A Traitor to Memory

I waited for her to identify the older girls. When she did not, I asked the obligatory question about Anastasia's choice of instrument. Harp, I was told. Suitable, I thought. Sarah-Jane had always possessed an air of the Regency about her, as if she'd somehow been a displaced person from a Jane Austen novel, more fitted for a life of writing letters, doing lacework, and creating inoffensive water colours than for the scramble and dash of existence enjoyed by women today. I couldn't envisage Sarah-Jane Beckett Hamilton jogging through Regent's Park with a mobile phone pressed to her ear any more than I could see her fighting fires, mining coal, or crewing a yacht in the Fastnet Race. So steering her eldest natural daughter towards the harp rather than something like the electric guitar was a logical act of parental guidance on her part, and I had no doubt she'd employed it deftly once the girl had decided she wanted to play an instrument.

“Of course, she's no match for you,” Sarah-Jane said, presenting me with another photograph, this one of Anastasia at her harp, arms raised gracefully so that her hands—stubby, unfortunately, like her mother's—could pluck the strings. “But she does well enough. I hope you'll hear her sometime. When you have the time, naturally.” And she trilled her gay little laugh again. “I do so wish Perry were here to meet you, Gideon. Are you in town for a concert?”





I told her that I wasn't there for a concert but I didn't add the rest. She'd obviously not seen any accounts of the incident in Wigmore Hall, and the less I had to delve into that with Sarah-Jane, the better I would feel about it. Instead, I told her that I was hoping to talk to her about my sister's death and the trial that followed her death.

She said, “Ah. Yes. I see.” And she sat on a plump sofa the colour of newly cut grass and motioned me over to an armchair whose fabric featured a muted autumn hunting scene with dogs and deer.

I waited for the logical questions to come. Why? Why now? Why dig up all that is past, Gideon? But they did not come, which I found curious. Instead, Sarah-Jane composed herself, her legs crossed at the ankles, her hands lying one on top of the other—with the sapphired one on top—and her expression perfectly attentive and not the least guarded, as I'd come to expect.

“What is it you'd like to know?” she asked.

“Anything you can tell me. About Katja Wolff, mainly. About what she was like, what living in the same house with her was like.”





“Yes. Of course.” Sarah-Jane sat quietly, gathering her thoughts. Finally, she began by saying, “Well, it was obvious from the first that she didn't belong in the position as your sister's nanny. It was a mistake for your parents to employ her, but they didn't see that before it was too late.”





“I've been told she was fond of Sonia.”





“Oh, fond of her, yes. It was very easy to be fond of Sonia. She was a fragile little thing and she was fractious—well, what child wouldn't be, in that condition?—but she was terribly sweet and quite precious after all, and who finds it impossible to be fond of a baby? But she had other things on her mind, did Katja, and they got in the way of her devotion to Sonia. And devotion is what's required with children, Gideon. Fondness won't get you through the first bout of willfulness or tears.”





“What sort of things?”





“She wasn't serious about childcare. It was a means to an end for her. She wanted to be a fashion designer—although God only knows why, considering the bizarre ensembles she put together for herself—and she intended to stay in your parents' employ only as long as it took her to save the money she needed for … for wherever it was that she intended to be trained. So there was that.”





“What else?”





“Celebrity.”





“She wanted fame?”





“She had fame already: The Girl Who Made It Over the Berlin Wall As Her Lover Died in Her Arms.”





“In her arms?”





“Hmm. Yes. That's how she told the tale. She had a scrapbook, mind you, of all the interviews she'd done with newspapers and magazines from round the world after that escape, and to hear her tell the story was to be made to believe that she'd designed and inflated the balloon on her own, which I seriously doubt was the case. I always said it was a lucky turn of events that made her the only survivor of that escape. Had the boy lived—and what was his name? Georg? Klaus?—I've little doubt he would have told an entirely different tale about whose idea it was and who did the work. So she came to England with her head enlarged, and it got larger during the year she spent at the Convent of the Immaculate Conception. More interviews, lunch with the Lord Mayor, a private audience at Buckingham Palace. She was ill-prepared psychologically to fade into the woodwork as your sister's nanny. And as for being physically and mentally prepared for what she was going to have to face—not to mention psychologically suited … She wasn't. Not in the least.”





“So she was destined to fail,” I remarked quietly, and I must have sounded contemplative because Sarah-Jane appeared to reach a conclusion about what I was thinking, and she hastened to make an adjustment.

“I don't mean to imply that your parents hired her because she was ill-prepared, Gideon. That wouldn't be an accurate assessment of the situation at all. And it might even go so far as to suggest that … Well, never mind. No.”





“Yet it was obvious right off that she couldn't handle the responsibility?”





“Only if you were looking was it obvious,” she replied. “And certainly, you and I were thrown together with Katja and the baby more than anyone else, so we could see and hear … And we were in the house—the four of us—far more than your parents, both of whom worked. So we saw more. Or at least I did.”