A Traitor to Memory

I said in the dream, Sosy's here. She's right here. But no one on the shore would listen. Instead, they began to swim towards the boat, and I couldn't stop them no matter how I shouted. I picked the baby up from the basket to show them I was telling the truth. I cried out, She's here! Look! Sosy's right here! Come back! There's no one in the boat! But they kept swimming, one by one entering the water in a single line, and one by one disappearing beneath the surface of the lake.

I was desperate to stop them. I thought that if they could see her face, if I could hold her high enough above my shoulders, they would believe me and come back. So I tore at the veil round my sister's face. But I found another veil beneath it, Dr. Rose. And under that another. And under that another. I tore at them till I was weeping and frantic and no one was left on the shore but me. Even Sonia was gone. Then I turned to the picnic basket again to find it filled not with food but with dozens of kites that I kept pulling out and tossing to one side. And as I pulled them out, I felt a desperation like nothing I've ever felt before. Desperation and tremendous fear because everyone was gone and I was alone.

So what did you do, you ask me gently.

I did nothing. Libby woke me. I found I was drenched in sweat, my heart was pounding, and I was actually weeping.

Weeping, Dr. Rose. My God, I was weeping over a dream.

I said to Libby, “There was nothing in the basket. I couldn't make them stop. I had her but they couldn't see I had her, so they went into the lake and didn't come out.”





She said, “You were only dreaming. Here. Come here. Let me hold you, okay?”





And yes, Dr. Rose, she had spent the night the way she often spends the night. She cooks a meal or I cook a meal, we do the washing up, and we watch the television. That's what I have been reduced to: the television. If Libby notices that we no longer listen to Perlman, Rubinstein, and Menuhin—especially Yehudi, magnificent Yehudi, child of the instrument as I myself was—she does not mention it. Indeed, she's probably grateful for the television. She is, at heart, so much an American.

When we run out of programmes to watch, we drift into sleep. We sleep in the same bed and on the same bedclothes that haven't been changed for weeks. But they are not soiled with the mixture of our fluids. No. We have not managed that.

Libby held me while my heart hammered like a miner hewing coal. Her right hand fondled the back of my head while her left hand caressed the length of my spine. From my spine, she worked her way down to my bum till we were pelvis to pelvis with only the thin flannel of my pyjamas and the cotton of her knickers between us. She whispered, “It's nothing, it's all right, you're fine,” and despite those words which might have been succour under other circumstances, I knew what was supposed to happen next. Blood would rush to my cock, and I would feel the pulse of it. The pulse of it would grow and the organ would ready. I would lift my head to find her mouth or lower my mouth to find her breasts, and I would grind against her, grind against her slowly. I would pin her to the bed beneath us and take her in a silence broken only by our cries of pleasure—like no other pleasure available to men and to women, as you know—when we come. Together, of course. We come together. Anything less than simultaneous orgasm is completely unworthy of my prowess as a male.

Except, of course, that is not what happened. How could it, I being who and what I am?

Which is what? you ask me.

A carapace covering nothing, Dr. Rose. No, less even than that. With my music gone, I am nothing itself.

Libby doesn't understand this because she can't see that who I was until Wigmore Hall was the music I made. I myself was merely an extension of the instrument, and the instrument was merely the manner in which my being took form.

You say nothing at first when you hear this, Dr. Rose. You keep your eyes on me—sometimes I wonder at the discipline it must take to keep your eyes on someone so patently not even in the room with you—and you look thoughtful. But there is something more than consideration in your eyes. Is it pity? Confusion? Doubt? Frustration?

You sit unmoving, in your widow's black. You observe me over the top of your tea cup. What are you crying out in the dream? you say. When Libby wakes you, what are you crying out, Gideon?

Mummy.

But I expect you knew that before you asked.

10 October





I can see my mother now because of the newspapers in the Press Association office. I glimpsed her—on the opposite page to Sonia's picture—before I thrust the tabloid out of my sight. I knew it was my mother because she was on my father's arm, because they were on the front step of the Old Bailey, because above them a headline declared Justice for Sonia! in four-inch type.