A Traitor to Memory

I did what you suggested, Dr. Rose, and I've nothing to report apart from the fact that I felt a real fool. Perhaps the experiment would have turned out differently had I cooperated and done it in your office as you asked, but I couldn't get my mind round what you were talking about, and it seemed absurd. More absurd, even, than spending hours at this notebook when I could be practising my instrument as I used to. As I want to.

But I still haven't touched it.

Why?

Don't ask the obvious, Dr. Rose. It's gone. Can't you see that and what it means? The music is gone.

Dad was here this morning. He's only just left. He came round to see if I'd improved at all—for that you can read Have I tried to play again?—although he was good enough not to ask the question directly. But then, he didn't actually need to ask it since the Guarneri was in the position he'd left it when he brought me home from Wigmore Hall. I haven't even had the nerve to touch the case.

Why? you ask.

You know the answer. Because at the moment I lack the courage: If I can't play, if the gift, the ear, the talent, the genius, or whatever else you wish to call it is moribund or gone from me entirely, how do I exist? Not how do I go on, Dr. Rose, but how do I exist? How do I exist when the sum and substance of who I am and who I have been for the last twenty-five years is contained in and defined by my music?

Then let's look at the music itself, you say. If each person in your life is indeed associated in some way with your music, perhaps we need to examine your music much more carefully for the key to unlock what's troubling you.

I laugh and say, Did you intend that pun?

And you gaze at me with those penetrating eyes. You refuse to engage in levity. You say, So that final Bartók you were writing about, the solo sonata … Is that what you associate with Libby?

Yes, I associate the sonata with Libby. But Libby's nothing to do with my present problem. I assure you of that.

My father found this notebook, by the way. When he came round to check on me, he found it on the window seat. And before you ask, he wasn't nosy-parkering. My dad might be an insufferably single-minded bastard, but he isn't a spy. He's merely given the last twenty-five years of his life to supporting his only child's career, and he'd like to see that career stay afloat and not go swimming down the toilet.

His only child not for long, though. I'd forgotten all about that in these last few weeks. There's Jill to consider. I can't imagine having a new brother or sister at my age, let alone a stepmother less than ten years my senior. But these are the days of elastic families, and the course of wisdom suggests that one stretch with the changing definitions of spouse, not to mention of father, mother, and sibling.

But yes, I think it a little odd, this bit about my father and his production of a new family. It's not that I expected him to remain a divorced single man forever. It's just that after nearly twenty years in which he never to my knowledge even had a date with a woman—let alone a relationship whose depth might suggest the sort of physical intimacy that produces children—it's all come as something of a shock to me.

I'd met Jill at the BBC when I was previewing a rough cut of that documentary they filmed at the East London Conservatory. This was several years ago, just before she produced that outstanding adaptation of Desperate Remedies—Did you see it, by the way? She's quite a Thomas Hardy buff—and she was working in their documentary division then, if that's what it's called. Dad must have met her as well at that time, but I don't recall ever seeing them together and I can't say at what point they became each other's partner. I do recall being invited round to Dad's flat for a meal and finding her there in the kitchen, stirring away at something on the cooker, and while I was surprised to see her, I simply assumed she was there because she'd brought along a final copy of the documentary for us to preview. I suppose that might have been the start of their relationship. Dad became slightly less available to me after that evening, now I come to think about it. So perhaps everything began that night. But as Jill and Dad have never lived together—although Dad says that's being arranged for shortly after the baby's birth—I really had no reason to conclude there was anything at all between them.

And now that you know? you ask me. How do you feel? And when did you learn about them and the baby? And where?

I see the direction you're taking. But I have to tell you it's something of a non-starter.

I learned about my father's situation with Jill some months ago, not on the day of the concert at Wigmore Hall, not even during the week or the month of the concert, in fact. And there was no blue door anywhere in sight when I was given the news about my future half sibling. You see, I knew where you were heading, didn't I?

But how did you feel? you persist in asking. A second family for your father after all these years—





Not a second family, I hasten to tell you. A third.