A Traitor to Memory (76 page)

23 October, 1:00 A.M.

I dreamed again. I woke, remembering it. I sit up in bed now, notebook on my knees, in order to scribble a summary.

I'm in the house in Kensington Square. I'm in the drawing room. I'm watching children playing outside in the central garden, and they see me watching them. They wave and gesture for me to join them and I can see they're being entertained by a magician in a black cape and a top hat. He keeps drawing live doves from the ears of the children, tossing the birds high into the air. I want to be there, I want the magician to draw a bird from
my
ear, but when I go to the drawing room door, I find there is no handle, just a keyhole through which I can peer in order to see the reception hall and the staircase.

But when I peer through that keyhole, which turns out to be much more like a porthole than a keyhole, I see not what I expect to see but my sister's nursery on the other side. And although the light is bright in the drawing room, it's quite dim in the nursery, as if the curtains have been closed for naptime.

I hear crying on the other side of the door. I know the crying is Sonia's, but I can't see her. And then the door is suddenly not a door any longer but a heavy curtain through which I push, finding myself not in the house any longer but in the garden behind it.

The garden is much larger than it actually was in reality. There are enormous trees, huge ferns, and a waterfall that drops into a distant pool. In the middle of the pool is the garden shed, the same shed against which I saw Katja and the man on that night I've recalled.

Outside in the garden, I still hear Sonia crying, but she's wailing now, nearly screaming, and I know that I'm meant to find her. I'm surrounded by undergrowth that seems to grow by the moment, and I fight my way through it, beating down fronds and lilies to locate the crying. Just when I think I'm close to it, it seems to come from a different area entirely, and I'm forced to begin again.

I call for help: my mother, Dad, Gran, or Granddad. But no one comes. And then I reach the edge of the pool and I see that there are two people leaning against the shed, a man and woman. He's bent to her, he's sucking from her neck, and still Sonia is crying and crying.

I can tell by her hair that the woman is Libby, and I'm frozen there, watching, as the man I can't yet identify sucks upon her. I call to them; I ask them to help me find my little sister. The man raises his head when I call out, and I see he's my father.

I feel rage, betrayal. I am immobilised. Sonia still cries.

Then Mother is with me, or someone like Mother, someone of her height and her shape with hair the same colour. She takes my hand and I'm aware I must help her because Sonia needs us to calm her crying, which is angry now, high-pitched with rage like a tantrum being thrown.

“It's all right,” the MotherPerson tells me. “She's just hungry, darling.”

And we find her lying beneath a fern, covered completely by fronds. MotherPerson picks her up and holds her to her breast. She says, “Let her suck me. She'll calm, then.”

But Sonia doesn't calm because she can't feed. MotherPerson doesn't free her breasts for Sonia, and even if she did, nothing would be accomplished. For when I look at my sister, I see she's wearing a mask that covers her face. I try to remove it, but I can't; my fingers keep slipping off. MotherPerson doesn't notice that there's anything wrong, and I can't make her look down at my sister. And I can't and I
can't
remove the mask that she's wearing. But I feel frantic to do so.

I ask the MotherPerson to help me, but that's no good because she doesn't even look down at Sonia. I hurry and fight my way back to the pool to find help there, and when I reach the edge, I slip and fall in, and I'm turning and turning beneath the water, unable to breathe.

That's when I awaken.

My heart was slamming. I could actually
feel
the way the adrenaline had shot into my blood stream. Writing all of it down has calmed my heartbeat, but I don't expect sleep to return to me tonight.

Libby isn't with you? you want to know.

No. She didn't return from wherever she jetted off to when we got back from Cresswell-White's office and found my father waiting at the house.

Are you worried about her?

Should I be worried?

There is no
should
to anything, Gideon.

But there is to me, Dr. Rose. I should be able to remember more. I should be able to play my instrument. I should be able to take a woman into my life and to share something with her without fearing that somehow I'll lose it all.

Lose what?

What's holding me together in the first place.

Do you need to be held together, Gideon?

That's how it feels.

23 October

Raphael did his daily duty by me today, but instead of sitting in the music room and waiting for a miracle to happen, we walked down to Regent's Park and strolled through the zoo. One of the elephants was being hosed off by a keeper, and we paused by the enclosure and watched as sheets of water cascaded down the side of the enormous creature. Sprouts of hair along the elephant's backbone bristled like wires as the water hit them, and the animal shifted its weight as if trying to gain its footing.

