A Traitor to Memory

And Mother says his name. She says it in the same way Gran says Jack when she's hoping to forestall an episode.

Dad tells me to go to my room, and the policeman says that he's only prolonging the inevitable. I don't know what that means, but I do as I'm told—as I always do when Dad is the one giving the or-ders—and I leave the room. I hear the inspector say, “This only makes the situation more frightening for the lad,” and I hear Dad say, “Now, you listen to me—” as Mother says, “Please, Richard,” in a voice that breaks.

Mother weeping. I should be used to this by now. Wearing grey or black, grey of face as well, she has wept for more than two years, it seems. But weeping or otherwise, she isn't able to alter the circumstances of that day.

From the mezzanine, I see the policeman leave. I see Mother show him to the door. I see him speak to her bent head, watch her intently , reach out to her then withdraw his hand. Then Dad calls out Mother's name and she turns. She doesn't see me as she goes back to him. Dad shouts at her behind the closed door.

Then hands are on my shoulders and I'm pulled back from the railing. I look up to see Sarah-Jane Beckett standing over me. She crouches down. She puts her arm round my shoulders just as my mother did, but neither her arm nor her body is shaking. We stay just like that for several minutes—and all the while Dad's voice is loud and sharp and Mother's is tentative and afraid. “… No more of this, Eugenie,” Dad says, “I won't have it. Do you hear me?”





I sense more than anger in those words. I sense violence, Granddad's kind of violence, violence that is forged on the wheel of a mind collapsing. I am afraid.

I look up at Sarah-Jane, seeking … what? Protection? Affirmation of what I'm hearing below? Distraction? Any of it, all of it. But she is rapt by the drawing room door, and her gaze is fixed to its dark panels. She watches that door, unblinking, and her fingers tighten on my shoulder, taking me to the threshold of pain. I whimper and glance down at her hand and see that her fingernails are bitten and torn, with angry hangnails that are chewed and bleeding. But her face is glowing and her breathing is deep and she doesn't move till the conversation below us ceases and footsteps fire against the parquet floor. Then she takes my hand and pulls me along in her wake, up the stairs to the second floor, past the door of the nursery—closed now—and back to my room where the school books have been re-opened to the Amazon River that crawls like a poisonous serpent across a continent.

What's happening between your parents? you ask me.

And the answer seems obvious to me now. Blame.

11 October





Sonia's dead and there must be a reckoning. This reckoning must be made not only in a courtroom of the Old Bailey, not only in the courtroom of public opinion, but also in the courtroom of the family itself. For someone must take the burden of responsibility for Sonia: first for her birth—imperfect as she was—then for the scores of medical problems that plagued her short life, and last for her violent and premature death. I know this now, although I could not have known it then: There is no surviving what occurred in that bathroom in Kensington Square if blame cannot be assigned somewhere.

Dad comes to me. Sarah-Jane and I have finished our lesson, and she's left with James the Lodger. I've watched them from my window as they cross the flagstones at the front of the house and go out through the gate. Sarah-Jane has stepped back to let James the Lodger hold the gate open for her, and she's waited for him on the other side and taken his arm. She's leaned into him that way women do, so that he might feel her nearly non-existent breasts press against his arm. But if he's felt them, he's given no sign. Instead, he's started walking in the direction of the pub, and she's taken care to match her steps to his.

I've put on a piece of music assigned by Raphael. I'm listening to it when my father joins me. I'm trying to feel the notes as well as to hear them, because only if I feel the notes will I be able to find them on my instrument.

Dad searches me out where I sit on the floor in a corner of the room. He squats in front of me and the music swirls round us. We live in the music till the movement is over. Dad turns off the stereo. He says, “Come here, son,” and he sits on the bed. I go to him and stand before him.

He studies me, and I want to wriggle away, but I don't. He says, “You live for the music, don't you?” and he smooths his hand through my hair. “You concentrate on the music, Gideon. Just on the music and nothing else.”





I can smell the scent of him: lemons and starch, so completely unlike the scent of cigars. I say, “He asked me how Sosy died.”





Dad draws me to him. He says, “She's gone now. No one can harm you.”