A Traitor to Memory (3 page)

Nothing
important
to me. All right. I'll say it. I remember nothing that I count as important. Is that what you want to hear? And shall you and I dwell on what nasty little detail about my character I reveal with that declaration?

Instead of answering those two questions, however, you tell me that we'll begin by writing what we do remember—whether it's important or not. But when you say
we
, you really mean
I'll
begin by writing and what I'll write is what
I
remember. Because as you so succinctly put it in your objective, untouchable psychiatrist's voice, “What we remember can often be the key to what we've chosen to forget.”

Chosen.
I expect that was a deliberate selection of words. You wanted to get a reaction from me. I'll show her, I'm supposed to think. I'll just show the little termagant how much I can remember.

How old are you, anyway, Dr. Rose? You say thirty, but I don't believe that. You're not even my age, I suspect, and what's worse you look like a twelve-year-old. How am I supposed to have confidence in you? Do you honestly think you're going to be an adequate substitute for your father? It was he I agreed to see, by the way. Did I mention that when we first met? I doubt it. I felt too sorry for you. The only reason I decided to stay, by the way, when I walked into the office and saw you instead of him is that you looked so pathetic sitting there, dressed all in black as if that could make you look like someone competent to handle people's mental crises.

Mental? you ask me, leaping onto the word as if it were a runaway train. So you've decided to accept the conclusion of the neurologist? Are you satisfied with that? You don't need any further tests in order to be convinced? That's very good, Gideon. That's a fine step forward. It will make our work together easier if you've been persuaded that there's no physiological explanation for what you're experiencing.

How well spoken you are, Dr. Rose. A voice like velvet. What I should have done was turn straight round and come back home as soon as you opened your mouth. But I didn't because you manoeuvred me into staying, didn't you, with that “I wear black because my husband died” nonsense. You wanted to evoke my sympathy, didn't you? Forge a bond with the patient, you've been told. Win his trust. Make him
suggestible
.

Where's Dr. Rose? I ask you as I enter the office.

You say, I'm Dr. Rose. Dr. Alison Rose. Perhaps you were expecting my father? He had a stroke eight months ago. He's recovering now, but it's going to take some time, so he's not able to see patients just now. I've taken over his practise.

And away you go, chatting about how it came about that you returned to London, about how you miss Boston, but that's all right because the memories were too painful there. Because of him, because of your husband, you tell me. You even go so far as to give me his name: Tim Freeman. And his disease: colon cancer. And how old he was when he died: thirty-seven. And how you'd put off having children because you'd been in medical school when you first got married and when it finally came time to think of reproducing, he was fighting for his life and you were fighting for his life as well and there was no room for a child in that battle.

And I, Dr. Rose, felt sorry for you. So I stayed. And as a result of that staying, I'm now sitting at the first-floor window overlooking Chalcot Square. I'm writing this rubbish with a biro so that I can't erase anything, per your instructions. I'm using a loose-leaf notebook so that I can add where necessary if something miraculously comes to me later. And what I'm not doing is what I ought to be doing and what the whole world expects me to be doing: standing side by side with Raphael Robson, making that infernal ubiquitous nothing between the notes disappear.

Raphael Robson? I can hear you query. Tell me about Raphael Robson, you say.

I had milk in my coffee this morning, and I'm paying for it now, Dr. Rose. My stomach's on fire. The flames are licking downwards through my gut. Fire moves up, but not inside me. It happens the opposite, and it always feels the same. Common distension of the stomach and the bowels, my GP tells me. Flatus, he intones, as if he's offering me a medical benediction. Charlatan, quack, and fourth-rate saw-bones. I've got something malignant devouring my intestines and he calls it wind.

Tell me about Raphael Robson, you repeat.

Why? I ask. Why Raphael?

Because he's a place to start. Your mind is giving you the place to start, Gideon. That's how this process is going to work.

But Raphael isn't the beginning, I inform you. The beginning is twenty-five years ago, in a Peabody House, in Kensington Square.

17 August

That's where I lived. Not in one of the Peabody Houses, but in my grandparents' house on the south side of the square. The Peabody Houses are long gone now, replaced by two restaurants and a boutique the last time I checked. Still, I remember those houses well and how my father employed them to fabricate the Gideon Legend.

That's how he is, my father, ever prepared to use what comes to hand if it has the potential to get him where he wants to go. He was restless in those days, always full of ideas. I see now that most of his ideas were attempts to allay my grandfather's fears about him, since in Granddad's eyes, Dad's failure to establish himself in the Army presaged his failure at everything else as well. And Dad knew that's what Granddad believed about him, I suppose. After all, Granddad wasn't a man who ever kept his opinions to himself.