“Odd, aren't they?” Raphael said. “One wonders about the design philosophy behind the elephant. When I see a biological oddity like this, I'm always sorry that I don't know more about evolution. How, for example, did something like an elephant develop out of the primordial muck?”

“He's probably thinking the same of us.” I'd noticed upon Raphael's arrival that he was decidedly good-humoured. And he'd been the one to suggest we get out of the house and into the questionable air of the city and into the even more questionable fragrance of the zoo, where the atmosphere was redolent with the smells of urine and hay. This prompted me to wonder what was going on. I saw my father's hand in it. “Get him out of that house,” he would have commanded.

And when Father commanded, Raphael obeyed.

That was the key to his longevity as my instructor: He held the reins to my musical training; Dad held the reins to the rest of my life. And Raphael had always accepted this division of their responsibilities towards me.

As an adult, of course, I could have chosen to replace Raphael with someone else to accompany me on my concert tours—apart from Dad, naturally—and to be a partner to my daily sessions of practice on the violin. But at this point with more than two decades of instruction, cooperation, and partnership between us, we knew each other's styles of living and working so well that to bring in someone else had never been a consideration. Besides, when I
could
play, I liked playing with Raphael Robson. He was—and is—a brilliant technician. There's a spark missing in him, an additional passion that would have long ago forced him to overcome his nerves and to play publicly, knowing that playing is forging a link with an audience, which makes the quadrinomial defined by composer-music-listener-performer complete. But aside from that spark, the artistry and the love are there, as is a remarkable ability to distil technique into a series of critiques, commands, adjustments, assignments, and instructions that are understandable to the neophyte artist and invaluable to the established violinist who seeks to improve himself on his instrument. So I never considered replacing Raphael, despite his obedience to—and loathing of—my father.

I must have always sensed the antipathy between them, even if I never saw it openly. They coped despite their dislike of each other, and it was only now, when they'd begun to seem at such pains to
hide
their mutual loathing, that I felt compelled to question why it had existed in the first place.

The natural answer was my mother: because of how Raphael may have felt about my mother. But that seemed to explain only why Raphael disliked my father so much, Dad being in possession of what Raphael might have wanted for himself. It didn't explain my father's aversion to Raphael. There had to be something more going on.

Perhaps it came from what Raphael could give you? you offer me as potential answer.

And it's true that my father played no instrument, but I think their dislike came from something more basic and atavistic than that.

I said to Raphael as we moved from the elephants to seek out the koalas, “You were told to get me out of the house today.”

He didn't deny it. “He thinks you're dwelling too much on the past and avoiding the present.”

“What do you think?”

“I trust Dr. Rose. At least I trust Dr. Rose the father. As to Dr. Rose the daughter, I assume she's discussing the case with him.” He glanced at me anxiously as he said the word
case
, which reduced me to a phenomenon that would doubtless appear in a psychiatric journal at a later date, my name scrupulously withheld but everything else forming neon arrows that all pointed to me as the patient. “He's had decades of experience with the sort of thing you're going through, and that's going to count for something with her.”

“What sort of thing do you think I'm going through?”

“I know what she's called it. The amnesia bit.”

“Dad told you?”

“He would do, wouldn't he? I'm as much involved with your career as anyone.”

“But you don't believe in the amnesia, do you?”

“Gideon, it's not my place to believe or disbelieve anything.”

He led me into the koala enclosure, where simulated eucalyptus trees were formed by crisscrossing branches that rose out of the floor, and the forest in which the bears would have lived in the wild was expressed by a mural painted on a tall pink wall. A single diminutive bear slept in the V of two of the branches, nearby him hanging a bucket that contained the leaves upon which he was supposed to feed. The forest floor beneath the bear was concrete, and there were no bushes, no diversions, and no toys for him. He had no companions to break his solitude either, only the visitors to his enclosure, who whistled and called out to him, frustrated that a creature nocturnal by nature would not accommodate himself to their timetables.

I looked at all this and felt a heaviness settle onto my shoulders. “God. Why do people come to zoos?”

“To remind them of their freedom.”

“To exult in their superiority.”

“I suppose that's true as well. After all, as humans we hold the keys, don't we?”

“Ah,” I said. “I did think there was a greater purpose behind this sojourn to Regent's Park than just getting some air. I've never seen you as interested either in exercise or in animals. So what did Dad say? ‘Show him he ought to count his blessings. Show him how bad life really can be’?”

“There are worse places than a zoo if that was his intention, Gideon.”

“Then what? And don't tell me you thought up the zoo on your own.”

“You're brooding. It's not healthy. He knows it.”

I laughed without humour. “As if what's happened already
is
healthy?”