A Traitor to Memory (40 page)

“I say lots of things.” She slapped the plastic bag against her lap and appeared to reach a decision, because she said, “I want to know how long. And you'd better be totally straight with me.”

“How long what?”

“How long not playing. Or playing like that. Just then. Like that. How long?” And then, in a switch that wasn't atypical of her, she said, “Never mind. I ought to have noticed before now. It's because of that bastard Rock.”

“We can hardly blame your husband—”

“Ex. Please.”

“Not yet.”

“Close enough.”

“Fine. But we can't blame him—”

“Loathsome as he is.”

“—if I'm having a rough time just now.”

“That's
so
not what I was talking about,” she said, irritation in her voice. “There's more people on earth than you, Gideon. I was talking about myself.
I
would've noticed what's been happening with
you
if
I
hadn't been so strung out about Rock.”

But I hardly heard what she said about her husband, because I was struck by her words:
more people on earth than you, Gideon
, and how they echoed almost exactly Sarah-Jane Beckett's sentiments all those years ago.
You're not the centre of the universe any longer
. And I couldn't see Libby in the car with me because all I could see was Sarah-Jane Beckett. I can see her still, I can see her eyes peering at me, her face bending over me. It's pinched, that face, with eyes that are narrowed to a band of stubby lashes.

What's she talking about when she says that? you ask me.

Yes. That's the question, all right.

I've been naughty while she was responsible for me. It's been left to her to determine my punishment, which has been a thorough wigging, Sarah-Jane style. There's a wooden box in Granddad's wardrobe and I've got into it. It's filled with old boot black, shoe polish, and rags, and I've used all this as paints. All along the first-floor corridor I've smeared brown polish and boot black on the walls. Bored, bored,
bored
, I've thought as I ruined the wallpaper and wiped my hands on the curtains. But I'm not bored, really, and Sarah-Jane knows. That's not why I've done it.

Do you know why you did it? you ask me.

I'm not sure now. But I think I'm angry, and I feel afraid. Quite distinctly and very much afraid.

I see the spark of interest in your face when I tell you this, Dr. Rose. Now we're getting somewhere. Angry and afraid. Emotion. Passion. Something, by God, that you can work with.

But I have little to add to that. Only this: When Libby said
more people on earth than you, Gideon
, what I felt distinctly was fear. It was a fear quite apart from the fear of never being able to play my instrument again, however. It was a fear that seemed entirely unrelated to the conversation that she and I were having. Yet I felt it in such a sudden paroxysm that I heard myself cry “Don't!” at Libby, and all the while it wasn't Libby I was talking to at all.

And what is it you were afraid of? you inquire.

That, I would have thought, is obvious.

3 October

We were directed up to the news library, a storage room where rack after rack of news cuttings are filed in manila folders and catalogued by subject along scores of rolling shelves. Do you know this place? News readers spend their days there, poring through every major paper, clipping and identifying stories which then become part of the library's collection. Nearby, a single table and a photocopier serve members of the public who want to do research.

I told a poorly dressed, long-haired boy what I was looking for. He said, “You should've rung first. It'll take twenty minutes or so. That stuff's not kept up here.”

I said that we'd wait, but I found that my nerves were tangled so excessively that I couldn't remain in the library once the young man had gone off on his search. I couldn't breathe, and in short order I found myself sweating as much as Raphael. I said to Libby that I needed some air. She followed me out onto Vauxhall Bridge Road. But I couldn't breathe there either.

“It's the traffic,” I told Libby, “the fumes,” and I found myself gasping like a winded runner. And then my viscera went into action: stomach clenching and bowels loosening, threatening a humiliating explosion right there on the pavement.

Libby said, “You look like hell, Gid.”

I said, “No. No. I'm all right.”

She said, “You're all right like I'm the Virgin Mary. C'mere. Get out of the middle of the sidewalk.”

She led me round the corner to a coffee bar and sat me at a table. She said, “Don't move unless you're, like, going to faint, okay? In which case, put your head … somewhere. Where is it you're supposed to put your head? Between your knees?” Then she went to the counter and came back with some orange juice. “When was the last time you ate?” she asked.

And I—sinner and softspined poltroon—let her believe what she was believing. I said, “Can't remember exactly,” and I downed the orange juice as if it were an elixir that could return to me everything that I have so far lost.

Lost? you repeat, ever vigilant for triggers.

Yes. What I've lost: my music, Beth, my mother, a childhood, memories that other people take for granted.

Sonia? you ask. Sonia as well? Would you have her back if you could, Gideon?

Yes, of course, is my reply. But a different Sonia.

And that answer stops me. Because contained within it is a reservoir of remorse for what I'd forgotten about my sister.

