Staircase, you leap. So there's a staircase as well?
Yes. A staircase. Which, we both know, means climbing, rising, elevating, clawing out of this pit … What of it?
You see the agitation in my scrawl, don't you? You say, Stay with the fear. It won't kill you, Gideon. Feelings won't kill you. You are not alone.
I never thought that I was, I say. Don't put words in my mouth, Dr. Rose.
2 September
Libby was here. She knows something's not right since she hadn't heard the violin in days and she generally hears it for hours on end when I'm practising. That's largely why I hadn't let the lower ground floor flat once the original tenants left. I thought about it when I first bought and moved into this house in Chalcot Square, but I didn't want the distraction of a tenant coming and going—even by a separate entrance—and I didn't want to have to limit my hours of practise out of concern for someone else. I told Libby all this when she was leaving that day, when she'd zipped herself into her leathers, returned her helmet to her head just outside my front door, and caught sight of the empty flat below through the wrought iron railings. She said, “Wow. Is that for rent or anything?”
And I explained that I left it empty. There was a young couple living there when I first bought the building, I told her. But as they weren't able to develop a passion for the violin at odd hours of the night, they soon decamped.
She cocked her head. She said, “Hey. How old are you anyway? And do you always talk like a bottle's in your butt? When you were showing me the kites, you sounded totally normal. So what's up? Is this about being English or something? Step out of the house and all of a sudden you're Henry James?”
“He wasn't English,” I informed her.
“Well. Sorry.” She began to fasten her helmet's strap, but she seemed agitated because she had trouble with it. “I got through high school on Cliffs Notes, bud, so I wouldn't know Henry James from Sid Vicious. I don't even know why he popped into my head. Or why Sid Vicious did, for that matter.”
“Who's Sid Vicious?” I asked her solemnly.
She peered at me. “Come on. You're joking.”
“Yes,” I said.
And then she laughed. Well, not laughed actually. It was more like a hoot. And she grabbed my arm and said, “You, you,” with such an inordinate degree of familiarity that I was both astounded and charmed. So I offered to show her the lower ground floor flat.
Why? you ask.
Because she'd asked about it and I wanted to show her and I suppose I wanted her company for a while. She was so absolutely un-English.
You say, I didn't mean why did you show her the flat, Gideon. I meant why are you telling me about Libby.
Because she was here, just now.
She's significant, isn't she?
I don't know.
3 September
“It's Liberty,” she tells me. “God, isn't that, like, totally the worst? My parents were hippies before they were yuppies, which was way before my dad made, like, a billion dollars in Silicon Valley. You do know about Silicon Valley, don't you?”
We are walking to the top of Primrose Hill. I have one of my kites. Libby's talked me into flying it this late afternoon, sometime last year. I ought to be rehearsing, since I'm due to record Paganini—the second violin concerto, this is—with the Philharmonic in less than three weeks and the Allegro maestoso has been giving me some trouble. But Libby's returned from a confrontation with the acidulous Rock about wages he's withheld from her again, and she's reported his response to her request for her money: “The jerk said, ‘Fly a kite, bitch,’ so I thought I'd take him up on it. Come on, Gideon, you're working too hard anyway.”
I've been at it for six hours, two increments of three with an hour's break to walk over to Regent's Park at noon, so I agree to the plan. I allow her to choose the kite, and she selects a multi-level affair that spins and requires just the right wind velocity to show its best stuff.
We head off. We follow the curve of Chalcot Crescent—more gentrification sourly remarked upon by Libby, who appears to prefer London decaying to London renewed—and dash across Regent's Park Road and thence into the park, where we set off up the side of the hill.
“Too much wind,” I tell her, and I have to raise my voice because the wind gusts fiercely against the kite and the nylon slaps against me. “You've got to have perfect conditions for this one. I don't expect we'll even get it in the air.”
That proves to be the case, much to her disappointment because it seems that she “just totally wanted to put it to Rock. The creep. He's threatening to tell whoever it is that gets told”—this with a wave of her hand in the vague direction of Westminster, by which I assume she must be talking about the Government—“that we were never really married in the first place. I mean physically married like in doing the deed with each other. Which is, like, just such a crock of shit that you wouldn't believe.”
“And what would happen if he told the Government that you weren't really married?”
“Except that we were. We are. Jeez, he makes me nuts.”
As it turns out, she's afraid that her status in the country will change if her estranged husband has his way. And because she's moved from his doubtless—to my imagination—insalubrious home in Bermondsey to the lower ground floor flat in Chalcot Square, he's afraid that he's losing her for good, which he apparently doesn't wish to do despite his continued womanising. So they've had yet another row, the end of which was his directive to her about kite flying.
Sorry not to be able to accommodate her, I invite her for a coffee instead. It's over coffee that she tells me the name for which Libby is merely a diminutive: Liberty.
“Hippies,” she says again of her parents. “They wanted their kids to have totally far out names”—this with a mock inhalation of an imaginary cannabis cigarette. “My sister's is even worse: Equality, if you can believe it. Ali for short. And if there'd been a third kid in the family …”
“Fraternity?” I say.
