A Traitor to Memory

by Elizabeth George

  Abnormality. Abnormality leading to crisis. That's it, Dr. Rose. We have lurched from crisis to crisis with my sister. Mother weeps at Mass in the morning, and Sister Cecilia knows that she needs help. Not only does she need help to cope with the fact that she has given birth to a child who is different, imperfect, unusual, outstanding, or whatever else you want to call her, but she also needs practical help in the caring for her. Because despite the presence of one child a prodigy and the other child handicapped by a defect of birth, life must continue, which means Gran must still be in attendance on Granddad, Dad must have two jobs as before, and if I'm to continue with the violin, Mother must work as well.

  The logical expense to cut is the violin and everything associated with it: release Raphael Robson from his duties, sack Sarah-Jane Beckett as my constant teacher, and send me to day school. With the enormous amount of money saved from these simple and expedient economies, Mother can stay at home with Sonia, see to her growing needs, and nurse her through the health traumas that come up continually.

  But making this change is unthinkable to everyone, because at six and a half years old, I have already made my public debut, and to deny the world the gift of my music seems an act of egregious pettiness. Doing this, however, has certainly been mooted among my parents and grandparents. Yes. I remember now. Mother and Dad are having a discussion in the drawing room and Granddad enters into it vociferously. “Boy's a genius, a God damn genius,” he bellows at them. And Gran is there, because I hear her anxious “Jack, Jack,” and I picture her scurrying to the stereo and throwing on a Paganini for the savage breast residing directly beneath Granddad's flannel shirt. “He's already giving concerts, God damn it,” Granddad rages. “You'll cut him off from that over my dead body. So for once in your life—just for flaming once, Dick—will you please make the right decision?”

  Neither Raphael nor Sarah-Jane is involved in this debate. Their futures hang in the balance along with my own, but they have as much say in what will happen as I do, which is none at all. The dispute goes on for hours and days during my mother's convalescence from her pregnancy, and both the dispute and the difficulties of my mother's recovery are exacerbated by the health crises that Sonia experiences.

  The baby's been taken to the doctor … to hospital … to Casualty. There is all round us a pervasive sense of tension, urgency, and fear that has never been in the house before. People are stretched to the breaking point with anxiety. Always the question hangs in the air, What will happen next?

  Crises. People are gone a great deal of the time. There are gaps in which no one seems at home at all. Just Raphael and I. Or Sarah-Jane and I. While everyone else is with Sonia.

  Why? you ask. What sort of crises did Sonia have?

  I can only remember He says he'll meet us at hospital. Gideon, go to your room, and the sound of Sonia's weak crying, and I can hear that crying as it fades away when they carry her downstairs and out into the night.

  I go to her room, which is next to mine. This is the nursery. A light has been left on, and there's some sort of machine next to her cot and straps that keep her hooked onto it while she sleeps. There is a chest of drawers with a carousel lamp on it, the same carousel lamp that I can remember watching turn round and round as I lay in my own cot, this very same cot. And I see the marks where I bit the railing, and I see the Noah's Ark transfers that I used to stare at. And I climb into the cot though I am six and a half years old and I curl up there and wait for what will happen.

  What does happen?

  In time, they return, as they always do, with medicine, with the name of a doctor they're to see in the morning, with a behavioural prescription or a cutting-edge diet that they're to adhere to. Sometimes they have Sonia with them. Sometimes she's being kept in hospital.

  Which is why my mother weeps at Mass. And yes, this is what she and Sister Cecilia must be talking about when we go with her into the convent that day that I overturn the bookshelf and break the statue of the Virgin. She murmurs mostly, this nun, and I assume it's to comfort my mother, who must feel … what? Guilt because she's given birth to a child who's suffering one illness after the next, anxiety because the what can happen next is always loitering outside her front door, anger at the inequities of life, and sheer exhaustion from trying to cope.

  Out of all this fertile turbulent soil must grow the idea of hiring a nanny. A nanny could be the solution for everyone. Dad could continue his two jobs, Mother could return to work, Raphael and Sarah-Jane could remain with me, and the nanny could help to care for Sonia. James the Lodger would be there to bring in extra funds, and perhaps another lodger could be accommodated. So Katja Wolff comes to us. As things turn out, she isn't a trained nanny, however. She hasn't been to a specialised course or a college to earn a certificate in child care. But she is educated and she is helpful, affectionate, grateful, and—it must be said—affordable. She loves children, and she needs the job. And the Davies family need help.

  6 October

  I went to see Dad that same evening. If anyone holds the anamnestic key I'm trying to find, it's going to be my father.

  I found him at Jill's flat, on the front steps of the building, in fact. The two of them were in the midst of one of those polite but tense arguments that loving couples have when they each have reasonable desires that have come into conflict. This one apparently involved whether Jill—as she approached her due date—was still going to drive herself round London.

  Dad was saying, “That's dangerous and irresponsible. It's a wreck, that car. For God's sake, I'll send a taxi round for you. I'll drive you myself.”

