A Traitor to Memory

See them? Together? The idea is preposterous.

Which part? you ask. The seeing part or the together part, Gideon?

And I know where you're heading with both those alternatives. Don't think I don't. I'm to choose between Oedipal conflicts and the primal scene. That's where we're going, isn't it, Dr. Rose? Little Gideon can't abide the fact that his music instructor a le béguin pour sa mère. Or, what's worse, little Gideon walked in on sa mère et l'amoureux de sa mère in flagrante delicto, with l'amoureux de sa mère being Raphael Robson.

Why the coy switch to French? you ask me. What does using English do to the facts? How does using English feel, Gideon?

Absurd. Ridiculous. Outrageous. Raphael Robson and my mother as lovers? What a ludicrous notion. How could she cope with his sweat? Even twenty years ago he sweats enough to water the garden.

12 September





The garden. Flowers. God. I've remembered those flowers, Dr. Rose. Raphael Robson coming to the house with an enormous spray of flowers. They're for my mother, and she's there in the house, so it's either night time or she hasn't gone into work that day.

Is she ill? you ask me.

I don't know. But I see the flowers. Dozens of them. All different kinds, so many different kinds that I can't even name them. It's the largest bouquet I've ever seen and yes, yes, she must be ill because Raphael takes the flowers to the kitchen and arranges them himself in a number of vases that Gran digs out for him. But Gran can't stay to help him with the flowers because Granddad must be watched for some reason. For days and days we've had to keep an eye on Granddad, and I don't know why.

An episode? you ask me. Is he having a psychotic episode, Gideon?

I don't know. Just that everyone is out of sorts. Mother is ill. Granddad is being confined upstairs with music playing all the time to calm him. Sarah-Jane Beckett keeps huddling in corners with James the Lodger and if I get too close to them, she tightens her mouth and tells me to get back to my school prep when I haven't actually been given a lesson that's generated any prep in the first place. I've caught Gran weeping on the stairs. I've heard Dad shouting somewhere: behind a closed door, I think. Sister Cecilia has called in, and I've seen her talking to Raphael in the upstairs corridor. And then there are all those flowers. Raphael and flowers. Scores of flowers that I can't even name.

He takes them to the kitchen and I'm required to wait in the sitting room, where he has provided an exercise for me to master. And I remember that exercise even today. It is scales. Scales, which I loathe and which I feel are far beneath me. So I refuse to do them. I kick over my music stand. I shout that I'm bored, bored, bored with this stupid music and I won't play it a minute more. I demand the telly. I demand biscuits and milk. I demand.

And Sarah-Jane is there in a flash. She says—and I do remember exactly what she says, Dr. Rose, because it is so foreign to my ears—“You're not the centre of the world any longer. Behave yourself.”





Not the centre of the world any longer? you muse. So this must be after Sonia was born.

It must be, Dr. Rose.

Can you make any connections, then?

What sort of connections?

Raphael Robson, the flowers, your grandmother weeping, Sarah-Jane Beckett and the lodger gossiping—





I didn't say that they are gossiping. They're just talking together, their heads together, sharing a secret perhaps? I wonder. Are they lovers?

Yes, yes, Dr. Rose. I see how I return to the theme of lovers. No need to point it out to me. And I know where you're heading, in an inexorable process that takes us towards my mother and Raphael. I see where that process is going to end if we examine the clues with rational calm. The clues are these: Raphael with those flowers, Gran crying and Dad shouting, Sister Cecilia in attendance, Sarah-Jane and the lodger tittering in a corner … I see where this takes us, Dr. Rose.

What stops you from saying it, then? you ask, with those sombre sad sincere eyes on mine.

Nothing stops me, except uncertainty.

If you say it, you'll be able to test how it feels, to see if it fits.

All right, then. All right. Raphael Robson has impregnated my mother and together they have produced this child, Sonia. My father realises he's been cuckolded—God, where did that word come from? I feel like I'm taking part in a Jacobean melodrama—and the shouting that ensues behind closed doors is his reaction. Granddad hears this, puts together the pieces, and is sent round the bend and on his way to another episode. Gran reacts to the chaos between Mother and Dad as well as to the potential of another episode. Sarah-Jane and the lodger are all agog with the excitement. Sister Cecilia is brought in to attempt to mediate the dispute, but Dad can't bear to live in the same house with a constant reminder of Mother's infidelity, and he demands that the baby be sent away somewhere, adopted or something. Mother can't bear the thought of this and she weeps in her room.