A Traitor to Memory (16 page)

Did it happen more than once? you want to know.

I see where you're heading, and I won't go there with you because I refuse to pretend that I remember what you seem to want me to remember. The facts are these: My mother is beside me in my bed, I am held by her, it is hot, I smell her perfume. And there's a weight on my cheek as well. I do feel that weight. It's heavy but inert and it smells of perfume. Odd, that I would recall that smell. I couldn't tell you what it was—her perfume, Dr. Rose—but I expect that if I ever smelled it again, I would know it at once and it would remind me of Mother.

I expect she was holding you between her breasts, you tell me. That's why you would both feel the weight and smell the perfume. Is it dark in your bedroom or is there a light?

I don't recall. Just the heat, that weight, the scent. And silence.

Have you lain that way with anyone else? With Libby perhaps? Or whoever preceded Libby?

God, no! And this is not about my mother! All right. Yes. Of
course
I know that her desertion of me—of us—looms large. I'm not an idiot, Dr. Rose. I come home from Austria, my mother is gone, I never see the woman again, never hear her voice, never read so much as a sentence in her handwriting addressed to me…. Yes, yes, I know the song: This is a Very Big Incident. And since I never heard from her again, I also see the logical connection that I would make as a child: It was my fault. Perhaps I make that connection when I am eight or nine or however old I was when she left, but it is not a connection that I recall making and it's not a connection that I make now. She left. End of story.

What do you mean, end of story? you ask.

Just that. We never spoke of her. Or at least I never spoke of her. And if my grandparents and father did, and if Raphael or Sarah-Jane or James the Lodger—

He was still there when she left?

He was there … Or was he? No. He couldn't have been. It was Calvin, wasn't it? Didn't I say earlier it was Calvin? Calvin the Lodger trying to phone for help in the midst of Granddad's episode after Mother left us … So James had long ago decamped as well.

Decamped, you say. There's a secrecy implied in
decamped
, you tell me. Was there secrecy behind James the Lodger's leaving?

There is secrecy everywhere. Silence and secrecy. That's how it seems. I walk into a room and a hush falls on it and I know they've been talking about my mother. And I am not allowed to speak of her.

What happens if you do?

I don't know because I never test the rule.

Why not?

The music is central. I have my music. I still have my music. My father, my grandparents, Sarah-Jane, and Raphael. Even Calvin the Lodger. We all have my music.

Is this rule stated? The rule about not asking after your mother? Or is it implied?

It must be … I don't know. She's not there to greet us when we return from Austria. She's gone but no one acknowledges that fact. The house has been wiped so clean of her that it's as if she never lived there in the first place. And no one says a word. They don't pretend she's taken a trip somewhere. They don't pretend she's suddenly died. They don't pretend she ran off with another man. They act as if she never existed. And life goes on.

You never asked about her?

I must have known that she was one of the subjects that we just didn't talk about.

One? There were others?

Perhaps I didn't miss her. I don't actually recall missing her. I don't even remember much about what she looked like. Except that her hair was blonde and she covered it with head scarves, the sort you always see the Queen wearing. But this would have been in church.

And yes, I do remember being with her in church. I remember her crying. Crying in church at morning Mass with the nuns lined up in the first few pews of that chapel of theirs in Kensington Square. They're on the other side of this rood screen affair, the nuns, except it's not really a rood screen but more like a fence to keep a separation between them and the rest of the public except there's no one else there to
be
the rest of the public at early morning Mass. There's just Mother and I. And the nuns are in front in those special pews giving responses, and one of them is dressed in that old way, in a habit, but all the rest are done up normally but very plain and with crosses on their chests. And during Mass, my mother kneels, always kneels, with her head resting on her hands. She weeps the whole time. And I don't know what to do.

Why is she weeping? you want to know, of course.

She is always weeping, it seems. And this one nun—the one dressed in the old way—comes up to Mother after Communion but before the end of Mass and she takes us both to a sitting room of some kind in the convent next door and there she and Mother talk. They sit in one corner of the room. I am in the other corner, the far corner, where I've been given a book to read and told to sit. I'm impatient to be back home, though, because Raphael's assigned me a set of exercises to master and if I master them to his liking, we're to go to the Festival Hall as a reward. A concert. Ilya Kaler will be performing. He is not yet twenty years old but already he has won the Grand Prize at the Genoa Paganini Competition and I want to hear him because I intend to be far greater than Ilya Kaler.