  And Jill was saying, “Would you stop treating me like a piece of Lalique? I can't even breathe when you're like this.”

  She began to go inside the building, but he took her by the arm. He said, “Darling. Please,” and I could tell how afraid for her he was.

  I understood. My father hadn't been blessed with luck in his children. Virginia, dead. Sonia, dead. Two out of three were not the sort of odds to give a man peace of mind.

  To her credit, Jill seemed to recognise this as well. She said, more quietly, “You're being silly,” but I think there was a part of her that appreciated the degree to which Dad was solicitous for her well-being. And then she saw me standing on the pavement, hesitating between skulking off and striding forward with a hearty hello that attempted to demonstrate a level of bonhomie that I did not feel. She said, “Hullo. Here's Gideon, darling,” and Dad swung round, releasing her arm, which freed her to unlock the front door and usher both of us up to her flat.

  Jill's flat is everywhere modern in a period building that was gutted several years ago by a clever developer who completely updated it within. It's all fitted carpets, copper pans hanging from the kitchen ceiling, gleaming mod cons that actually work, and paintings that look as if they intend to slide off their canvases and do something questionable on the floor. It is, in short, perfectly Jill. I wonder how my father is going to cope with her decorating preferences when at last they begin to cohabit. Not that they're not already as good as cohabiting. My father's hovering over Jill is becoming somewhat obsessive.

  With his paranoia about the new baby rising daily, I wondered if I should broach the subject of Sonia with him. My body told me not: I found that my head had begun a vague aching, and my stomach burned, but it burned in a way that told me I could not attribute it to anything other than nerves.

  Jill said, “I've got some work to do, so I'll leave you two to your own devices. I don't expect you've come to visit me, have you?”

  I suppose I should have considered dropping in to see Jill now and again, especially as she is to be my step-mother, odd though the proposition seems. But I could tell by the way she asked her question that she was merely sorting out information and not implying anything the way so many women do.

  I said, “There are one or two things …”

  She said, “I expect there are. I'll be in the study,” and she went in that direction.

/>   When Dad and I were alone, we repaired to the kitchen. Dad moved Jill's impressive coffee maker into the centre of the work top and fetched some espresso beans, which he poured inside. The coffee maker—like the flat itself—is quintessentially Jill. It's an amazing machine with a capability of producing one fresh cup of anything in less than a minute: coffee, cappuccino, espresso, latte. It steams milk and boils water and I expect it would do the washing up, the laundry, and the hoovering if you programmed it thus. Dad used to scoff at the appliance, but I noticed that he was using it like a pro.

  He took out two demitasse cups and their saucers. From a bowl near the sink, he found a lemon. He was searching for the proper knife with which to carve us each a curl of the peel when I spoke.

  “Dad, I've seen a picture of Sonia. I mean a better picture than the one you showed me. A newspaper picture from the time of the trial.”

  He turned a dial on the coffee machine, replaced its single spout with a double one that he took from a drawer, and put the two small cups in position. He pushed a button. A gentle whirring ensued. He gave his attention to the lemon again, making a curving sliver that would have done credit to a chef at the Savoy. “I see,” was all he said. He began a second slice.

  “Why did no one tell me about it?” I asked.

  “About what?”

  “You know. The trial. How Sonia died. Everything. Why didn't we talk about it?”

  He shook his head. He had finished the second lemon-peel curl—as perfectly carved as was the first—and when the espresso was done, he plopped a curl in each cup and handed me mine. He said, “Out here?” and cocked his head in the direction of the sitting room off which a terrace overlooked other similar period buildings nearby.

  On a grey day such as this, the terrace didn't promise much comfort. But it did offer the benefit of privacy, which I wanted with Dad, so I followed him out.

  As I suspected, we were completely alone there. The other terraces from the building were deserted. Jill's outdoor furniture was already covered, but Dad removed the plastic sheeting from two of the chairs and we sat. He set his espresso on his knee and zipped his parka. He said, “I didn't keep the newspapers. I didn't look at them. What I wanted more than anything was to forget. I realise that's probably anathema to the current thinking among mental health experts. Aren't we all supposed to wallow in recollection till we reek of the stench? But I don't come from an age when that was fashionable, Gideon. I lived through it—the days and weeks and months of it—and when it was over, I wanted nothing more than to forget it had ever happened.”

  “Is that how Mother felt as well?”

  He lifted his cup. He drank, but he observed me as he did so. “I don't know how your mother felt. We couldn't talk about it. None of us could talk about it. To talk about it meant to relive it, and living through it once was horror enough.”

  “I need to talk about it now.”

  “More of your Dr. Rose's sterling recommendations? Sonia loved the violin, if that's of interest to you. She loved you and the violin, more precisely. She spoke very little—language comes late to a Down's child—but she could say your name.”

  That was like the precise administering of a wound, a delicate but perfectly accurate incision into my heart. I said, “Dad—”

  He cut in. “Never mind. That was low of me.”

