A Traitor to Memory

Did it happen more than once? you want to know.

I see where you're heading, and I won't go there with you because I refuse to pretend that I remember what you seem to want me to remember. The facts are these: My mother is beside me in my bed, I am held by her, it is hot, I smell her perfume. And there's a weight on my cheek as well. I do feel that weight. It's heavy but inert and it smells of perfume. Odd, that I would recall that smell. I couldn't tell you what it was—her perfume, Dr. Rose—but I expect that if I ever smelled it again, I would know it at once and it would remind me of Mother.

I expect she was holding you between her breasts, you tell me. That's why you would both feel the weight and smell the perfume. Is it dark in your bedroom or is there a light?

I don't recall. Just the heat, that weight, the scent. And silence.

Have you lain that way with anyone else? With Libby perhaps? Or whoever preceded Libby?

God, no! And this is not about my mother! All right. Yes. Of course I know that her desertion of me—of us—looms large. I'm not an idiot, Dr. Rose. I come home from Austria, my mother is gone, I never see the woman again, never hear her voice, never read so much as a sentence in her handwriting addressed to me…. Yes, yes, I know the song: This is a Very Big Incident. And since I never heard from her again, I also see the logical connection that I would make as a child: It was my fault. Perhaps I make that connection when I am eight or nine or however old I was when she left, but it is not a connection that I recall making and it's not a connection that I make now. She left. End of story.

What do you mean, end of story? you ask.

Just that. We never spoke of her. Or at least I never spoke of her. And if my grandparents and father did, and if Raphael or Sarah-Jane or James the Lodger—





He was still there when she left?

He was there … Or was he? No. He couldn't have been. It was Calvin, wasn't it? Didn't I say earlier it was Calvin? Calvin the Lodger trying to phone for help in the midst of Granddad's episode after Mother left us … So James had long ago decamped as well.

Decamped, you say. There's a secrecy implied in decamped, you tell me. Was there secrecy behind James the Lodger's leaving?

There is secrecy everywhere. Silence and secrecy. That's how it seems. I walk into a room and a hush falls on it and I know they've been talking about my mother. And I am not allowed to speak of her.

What happens if you do?

I don't know because I never test the rule.

Why not?

The music is central. I have my music. I still have my music. My father, my grandparents, Sarah-Jane, and Raphael. Even Calvin the Lodger. We all have my music.

Is this rule stated? The rule about not asking after your mother? Or is it implied?

It must be … I don't know. She's not there to greet us when we return from Austria. She's gone but no one acknowledges that fact. The house has been wiped so clean of her that it's as if she never lived there in the first place. And no one says a word. They don't pretend she's taken a trip somewhere. They don't pretend she's suddenly died. They don't pretend she ran off with another man. They act as if she never existed. And life goes on.

You never asked about her?

I must have known that she was one of the subjects that we just didn't talk about.

One? There were others?

Perhaps I didn't miss her. I don't actually recall missing her. I don't even remember much about what she looked like. Except that her hair was blonde and she covered it with head scarves, the sort you always see the Queen wearing. But this would have been in church.

And yes, I do remember being with her in church. I remember her crying. Crying in church at morning Mass with the nuns lined up in the first few pews of that chapel of theirs in Kensington Square. They're on the other side of this rood screen affair, the nuns, except it's not really a rood screen but more like a fence to keep a separation between them and the rest of the public except there's no one else there to be the rest of the public at early morning Mass. There's just Mother and I. And the nuns are in front in those special pews giving responses, and one of them is dressed in that old way, in a habit, but all the rest are done up normally but very plain and with crosses on their chests. And during Mass, my mother kneels, always kneels, with her head resting on her hands. She weeps the whole time. And I don't know what to do.