How old are you? you want to know.

I must be six. Seven at the oldest. And I am impatient to go home. So I leave my corner and I approach my mother and I pull on her sleeve and say, “Mum. I'm bored,” because that's what I always say, that's how I communicate. Not: I've got to practise for my lesson with Raphael, Mum. But: I'm bored and it's your duty as my mother to deal with my boredom. But Sister Cecilia—and yes, that's her name, I've remembered her name—disengages my hand from my mother's sleeve and leads me back to the corner and says, “You'll be stopping right here till you're called for, Gideon, and no nonsense about it,” and I'm surprised because no one ever talks to me that way. I'm the prodigy, after all. I am—if there can be degrees of it—more unique than anyone within my universe.

The surprise of being disciplined in such a way and by such a woman in such a costume is perhaps what keeps me in my corner for another few minutes as Sister Cecilia and my mother huddle together at their end of the room. But then I begin kicking at a bookshelf to entertain myself and I kick too hard and books topple to the floor and a statue of the Virgin falls and breaks on the lino. We leave soon afterwards, my mother and I.

I excel at my lesson that morning. Raphael takes me to the concert as he's promised. He's arranged for me to meet Ilya Kaler and I've brought my violin and we play together. Kaler is brilliant, but I know I'll exceed what he has accomplished. Even then, I know this.

What happens to your mother? you ask.

She spends much of her time upstairs.

In her bedroom?

No. No. In the nursery.

In the nursery? Why?

And I know the answer. I
know
the answer. Where has it been for all these years? Why have I suddenly remembered now?

My mother's with Sonia.

8 September

There are gaps, Dr. Rose. They exist in my brain like a series of canvases painted by an artist but incomplete and coloured only black.

Sonia is part of one of those canvases. I remember the
fact
of her now: that there was a Sonia, and that she was my younger sister. She died at a very early age. I remember this as well.

So that would be why my mother was weeping all those mornings at early Mass. And Sonia's death must have been one of the subjects we did not speak about. To speak about her death would be to bring on a new torrent of Mother's terrible grieving and we wished to spare her that.

I've been trying to conjure up a picture of Sonia, but nothing is there. Just the black canvas. And when I try to summon her up to take part in a specific memory—Christmas, for instance, or Guy Fawkes Night, or the annual taxi ride with Gran to Fortnum and Mason for a birthday lunch in the Fountain … anything … anything at all … nothing is there. I don't even remember the day that she died. Nor do I recall her funeral. I know just the
fact
that she died because suddenly she wasn't there any longer.

Just like your mother, Gideon? you ask me.

No. This is different. This
must
be different because this feels different . And all I know for certain is that she was my sister, that she died young. Then Mother was gone. Whether she left us soon after Sonia died or whether it was months or years later, I couldn't say. But why? Why can't I remember my sister? What happened to her? What do children die of: cancer, leukaemia, cystic fibrosis, scarlet fever, influenza, pneumonia … what else?

This is the second child to die, you point out to me.

What? What do you mean? The second child?

The second child of your father's to die, Gideon. You've told me about Virginia …?

Children die, Dr. Rose. That's what happens sometimes. Every day of the week. Children fall ill. Children die.

3

“I
DON'T REALLY
see how the caterer managed to cope in here, do you?” Frances Webberly asked. “Of course, it's quite good enough for us, this kitchen. I can't see that we'd actually use a dishwasher or a microwave even if we had one. But caterers … They're used to all the mod cons, aren't they? What a surprise it must have been for the poor woman to arrive and find us living practically in the Middle Ages.”

At the table, Malcolm Webberly made no reply. He'd heard his wife's deliberately cheerful words, but his mind was elsewhere. To deflect a potential conversation that he didn't want to have with anyone, he'd set about polishing his shoes in the kitchen. He assumed that Frances, having known him for more than thirty years and thus being well aware of his aversion to doing two things at once, would see him at this modest industry and leave him to himself.