A Traitor to Memory

His third family? You look at the notes you've been taking during our sessions and you see no reference to an earlier family, before my own birth. But there was one and there was a child from that family, a girl who died in infancy.

She was called Virginia, and I don't know exactly how she died or where or how long after her death my father ended his marriage to her mother or even who her mother was. In fact, the only reason I know about her existence at all—or about my father's earlier marriage—is that Granddad began shouting about it during one of his episodes. It was in the same vein as his “you're no son of mine” curses as he was being taken from the house. Except this time it was along the lines of Dad's not being any son of Granddad's because all he could ever produce was freaks. And I suppose I was given a hasty explanation by someone—Was it Mother who told me or was she gone by then?—since I must have assumed that, in shouting about freaks, Granddad meant me. So Virginia must have died because there was something wrong with her, a congenital condition perhaps. But I don't actually know what it was, because whoever it was who told me about her in the first place didn't know or wouldn't say and because the subject never came up again.

Never came up? you query.

But you know the dance, Doctor. Children don't mention topics that they associate with chaos, tumult, and contention. They learn quite early the consequences of stirring a pot best left alone. And I assume you can make the leap from there yourself: Since the violin was my sole concentration, once I was assured of my grandfather's esteem, I thought no more of the subject.

The subject of the blue door, however, is something else entirely. As I said when I began, I did exactly as you asked me to do and as we tried to do in your office. In my mind I recreated that door: Prussian blue with a silverish ring in its centre serving as a knob; two locks, I think, done in silver like the ring; and perhaps a house number or a flat number above the knob.

I darkened my bedroom and stretched out on my bed and closed my eyes and visualised that door; I visualised my approach to it; I visualised my hand grasping the ring that served as its knob and my fingers turning keys in the locks, the lower lock first with one of those old-fashioned keys with large and easily duplicated teeth, the upper lock next, which is modern, burglar proof, and safe. With the locks disengaged, I put my shoulder against the door, gave a slight push, and … Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

There is nothing there, Dr. Rose. My mind is a blank. You want to make interpretive leaps based on what I find behind that door, or what colour it is, or the fact that it has two locks, not one, and a ring for a knob—Could he be fleeing from commitment? you ask yourself—while I'm inspired by this exercise to tell you bloody sod all. Nothing has been revealed to me. Nothing lurks ghoul-like behind that door. It leads to no room that I can conjure up, it merely sits at the top of a staircase like—





Staircase, you leap. So there's a staircase as well?

Yes. A staircase. Which, we both know, means climbing, rising, elevating, clawing out of this pit … What of it?

You see the agitation in my scrawl, don't you? You say, Stay with the fear. It won't kill you, Gideon. Feelings won't kill you. You are not alone.

I never thought that I was, I say. Don't put words in my mouth, Dr. Rose.

2 September





Libby was here. She knows something's not right since she hadn't heard the violin in days and she generally hears it for hours on end when I'm practising. That's largely why I hadn't let the lower ground floor flat once the original tenants left. I thought about it when I first bought and moved into this house in Chalcot Square, but I didn't want the distraction of a tenant coming and going—even by a separate entrance—and I didn't want to have to limit my hours of practise out of concern for someone else. I told Libby all this when she was leaving that day, when she'd zipped herself into her leathers, returned her helmet to her head just outside my front door, and caught sight of the empty flat below through the wrought iron railings. She said, “Wow. Is that for rent or anything?”





And I explained that I left it empty. There was a young couple living there when I first bought the building, I told her. But as they weren't able to develop a passion for the violin at odd hours of the night, they soon decamped.

She cocked her head. She said, “Hey. How old are you anyway? And do you always talk like a bottle's in your butt? When you were showing me the kites, you sounded totally normal. So what's up? Is this about being English or something? Step out of the house and all of a sudden you're Henry James?”





“He wasn't English,” I informed her.

“Well. Sorry.” She began to fasten her helmet's strap, but she seemed agitated because she had trouble with it. “I got through high school on Cliffs Notes, bud, so I wouldn't know Henry James from Sid Vicious. I don't even know why he popped into my head. Or why Sid Vicious did, for that matter.”





“Who's Sid Vicious?” I asked her solemnly.

She peered at me. “Come on. You're joking.”