A Traitor to Memory

Her anxiety rising, she scrabbled her fingers on the floor beneath her. She felt the lever, then the edge of the lever. She felt the seat springs. She felt the track. And then she found it. Something hard and thin and rectangular was blocking the old metal track, wedged in in such a way as to make it virtually immovable.

She frowned. She pulled on the object. She jockeyed it back and forth when it got stuck. She cursed. Her hands became damp with sweat. And finally, finally, she managed to dislodge it. She slid it out, lifted it, and laid it on the broad seat next to her.

It was a photograph, she saw, a picture in a stark monastic wooden frame.

GIDEON





11 November





I ran, Dr. Rose. I bolted for the music room door and crashed down the stairs. I threw open the door. It slammed back against the wall. I flung myself into Chalcot Square. I didn't know where I was going or what I intended to do. But I had to be away: away from my father and away from what he'd inadvertently forced me to face.

I ran blindly, but I saw her face. Not as she might have looked in joy or innocence or even in suffering, but in losing consciousness as I drowned her. I saw her head turn side to side, her baby's hair fan out, her mouth gulp fishlike, her eyes roll back and disappear. She fought to stay alive, but she couldn't match the strength of my rage. I held her down and held her down, and when Katja and Raphael burst into the room, she was no longer moving or struggling against me. But still my rage was not satisfied.

My feet pounded the pavement as I tore along the square. I did not head for Primrose Hill, for Primrose Hill is exposed, and exposure to anything, anyone, any longer, was an unbearable thought to me. So I thundered in another direction, veering round the first corner I came to, charging through the silent neighbourhood till I burst into the upper reaches of Regent's Park Road.

Moments later, I heard him shouting my name. As I stood panting at the junction where Regent's Park and Gloucester Roads meet, he came round the corner, holding his side against a stitch. He raised his arm. He shouted, “Wait!” I ran again.

What I thought as I ran was a simple phrase: He's always known. For I remembered more, and I saw what I remembered as a series of images.

Katja screams and shrieks. Raphael pushes past her to get to me. Shouts and footsteps rise up the stairs and along the corridor. A voice cries out, “God damn it!”





Dad is in the bathroom. He tries to pull me away from the tub, where my fingers have dug and dug and dug into my sister's fragile shoulders. He shouts my name and slaps my face. He yanks me by the hair, and I finally release her.

“Get him out of here!” he roars, and for the first time he sounds just like Granddad and I am frightened.

As Raphael jerks me across the corridor, I hear others on their way. My mother is calling, “Richard? Richard?” as she runs up the stairs. Sarah-Jane Beckett and James the Lodger are talking to each other as they hurry down from above. Somewhere Granddad is bellowing, “Dick! Where's my whisky? Dick!” And Gran is calling out fearfully from below, “Has something happened to Jack?”





Then Sarah-Jane Beckett is with me, saying, “What's happened? What's going on?” She takes me from Raphael's fierce grip saying, “Raphael, what are you doing to him?” and “What on earth is she going on about?” in reference to Katja Wolff, who is weeping and saying, “I do not leave her. For a minute only,” to which comment Raphael Robson is adding nothing at all.

After that I am in my room. I hear Dad cry, “Don't come in here, Eugenie. Dial nine-nine-nine.”





She says, “What's happened? Sosy! What's happened?”





A door shuts. Katja weeps. Raphael says, “Let me take her below.”





Sarah-Jane Beckett goes to stand at the door to my room, where she listens, her head bent, and there she remains. I sit against the headboard of the bed, arms wet to the elbows, shaking now, finally aware of the terrible enormity of what I have done. And all along the music has played, that same music, the cursed Archduke that has haunted and pursued me like a relentless demon for the last twenty years.

That is what I remembered as I ran, and when I crossed the junction, I did not attempt to avoid the traffic. It seemed to me that the only mercy would be if a car or lorry struck me.

None did. I made it to the other side. But Dad was hard on my heels, still shouting my name.

I set off again running, running away from him, running into the past. And I saw that past like a kaleidoscope of pictures: that genial ginger-haired policeman who smelled of cigars and spoke in a kindly paternal voice … that night in bed with my mother holding me holding me holding me and my face pressed firmly into her breasts as if she would do to me what I had done to my sister … my father sitting on the edge of my bed, his hands on my shoulders as my hands were on hers … his voice saying, “You're quite safe, Gideon, no one will harm you” … Raphael with flowers, flowers for my mother, flowers of sympathy to assuage her grief … and always hushed voices, in every room, for days on end …