A Traitor to Memory (41 page)

“
Drowned
your—”

I clutched her arm to stop the rest. I had no need for the staff of the news library to know who I was. Believe me, my shame was great enough without having my identity attached to it openly.

“Look,” I told Libby tersely. “Look for yourself. And I couldn't
remember
her, Libby. I couldn't remember the first bloody thing about her.”

“Why?” she asked.

Because I didn't want to.

3 October, 10:30 P.M.

I expect you to leap upon that admission with a warrior's triumph, Dr. Rose, but you say nothing. You merely watch me, and while you have schooled your features to betray nothing, you have little power over the light that comes to your eyes, dark though they might be. I see it there for just an instant—that spark again—and it tells me you wish me to hear what I myself have just said.

I couldn't remember my sister because I didn't
want
to remember her. That must be the case. We don't want to remember, so we choose to forget. Except isn't the truth that sometimes we simply don't need to remember. And other times we are
told
to forget.

Here's what I can't understand, though. My grandfather's episodes were the Great Unspoken in Kensington Square, and yet I remember them clearly. I have vivid memories of what led up to them, of the music that my grandmother used in an attempt to forestall them, of their occurrences and the chaos that accompanied them, and of the aftermath in which tears flowed as attendants fetched him for a spell in the country to rid him of them. Yet we never spoke of his episodes. So why do I remember them—and him—but not my sister?

Your grandfather figures larger in your life than your sister, you tell me, because of your music. He plays a leading part in the drama that is your musical history, even if a segment of his rôle takes place within the fiction that is the Gideon Davies Legend. To repress him as you've apparently repressed the memory of Sonia—

Repressed? Why
repressed
? Are you agreeing that I haven't
wanted
to have memories of my sister, Dr. Rose?

Repression isn't a conscious choice, you tell me, and your voice is quiet, compassionate, calm. It's associated with an emotional, psychological, or physical state too overwhelming for someone to handle, Gideon. For example, if as children we witness something terrifying or incomprehensible to us—sexual intercourse between our parents is a good illustration—we shove it out of our conscious awareness because at that age we have no tools to deal with what we've seen, to assimilate it in a fashion that makes sense to us. Even as adults, people who suffer horrific accidents generally have no memory of the catastrophe simply because it
is
horrific. We don't actively make the choice to shove an image from our mind, Gideon. We simply do it. Repression is how we protect ourselves. It's how our mind protects itself from something it isn't yet prepared to face.

Then what—
what
—can I not face about my sister, Dr. Rose? Although I did remember Sonia, didn't I? When I was writing about Mother, I remembered her. I'd blocked just one detail about her. Until I saw the picture, I didn't know she was Down's.

So the fact that she was
Down's
figures in all this, doesn't it? It must, because it's the one detail that had to be revealed to me. I couldn't dredge it up. Nothing led me to it.

You weren't able to dredge up Katja Wolff either, you point out to me.

So Down's and Katja Wolff are connected, aren't they, Dr. Rose? They must be.

5 October

I couldn't remain in the news library once I saw that picture of my sister and heard Libby voice what I myself could not say. I wanted to remain there. I had five envelopes of information in front of me, all detailing what had happened to my family twenty years ago. No doubt I would also have discovered within those envelopes every significant name of every person who had been involved in the investigation and the legal proceedings that followed it. But I found that I couldn't read any further once I saw that picture of Sonia. Because seeing that picture allowed me to visualise my sister under the water: with her so-round head turning side to side and her eyes—those eyes which even in a newspaper photograph show that she was born anomalous—looking looking always looking because they cannot keep themselves from looking upon her killer. This is someone she trusts, loves, depends upon, and needs, who is holding her down beneath the water, and she doesn't understand. She is only two years old, and even if she had been a normal child, she would not have understood what was happening. But she isn't normal. She wasn't born normal. And nothing in the two years that comprise her short life has ever been normal.

Abnormality. Abnormality leading to crisis. That's it, Dr. Rose. We have lurched from crisis to crisis with my sister. Mother weeps at Mass in the morning, and Sister Cecilia knows that she needs help. Not only does she need help to cope with the fact that she has given birth to a child who is different, imperfect, unusual, outstanding, or whatever else you want to call her, but she also needs practical help in the caring for her. Because despite the presence of one child a prodigy and the other child handicapped by a defect of birth, life must continue, which means Gran must still be in attendance on Granddad, Dad must have two jobs as before, and if I'm to continue with the violin, Mother must work as well.

The logical expense to cut is the violin and everything associated with it: release Raphael Robson from his duties, sack Sarah-Jane Beckett as my constant teacher, and send me to day school. With the enormous amount of money saved from these simple and expedient economies, Mother can stay at home with Sonia, see to her growing needs, and nurse her through the health traumas that come up continually.

