A Traitor to Memory

So she thought that I—


Yes, she thought. She thought, she thought. But she did not know. Any more than you know right now. You were not in the room. You were dragged away, and she was taken downstairs. Your mother went to phone for help. And that left me alone with your sister. Don't you see what that means?

But I remember—

You remember what you remember because that's what happened: You held her down. But holding her down and keeping her down are not the same. And you know that, Gideon. By God, you know it.

But I remember—

You remember what you did as far as you did it. I did the rest. I stand guilty of all the crimes that were committed. I am the man, after all, who could not bear to have my own daughter Virginia in my life.

No. It was Granddad.

Granddad was simply the excuse I used. I dismissed her, Gideon. I pretended she was dead because I wanted her dead. Don't forget that. Never forget that. You know what it means. You know it, Gideon.

But Mother … Mother was going to tell me—

Eugenie was going to perpetuate the lie. She was going to tell you what I'd let her believe was the truth for years. She was going to explain why she'd left us without a word of goodbye, why she'd taken every picture of your sister with her, why she'd stayed away for nearly twenty years…. Yes. She was going to tell you what she thought was the truth—that you drowned your sister—and I refused to let that happen. So I killed her, Gideon. I murdered your mother. I did it for you.

So now there's no one left who can tell me—

I am telling you. You can believe me and you must believe me. Am I not a man who killed the mother of his own children? Am I not a man who hit her on the street, who drove a car over her, who removed the picture she'd brought to town with her to sustain your guilt? Am I not a man who drove off quietly and felt nothing afterwards? Am I not a man who went happily home to his young lover and got on with his life? So am I not thus also a man who is fully capable of killing a sickly worthless cretin of a child, a burden to us all, a living illustration of my own failure? Am I not that man, Gideon? Am I not that man? The question echoed through the years. It forced upon Gideon a hundred memories, He saw them flicker, unspooling before him, each asking the same question: Am I not that man?

And he was. He was. Of course. He was. Richard Davies had always been that man. Gideon saw it and read it in every word, nuance, and gesture of his father over the last two decades. Richard Davies was indeed that man.

But an admission of the fact—a final embracing of it—did not produce one gram of absolution.

So Gideon walked. His face was streaked with rain, and his hair was painted onto his skull. Rivulets ran like veins down his neck, but he felt nothing of the cold or the damp. The path he followed felt aimless to him, but it was not so despite the fact that he barely recognised when Park Lane gave way to Oxford Street and when Orchard Street turned into Baker.

From the morass of what he remembered, what he had been told, and what he had learned emerged a single point that he clung to at the last: Acceptance was the only option available because only acceptance allowed reparation finally to be made. And he was the one who had to make that reparation because he was the only one left who could do so.

He could not bring his sister back to life, he could not save his mother from destruction, he could not give Katja Wolff back the twenty years she'd sacrificed in the service of his father's plans. But he could pay the debt of those twenty years and at least in that one way he could make amends for the unholy deal his father had struck with her.

And there was indeed a way to pay her back that would also close the circle of everything else that had happened: from his mother's death to the loss of his music, from Sonia's death to the public exposure of everyone associated with Kensington Square. It was embodied in the long and elegant inner bouts, the perfect scrolls, and the lovely perpendicular F holes crafted two hundred and fifty years ago by Bartolomeo Giuseppe Guarneri.

He would sell the violin. Whatever price it fetched at auction, no matter how high, and it would be astronomical, he would give that money to Katja Wolff. And in taking those two specific actions, he would in effect be making a statement of apology and sorrow that no other effort on his part would permit him to make.