A Traitor to Memory (80 page)

“But you didn't.”

“Having reported to one parent, I didn't think it would be necessary to report it to the other. And your mother was more often in the house, Gideon. Your father was rarely about, as he had more than one job, as you may recall. Have a biscuit. Do you still have a fondness for sweets? How funny. I've just recalled that Katja had a real passion for them. For chocolates, especially. Well, I suppose that comes of growing up in an eastern bloc country as well. Deprivation.”

“Had she any other passions?”

“Any other …?” Sarah-Jane looked perplexed.

“I know she was pregnant, and I've remembered seeing her in the garden with a man. I couldn't see him clearly, but I could tell what they were doing. Raphael says it was James Pitchford, the lodger.”

“I
hardly
think that!” Sarah-Jane protested. “James and Katja? Heavens!” Then she laughed. “James Pitchford wasn't involved with
Katja
. What would make you think that? He helped her with her English, it's true, but apart from that … Well, James always had something of an air of indifference towards women, Gideon. One was forced to wonder about his … if I might say it … his sexual orientation at the end of the day. No, no. Katja wouldn't have been involved with James Pitchford.” She took up another ginger biscuit. She said, “One naturally tends to
think
that when a group of adults live under one roof and when one of the
female
adults becomes pregnant, another of the co-inhabitants must be the father. I suppose it's logical, but in this case …? It wasn't James. It couldn't have been your grandfather. And who else is there? Well, Raphael, of course. He could have been the pot calling the kettle when he named James Pitchford.”

“What about my father?”

She looked disconcerted. “You can't possibly think your
father
and Katja—certainly you would have recognised your own father had he been the man you saw with her, Gideon. And even if you hadn't recognised him for some reason, he was utterly devoted to your mother.”

“But the fact that they separated within two years after Sonia died …”

“That had to do with the death itself, with your mother's inability to cope afterwards. She went into a very black period after your sister was murdered—well, what mother wouldn't?—and she never pulled herself out of it. No. You mustn't think ill of your father on any account. I won't hear of that.”

“But when she wouldn't name the father of her child … when she wouldn't talk at all about anything to do with my sister—”

“Gideon, listen to me.” Sarah-Jane set down her coffee, placing the remainder of her biscuit on the saucer's edge. “Your father might have admired Katja Wolff's physical beauty, as all men did. He might have spent the odd hour now and again alone with her. He might have chuckled fondly at her mistakes in English, and he might have bought her a gift at Christmas and two on her birthday … But
none
of that means he was her lover. You must drive that idea straight from your mind.”

“Yet not to talk to anyone … I know Katja never said a word about anything, and that doesn't make sense.”

“To us, no. It doesn't,” Sarah-Jane agreed. “But you must remember that Katja was headstrong. I've little doubt that she'd got it into her mind that she could say nothing and all would be well. To her way of thinking—and coming from a communist country where criminal science isn't what it is in England, how could she think otherwise?—what evidence had they that couldn't be argued away? She could claim to have been called to the telephone briefly—although why she would claim something that could be so easily disproved is
far
beyond me—with a tragic accident being the result. How was she to know what else would become public that, taken in conjunction with Sonia's death, would serve to prove her guilt?”

“What else did become public? Beyond the pregnancy and the lie about the phone call and the row she'd had with my parents. What else?”

“Aside from the other, healed injuries to your sister? Well, there was her character, for one thing. Her callous disregard for her own family in East Germany. What happened to them as a result of her escape. Someone did some digging round in Germany after her arrest. It was in the papers. Don't you recall?” She took up her cup again and poured herself more coffee. She didn't notice that I had not yet touched mine. “But no. You wouldn't have done, would you? Every effort was made never to talk about the case in front of you, and I doubt you saw the papers, so how would you remember—or even know in the first place—that her family had been tracked down—God knows how although the East Germans were probably happy to offer the information as a caveat for anyone who might think of escaping …”

“What happened to them?” I pressed.

“Her parents lost their jobs, and her siblings in university lost their places. And had Katja shed a single tear about any of her family while she was in Kensington Square? Had she tried to contact them or help them? No. She never even
mentioned
them. They might not have existed for her.”

“Did she have friends, then?”

“Hmmm. There was that fat girl who always had her mind in the gutter. I remember her last name—Waddington—because it reminded me of
waddle
, which is how she walked.”

