he took his time with the activity. He commented upon my choice of ready-ground beans and what they did to destroy freshness. He went from there to an expatiation of what the presence of yet another Starbucks—this one on Gloucester Road not far from Braemar Mansions—has done to the atmosphere of his neighbourhood.

As he did all this, the pain in my gut began to move slowly down where it planned, as always, to wreak havoc with my bowels. I listened to him make the leap from Starbucks to the Americanisation of global culture, and I pressed my arm hard against the lowest part of my intestines, willing the pain to stop and the urgency to ease, because if that did not happen, Dad would have won.

I let him exhaust the subject of America: international conglomerates dominating business, Hollywood megalomaniacs determining cinematic art forms, astronomical and singularly obscene salaries and share options becoming the measure of a capitalist's success. When he reached the peroration of his speech—evidenced by the fact that the great gulps he was taking from his coffee cup were becoming more frequent—I repeated my question, except this time I didn't ask it
as
a question. “Katja,” I said. “Catherine would remind you.”

He poured what remained of his coffee down the drain. He strode into the music room. As he moved, he said, “God damn it.
Show
me, Gideon.” And then, “Ah. This is what's going for progress, is it?”

He'd seen the Guarneri back in its case and although the case was open, he somehow knew that I hadn't yet attempted to play it. He took it from the case and the absence of the reverence with which he'd touched that violin in the past told me just how angry—or agitated, irritated, infuriated, frightened, worried, I do not know which—he actually was. He held the instrument out to me, fingers round its neck with that brilliant scroll emerging from his fist like hope coiled round an unspoken promise. He said, “Here. Take it. Show me where we are. Show me exactly where weeks of excavating through the dreck of the past has taken you, Gideon. A note will do. A scale. An arpeggio. Or, miraculously because something tells me it would be miraculous at this point, a movement from the concerto of your choice. Any concerto. Too tough? Then what about a little encore piece?”

And the fire was in me but it was changed to a single coal. White hot, silver hot, incandescent, and it moved like acid down through my body.

And yes, yes, I see what my father has done, Dr. Rose. You don't need to point it out. I see what he's done. But in that moment I could only say, “I can't. Don't make me. I can't,” like a nine-year-old who's been asked to play a piece that he cannot master.

Dad used that next, saying, “Perhaps that's beneath you. Too easy for you, Gideon. An insult to your talent. So let's start with
The Archduke
, shall we?”

Let's start with
The Archduke. The acid ate through me, and what was left when the pain had knotted my viscera and rendered me useless was blame. I am at fault. I placed myself into this position. Beth set the programme for the Wigmore Hall benefit, and she said, “What about
The Archduke
, Gideon?” in absolute innocence. And because it was Beth who made the suggestion, Beth who'd already experienced my other more personal brand of failure, I couldn't bring myself to say, “Forget it. That piece is a jinx.”

Artists believe in jinxes. The word
Macbeth
spoken inside a theatre has its counterpart in every field of art. So if I'd called
The Archduke
what I needed to call it—my personal jinx—Beth would have understood, despite the way she and I ended. And Sherrill wouldn't have cared as much as a sprat what we played. He would have said, in that Do-I-actually-give-a-shit American fashion of his that he uses to hide a monstrous talent, “Just point me to the keyboard, boys and girls,” and that would have been that. So it was all down to me and I let it happen. I am to blame.

Dad found me where I'd taken myself off to when I could not face the challenge he was issuing: in the shed in the garden, where I sketch the designs and make my kites. That's what I was doing then—sketching—and he joined me, the Guarneri replaced in its case and the case itself left inside the house.

He said, “You are the music, Gideon. That's what I want you for. That's all that I want.”

I said, “That's what we're trying to get to.”

He said, “It's bollocks, going at it this way, scratching in notebooks and having a nod-off on a screw doctor's sofa every three days.”

“I don't lie on a sofa.”

“You know what I mean.” He placed his hand across the sketch I was working on, the better to force me to pay attention. He said, “We can hold people at bay only so long for you, Gideon. We're doing it—Joanne is doing a bloody brilliant job, in fact—but there's going to come a point when even a publicist like Joanne, loyal as she is, is going to start asking exactly what the term
exhaustion
means in a case in which that same exhaustion is showing no sign of improvement. When that happens, I'm either going to have to tell her the truth or I'm going to have to invent a fiction for her to offer people that might damn well make the situation worse.”

“Dad,” I said, “it's mad to think the tabloid-reading public gives a toss about—”

“I'm not talking about tabloids. Right. A rock star disappears from view and the journalists are digging through his rubbish every morning, looking for something that will tell them why. That's not the case here and that's not what concerns me. What concerns me is the world that
we
live in with a schedule of concerts set up through the next twenty-five months, Gideon, as you well know, and with phone calls—almost daily, mind you—from musical directors enquiring about the state of your health. Which is, as you also know, a euphemism for your playing. ‘Is he recovering from exhaustion?’ means ‘Do we tear up the contract or keep the programme in place?’” As he said all this, Dad slowly eased my drawing towards him, and although his fingers had begun to smear the lines that sketched out the two bottom spreaders, I didn't point this out to him and I didn't stop him. So he went on. “Now, what I'm asking you to do is simple: Walk inside that house, go up to the music room, and pick up that violin. Don't do it for me because this isn't about me and it never was. Do it for yourself.”