A Traitor to Memory

You already know what they are, Dr. Rose.

I suspect, you say, I consider, I speculate, and I wonder, but I do not know. You're the only one who knows, Gideon.

All right. I accept that. And to show you how wholeheartedly I accept that, I'll name them for you: fear of crowds, fear of being trapped in the Underground, fear of excessive speed, complete terror of snakes.

All fairly common fears, you note.

As are fear of failure, fear of my father's disapproval, fear of enclosed spaces—





You raise an eyebrow at that, a momentary lapse in your lack of expression.

Yes, I'm afraid to be enclosed and I see how that relates to relationships, Dr. Rose. I'm afraid of being suffocated by someone, which fear in and of itself indicates a larger fear of being intimate with a woman. With anyone, for that matter. But this is hardly news to me. I've had years to consider how and why and at what point my affair with Beth fell completely apart, and believe me I've had plenty of opportunities to dwell on my lack of response to Libby. So if I know and admit my fears and take them out into the sunlight and shake them like dusters, how can you or Dad or anyone else accuse me of displacing them onto an unhealthy interest in my sister's death, in what led up to my sister's death, in the trial that followed it, and in what happened after that trial?

I'm not accusing you of anything, Gideon, you say, clasping your hands in your lap. Are you, however, accusing yourself?

Of what?

Perhaps you can tell me.

Oh, I see that game. And I know where you want me to head. It's where everyone wants me to head, everyone save Libby, that is. You want me to head to the music, Dr. Rose, to talk about the music, to delve into the music.

Only if that's where you want to go, you say.

And if I don't want to go there?

We might talk about why.

You see? You're trying to trick me. If you can get me to admit …





What? you ask when I hesitate, and your voice is as soft as goose down. Stay within the fear, you tell me. Fear is only a feeling; it is not a fact.

But the fact is that I cannot play. And the fear is of the music.

All music?

Oh, you know the answer to that, Dr. Rose. You know it's fear of one piece in particular. You know how The Archduke haunts my life. And you know that once Beth suggested it as our performance piece, I could not refuse. Because it was Beth who made the suggestion, not Sherrill. Had it been Sherrill, I could have tossed out a “Choose something else,” without a thought, because even though Sherrill has no jinx himself and consequently might have questioned my rejection of The Archduke, the fact is that Sherrill's talent is such that for him to make the shift from one piece to another is so simple that even questioning that shift would have taken more energy than he'd have wished to expend on the matter. But Beth is not like Sherrill, Dr. Rose, either in talent or in laissez-faire. Beth had already prepared The Archduke, so Beth would have questioned. And questioning, she may have connected my failure to play The Archduke with that other more significant failure of mine with which she was once all too familiar. So I didn't ask for a different choice of music. I decided to confront the jinx head-on. And put to the test of that confrontation, I failed.

Before that? you ask.

Before what?

Before the performance at Wigmore Hall. You must have rehearsed.

We did. Of course.

And you played it then?

We would hardly have mounted a public concert of three instruments had one of them—





And you played it without difficulty then? During rehearsal?

I've never played it without difficulty, Dr. Rose. Either in private or in rehearsal, I've never played it without a bout of nerves, of burning in the gut, of pounding in the head, of sickness that makes me cling to the toilet for an hour first, and all that and I'm not even performing it publicly.

So what about the Wigmore night? you ask me. Did you have that same reaction to The Archduke before Wigmore Hall?

And I hesitate.

I see how your eyes spark with interest at my hesitation: evaluating, deciding, choosing whether to press forward now or to wait and let my realisations and admissions come when they will.

Because I did not suffer before that performance.

And I haven't considered that fact before now.

26 October