A Traitor to Memory

For some reason I know this even as I ask again and again and again, even as I bargain, beg, behave as badly as I've ever done, as I kick the music stand, fling myself into my grandmother's treasured demilune table and crack two of its legs … even then I know there will be no Juilliard no matter what I do. Alone, with my family, with one of my parents, accompanied only by Raphael, or with Sarah-Jane dogging my heels as my shadow or protector, I will not be going to that Mecca of music.

Know, you point out to me. Know before you ask, know as you ask, know despite everything you do to change … what, Gideon? What are you trying to change?

Reality, obviously. And yes, Dr. Rose, I know that's an answer that takes us nowhere. What's the reality that I already understand as a seven-or eight-year-old?

It appears to be this: We are not a rich family. Oh yes, we live in an area that not only indicates but also requires money, but the family's owned that house for generations and the only reason the family still owns it is due to the lodgers, to Dad's two jobs, to Mother's going to work, and to Granddad's pittance from the Government. But money is not something we ever discuss. Talk of money is like speaking of bodily functions at the dinner table. Yet I know I won't go to Juilliard and I feel a tightening inside me as I know this. It starts in my arms. It moves to my stomach. It rises upwards into my throat till I shout oh I shout and I remember what I shout, “It's because she's here!” And that's when I kick and pound and fling. That's when, Dr. Rose.

She's here?

She. Of course. It must be Katja.

26 September





Dad was here again. He came for two hours and was replaced by Raphael. They wanted to make it look as if they weren't taking shifts at a death watch, so I had at least five minutes alone between the time Dad left and Raphael arrived. But what they don't know is that I saw them from the window. Raphael came walking into Chalcot Square from the direction of Chalcot Road, and Dad intercepted him in the middle of the garden. They stood on either side of one of the benches and they talked. At least, Dad talked. Raphael listened. He nodded and did what he always does: ran his fingers left to right on his scalp to arrange the fretwork that's left of his hair. Dad was passionate. I could tell that much from the way he gestured, one hand up at the level of his chest and closed into a fist like a punch withheld. The rest I didn't need to interpret because I knew what he was passionate about.

He'd come in peace. No mention of anything regarding my music. “Had to get away from her for a while,” he sighed. “I've come to believe that women the world over in the last months of pregnancy are all the same.”





“Jill's moved in, then?” I asked him.

“Why tempt fate?”





Which was his way of saying that they're sticking to their original plan: Have the baby first, combine their households second, and marry when the dust settles on the first two events. It's the fashion these days to go at relationships in that way, and Jill is an adherent to fashion. But I sometimes wonder how Dad feels about an arrangement so foreign to his other marriages. He's a traditionalist at heart, I believe, with nothing so important as his family and with only one way in mind to make a family. Once he learned Jill was pregnant, I can't see him doing anything but dropping hastily to one knee in order to claim her. Indeed, that's what he did with his first wife, although he doesn't know that I learned that from Granddad. He met her while he was on leave from the Army—his intended career, by the way—he got her pregnant, and he married her. That he's not gone the same route with Jill tells me it's Jill's agenda being followed.

“She sleeps when she can now,” he told me. “It's always like that in the last six weeks or so. They're so blasted uncomfortable and if the baby's decided to be awake from midnight till five A.M….” He brushed his hand through the air dismissively. “Then you've got what you've been waiting for for years: a nightly chance to read War and Peace.”





“Are you staying with her now?”





“I'm doing time on the sofa.”





“Not good for your back, Dad.”





“Don't remind me.”





“Have you settled on the name?”





“I still want Cara.”





“She still wants—” and the import dawned upon me so suddenly that I scarcely said it but I forced myself to go on. “She's holding fast for Catherine?”





He and I locked eyes, and she was there between us, as if she were corporeal, immediate, and eternally that captivating girl in the picture. I said, even though my palms were damp and my gut was beginning to feel the first spark of a fire to come, “But that would remind you of Katja, wouldn't it? If you called the baby Catherine?”