A Traitor to Memory

She went to work. She'd been a constant presence for my first four years, but once it became clear that she had a child of exceptional talent that needed fostering, which was going to be not only time-consuming but hideously expensive, she took a job to help out with the costs. I was given into the care of my grandmother—when I was not practising my instrument, having lessons with Raphael, listening to the recordings he brought for me, or attending concerts in his company—but my life had altered so appreciably from what it had been before that day I first heard the music in Kensington Square, I hardly noticed her absence. Prior to that, however, I do remember accompanying her—it seemed like every day—to early morning Mass.

She'd struck up a friendship with a nun at the convent in the square, and between them they'd arranged that my mother could attend the daily Mass that was said for the sisters. She was a convert to Catholicism, my mother. But as her own father was an Anglican minister, I wonder now how much her conversion had to do with devotion to a different dogma and how much it had to do with slapping her father in the face. He wasn't, as I was given to understand it, a very nice fellow. Other than that, I don't recall him.

This is not the case for my mother, but she's a shadowy figure for me because she left us. When I was nine or ten—I can't remember which—I arrived home from a concert tour of Austria to find that my mother had quit Kensington Square, leaving not a trace of herself behind. She took every article of clothing she possessed, each one of her books, and a number of family photographs. And off she went, like a figurative thief in the night. Except it was the day, I've been told. And she called a taxi. She left no note and no forwarding address, and I never heard from her again.

My father had been with me in Austria—Dad always traveled with me, and Raphael often accompanied us as well—so he was as much in the dark about where Mother had gone and why she had gone as I myself was. All I know is that we came home to find Granddad having an episode, Gran weeping on the stairs, and Calvin the Lodger trying to find the appropriate phone number with no one to help him.

Calvin the Lodger? you ask me. The earlier lodger—James, is that right?—he was gone?

Yes. He must have left the year before. Or the year before that. I don't remember. We had a number of lodgers over time. We had to, in order to make ends meet, as I've already noted.

Do you remember them all? you want to know.

I don't. Just those who figure large, I suppose. Calvin because he was there that night when I first learned my mother had gone. James because he was present when everything began.

Everything? you ask.

Yes. The violin. The lessons. Miss Orr. Everything.

26 August

I associate everyone with music. When I think of Rosemary Orr, I think of Brahms, the concerto that was playing the first time I met her. When I think of Raphael, it's the Mendelssohn. Dad is Bach, the solo violin sonata in G minor. And Granddad will always be Paganini. The twenty-fourth caprice was his favourite. “All those notes,” he would marvel. “All those perfect notes.”





And your mother? you ask me. What about her? Which piece of music do you associate with your mother?

Interestingly, I can't attach an actual piece of music to Mother the way I can with the others. I'm not sure why. A form of denial, perhaps? Repression of emotion? I don't know. You're the psychiatrist. Explain it to me.

I still do this with music, by the way. I still associate a person with a piece. Sherrill, for example, is Bartók's Rhapsody, which is what he and I initially played together in public, years ago, at St. Martin's in the Fields. We've never played it since and we were teenagers then—the American and the English wunderkind together made excellent press, believe me—but he'll always be Bartók when I think of him. That's just how it works in my mind.

And it's the same for people who aren't musical in the least. Take Libby, for instance. Have I told you about Libby? She's Libby the Lodger. Yes, like James and Calvin and all the others except she's of the present, not of the past, and she lives in the lower ground floor flat of my house in Chalcot Square.

I hadn't thought of letting it till she turned up at my door one day, ferrying a recording contract that my agent had decided had to be signed at once. She works for a courier service, and I didn't know she was a girl till she handed me the paperwork, took off her helmet, and said with a nod at the contracts, “Don't be bugged by this, okay? I just gotta ask. You a rock musician or something?” in that excessively casual and friendly fashion that seems to plague the native Californian.

I replied, “No. I'm a concert violinist.”


She said, “No way!”


I said, “Way.”