A Traitor to Memory

“What about my grandparents? Where were they?”





“It's true that your granddad hung about a lot. He rather fancied Katja, so he kept her under his eye. But he wasn't actually altogether there, was he, if you understand my meaning? So he could hardly be prepared to report on anything irregular that he saw.”





“Irregular?”





“Sonia's crying going unattended to. Katja's absences from the house when the baby was having a nap in the middle of the day. Telephone conversations during your sister's mealtimes. A general impatience with the baby when she was difficult. Those sorts of things that are questionable and disturbing while not being out-and-out grossly negligent.”





“Did you tell anyone?”





“Indeed. I told your mother.”





“What about Dad?”





Sarah-Jane gave a little bounce on the sofa. She said, “The coffee! I'd quite forgotten …” And she excused herself and hurried from the room.

What about Dad? The room was so quiet, and the neighbourhood outside was so quiet, that my question seemed to bounce off the walls like an echo in a canyon. What about Dad?

I got up from my chair and went to one of the two display cabinets that stood on either side of the fireplace. I examined its contents: four shelves filled with antique dolls of all shapes and sizes, representing everything from infants to adults, all of them dressed in period clothes, perhaps from the period during which the dolls themselves had been manufactured. I know nothing of dolls, so I had no idea what I was looking at, but I could tell that the collection was impressive: by the numbers, the quality of the dress, and the condition of the toys themselves, which was pristine. Some of them looked as if they'd never actually been handled by a child, and I wondered if Sarah-Jane's own daughters or step-daughters had ever stood before this case or the other, gazing inside wistfully at what they could never themselves possess.

I then noted that the walls of the room displayed a collection of water colours that appeared to have been painted by the same artist. These depicted houses, bridges, castles, automobiles, and even buses, and when I peered at the name penciled into the right corner of two of them, I saw SJBeckett in a sloping script. I stood back and studied them. I hadn't recalled Sarah-Jane doing any painting when she'd been my teacher, and I could see from her work that she had a talent for detailed accuracy if not the confidence merely to let a stroke of paint read as an intended image.

“Ah. You've discovered my secret.” She spoke from the doorway, where she had paused, bearing a large tray on which she'd assembled an ornate silver coffee pot with a matching sugar bowl and cream jug. She'd accompanied this with porcelain coffee cups, spoons, and a plate of ginger biscuits that were, she confided, “Homemade, just this morning.” Unaccountably, I found myself wondering how Libby would react to all this: to the dolls, to the water colours, to the coffee presentation, to Sarah-Jane Beckett Hamilton herself, and most of all to what she had said so far and what she had avoided saying.

“I'm afraid I'm an utter failure with people,” she said. “With animals as well. With anything living, when it comes to that, except trees. I can do trees. Flowers, on the other hand, defeat me entirely.”





For a moment, I wondered what she was talking about. But then I saw that she meant her paintings and I made a suitable remark about the fine quality of her work.

“Flatterer,” she laughed.

On a coffee table, she set down the tray and did the pouring. She said, “I was less than charitable about Katja's manner of dress just now. I do that sometimes. You must forgive me. I spend so much time alone—Perry travels, as I've said, and the girls are at school, of course—that I forget to monitor my tongue on the odd occasion when someone comes to call. What I should have said was that she had no experience with fashion or colour or design, having grown up in East Germany. And what would one actually expect from someone from an eastern bloc country, haute couture? So it was admirable, really, that she even had the ambition to go to college and learn fashion design. It was just unfortunate—it was tragic, really—that she brought both her dreams and her inexperience with children into your parents' home. That was a deadly combination. Sugar? Milk?”





I took the cup from her. I was not about to be sidetracked into a discussion of Katja Wolff 's clothes. I said, “Did Dad know that she was derelict in her duties towards Sonia?”





Sarah-Jane took up her own cup and stirred the coffee although she'd put nothing in it to require stirring. “Your mother would have told him, naturally.”





“But you didn't.”