A Traitor to Memory (124 page)

“Oh. Good.”

I took a deep breath. “Libby, I'm going to see my mother. After all this time, I'm actually going to see her. Dad told me she's been phoning him about me, so we're going to meet. Just the two of us. And when we do, there's a chance that I'll get to the bottom of the violin problem.”

She put her can of diet Coke into the Boots bag and rubbed her hand down her hip. “I guess that's cool, Gid. If you want it to be. It's, like, what you want in life, right?”

“It
is
my life.”

“Sure. It's your life. That's what you've made it.”

I could tell by her tone that we were back to the uneven ground we'd walked over before, and I felt a surge of frustration run through me. “Libby, I'm a musician. If nothing else, it's how I support myself. It's where the money to live comes from. You can understand that.”

“I understand,” she said.

“Then—”

“Look, Gid. Like I said, I'm heading out to feed the ducks.”

“Why don't you come up afterwards? We could have a meal.”

“I've got plans for tapping.”

“Tapping?”

She looked away. For a moment, her face expressed a reaction I couldn't quite grasp. When she turned her head back to me, her eyes appeared sorrowful. But when she spoke, her voice was resigned. “Tap dancing,” she said. “It's what I like to do.”

“Sorry. I'd forgotten.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I know.”

“What about later, then? I should be home. I'm just hanging about, waiting to hear from Dad. Come up after your dancing. If you've a mind to, that is.”

“Sure,” she said. “I'll see you around.”

At that, I knew she wouldn't come up. The fact that I'd forgotten her dancing was, apparently, the final blow to her. I said, “Libby, I've had a lot on my mind. You know that. You must see—”

“Jesus,” she interrupted me. “You don't get anything.”

“I ‘get’ that you're angry.”

“I'm not angry. I'm not anything. I'm going to the park to feed the ducks. Because I've got the time and I like ducks. I've always liked ducks. And after that, I'm going to a tap-dancing lesson. Because I like tap dancing.”

“You're avoiding me, aren't you?”

“This isn't about you.
I'm
not about you. The rest of the world isn't about you. If you, like, stop playing the violin tomorrow, the rest of the world will just go on being the rest of the world. But how can you go on being you if there's no you in the first place, Gid?”

“That's what I'm trying to recapture.”

“You can't recapture what's never been there. You can create it if you want to. But you can't just go out with a net and bag it.”

“Why won't you see—”

“I want to feed the ducks,” she cut in. And with that, she swung past me and headed down to Regent's Park Road.

I watched her go. I wanted to run after her and argue my point. How easy it was for her to talk about one's simply being oneself when she didn't have a past that was littered with accomplishments, all of which served as guideposts to a future that had long been determined. It was easy for her simply to exist in a given moment of a given day because moments were all she had ever had. But my life had never been like that, and I wanted her to acknowledge that fact.

She must have read my mind. She turned when she came to the corner and shouted something back at me.

“What?” I called to her as her words were taken by the wind.

She cupped her hands round her mouth and tried again. “Good luck with your mother,” she shouted.

17 November

I'd been able to put my mother from my mind for years because of my work. Preparing for this concert or that recording session, practising my instrument with Raphael, filming a documentary, rehearsing with this or that orchestra, touring Europe or the US, meeting my agent, negotiating contracts, working with the East London Conservatory … My days and my hours had been filled with music for two decades. There had been no place in them for speculation about the parent who'd deserted me.

But now there was time, and she dominated my thoughts. And I knew even as I thought about it, even as I wondered, imagined, and pondered, that keeping my mind fixed on my mother was a way to keep it at a distance from Sonia.

I wasn't altogether successful. For my sister still came to me in unguarded moments.

“She doesn't look right, Mummy,” I remembered saying, hovering over the bed on which my sister lay, swaddled in blankets, wearing a cap, in possession of a face that didn't look as it should.

“Don't say that, Gideon,” Mother replied. “Don't ever say that about your sister.”

“But her eyes are squishy. She's got a funny mouth.”

“I said don't talk like that about your sister!”

We began in that way, making the subject of Sonia's disabilities
verboten
among us. When they began to dominate our lives, we made no mention of them. Sonia was fretful, Sonia cried through the night, Sonia went into hospital for two or three weeks. But still we pretended that life was normal, that this was the way things always happened in families when a baby was born. We went about life in that way till Granddad fractured the glass wall of our denial.

