A Traitor to Memory (4 page)

I am in the garden of Kensington Square that day with a summer play group sponsored by a nearby convent, populated by the infant inhabitants of the square, and directed by three of the college students who live in a hostel behind the convent. We are collected daily from our individual houses by one or another of our three keepers and we are led hand-in-hand into the central garden where, it is hoped and for a nominal fee, we will learn the social skills that are engendered through cooperative play. This will stand us in good stead when we take our places at primary school. Or so the plan is.

The college students occupy us with games, with crafts, and with exercise. And once we are set busily to whatever task they've chosen that day, they—unbeknownst to our parents—repair to that same Greek-temple affair where they chat amongst themselves and smoke cigarettes.

This particular day is earmarked for biking although what passes for biking is actually tricycle riding round the perimeter of the garden. And while I trundle round and round on my tricycle at the tail end of the small pack, a boy like myself—although I don't remember his name—takes out his willie and urinates openly upon the lawn. A crisis ensues, during which the malefactor is marched directly home amid a thorough telling-off.

This is when the music begins, and the two college students who remain after the child has been removed haven't the slightest idea what it is that we're listening to. But I want to go to that sound and I insist with a force so unusual in me that one of the students—it's an Italian girl, I think, because her English isn't good although her heart is big—says that she will help me track it down. And so we do, to the Peabody House where we meet Miss Orr.

She is neither playing, pretending to play, nor weeping when the college girl and I find her in her sitting room. Rather, she is giving a music lesson. She ends every lesson—I learn—by playing a piece of music on her stereo for her student. Today she is playing the Brahms concerto.

Do I like music? she wants to know.

I have no answer. I don't know if I like it, if what I feel is liking or something else. I only know that I want to be able to make those sounds. But I'm shy and say nothing of this, and I hide behind the Italian girl's legs until she clutches my hand and apologises in her broken English and shoos me back to the garden.

And that's the reality.

You want to know, naturally, how this inauspicious beginning to my life in music metamorphosed into the Gideon Legend. How, in other words, did the discarded weapon left—shall we say?—to collect one hundred years of lime deposits in a cave become Excalibur, the Sword in the Stone? I can only speculate, as the Legend is my father's invention and not my own.

The children from the play group were taken to their homes by their student keepers at the end of the day, and reports were given on each child's development and comportment. What else were the parents spending their money on if not to receive hopeful daily indications that a suitable level of social maturity was being achieved?

God knows what the display in public of what should have been a private bodily function earned the willie waver that afternoon. In my case, the Italian student reported on my meeting with Rosemary Orr.

This would have occurred in the sitting room, I dare say, where Gran would have been presiding over the afternoon tea she never failed to make for Granddad, enveloping him in an aura of normalcy as a hedge against the intrusion of an episode. Perhaps my father was there as well, perhaps we were joined by James the Lodger, who helped us make ends meet by renting one of the vacant bedrooms on the fourth floor of the house.

The Italian student—although let me say now that she might as easily have been Greek or Spanish or Portuguese—would have been invited to join the family for refreshment, which would then have given her the opportunity to tell the tale of our meeting with Rosemary Orr.

She says, “The little one, he wants to find this music we are listening, so we trail it up—”

“She means ‘hearing’ and ‘track it down,’ I think,” the lodger interposes. His name is James, as I've said, and I've heard Granddad complain that his English is “too bloody perfect to be real” so he must be a spy. But I like to listen to him anyway. Words come from James the Lodger's mouth like oranges, plump and juicy and round. He himself is none of that, except for his cheeks, which are red and get redder still when he realises everyone is attending to him. He says, “Do go on,” to the Italian-Spanish-Greek-Portuguese student. “Don't take the slightest notice of me.”

And she smiles because she likes the lodger. She'd like him to help her with her English, I expect. She'd like to be friends with him.

I myself have no friends—despite the play group—but I don't notice their absence because I have my family, and I bask in their love. Unlike most children of three, I do not lead an existence separate from the adults in my limited world: taking my meals alone, entertained and exposed to life by a nanny or some other child minder, making periodic appearances in the bosom of the family, spinning my wheels until such a time as I can be packed off to school. Instead, I am
of
the world of the adults with whom I live. So I see and hear much of what happens in my home and if I don't remember events, I remember the impressions of events.

So I recall this: the story of the violin music being told and Granddad plunging into the midst of the tale with an expatiation on Paganini. Gran's used music for years to soothe him when he's teetering on the edge of an episode and while there's still a hope of heading it off, and he talks about trills and bowing, about vibrato and glissandi with what sounds like authority but is likely, I know now, delusion. He's big and booming in his grandiloquence, an orchestra in and of himself. And no one interrupts or disagrees when he says to everyone but in reference to me, “This boy shall play,” like God declaring Himself for light.

Dad hears this, attaches to it a significance that he shares with no one, and swiftly makes all the necessary arrangements.

So it is that I come to receive my first lessons in the violin from Miss Rosemary Orr. And from these lessons and from that report from the play group, my father develops the Gideon Legend which I've dragged through life like a ball and chain.