3 October, 6:00 P.M.

When I was able to get my raging bowels under control and to breathe normally, Libby and I returned to the news library. There, five bulging manila envelopes awaited us, crammed with newspaper cuttings from over twenty years ago. They were roughly clipped from papers and dog-eared; they were musty smelling and discoloured with age.

While Libby searched out a second chair so that she could join me at the table, I reached for the first envelope and opened it.

KILLER NANNY CONVICTED leapt out at me, with the unspoken reassurance that little had changed with newspaper headlines in the last two decades. The words were accompanied by a picture, and there she was before me, my sister's killer. The photograph looked as if it had been taken very early on in the legal process, since Katja Wolff had been caught by the lens not at the Old Bailey or in prison somewhere but in the Earl's Court Road as she came out of the Kensington police station in the company of a stubby man in an ill-fitting suit. Just behind him, partially obscured by the doorway, was a figure I would not have been able to make out had I not known the shape of him and the size of him and the general look of him from nearly twenty-five years of daily sessions on the violin: Raphael Robson. I registered the presence of these two men—assuming the former to be Katja Wolff 's solicitor—but what I focused on was Katja herself.

Much had changed for her since the day of the sunny picture that had been taken in the back garden. Of course, that photograph had been posed while this one had obviously been snapped in that frantic rush that exists between the time a newsworthy figure leaves a building and the time she enters a vehicle which whisks her away. What was evident in the picture was that public notoriety—at least of this sort—hadn't suited Katja Wolff. She looked thin and ill. And whereas the back-garden shot had depicted her smiling up at the camera openly and happily, this shot had captured her trying to conceal her face. The photographer must have got in quite close, because the picture wasn't grainy as one would expect from a telephoto shot. Indeed, every detail of Katja Wolff 's face seemed harshly highlighted.

Her mouth was pressed shut so her lips were thin. Dark skin formed half-moon bruises beneath her eyes. Her aquiline features had sharpened unappealingly from a loss in weight. Her arms were sticklike, and where her blouse formed a V, her collar bone looked like the edge of a plank.

I read the copy to find that Mr. Justice St. John Wilkes had passed the mandatory life sentence for murder upon Katja Wolff, with an unusual recommendation made to the Home Office that she serve no less than twenty years. According to the correspondent, who evidently had been present in the courtroom, the defendant had leapt to her feet upon hearing the sentence pronounced and demanded to speak. “Let me tell what happened,” she was reported as saying. But her offer to speak now—after having maintained her right to silence not only through the trial but throughout the investigation as well—smacked of panic and deal-making, and it came too late.

“We know what happened,” Bertram Cresswell-White, senior Treasury Counsel, declared later to the press. “We heard it from the police, we heard it from the family, we heard it from the forensic laboratory and from Miss Wolff 's own friends. Placed in circumstances which she found increasingly difficult, seeking to vent her anger in a situation in which she felt she was being unfairly disciplined, and given the opportunity to rid the world of a child who was imperfect anyway, she willfully and with malice towards the Davies family shoved Sonia Davies beneath the water in her own bathtub and held her there—despite the child's pathetic struggles—until she drowned. At which point, Miss Wolff raised the alarm. This is what happened. This is what was proved. And it is for this that Mr. Justice Wilkes handed down the sentence required by law.”

“She'll serve twenty years, Dad.” Yes. Yes. That's what he says to Granddad when my father comes into the room where we are waiting for word: Granddad, Gran, and I. I remember. We are in the drawing room, lined up on the sofa, myself in the middle. And yes, my mother is there as well, and she's crying. As she always is, it seems to me, not just after Sonia's death but after Sonia's birth as well.

Birth is supposed to be a joyful time, but Sonia's birth could not have been. I finally realised that as I flipped the first news cutting over and looked at the second one—a continuation of the front-page story—that lay beneath it. For there I discovered a photograph of the victim, and to my shame I saw what I had forgotten or deliberately erased from my mind for more than two decades about my younger sister.

What I'd forgotten was the first thing that Libby noticed and mentioned when she rejoined me with a second chair, towing it along behind her as she came into the news library again. Of course, she didn't know it was my sister's picture since I hadn't told her why we'd come to the Press Association office in the first place. She'd heard me ask for cuttings on the Katja Wolff trial, but that was the extent of it.

Libby scooted herself to the table, half-turned towards me, and she reached for the picture, saying, “What've you got?” And then when she saw, she said, “Oh. She's Down's Syndrome, right? Who is she?”

“My sister.”

“Really? But you've never said …” She looked from the picture to me. She went on carefully, either choosing her words or choosing how far she wished to go with their implications, “Were you, like … ashamed of her or something? I mean … Gosh. It's no big deal. Down's Syndrome, I mean.”

“Or something,” I said. “I was or something. Something contemptible. Something bad.”

“What, then?”

“I couldn't remember her. Or any of this.” I gestured to the files. “I couldn't remember any of this. I was eight years old, someone drowned my sister—”