He hadn't been well since the war, my grandfather. I supposed that's why we lived with him and Gran. He'd spent two years in Burma as a prisoner of the Japanese, and he'd never recovered from that completely. I suspect that being a prisoner had triggered something inside him that would have remained dormant otherwise. But in any event, all I was ever told about the situation was that Granddad had “episodes” which called for his being carted off for a “nice countryside holiday” every now and again. I can't remember any specific details about these episodes, as my grandfather died when I was ten. But I do remember that they always began with some fierce and frightening banging about, followed by my grandmother weeping, and my grandfather shouting “You're no son of mine” at my father as they took him away.

They? you ask me. Who are they?

The goblin people is what I called them. They looked like anyone else on the street, but their bodies were inhabited by snatchers of the soul. Dad always let them into the house. Gran always met them on the stairs, crying. And they always passed her without a word because all the words they had to say had already been said more than once. They'd been coming for Granddad for years, you see. Long before I was born. Long before I watched from between the stairway balusters, crouched there like a little toad and frightened.

Yes. Before you ask, I do remember that fear. And something else as well. I remember someone drawing me away from the balusters, someone who peeled off my fingers one by one to loosen my grip and lead me away.

Raphael Robson? you're asking me, aren't you? Is this where Raphael Robson appears?

But no. This is years before Raphael Robson. Raphael came after the Peabody House.

So we're back to the Peabody House, you say.

Yes. The House and the Gideon Legend.

19 August

Do I remember the Peabody House? Or have I manufactured the details to fill in an outline that my father gave me? If I couldn't remember what it smelled like inside, I would say that I was merely playing a game by my father's rules to be able to conjure the Peabody House out of my brain at a time like this. But because the scent of bleach can still transport me back to the Peabody House in an instant, I know the foundation of the tale is true, no matter how much of it has been embroidered upon over the years by my father, my publicist, and the journalists who've spoken to them both. Frankly, I myself no longer answer questions about the Peabody House. I say, “That's old ground. Let's till some fresh soil this time round.”

But journalists always want a hook for their story and, limited by my father's firm injunction that only my career is open for discussion when I'm interviewed, what better hook could there be than the one my father created out of a simple stroll in the garden of Kensington Square:

I am three years old and in the company of my grandfather. I have with me a tricycle on which I am trundling round the perimeter of the garden while Granddad sits in that Greek-temple affair that serves as a shelter near the wrought iron fence. Granddad has brought a newspaper to read, but he isn't reading. Instead, he's listening to some music coming from one of the buildings behind him.

He says to me in a hushed voice, “It's called a concerto, Gideon. This is Paganini's D major concerto. Listen.” He beckons me to his side. He sits at the very end of the bench and I stand next to him with his arm round my shoulders, and I listen.

And I know in an instant that this is what I want to do. I somehow know as a three-year-old what has never left me since: that to listen is to be but to play is to live.

I insist that we leave the garden at once. Granddad's hands are arthritic and they struggle with the gate. I demand that he hurry “before it's too late.”

“Too late for what?” he asks me fondly.

I grab his hand and show him.

I lead him to the Peabody House, which is where the music is coming from. And then we're inside, where a lino floor has recently been washed and the air stings our eyes with the smell of bleach.

Up on the first floor, we find the source of the Paganini concerto. One of the bed-sitting rooms is the dwelling place of Miss Rosemary Orr, long retired from the London Philharmonic. She is standing in front of a large wall mirror, and she's got a violin under her chin and a bow in her hand. She isn't playing the Paganini, though. Instead, she's listening to a recording of it with her eyes closed and her bow hand lowered and tears coursing down her cheeks and onto the wood of her instrument.

“She's going to wreck it, Granddad,” I inform my grandfather. And this rouses Miss Orr, who starts and no doubt wonders how an arthritic old gentleman and a runny-nosed boy come to be standing at the door to her room.

But there is no time for her to voice any consternation, for I go to her and take the instrument from her hands. And I begin to play.

Not well, of course, for who would believe that an untrained three-year-old no matter his natural talent could possibly pick up a violin and play Paganini's
Concerto in D Major
the first time he's heard it? But the raw materials are there within me—the ear, the inherent balance, the passion—and Miss Orr sees this and insists that she be allowed to instruct the precocious child.

So she becomes my first instructor in the violin. And I remain with her until I am four and a half years old, at which time it is decided that a less conventional manner of instruction is required for my talent.

So that is the Gideon Legend, Dr. Rose. Do you know the violin well enough to see where it lapses into fantasy?

We've managed to promulgate the legend by actually calling it a legend, by laughing it off even as it is told. We say, Stuff and nonsense, all of it. But we say that with a suggestive smile. Miss Orr's long dead, so she can't refute the story. And after Miss Orr there was Raphael Robson, who has limited investments to make in the truth.

But here's the truth for you, Dr. Rose, because despite what you may think concerning my reaction to this exercise in which I've agreed to engage, I am interested in telling you the truth.