A Traitor to Memory (77 page)

“We don't know what's happened. We can only guess. And that's what this amnesia business is. It's a qualified guess.”

“So he's brought you on board. I wouldn't have thought that possible, your past relationship with him considered.”

Raphael kept his gaze on the pathetic koala, a ball of fur unmoving in the embrace of the wood that posed as branches from his native land. “My relationship with your father isn't your concern,” he said steadily, but the pinpoints of perspiration—always his Nemesis—began to sprout on his forehead. Another two minutes and his face would be dripping and he'd be using his handkerchief to mop up the sweat.

“You were in the house the night Sonia drowned,” I said. “Dad told me that. So you've always known everything, haven't you? Everything that happened, what led up to her death, and what followed it.”

“Let's get some tea,” Raphael said.

We went to the restaurant in Barclays Court, although a simple kiosk selling hot and cold drinks would have done as well. He wouldn't say anything until he'd meticulously looked over the mundane menu of grilled everything and ordered a pot of Darjeeling and a toasted tea cake from a middle-aged waitress wearing retro spectacles.

She said, “Got it, luv,” and waited for my order, tapping her pencil against her pad. I ordered the same although I wasn't hungry. She took herself off to fetch it.

It wasn't a mealtime, so there were few people in the restaurant and no one at all near our table. We were next to a window, though, and Raphael directed his attention outside, where a man was struggling to unhook a blanket from the wheels of a push chair while a woman with a toddler in her arms gesticulated and gave him instructions.

I said, “It feels like night in my memory, when Sonia drowned. But if that's the case, what were you doing at the house? Dad told me you were there.”

“It was late afternoon when she drowned, half past five, nearly six. I'd stayed to make some phone calls.”

“Dad said you were probably contacting Juilliard that day.”

“I wanted you to be able to attend once they'd made you the offer, so I was lining up support for the idea. It was inconceivable to me that anyone would think of turning down Juilliard—”

“How had they heard of me? I'd done those few concerts, but I don't remember actually applying to go there. I just remember being invited to attend.”

“I'd written to them. I'd sent them tapes. Reviews. A piece that
Radio Times
did on you. They were interested and invited the application, which I filled out.”

“Did Dad know about this?”

Again, the perspiration speckled his forehead, and this time he used one of the napkins on the table to mop it up. He said, “I wanted to present the invitation as a
fait accompli
because I thought that if I had the invitation in hand, your father would agree to your attending.”

“But there wasn't the money, was there?” I concluded grimly. And just for a moment, oddly enough, I felt it again, that searing disappointment bordering on fury to know as an eight-year-old that Juilliard was not and would never be available to me because of money, because in our lives there
never
was nearly enough money to live.

Raphael's next words surprised me, then. “Money was never the issue. We would have come up with it eventually. I was always certain of that. And they'd offered a scholarship for your tuition. But your father wouldn't hear of your going. He didn't want to separate the family. I assumed his main concern was leaving his parents, and I offered to take you to New York on my own, allowing everyone else to remain here in London, but he wouldn't accept that solution either.”

“So it wasn't financial? Because I'd thought—”

“No. Ultimately, it wasn't financial.”

I must have looked either confused or betrayed by this information, because Raphael continued, saying quickly, “Your father believed you didn't need Juilliard, Gideon. It's a compliment to us both, I suppose. He thought you could get the instruction you needed right here in London, and he believed you'd succeed without a move to New York. And time proved him right. Look where you are today.”

“Yes. Just look,” I said ironically, as Raphael fell into the same trap that I'd fallen into myself, Dr. Rose.

Look where I am today, huddled pathetically into the window seat in my music room where the last thing made in the room is the music that defines my life. I'm scribbling random thoughts in an effort that I don't quite believe in, trying to recall details that my subconscious has judged as better forgotten. And now I'm discovering that even some of the details that I
do
dredge up out of my memory—like the invitation to Juilliard and what prevented me from accepting it—are not accurate. If
that's
the case, what can I rely on, Dr. Rose?

You'll know, you answer quietly.

But I ask how you can be so sure. The facts of my past seem more and more like moving targets to me, and they're scurrying past a background of faces that I haven't seen in years. So
are
they actual facts, Dr. Rose, or are they merely what I wish the facts to be?

