A Traitor to Memory

He doesn't play notes; he exists within sounds. The allegro fireworks he produces on his instrument mesmerise me. In a moment he has been transformed. He is no sweating, patchy-skinned cough drop, but Merlin, and I want his magic for myself.

Raphael doesn't teach method, I discover, saying in his interview with my grandfather that “It's the work of the violinist to develop his own method.” Instead, he improvises exercises for me. He leads and I follow. “Rise to the opportunity,” he instructs me over his own playing and watching mine. “Enrich that vibrato. Don't be afraid of portamenti, Gideon. Slide. Make them flow. Slide.”





And this is how I begin my real life as a violinist, Dr. Rose, because all that has gone before with Miss Orr was a prelude. I take three lessons a week at first, then four, and then five. Each lesson lasts three hours. I go at first to Raphael's office at the Royal College of Music, Granddad and I on the bus from Kensington High Street. But the extended hours of waiting for me to finish my lessons are a trouble to Granddad, and everyone in the house is terrified that they will provoke an episode sooner or later without my grandmother there to contend with it. So eventually an arrangement must be made for Raphael Robson to come to me.

The cost is, of course, enormous. One does not ask a violinist of Raphael's calibre to commit vast stretches of his teaching time to one small student without recompensing him for his travel, for the hours lost from instructing other students, and from the increased time he will be spending on me. Man does not, after all, live on the love of music alone. And while Raphael has no family to support, he does have his own mouth to feed and his own rent to pay and the money must be raised somehow to see to it that he wants for nothing that would make it necessary for him to reduce his hours with me.

My father is already working at two jobs. Granddad gets a small pension from a Government grateful for the wartime sacrifice of his sanity, and it has been in the course of preserving that sanity that my grandparents have never moved to less expensive but more trying surroundings in the post-war years. They've cut back to the bone, they've let out rooms to lodgers, and they've shared the expense and the work of running a large house with my father. But they have not allowed for having a child prodigy in the family—and that is what my grandfather insists upon calling me—nor have they budgeted for what the costs will be in nurturing that prodigy to fulfill his potential.

And I don't make it easy on them. When Raphael suggests another lesson here or there, another hour or two or three with our instruments, I am passionate about my need for this time. And they see how I thrive under Raphael's tutelage: He steps into the house and I am ready for him, my instrument in one hand and my bow in the other.

So an accommodation must be made for my lessons, and my mother is the one who makes it.

1


IT WAS THE knowledge of a touch—reserved for him but given to another—that drove Ted Wiley out into the night. He'd seen it from his window, not intending to spy but spying all the same. The time: just past one in the morning. The place: Friday Street, Henley-on-Thames, a mere sixty yards from the river, and in front of her house from which they'd departed only moments before, both of them having to duck their heads to avoid a lintel put into a building in centuries past when men and women were shorter and when their lives were more clearly defined.

Ted Wiley liked that: the definition of roles. She did not. And if he hadn't understood before now that Eugenie would not be easily identified as his woman and placed into a convenient category in his life, Ted had certainly reached that conclusion when he saw the two of them—Eugenie and that broomstick stranger—out on the pavement and in each other's arms.