A Traitor to Memory

And Raphael? you ask.

He's the proud father, isn't he? Bearing flowers like every proud father before him.

How does that feel? you want to know.

It makes me want to have a shower. And not because of the thought of my mother “in the rank sweat of an unseamèd bed”—if you'll pardon the obvious allusion—but because of him. Because of Raphael. Yes, I do see that he may have loved my mother and hated my father for possessing what he himself wanted. But that my mother would have returned his love … would have thought of taking that sweaty and perpetually sun-incinerated body into her bed or wherever else they might have accomplished the act … this thought is too incredible to be embraced.

But children, you point out to me, always find the contemplation of their parents' sexuality abhorrent, Gideon. This is why the actual sight of intercourse—





I did not witness intercourse, Dr. Rose. Not between my mother and Raphael, not between Sarah-Jane Beckett and the lodger, not between my grandparents, not between my father and anyone. Anyone.

Your father and anyone? you are quickly upon it. Who is anyone? Where does anyone come from?

Oh God. I don't know. I don't know.

15 September





I went to see him this afternoon, Dr. Rose. Ever since unearthing Sonia and then having the recollection of Raphael and those obscene flowers and the chaos in the house in Kensington Square, I've felt that I needed to talk to my father. So I went down to South Kensington and found him in the garden next to Braemar Mansions, which is where he's lived for the past few years. He was in the little greenhouse that he's commandeered from the rest of the residents of the building, and he was doing what he usually does with his free time. He was hovering over his infant hybrid camellias, examining their leaves with a magnifying glass, looking for either entomological intruders or incipient buds. I could not tell which. It's his dream to create a bloom worthy of the Chelsea Flower Show. Worthy of a prize at the show, I should say. Anything less would be a waste of his time.

From the street, I saw him inside the greenhouse, but as I don't have a key to the garden gate, I entered through the building. Dad has the first floor flat at the top of the stairs, and because I could see that the door was ajar up there, I headed up with the thought of securing it. But I found Jill inside at Dad's dining table, working on her laptop with her feet propped up on a hassock she'd brought in from the sitting room.

We exchanged pleasantries—what exactly does one say to one's father's young, pregnant mistress?—and she told me what I already knew, specifically that Dad was in the garden. She said, “He's nurturing the rest of his children,” with one of those long-suffering rolls of the eyes that are intended to convey fond exasperation. But that phrase the rest of his children seemed heavily laden with meaning today, and I couldn't put it from my mind as I left her.

I realised that I'd failed to notice something before that was obvious to me as I made my way back through the flat. Walls, chest tops, table tops, and bookshelves announced a single bald fact that had never once touched upon my consciousness, and that fact was what I first dealt with when I entered the greenhouse, because it seemed to me that if I could wrest a truthful answer from my father, I would be one step closer to understanding.

Wrest? You seize upon that word, don't you, Dr. Rose? You seize upon it and everything it implies. Is your father less than truthful, then? you ask me.

I'd never thought him so. But now I wonder.

And what will you understand? you want to know. Wresting the truth from your father will take you one step closer to understanding what?

To understanding what has happened to me.

It's connected to your father?

I don't want to think so.

When I walked into the greenhouse, he didn't look up, and I thought about how his body has begun to suit him for this current employment, bending over small plants. His scoliosis seems to have worsened over the past few years, and although he's just sixty-two years old, he seems older to me because of his growing curvature. Looking at him, I wondered how Jill Foster—nearly thirty years his junior—had come to see him as a sexual object. What draws human beings together is a puzzle to me.

I said, “Why are there no pictures of Sonia in your flat, Dad?” An unexpected frontal assault seemed most likely to garner results. “You've got me from every angle at every age, with violin and without; but you haven't got Sonia. Why?”





He did look up then, but I think he was buying time, because he took a handkerchief from the back pocket of his jeans and he used it to polish the magnifying glass. He refolded the handkerchief, stowed the lens in a chamois sack, and took the sack to a shelf at the end of the greenhouse, where he keeps his gardening tools.

“Good afternoon to you as well,” he said. “You had more of a greeting for Jill, I hope. Is she still on the computer?”