I said to Raphael, “Tell me what happened when Sonia drowned. That night. That afternoon. What happened? Getting Dad to talk about it …” I shook my head. The waitress returned with our tea and tea cakes spread across a plastic tray that, in keeping with the overall theme of the zoo, was painted to look like something else, in this case wood. She arranged cups, saucers, plates, and pots to her liking, and I waited till she was gone before I went on. “Dad won't say much. If I want to talk about music, the violin, that's fine. That looks like progress. If I want to go in another direction … He'll go, but it's hell for him. I can see that much.”

“It was hell for everyone.”

“Katja Wolff included?”

“Her hell came afterwards, I dare say. She couldn't have been anticipating the judge recommending she serve twenty years before parole.”

“Is that why at the trial … I read that she jumped up and tried to make a statement once he'd passed sentence.”

“Did she?” he asked. “I didn't know. I wasn't there on the day of the verdict. I'd had enough at that point.”

“You went with her to the police station, though. In the beginning. There was that picture of the two of you coming out.”

“I expect that was coincidence. The police had everyone down for questioning at one time or another. Most of us more than once.”

“Sarah-Jane Beckett as well?”

“I expect so. Why?”

“I need to see her.”

Raphael had buttered his tea cake and raised it to his mouth, but he didn't take a bite. Instead, he watched me over the top of it. “What's that going to accomplish, Gideon?”

“It's just the direction I think I should go. And that's what Dr. Rose suggested, following my instincts, looking for connections, trying to find anything that will jar loose memories.”

“Your father's not going to be pleased.”

“So take your telephone off the hook.”

Raphael took a substantial bite of the tea cake, no doubt covering his chagrin at having been found out. But what else would he expect me to assume other than that he and Dad are having daily conversations about my progress or lack thereof? They are, after all, the two people most involved with what has happened to me, and aside from Libby and you, Dr. Rose, they are the only two who know the extent of my troubles.

“What do you expect to gain from seeing Sarah-Jane Beckett, assuming you can even find her?”

“She's in Cheltenham,” I told him. “She's been there for years. I get a card from her on my birthday and at Christmas. Don't you?”

“All right. She's in Cheltenham,” he said, ignoring my question. “How can she help?”

“I don't know. Maybe she can tell me why Katja Wolff wouldn't talk about what happened.”

“She had a right to silence, Gideon.” He placed his tea cake on his plate and took up his cup, which he held in both hands as if warming them.

“In court, right. With the police, right. She didn't have to talk. But with her solicitor? With her barrister? Why not talk to them?”

“She wasn't fluent in English. Someone might have explained her right to silence and she could have misunderstood.”

“And that brings up something else I don't understand,” I told him. “If she was foreign, why did she serve her time in England? Why wasn't she sent back to Germany?”

“She fought repatriation through the courts, and she won.”

“How do you know?”

“How could I help knowing? It was in all the newspapers at the time. She was like Myra Hindley: Every legal move she made from behind bars was scrutinised by the media. It was a nasty case, Gideon. It was a brutal case. It destroyed your parents, it killed both your grandparents within three years, and it damn well might have ruined you had not every effort in the world been made to keep you out of it. So to dig it all up now … all these years afterwards …” He set down his cup and added more tea to it. He said, “You aren't touching your food.”

“I'm not hungry.”

“When did you last have a meal? You look like hell. Eat the tea cake. Or at least drink the tea.”

“Raphael, what if Katja Wolff didn't drown Sonia?”

He put the tea pot back on the table. He took the sugar and added a packet to his cup, following this with the milk. It came to me then that he did it all in reverse of the usual order.

He said once the pouring and sugaring was done, “It hardly makes sense that she'd keep quiet if she hadn't killed Sonia, Gideon.”

“Perhaps she suspected that the police would twist her words. Or the Crown Prosecutors, should she have stood in the witness box.”

“They might have done, all of them, yes. Indeed. But her solicitor and her barrister would have been unlikely to twist her words should she have seen fit to give them any.”

“Did my father make her pregnant?”

He'd lifted his cup, but he set it back on its saucer. He looked out of the window, where the couple with the push chair had now unloaded it of a bag, two baby bottles, and a pack of disposable nappies. They'd turned the chair on its side and the man was attacking the wheel with the heel of his shoe. Raphael said quietly, “That has nothing to do with the problem,” and I knew he was not speaking about the blanket that continued to make the push chair impossible to roll forward.

“How can you say that? How can you know? Did he make her pregnant? And is that what destroyed my parents' marriage?”

“Only the people within a marriage can say what destroyed it.”

“All right. Accepted. And as to the rest? Did he make Katja pregnant?”

“What does he say? Have you asked him?”