A Traitor to Memory

You want to know, naturally, how this inauspicious beginning to my life in music metamorphosed into the Gideon Legend. How, in other words, did the discarded weapon left—shall we say?—to collect one hundred years of lime deposits in a cave become Excalibur, the Sword in the Stone? I can only speculate, as the Legend is my father's invention and not my own.

The children from the play group were taken to their homes by their student keepers at the end of the day, and reports were given on each child's development and comportment. What else were the parents spending their money on if not to receive hopeful daily indications that a suitable level of social maturity was being achieved?

God knows what the display in public of what should have been a private bodily function earned the willie waver that afternoon. In my case, the Italian student reported on my meeting with Rosemary Orr.

This would have occurred in the sitting room, I dare say, where Gran would have been presiding over the afternoon tea she never failed to make for Granddad, enveloping him in an aura of normalcy as a hedge against the intrusion of an episode. Perhaps my father was there as well, perhaps we were joined by James the Lodger, who helped us make ends meet by renting one of the vacant bedrooms on the fourth floor of the house.

The Italian student—although let me say now that she might as easily have been Greek or Spanish or Portuguese—would have been invited to join the family for refreshment, which would then have given her the opportunity to tell the tale of our meeting with Rosemary Orr.

She says, “The little one, he wants to find this music we are listening, so we trail it up—”





“She means ‘hearing’ and ‘track it down,’ I think,” the lodger interposes. His name is James, as I've said, and I've heard Granddad complain that his English is “too bloody perfect to be real” so he must be a spy. But I like to listen to him anyway. Words come from James the Lodger's mouth like oranges, plump and juicy and round. He himself is none of that, except for his cheeks, which are red and get redder still when he realises everyone is attending to him. He says, “Do go on,” to the Italian-Spanish-Greek-Portuguese student. “Don't take the slightest notice of me.”





And she smiles because she likes the lodger. She'd like him to help her with her English, I expect. She'd like to be friends with him.

I myself have no friends—despite the play group—but I don't notice their absence because I have my family, and I bask in their love. Unlike most children of three, I do not lead an existence separate from the adults in my limited world: taking my meals alone, entertained and exposed to life by a nanny or some other child minder, making periodic appearances in the bosom of the family, spinning my wheels until such a time as I can be packed off to school. Instead, I am of the world of the adults with whom I live. So I see and hear much of what happens in my home and if I don't remember events, I remember the impressions of events.

So I recall this: the story of the violin music being told and Granddad plunging into the midst of the tale with an expatiation on Paganini. Gran's used music for years to soothe him when he's teetering on the edge of an episode and while there's still a hope of heading it off, and he talks about trills and bowing, about vibrato and glissandi with what sounds like authority but is likely, I know now, delusion. He's big and booming in his grandiloquence, an orchestra in and of himself. And no one interrupts or disagrees when he says to everyone but in reference to me, “This boy shall play,” like God declaring Himself for light.

Dad hears this, attaches to it a significance that he shares with no one, and swiftly makes all the necessary arrangements.

So it is that I come to receive my first lessons in the violin from Miss Rosemary Orr. And from these lessons and from that report from the play group, my father develops the Gideon Legend which I've dragged through life like a ball and chain.

But why did he make it a story about your grandfather? you want to know, don't you? Why not just keep the central characters but fudge on the details here and there? Wasn't he worried that someone would step forward, refute the story, and tell the real tale?

I give you the only answer I can, Dr. Rose: You'll have to ask my father.

21 August