A Traitor to Memory

Ah. I see. You give me no answer. You keep a safe distance in your father's chair and you fix your soulful eyes on me and I'm meant to take this distance between us as the Bosporus waiting for me to swim. Plunge into the waters of veracity, it suggests. As if I'm not telling the truth.

She was there. Of course she was there, my mother. And if I mentioned the Italian girl instead of my mother, it was for the simple reason that the Italian girl—and why can't I remember her blasted name, for God's sake?—figured in the Gideon Legend while my mother did not. And I thought you instructed me to write what I remembered, going back to the earliest memory I could recall. If that's not what you instructed me to do, if instead you wished me to manufacture the salient details of a childhood that is largely fiction but safely and antiseptically regurgitated in such a way that you can identify and label where and what you choose—





Oh yes, I am angry, before you point that out to me. Because I do not see what my mother, an analysis of my mother, or even a superficial conversation about my mother has to do with what happened at Wigmore Hall. And that's why I've come to see you, Dr. Rose. Let's not forget that. I've agreed to this process because there on the stage in Wigmore Hall, in front of an audience paying mightily to benefit the East London Conservatory—which is my own charity, mind you—I mounted the platform, I rested my violin on my shoulder, I picked up my bow, I flexed my left hand's fingers as usual, I nodded to the pianist and the cellist … and I could not play. God in heaven, do you know what that means?

This wasn't stage fright, Dr. Rose. This wasn't a temporary block against a single piece of music, which, by the way, I'd spent the last two weeks rehearsing. This was a total, utter, complete, and humiliating loss of ability. Not only had the music itself been ripped from my brain, but how to play the music—not to mention how to live—was gone as well. I may as well not ever have held a violin, let alone have spent the last twenty-one years of my life performing in public.

Sherrill began the Allegro, and I heard it without the slightest degree of recognition. And where I was supposed to join the piano and the cello: nothing. I knew neither what to do nor when to do it. I was Lot's son incarnate had he and not the man's wife been the one to turn and observe the destruction.

Sherrill covered for me. He feinted. He improvised, God help him, with Beethoven. He worked his way round to my entrance again. And again there was nothing. Just silence like a vacuum, and the silence roared like a hurricane in my head.

So I left the platform. Blindly, body shivering, vision tunneling, I walked. Dad met me in the Green Room, crying, “What? Gideon. For God's sake. What?” with Raphael only a step behind him.

I thrust my instrument into Raphael's hands and collapsed. Babble all round me and my father saying, “It's that bloody girl, isn't it? This is down to her. God damn it. Get a grip, Gideon. You have obligations.”





And Sherrill, who'd left the platform in my wake, asking, “Gid? What happened? Lose your nerve? Shit. It happens sometimes.”





While Raphael set my violin on the table saying, “Oh dear. I was afraid this would happen eventually.” Because like most people he was thinking of himself, of his own countless failures to perform in a public venue like his father and his father before him. Every member of his family has a high-powered career in performance music save poor sweating Raphael, and I expect he's secretly been biding his time, waiting for disaster to befall me, making us official brothers in misery. He was the one who cautioned against climbing aboard the swift acceleration that occurred in my career after my first public concert when I was seven. Evidently, now he thinks the chickens of catastrophe, born of that acceleration, have come home to roost on my shoulders.

But it wasn't nerves that I felt in the Green Room, Dr. Rose. And it wasn't nerves that I felt before, in front of that audience out in the Hall. It was instead some sort of shutdown, which feels irrevocable and complete. And what was odd about it was that despite the fact that I could hear all their voices—my father's, Raphael's, and Sherrill's—quite clearly, all I could see in front of me was white light shining on a blue, blue door.

Am I having an episode, Dr. Rose? Just like Granddad, am I having an episode that a nice calm countryside visit can cure? Please tell me, because music is not what I do, music is who I am and if I don't have it—the sound and the sheer chivalry of sound—I am nothing but an empty husk.

So what does it matter that in recounting my introduction to music, I made no mention of my mother? It was an omission of sound and fury, and you'd be wise to account its significance accordingly.

But to omit her now would be deliberate, you tell me. You say, Tell me about your mother, Gideon.

25 August