A Traitor to Memory

“Yes,” I said.

And then she laughed. Well, not laughed actually. It was more like a hoot. And she grabbed my arm and said, “You, you,” with such an inordinate degree of familiarity that I was both astounded and charmed. So I offered to show her the lower ground floor flat.

Why? you ask.

Because she'd asked about it and I wanted to show her and I suppose I wanted her company for a while. She was so absolutely un-English.

You say, I didn't mean why did you show her the flat, Gideon. I meant why are you telling me about Libby.

Because she was here, just now.

She's significant, isn't she?

I don't know.

3 September





“It's Liberty,” she tells me. “God, isn't that, like, totally the worst? My parents were hippies before they were yuppies, which was way before my dad made, like, a billion dollars in Silicon Valley. You do know about Silicon Valley, don't you?”

We are walking to the top of Primrose Hill. I have one of my kites. Libby's talked me into flying it this late afternoon, sometime last year. I ought to be rehearsing, since I'm due to record Paganini—the second violin concerto, this is—with the Philharmonic in less than three weeks and the Allegro maestoso has been giving me some trouble. But Libby's returned from a confrontation with the acidulous Rock about wages he's withheld from her again, and she's reported his response to her request for her money: “The jerk said, ‘Fly a kite, bitch,’ so I thought I'd take him up on it. Come on, Gideon, you're working too hard anyway.”





I've been at it for six hours, two increments of three with an hour's break to walk over to Regent's Park at noon, so I agree to the plan. I allow her to choose the kite, and she selects a multi-level affair that spins and requires just the right wind velocity to show its best stuff.

We head off. We follow the curve of Chalcot Crescent—more gentrification sourly remarked upon by Libby, who appears to prefer London decaying to London renewed—and dash across Regent's Park Road and thence into the park, where we set off up the side of the hill.

“Too much wind,” I tell her, and I have to raise my voice because the wind gusts fiercely against the kite and the nylon slaps against me. “You've got to have perfect conditions for this one. I don't expect we'll even get it in the air.”





That proves to be the case, much to her disappointment because it seems that she “just totally wanted to put it to Rock. The creep. He's threatening to tell whoever it is that gets told”—this with a wave of her hand in the vague direction of Westminster, by which I assume she must be talking about the Government—“that we were never really married in the first place. I mean physically married like in doing the deed with each other. Which is, like, just such a crock of shit that you wouldn't believe.”





“And what would happen if he told the Government that you weren't really married?”





“Except that we were. We are. Jeez, he makes me nuts.”





As it turns out, she's afraid that her status in the country will change if her estranged husband has his way. And because she's moved from his doubtless—to my imagination—insalubrious home in Bermondsey to the lower ground floor flat in Chalcot Square, he's afraid that he's losing her for good, which he apparently doesn't wish to do despite his continued womanising. So they've had yet another row, the end of which was his directive to her about kite flying.

Sorry not to be able to accommodate her, I invite her for a coffee instead. It's over coffee that she tells me the name for which Libby is merely a diminutive: Liberty.

“Hippies,” she says again of her parents. “They wanted their kids to have totally far out names”—this with a mock inhalation of an imaginary cannabis cigarette. “My sister's is even worse: Equality, if you can believe it. Ali for short. And if there'd been a third kid in the family …”





“Fraternity?” I say.

“You got it,” she rejoins. “But I should be excessively glad they went for abstract nouns. I mean, God, it could be totally worse. My name could be Tree.”





I chuckle. “Or perhaps just a type of tree: pine, oak, willow.”





“Willow Neale. I could get behind that.” She fingers through the packets of sugar on the table to find the dieters' sweetener. She is, I have discovered, a chronic dieter whose pursuit of bodily perfection has been “the rip tide in the otherwise peaceful ocean of my existence,” she's said. She dumps the sweetener into her non-fat caffèlatte and says, “What about you, Gid?”





“Me?”





“Your parents. What are they like? Not former flower children, I bet.”