A Traitor to Memory

“I had a very good reason—”

“Have you had this all along?”

“I have.” Richard's eyes bored into his son's.

“I don't believe you,” Gideon said. “You said she took them and she took them. You wanted her to take them. Or you sent them to her. But you didn't have this, because if you'd had it, on that day when I wanted it, when I needed to see her, when I asked you, begged you—”

“Rubbish. This is bollocks. I didn't give it to you then because I thought you might—”

“What? Throw myself onto the railway tracks? I didn't know then. I didn't even suspect. I was panicked about my music and so were you. So if you'd had this then, on that day, Dad, you'd have handed it over straightaway. If you thought for a moment it would get me back to the violin, you would have done anything.”

“Listen to me.” Richard spoke rapidly. “I had that picture. I'd forgotten about it. I'd merely misplaced it among your grandfather's papers. When I saw it yesterday, I intended at once to give it to you. I remembered you wanted a picture of Sonia … that you'd asked about one….”

“It wouldn't be in a frame,” Gideon said. “Not if it was yours. Not if you'd misplaced it among his papers.”

“You're twisting my words.”

“It would have been like the other. It would have been in an envelope or stuffed into a book or placed in a bag or lying somewhere loose, but it wouldn't—it wouldn't—have been in a frame.”

“You're getting hysterical. This is what comes of psychoanalysis. I hope you see that.”

“What I see,” Gideon cried, “is a self-involved hypocrite who'd say anything at all, who'd do anything at all if that's what it took—” Gideon stopped himself.

On the sofa, Jill felt the atmosphere between the two men suddenly become electric and hot. Her own thoughts were charging round madly in her head, so at first when Gideon spoke again, she didn't comprehend his meaning.

“It was you,” he said. “Oh my God. You killed her. You had spoken to her. You had asked her to support your lies about Sonia, but she wouldn't do that, would she? So she had to die.”

“For the love of God, Gideon. You don't know what you're saying.”

“I do. For the first time in my life, I do. She was going to tell me the truth, wasn't she? You didn't think she would, you were so certain she'd go along with anything you planned, because she did at first, all those years ago. But that's not who she was and why the hell did you think it might be? She'd left us, Dad. She couldn't live a lie and live with us, so she walked out. It was too much for her, knowing that we'd sent Katja to prison.”

“She agreed to go. She was party to it all.”

“But not to twenty years,” Gideon said. “Katja Wolff wouldn't have been party to that. To five years, perhaps. Five years and one hundred thousand pounds, all right. But twenty years? No one expected it. And Mother couldn't live with it, could she? So she left us and she would have stayed away forever had I not lost my music at Wigmore Hall.”

“You've got to stop thinking that Wigmore Hall is connected to anything but Wigmore Hall. I've told you that from the first.”

“Because you wanted to believe it,” Gideon said. “But the truth is that Mother was going to tell me that my memory wasn't lying to me, wasn't she, Dad? She knew I killed Sonia. She knew I did it alone.”

“You didn't. I've told you. I explained what happened.”

“Tell me again, then. In front of Jill.”

Richard said nothing, although he cast a look at Jill. She wanted to see it as a look that begged for her help and her understanding. But she saw instead the calculation behind it. Richard said, “Gideon. Let's put this aside. Let's talk about it later.”

“We'll talk about it now. One of us will. Shall I be the one? I killed my sister, Jill. I drowned her in her bath. She was a millstone round everyone's neck—”

“Gideon. Stop it.”

“—but especially round mine. She stood in the way of my music. I saw the world revolving round her, and I couldn't cope with that, so I killed her.”

“No!” Richard said.

“Dad wants me to think—”

“No!” Richard shouted.

“—that he was the one, that when he came into the bathroom that evening and saw her underwater in the tub, he held her there and finished the job. But he's lying about that because he knows that if I continue to believe I killed her, there's a very good chance I'll never pick up the violin again.”

“That's not what happened,” Richard said.

“Which part of it?”

Richard said nothing for a moment, then, “Please,” and Jill saw that he was caught between the two choices that Gideon's accusations had brought him to facing. And no matter which way he chose to go, both choices amounted to a single one in the end. Either he killed his child. Or he killed his child.