“What good are either of them?” he raged. “What good is any one of you, Dick?”

Is that when it began in my head? Is that when I first saw the necessity to prove myself different from my sister? Granddad had lumped me together with Sonia, but I would show him the truth.

Yet how could I do that when everything revolved round
her
? Her health, her growth, her disabilities, her development. A cry in the night and the household was rallied to see to her needs. A change in her temperature and life was halted till a doctor could explain what had brought it about. An alteration in the manner of her feeding and specialists were consulted for an explanation. She was the topic of every conversation but at the same time the cause of her ailments could never be directly mentioned.

And I remembered this, Dr. Rose. I remembered because when I thought of my mother, my sister was clinging to the shirttails of any memory I was able to evoke. She was there in my mind as persistently as she'd been there in my life. And as I waited for the time when I would see my mother, I sought to shake her from me with as much determination as I'd sought to shake her from me when she was alive.

Yes, I do see what that means. She is in my way now. She was in my way then. Because of her, life had altered. Because of her, it was going to alter still more.

“You'll be going to school, Gideon.”

That must be when the seed was planted: the seed of disappointment, anger, and thwarted dreams that grew into a forest of blame. Dad was the one who broke the news to me.

He comes into my bedroom. I'm sitting at the table by the window, where Sarah-Jane Beckett and I do our lessons. I'm working on school prep. Dad pulls out the chair in which Sarah-Jane generally sits, and he watches me with his arms crossed.

He says, “We've had a good run of it, Gideon. You've thrived, haven't you, son?”

I don't know what he's talking about, and what I hear in his words makes me wary immediately. I know now that what I heard must have been resignation, but at the moment I cannot put a name to what he's apparently feeling.

That is when he tells me that I will be going out to school, to a C of E school that he's managed to locate, a day school not too far away. I say what first comes to my mind.

“What about my playing? When will I practise?”

“We'll have to work that out.”

“But what will happen to Sarah-Jane? She won't like it if she can't teach me.”

“She'll have to cope. We're letting her go, son.”

Letting her go. At first I think he means that Sarah-Jane
wants
to leave us, that she's made a request and he's acceded to it with as much good grace as he can muster. But when I say, “I shall talk to her, then. I shall stop her from going,” he says, “We can't afford her any longer, Gideon.” He doesn't add the rest, but I do, in my head.
We can't afford her because of Sonia.
“We have to cut back somewhere,” Dad informs me. “We don't want to let Raphael go, and we can't let Katja go. So it's come down to Sarah-Jane.”

“But when will I play if I'm at school? They won't let me come to school only when I want to, will they, Dad? And there'll be rules. So how will I have my lessons?”

“We've spoken to them, Gideon. They're willing to make allowances. They know the situation.”

“But I don't want to go! I want Sarah-Jane to keep teaching me.”

“So do I,” Dad said. “So do we all. But it's not possible, Gideon. We haven't the funds.”

We haven't the funds, the money, the funds. Hasn't this been the leitmotiv for all of our lives? So should I be the least surprised when the Juilliard offer comes and must be rejected? Isn't it logical that I would attach my inability to attend Juilliard to money?

But I
am
surprised. I am outraged. I am maddened. And the seed that was planted sends shoots upwards, sends roots downwards, and begins to multiply in the soil.

I learn to hate. I acquire a need for revenge. A target for my vengeance becomes essential. I hear it at first, in her ceaseless crying and the inhuman demands she places upon everyone. And then I see it, in her, in my sister.

Thinking of my mother, I dwelled upon these other thoughts as well. In considering them, I had to conclude that even if Dad had not acted to save Sonia as he might have done, what did it matter? I had begun the process of killing her. He had only allowed that process to run its course.

You say to me: Gideon, you were just a little boy. This was a sibling situation. You weren't the first person who has attempted to harm a younger sibling, and you won't be the last.

But she
died
, Dr. Rose.

Yes. She died. But not at your hands.

I don't
know
that for certain.

You don't know—and can't know—what's true right now. But you will. Soon.

You're right, Dr. Rose, as you usually are. Mother will tell me what actually happened. If there's salvation for me anywhere in the world, it will come to me from her.