A Traitor to Memory

“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—”





“Drowned your—”





I clutched her arm to stop the rest. I had no need for the staff of the news library to know who I was. Believe me, my shame was great enough without having my identity attached to it openly.

“Look,” I told Libby tersely. “Look for yourself. And I couldn't remember her, Libby. I couldn't remember the first bloody thing about her.”





“Why?” she asked.

Because I didn't want to.

3 October, 10:30 P.M.

I expect you to leap upon that admission with a warrior's triumph, Dr. Rose, but you say nothing. You merely watch me, and while you have schooled your features to betray nothing, you have little power over the light that comes to your eyes, dark though they might be. I see it there for just an instant—that spark again—and it tells me you wish me to hear what I myself have just said.

I couldn't remember my sister because I didn't want to remember her. That must be the case. We don't want to remember, so we choose to forget. Except isn't the truth that sometimes we simply don't need to remember. And other times we are told to forget.

Here's what I can't understand, though. My grandfather's episodes were the Great Unspoken in Kensington Square, and yet I remember them clearly. I have vivid memories of what led up to them, of the music that my grandmother used in an attempt to forestall them, of their occurrences and the chaos that accompanied them, and of the aftermath in which tears flowed as attendants fetched him for a spell in the country to rid him of them. Yet we never spoke of his episodes. So why do I remember them—and him—but not my sister?

Your grandfather figures larger in your life than your sister, you tell me, because of your music. He plays a leading part in the drama that is your musical history, even if a segment of his r?le takes place within the fiction that is the Gideon Davies Legend. To repress him as you've apparently repressed the memory of Sonia—





Repressed? Why repressed? Are you agreeing that I haven't wanted to have memories of my sister, Dr. Rose?

Repression isn't a conscious choice, you tell me, and your voice is quiet, compassionate, calm. It's associated with an emotional, psychological, or physical state too overwhelming for someone to handle, Gideon. For example, if as children we witness something terrifying or incomprehensible to us—sexual intercourse between our parents is a good illustration—we shove it out of our conscious awareness because at that age we have no tools to deal with what we've seen, to assimilate it in a fashion that makes sense to us. Even as adults, people who suffer horrific accidents generally have no memory of the catastrophe simply because it is horrific. We don't actively make the choice to shove an image from our mind, Gideon. We simply do it. Repression is how we protect ourselves. It's how our mind protects itself from something it isn't yet prepared to face.

Then what—what—can I not face about my sister, Dr. Rose? Although I did remember Sonia, didn't I? When I was writing about Mother, I remembered her. I'd blocked just one detail about her. Until I saw the picture, I didn't know she was Down's.