But making this change is unthinkable to everyone, because at six and a half years old, I have already made my public debut, and to deny the world the gift of my music seems an act of egregious pettiness. Doing this, however, has certainly been mooted among my parents and grandparents. Yes. I remember now. Mother and Dad are having a discussion in the drawing room and Granddad enters into it vociferously. “Boy's a genius, a God damn
genius
,” he bellows at them. And Gran is there, because I hear her anxious “Jack, Jack,” and I picture her scurrying to the stereo and throwing on a Paganini for the savage breast residing directly beneath Granddad's flannel shirt. “He's already giving
concerts
, God damn it,” Granddad rages. “You'll cut him off from that over my dead body. So for once in your life—just for flaming once, Dick—will you please make the
right
decision?”

Neither Raphael nor Sarah-Jane is involved in this debate. Their futures hang in the balance along with my own, but they have as much say in what will happen as I do, which is none at all. The dispute goes on for hours and days during my mother's convalescence from her pregnancy, and both the dispute and the difficulties of my mother's recovery are exacerbated by the health crises that Sonia experiences.

The baby's been taken to the doctor … to hospital … to Casualty.
There is all round us a pervasive sense of tension, urgency, and fear that has never been in the house before. People are stretched to the breaking point with anxiety. Always the question hangs in the air, What will happen next?

Crises. People are gone a great deal of the time. There are gaps in which no one seems at home at all. Just Raphael and I. Or Sarah-Jane and I. While everyone else is with Sonia.

Why? you ask. What sort of crises did Sonia have?

I can only remember
He says he'll meet us at hospital. Gideon, go to your room
, and the sound of Sonia's weak crying, and I can hear that crying as it fades away when they carry her downstairs and out into the night.

I go to her room, which is next to mine. This is the nursery. A light has been left on, and there's some sort of machine next to her cot and straps that keep her hooked onto it while she sleeps. There is a chest of drawers with a carousel lamp on it, the same carousel lamp that I can remember watching turn round and round as I lay in my own cot, this very same cot. And I see the marks where I bit the railing, and I see the Noah's Ark transfers that I used to stare at. And I climb into the cot though I am six and a half years old and I curl up there and wait for what will happen.

What does happen?

In time, they return, as they always do, with medicine, with the name of a doctor they're to see in the morning, with a behavioural prescription or a cutting-edge diet that they're to adhere to. Sometimes they have Sonia with them. Sometimes she's being kept in hospital.

Which is why my mother weeps at Mass. And
yes
, this is what she and Sister Cecilia must be talking about when we go with her into the convent that day that I overturn the bookshelf and break the statue of the Virgin. She murmurs mostly, this nun, and I assume it's to comfort my mother, who must feel … what? Guilt because she's given birth to a child who's suffering one illness after the next, anxiety because the
what can happen next
is always loitering outside her front door, anger at the inequities of life, and sheer exhaustion from trying to cope.

Out of all this fertile turbulent soil must grow the idea of hiring a nanny. A nanny could be the solution for everyone. Dad could continue his two jobs, Mother could return to work, Raphael and Sarah-Jane could remain with me, and the nanny could help to care for Sonia. James the Lodger would be there to bring in extra funds, and perhaps another lodger could be accommodated. So Katja Wolff comes to us. As things turn out, she isn't a trained nanny, however. She hasn't been to a specialised course or a college to earn a certificate in child care. But she is educated and she is helpful, affectionate, grateful, and—it must be said—affordable. She loves children, and she needs the job. And the Davies family need help.

6 October

I went to see Dad that same evening. If anyone holds the anamnestic key I'm trying to find, it's going to be my father.

I found him at Jill's flat, on the front steps of the building, in fact. The two of them were in the midst of one of those polite but tense arguments that loving couples have when they each have reasonable desires that have come into conflict. This one apparently involved whether Jill—as she approached her due date—was still going to drive herself round London.

Dad was saying, “That's dangerous and irresponsible. It's a wreck, that car. For God's sake, I'll send a taxi round for you. I'll drive you myself.”

And Jill was saying, “Would you
stop
treating me like a piece of Lalique? I can't even breathe when you're like this.”

She began to go inside the building, but he took her by the arm. He said, “Darling. Please,” and I could tell how afraid for her he was.

I understood. My father hadn't been blessed with luck in his children. Virginia, dead. Sonia, dead. Two out of three were not the sort of odds to give a man peace of mind.

To her credit, Jill seemed to recognise this as well. She said, more quietly, “You're being silly,” but I think there was a part of her that appreciated the degree to which Dad was solicitous for her well-being. And then she saw me standing on the pavement, hesitating between skulking off and striding forward with a hearty hello that attempted to demonstrate a level of bonhomie that I did not feel. She said, “Hullo. Here's Gideon, darling,” and Dad swung round, releasing her arm, which freed her to unlock the front door and usher both of us up to her flat.

Jill's flat is everywhere modern in a period building that was gutted several years ago by a clever developer who completely updated it within. It's all fitted carpets, copper pans hanging from the kitchen ceiling, gleaming mod cons that actually work, and paintings that look as if they intend to slide off their canvases and do something questionable on the floor. It is, in short, perfectly Jill. I wonder how my father is going to cope with her decorating preferences when at last they begin to cohabit. Not that they're not already as good as cohabiting. My father's hovering over Jill is becoming somewhat obsessive.