“You got it,” she rejoins. “But I should be excessively glad they went for abstract nouns. I mean, God, it could be totally worse. My name could be Tree.”
I chuckle. “Or perhaps just a type of tree: pine, oak, willow.”
“Willow Neale. I could get behind that.” She fingers through the packets of sugar on the table to find the dieters' sweetener. She is, I have discovered, a chronic dieter whose pursuit of bodily perfection has been “the rip tide in the otherwise peaceful ocean of my existence,” she's said. She dumps the sweetener into her non-fat caffèlatte and says, “What about you, Gid?”
“Me?”
“Your parents. What are they like? Not former flower children, I bet.”
She hadn't yet met my father, you see, although he had seen her from the music room late one afternoon when she returned home from work on her Suzuki and parked it in her accustomed place on the pavement, right next to the steps that lead down to the lower ground floor flat. She roared up and gunned the engine two or three times, as is her habit, creating a ruckus that caught Dad's attention. He went to the window, saw her, and said, “I'll be damned. There's an infernal cyclist actually chaining his motorbike to your front rails, Gideon. See here …” and he began to open the window.
I said, “That's Libby Neale. It's fine, Dad. She lives here.”
He turned slowly from the glass. “What? That's a woman out there? She lives here?”
“Below. In the flat. I decided to let it out. Did I forget to tell you?”
I hadn't done. But my failure to mention Libby and the flat hadn't been so much a deliberate omission as a subject that hadn't come up. Dad and I talk every day, but our conversations are always about our professional concerns, like an upcoming concert, a tour he might be organising, a recording session that hadn't gone well, a request for an interview, or a personal appearance. Witness the fact that I didn't know a thing about his relationship with Jill until not mentioning it became more awkward than mentioning it: The s
udden appearance of an obviously pregnant woman in one's life will demand some sort of explanation, after all. But otherwise, we've never had a chummy father-and-son relationship. We've both been absorbed with my music since my childhood, and this concentration on both our parts has precluded the possibility—or perhaps obviated the necessity—of the sort of soul baring that appears to be the hallmark of closeness between people these days.
Mind you, I don't regret for an instant that Dad and I have the sort of connection with each other that we have. It's firm and true, and if it's not the sort of bond that makes us want to hike the Himalayas together or paddle up the Nile, it's still a relationship that strengthens and supports me. Truth be told, if it were not for my father, Dr. Rose, I would not be where I am today.
4 September
No. You will not catch me with that.
Where are you today, Gideon? you ask me blandly.
But I refuse to participate. My father plays no part in this, in whatever this is. If I cannot bring myself to even pick up the Guarneri, it is not my father's fault. I refuse to become one of those gormless pulers who lay the blame for their every difficulty at the feet of their parents. Dad's life was rough. He did his best.
Rough in what way? you want to know.
Well, can you imagine having Granddad for a father? Being sent off to school when you were six? Growing up with a steady diet of someone's psychotic episodes to feed you when you were at home? And always knowing that there was never a hope in hell that you could fully measure up no matter what you did because you were adopted in the first place and your father never let you forget it? No. Dad's done the best he could as a father. And he's done better than most as a son.
Better than yourself as a son? you ask me.
You'll have to get that information from Dad.
But what do you think about yourself as a son, Gideon? What comes first to your mind?
Disappointment, I say.
That you've disappointed your father?
No. That I mustn't. But that I might.
Has he let you know how important it is not to disappoint him?
Never once. Not at all. But …
But?
He doesn't like Libby. I somehow knew that he wouldn't like her or at least wouldn't like her being there. He would consider her a potential distraction or, worse, an impediment to my work.
You ask, Is that why he said, “It's that girl, isn't it?” when you had your blackout in Wigmore Hall? He leapt right to her, didn't he?
Yes.
Why?
It's not that he doesn't want me to be with someone. Why wouldn't he? Family is everything to my father. But family is going to be stopped short if I don't marry someday and have children of my own.
Except there's another child on the way now, isn't there? The family will continue anyway, no matter what you do.
Yes, it will.
So now he can disapprove of every woman in your life without fearing the consequences of your taking that disapproval to heart and never marrying, can't he, Gideon?
No! I will not play this game. This is not about my father. If he doesn't like Libby, it's because he's concerned about the impact she could have on my music. And he's well within his rights to be concerned. Libby doesn't know a bow from a kitchen knife.
Does she interrupt your work?
No, she doesn't.
Does she display an indifference to your music?
No.
Does she intrude? Ignore requests for solitude? Make demands upon you that violate the time you've set aside for your music?
Never.
You said she was a philistine. Have you discovered that she clings to her ignorance like a badge of accomplishment?
No. I haven't.
But still your father doesn't like her.
