A Traitor to Memory

His response was to get up and make coffee, and he took his time with the activity. He commented upon my choice of ready-ground beans and what they did to destroy freshness. He went from there to an expatiation of what the presence of yet another Starbucks—this one on Gloucester Road not far from Braemar Mansions—has done to the atmosphere of his neighbourhood.

As he did all this, the pain in my gut began to move slowly down where it planned, as always, to wreak havoc with my bowels. I listened to him make the leap from Starbucks to the Americanisation of global culture, and I pressed my arm hard against the lowest part of my intestines, willing the pain to stop and the urgency to ease, because if that did not happen, Dad would have won.

I let him exhaust the subject of America: international conglomerates dominating business, Hollywood megalomaniacs determining cinematic art forms, astronomical and singularly obscene salaries and share options becoming the measure of a capitalist's success. When he reached the peroration of his speech—evidenced by the fact that the great gulps he was taking from his coffee cup were becoming more frequent—I repeated my question, except this time I didn't ask it as a question. “Katja,” I said. “Catherine would remind you.”





He poured what remained of his coffee down the drain. He strode into the music room. As he moved, he said, “God damn it. Show me, Gideon.” And then, “Ah. This is what's going for progress, is it?”





He'd seen the Guarneri back in its case and although the case was open, he somehow knew that I hadn't yet attempted to play it. He took it from the case and the absence of the reverence with which he'd touched that violin in the past told me just how angry—or agitated, irritated, infuriated, frightened, worried, I do not know which—he actually was. He held the instrument out to me, fingers round its neck with that brilliant scroll emerging from his fist like hope coiled round an unspoken promise. He said, “Here. Take it. Show me where we are. Show me exactly where weeks of excavating through the dreck of the past has taken you, Gideon. A note will do. A scale. An arpeggio. Or, miraculously because something tells me it would be miraculous at this point, a movement from the concerto of your choice. Any concerto. Too tough? Then what about a little encore piece?”





And the fire was in me but it was changed to a single coal. White hot, silver hot, incandescent, and it moved like acid down through my body.

And yes, yes, I see what my father has done, Dr. Rose. You don't need to point it out. I see what he's done. But in that moment I could only say, “I can't. Don't make me. I can't,” like a nine-year-old who's been asked to play a piece that he cannot master.

Dad used that next, saying, “Perhaps that's beneath you. Too easy for you, Gideon. An insult to your talent. So let's start with The Archduke, shall we?”





Let's start with The Archduke. The acid ate through me, and what was left when the pain had knotted my viscera and rendered me useless was blame. I am at fault. I placed myself into this position. Beth set the programme for the Wigmore Hall benefit, and she said, “What about The Archduke, Gideon?” in absolute innocence. And because it was Beth who made the suggestion, Beth who'd already experienced my other more personal brand of failure, I couldn't bring myself to say, “Forget it. That piece is a jinx.”





Artists believe in jinxes. The word Macbeth spoken inside a theatre has its counterpart in every field of art. So if I'd called The Archduke what I needed to call it—my personal jinx—Beth would have understood, despite the way she and I ended. And Sherrill wouldn't have cared as much as a sprat what we played. He would have said, in that Do-I-actually-give-a-shit American fashion of his that he uses to hide a monstrous talent, “Just point me to the keyboard, boys and girls,” and that would have been that. So it was all down to me and I let it happen. I am to blame.

Dad found me where I'd taken myself off to when I could not face the challenge he was issuing: in the shed in the garden, where I sketch the designs and make my kites. That's what I was doing then—sketching—and he joined me, the Guarneri replaced in its case and the case itself left inside the house.

He said, “You are the music, Gideon. That's what I want you for. That's all that I want.”





I said, “That's what we're trying to get to.”





He said, “It's bollocks, going at it this way, scratching in notebooks and having a nod-off on a screw doctor's sofa every three days.”





“I don't lie on a sofa.”





“You know what I mean.” He placed his hand across the sketch I was working on, the better to force me to pay attention. He said, “We can hold people at bay only so long for you, Gideon. We're doing it—Joanne is doing a bloody brilliant job, in fact—but there's going to come a point when even a publicist like Joanne, loyal as she is, is going to start asking exactly what the term exhaustion means in a case in which that same exhaustion is showing no sign of improvement. When that happens, I'm either going to have to tell her the truth or I'm going to have to invent a fiction for her to offer people that might damn well make the situation worse.”