  “Why did no one speak of her afterwards? After she … after the trial?” I asked the question but the answer was obvious: We never spoke of anything frightful. Granddad raged like a maniac periodically; he was carted, dragged, led, or carried out into the night or the morning or the heat of the afternoon and he did not return for weeks, and we did not mention the fact at any time. Mother vanished one day, taking with her not only every possession she owned but also every reminder that she had ever been part of the family, and we did not concern ourselves with a discussion of where she might have gone or why. And there I sat on my father's lover's terrace, wondering why we never spoke of Sonia's life or her death when we were and had always been a group of people who spoke of nothing: nothing painful, nothing heartbreaking, nothing horrifying, nothing grievous.

  “We wanted to forget it had happened.”

  “Forget Mother had happened? Forget Sonia herself had happened?”

  He observed me and I saw that opaqueness in his eyes, that expression that had always succeeded so well in defining a territory whose landscape was ice, bitter wind, and endless smoke-coloured sky. “That's unworthy of you,” he said. “I think you know what I'm talking about.”

  “But never to say her name. All those years. To me. Never to say even the words your sister …”

  “There would have been profit in that, you think? You would have gained something had Sonia's murder become part of the daily fabric of our lives. Is that your conclusion?”

  “I just don't understand—”

  He drank down the rest of his espresso and put the cup on the terrace, next to the leg of his chair. His face was as grey as his hair, which swept back from his forehead as my own hair does, with that very same widow's peak in the centre, with those same indentations like fjords on either side. He said, “Your sister was drowned in her bath. She was drowned by a German girl we'd taken into our home.”

  “I know—”

  “Nothing. That's what you know. You know what the papers might have told you but you don't know what it was to be there. You don't know that Sonia was murdered because she was growing progressively more difficult to care for and because the German girl—”

  Katja Wolff, I thought. Why won't he say her name?

  “—was pregnant.”

  Pregnant. The word was a snap of the fingers in front of my face. The word brought me back to my father's world and what he had lived through and what the present circumstances were asking him to live through again. I thought back to the picture of Katja Wolff smiling dreamily up at the camera in the Kensington Square garden with Sonia in her arms. I thought of the picture of her leaving the police station, stick thin and ill-looking with features sharpened by excessive weight loss. Pregnant.

  I murmured, “She didn't look pregnant in the picture,” and I looked away from Dad to one of the other terraces where, I noticed, an Old English sheep dog was watching us curiously. As he saw me take note of him, he rose on his hind legs, front paws on the iron rail that surrounded the terrace. He began to bark. I shivered at the sound. He'd had his vocal cords removed and what remained was a hopeful but pathetic yelp that was air and muscle and mostly cruelty. It made me feel sick.

  Dad said, “What picture?” And then he must have reckoned I was speaking of a photo I'd seen in the newspaper, because he said, “It wouldn't have shown. She was deadly ill at the start of her pregnancy, so she didn't put on weight, she lost it. We noticed first that she'd gone off food, that she didn't look well, and we thought it was a lover's spat of some kind. She and the lodger—”

  “That would've been James.”

  “Yes. James. They were close. Obviously, a hell of a lot closer than we originally assumed. He liked to help her with her English when she had free time. We had no objection to that. Until she came up pregnant.”

  “Then what?”

  “We told her she'd have to go. We weren't running a home for unmarried mothers, and we needed someone whose attention would be kept on Sonia, not on herself: her illness, her difficulty, her condition, whatever you want to call it. We didn't throw her out on the street or even tell her she had to leave at once. But as soon as she was able to find another … situation, job, she would have to go. That would have taken her away from James, though, and she snapped.”

  “Snapped?”

  “Tears, anger, hysteria. She couldn't cope. Not with pregnancy, unremitting illness during pregnancy, looming homelessness, and your sister as well. Sonia was just out of hospital at the time. She needed constant care. The German girl snapped.”

  “I remember.”

  “What?” I could hear the reluctance behind the question
, that conflict between Dad's desire to put an end to a reminiscence that was painful for him and his wish to liberate from a prison of mind the son he loved.

  “Crises. Sonia being carried to the doctor, to hospital, to … I don't know where else.”

  He sank back in his chair and, like me, looked over at the dog who so wanted our attention. He said, “No place for a creature with complicated needs,” and I couldn't tell if he was referring to the animal, to himself, to me, or to my sister. “At first it was her heart. An atrioseptal defect, it was called. It wasn't long—just after her birth—when we knew from her colour and her pulse that there was trouble. So they performed an operation on her and we thought, Right. That's taken care of the problem. But then it was her stomach: duodenal stenosis. Very common among Down's children, we were told. As if her being Down's in the first place was as minor an issue as the poor creature having a wandering eye. More surgery then. After that, imperforate anus. Hmm, we were told, this particular little one appears to be at the farthest extreme of the syndrome. So many problems. Let's see if we can cut her open again. And again. And again. And then give her hearing aids. And bottles of medicine. And of course, we can only hope she'll be happy to have her body invaded and probed and rearranged on a regular basis till we get her sorted out.”