Look, it's for my own good. He's never made a move that wasn't for my good. I'm here with you because of him, Dr. Rose. When he understood what had happened to me in Wigmore Hall, he didn't say “Buck up! Get a grip! You've a God damn audience who've paid to see you!” No. What he said was “He's ill” to Raphael. “Make our excuses,” and he spirited me out of there. He took me home and he put me to bed and he sat next to me all night and he said, “We'll handle this, Gideon. Just sleep for now.”
He instructed Raphael to find help. Raphael knew about your own father's work with blocked artists, Dr. Rose. And I came to you. Because my father wants me to have my music, I came to you.
5 September
No one else knows. Just the three of us: Dad, Raphael, and I. Even my publicist isn't clear what's going on. Under a doctor's care, she's given out, telling the world that it's merely exhaustion.
I assume the interpretation given to that story is one variation or another of The Artist Piqued, and that's fine with me. Better the assumption that I stalked off the platform because I did not like the Hall's lighting than the truth reach public consumption.
Which truth is that? you ask.
Is there more than one? I want to know.
Certainly, you say. There's the truth of what's happened to you and the truth of why. What's happened is called psychogenic amnesia, Gideon. Why it's happened is the reason for our meetings.
Are you saying that until we know why I have this … this … what did you call it?
Psychogenic amnesia. It's like hysterical paralysis or blindness: Part of you that's always worked—in this case your musical memory, if you'd like to call it that—simply stops working. Until we know why you're experiencing this trouble, we won't be able to change it.
I'm wondering if you know how I recoil from that information, Dr. Rose. You impart it with perfect sympathy, but still I feel like a freak. And yes, yes, I know how that word resonates in my past, so you needn't point that out to me. I still hear Granddad howling it at my father as they drag him away, and I still apply that word to myself every day now. Freak, freak, freak, I call myself. Finish the freak off. Put an end to the freak.
Is that what you are? you ask me.
What else could I be? I never rode a bicycle, played rugby or cricket, hit a tennis ball, or even went to school. I had a grandfather given to fits of psychosis, a mother who would have been happier as a cloistered nun and probably ended up in a convent for all I know, a father who slaved at two jobs till I was established professionally, and a violin instructor who shepherded me from concert tours to recording engagements and otherwise never let me out of his sight. I was coddled, catered to, and worshipped, Dr. Rose. Who would emerge from conditions like that as anything other than a bona fide freak?
Is it any wonder that I'm riddled with ulcers? That I puke my guts out before a performance? That my brain sometimes pounds like a hammer in my skull? That I haven't been able to be with a woman in more than six years? That even when I was able to take a woman to bed, there was neither closeness, joy, nor passion in the act but merely a need to have done, have it over, have my paltry release, and then have her gone?
And what is the sum of all that, Dr. Rose, if not a sure-fire genuine freak?
7 September
Libby asked this morning if something was wrong. She came upstairs in her usual leisure attire—denim dungarees, a T-shirt, and hiking boots—and she seemed about to head out for a stroll because she was wearing the Walkman she usually takes with her when she's engaging in one of her diet hikes. I was in the window seat, doing my duty with this journal, when she turned and saw me watching her. Up she came.
She's trying a new diet, she told me. The No-White Diet, as she calls it. “I've tried the Mayo diet, the cabbage-soup diet, the Zone diet, the Scarsdale diet, the you-name-it diet. Nothing's worked, so I'm on to this.” This, she tells me, consists of eating whatever she wants as long as it isn't white. White foods unnaturally altered with food colouring count as white as well.
She is, I have learned, obsessed with her weight, and this is a mystery to me. She isn't fat, as far as I can tell, which admittedly isn't very far since she's always garbed either
in her leathers for the courier service or in her dungarees. She doesn't appear to have any other clothes. But even if she does look slightly podgy to some people—and mind you, I'm not saying that she looks slightly podgy to me—it's probably owing to the fact that her face is round. Don't round faces make one look plump? I tell her this, but it's no consolation. “We live in skeletal times,” she says. “You're lucky to be naturally skinny.”
I've never told her the cost of this emaciation that she seems to admire. Instead, I've said, “Women are too obsessed with their weight. You look perfectly fine.”
On one occasion when I say this, she responds with “So if I look so perfectly fine, take me on a date, why don't you?”
And this is how we begin to see each other. What an odd expression that is, “to see each other,” as if we're incapable of seeing another person until we're socially involved. I don't much like it—“seeing each other”—because it smacks of a euphemism where one isn't needed. Dating, on the other hand, sounds so adolescent. And even if that weren't the case, I wouldn't call what we're doing dating.
So what are you doing with Liberty Neale? you want to know.
And you mean, Are you sleeping with her, Gideon? Is she the woman who's managed to melt the ice that's been in your veins these last years?
I suppose that depends on what you mean by sleeping with her, Dr. Rose. And there's another euphemism for you. Why do we use a term like sleeping when sleeping is the last thing we intend to do when we climb into bed with the opposite sex?
But yes, we are sleeping together. Now and again. But by sleeping, I mean sleeping, not shagging. We're neither of us ready for anything else.
How did this come about? you want to know.
A Traitor to Memory Page 9