A Traitor to Memory

Her ankles, Pitchley-Pitchford saw, were a little too thick, but the rest of her was just as he liked a woman to be: a bit worn, a touch disheveled, and possessing a somewhat harried academic mien which suggested not only an agreeable level of intelligence but also the sort of lack of sexual confidence that he always found so stimulating. Chat-room women were invariably like this woman when he finally met them, which was why he was drawn to the internet, despite his own better judgement, not to mention the threat of sexually transmitted diseases. And, considering what he'd just been through at the Hampstead police station, even though the better part of his mind was lecturing him about the idiocy of future encounters with women whose names had thus far been inconsequential to him, the other part of his mind—his reptilian brain—would have no part of lessons learned or trepidation about the future. There are more important considerations than a bit of mess with the police, James, the lizard cerebellum declared. Dwell, for example, on the infinite pleasures to be given to and taken from the individual orifices of the female anatomy.

But that was pure madness, that kind of adolescent fantasising. What wasn't fantasy was the death of Eugenie Davies in Crediton Hill, Eugenie Davies, who had been carrying his address.

When he first knew Eugenie, he'd been James Pitchford, twenty-five years old, three years graduated from university and one year graduated from a bed-sit in Hammersmith the approximate size of a fingernail. A year in those lodgings had offered him access to the language school he needed where, for an exorbitant sum that took ages to recoup, he'd purchased individual instruction in his native language, suitable for business dealings, for academic purposes, for social gatherings, and for cowing doormen at fine hotels.

From there, he'd snagged his first job in the City from whose perspective a central London address had sounded so absolutely right. And since he never invited office mates home for drinks, dinner, or anything else, there was no way for them to know that the letters, documents, and thick party invitations sent to a lofty address in Kensington were actually delivered to the fourth-floor bedroom he occupied, which was even smaller than the bed-sit he'd begun with in Hammersmith.

Cramped accommodation had been a small price to pay all those years ago, not only for the address but also for the companionship the address had afforded. In the time since those days in Kensington Square, J. W. Pitchley had schooled himself not to think of that companionship. But James Pitchford, who had reveled in it and had deemed himself an unmitigated success in self-reinvention because of it, had scarcely lived a single moment without experiencing some passing thought about one member of the household or another. Especially Katja.

“You can help my talking English, please?” she had asked him. “I am here one year. I learn not as good as I wish. I will be so grateful.” All those charming V's in place of W's when she spoke were her own variation of the abhorrent missing aitch he'd worked so hard upon.

He agreed to help her because she was so earnest in supplicating him. He agreed to help her because—although she couldn't know it and he would die before telling her—they were two of a kind. Her escape from East Germany, while far more dramatic and awe-inspiring, mirrored an earlier flight of his own. And although their motivations were different, the core of them was identical.

They already spoke the same language, he and Katja. If he could help her better herself through something as simple as grammar and pronunciation, he was glad to do so.

They met in her free time, when Sonia was asleep or with her family. They used his room or hers, where they each had a table that was just large enough for the books from which Katja did her grammar exercises and for the tape recorder into which she spoke. She was earnest in her efforts at diction, enunciation, and pronunciation. She was courageous in her willingness to experiment in a language that was as foreign to her as Yorkshire pudding. Indeed, it was for her courage that James Pitchford had first learned to admire Katja Wolff. The sheer audacity that had carried her over the old Berlin Wall was the stuff of a heroism he could only hope to emulate.

I will make myself worthy of you, he told her silently as they sat together and worked on the mystery of irregular verbs. And while the table light shone on her soft blonde hair, he visualised himself touching it, running his fingers through it, feeling it caress his naked chest as she lifted herself from their shared embrace.

On her chest of drawers across the room, the intercom broke into James Pitchford's reveries just about as often as he allowed himself to dream them. From two floors below, the child would whimper and Katja's head would rise from her nightly lesson.

“It's nothing,” he'd say because if it was something, their shared time that was so precious to him and already too brief would be over for the evening. For if Sonia Davies' whimper escalated to a cry, the possibilities were endless as to what the trouble might be.

“The little one. I must go,” Katja said.

“Wait a moment.” He used the opportunity to cover her hand with his own.

“I cannot, James. If she weeps and Mrs. Davies hears and finds me not with her … You know how she is. And this is my job.”

Job? he thought. It was more like indentured servitude. The hours were long, and the duties were endless. Caring for a child so constantly ill required the efforts of more than one young woman with virtually no experience.