But why did he make it a story about your grandfather? you want to know, don't you? Why not just keep the central characters but fudge on the details here and there? Wasn't he worried that someone would step forward, refute the story, and tell the real tale?

I give you the only answer I can, Dr. Rose: You'll have to ask my father.

21 August

I remember those first lessons with Rosemary Orr: my impatience locking horns with her devotion to minutiae. “Find your body, Gideon dear, find your body,” she says. And with a one-sixteenth tucked between my chin and my shoulder—for this was in the days when that was the smallest instrument one could obtain—I endure Miss Orr's perpetual adjustments to my position. She arches my fingers over the fingerboard; she stiffens my left wrist; she grips my shoulder to prevent its intrusion into the bowing; she straightens my back and uses a long pointer to tap the insides of my legs to alter my stance. All along while I play—when she at last
allows
me to play—her voice rings out above the scales and arpeggios that are my initial assignments: “Body up, shoulder down, Gideon dear.” “Thumb under
this
part of the bow, not on the silver part, please, and not on the side.” “The whole
arm
up-bows.” “Strokes are big and detached.” “No, no! You use the
fleshy
part of the fingers, dear.” Continually, she has me play one note and set up for the next. Over and over we engage in this exercise until she is satisfied that all body parts which exist as extensions of the right hand—that is to say the wrist, the elbow, the arm, and the shoulder blade—function along with the bow like an axis and wheel, with the body parts keeping the bow on course.

I learn that my fingers must work independently of each other. I learn to find that balancing point on the fingerboard which will later allow my fingers to shift as if through air alone from one position to the next on the strings. I learn to listen for and to find the ringing tone of my instrument. I learn up bow and down bow, the golden mean,
staccato
and
legato, sul tasto
and
sul ponticello.

In short, I learn method, theory, and principle, but what I do not learn is what I hunger to learn: how to rupture the spirit to bring forth the sound.

I persevere with Miss Rosemary Orr for eighteen months, but soon I tire of the soulless exercises that dominate my time. Soulless exercises were not what I heard issuing forth from her window that day in the square, and I rail against having to be part of them. I hear Miss Orr excuse this to my father, “He is, after all, a very small child. It's to be expected that, at such a young age, his interest wouldn't be held for long.” But my father—who is already doing two jobs to keep the family at Kensington Square—has not attended my thrice-weekly lessons and thus he can't perceive the manner in which they're bleeding life from the music I love.

My grandfather, however, has been there all along because during the eighteen months that I have been with Miss Orr, he has not experienced anything resembling an episode. So he's taken me to my lessons and he's listened from a corner of the room, and with his sharp eyes absorbing the form and the content of my lessons and his parched soul thirsty for Paganini, he has drawn the conclusion that his grandson's prodigious talent is being held back, not nurtured, by well-meaning Rosemary Orr.

“He wants to make
music
, damn it,” Granddad roars at my father when they discuss the situation. “The boy's a bloody
artist
, Dick, and if you can't see that much when it's painted in front of you, you've got no brains and you're no son of mine. Would you feed a thoroughbred from the pig trough? I don't bloody think so, Richard.”

Perhaps it is fear that garners my father's cooperation, fear that another episode will be forthcoming if he does not acquiesce in Granddad's plan. And it is a plan that my grandfather makes immediately apparent: We live in Kensington, no great distance from the Royal College of Music, and it is there that a suitable instructor of the violin shall be found for his grandson Gideon.

So it is that my grandfather becomes my saviour and the trustee of my unspoken dreams. So it is that Raphael Robson enters my life.

22 August

I am four years and six months old, and although I know now that Raphael would only have been in his early thirties at the time, to me he is a distant, awesome figure who commands my complete obedience from the first moment we meet.

He isn't a pleasing figure to behold. He sweats copiously. I can see his skull through his baby-fine hair. His skin is the white of river-fish flesh and it is patched with scales from too much time in the sun. But when Raphael picks up his violin and plays for me—for that is our introduction to each other—whatever he looks like fades to insignificance, and I am clay for him to mould. He chooses the Mendelssohn E minor, and he gives his entire body to the music.

He doesn't play notes; he exists within sounds. The allegro fireworks he produces on his instrument mesmerise me. In a moment he has been transformed. He is no sweating, patchy-skinned cough drop, but Merlin, and I want his magic for myself.

Raphael doesn't teach method, I discover, saying in his interview with my grandfather that “It's the work of the violinist to develop his own method.” Instead, he improvises exercises for me. He leads and I follow. “Rise to the
opportunity
,” he instructs me over his own playing and watching mine. “
Enrich
that vibrato. Don't be afraid of
portamenti
, Gideon. Slide. Make them flow.
Slide
.”

And this is how I begin my real life as a violinist, Dr. Rose, because all that has gone before with Miss Orr was a prelude. I take three lessons a week at first, then four, and then five. Each lesson lasts three hours. I go at first to Raphael's office at the Royal College of Music, Granddad and I on the bus from Kensington High Street. But the extended hours of waiting for me to finish my lessons are a trouble to Granddad, and everyone in the house is terrified that they will provoke an episode sooner or later without my grandmother there to contend with it. So eventually an arrangement must be made for Raphael Robson to come to me.