“Was that a girl called Katie?”

“Yes. Yes, that was it. Katie Waddington. Katja knew her from the convent, and when she moved in with your parents, this Waddington—Katie—hung about quite regularly. Usually eating something—well, just consider her
size
—and always going on about Freud. And sex. She was
obsessed
with sex. With Freud and sex. With sex and Freud. The significance of orgasm, the resolution of the Oedipal drama, the gratification of childhood's unfulfilled and forbidden wishes, the rôle of sex as a catalyst for change, the sexual enslavement of women by men and men by women …” Sarah-Jane leaned forward and took up the coffee pot, smiling at me and saying, “Another? Oh, but you haven't touched a drop yet, have you? Here, then. Let me pour you a fresh one.”

And before I could reply, she snatched up my coffee cup and disappeared into the kitchen, leaving me with my thoughts: about celebrity and the abrupt loss of it, about the destruction of immediate family, about the possession of dreams and the crucial ability to delay the immediate fulfilment of those dreams, about physical beauty and the lack thereof, about lying out of malice and telling the truth for the very same reason.

When Sarah-Jane came into the room, I had my question ready. “What happened the night my sister died? I remember this: I remember the emergency people arriving, the paramedics or whoever they were. I remember us—you and me—in my bedroom while they were working on Sonia. I remember people crying. I think I remember Katja's voice. But that's all. What actually happened?”

“Surely your father can give you a far better answer to that than I. You've asked him, I take it?”

“It's rough for him to talk about that time.”

“Naturally, it would be … But as for me …” She fingered her pearls. “Sugar? Milk? You must try my coffee.” And when I obliged her by raising the bitter brew to my mouth, she said, “I can't add much, I'm afraid. I was in my room when it happened. I'd been preparing your lessons for the following day and I'd just popped into James's room to ask him to help me devise a scheme that would get you interested in weights and measures. Since he was a man—well, is a man, assuming he's still alive, and there's certainly no reason to assume otherwise, is there?—I thought he'd be able to suggest some activity that would intrigue a little boy who was”—and here she winked at me—“not always cooperative when it came to learning something he thought was unrelated to his music. So James and I were going over some ideas, when we heard the commotion downstairs: shouting and pounding feet and doors slamming. We went running down and saw everyone in the corridor—”

“Everyone?”

“Yes. Everyone. Your mother, your father, Katja, Raphael Robson, your grandmother …”

“What about Granddad?”

“I don't … Well, he must have been there. Unless, of course, he was … well, out in the country for one of his rests? No, no, he must have been there, Gideon. Because there was such shouting going on, and I remember your grandfather as something of a shouter. At any rate, I was told to take you into your bedroom and stay with you there, so that's what I did. When the emergency services arrived, they told everyone else to get out of their way. Only your parents stayed. And we could still hear them from your room, you and I.”

“I don't remember any of it,” I said. “Just the part in my room.”

“That's just as well, Gideon. You were a little boy. Seven? Eight?”

“Eight.”

“Well, how many of us have explicit, full memories even of
good
times from when we were children? And this was a terrible, shocking time. I dare say, forgetting it was a blessing, dear.”

“You said you wouldn't leave. I remember that.”

“Of
course
I wouldn't have left you alone in the middle of what was going on!”

“No. I mean, you said that you wouldn't be leaving as my teacher. Dad told me he'd sacked you.”

She coloured at that, a deep crimson that was the child of her red hair, hair that was dyed to its original hue now that she was approaching fifty. “There
was
a shortage of money, Gideon.” Her voice was fainter than it had been.

“Right. Sorry. I know. I didn't mean to imply … Obviously, he wouldn't have kept you on till I was sixteen if you'd been anything less than extraordinary as my teacher.”

“Thank you.” Her reply was formal in the extreme. Either she had been wounded by my words or she wanted me to think so. And believe me, Dr. Rose, I could see how my believing I'd wounded her could serve to direct the course of the conversation. But I chose to eschew that direction, saying, “What were you doing before you asked James for his advice on the weights-and-measures activity?”

“That evening? As I said, I was planning your lessons for the following day.”

She didn't add the rest, but her face told me she knew I'd appended the information myself: She had been alone in her room before she asked James to help her.

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