A Traitor to Memory

by Elizabeth George

  Yes, I'm afraid to be enclosed and I see how that relates to relationships, Dr. Rose. I'm afraid of being suffocated by someone, which fear in and of itself indicates a larger fear of being intimate with a woman. With anyone, for that matter. But this is hardly news to me. I've had years to consider how and why and at what point my affair with Beth fell completely apart, and believe me I've had plenty of opportunities to dwell on my lack of response to Libby. So if I know and admit my fears and take them out into the sunlight and shake them like dusters, how can you or Dad or anyone else accuse me of displacing them onto an unhealthy interest in my sister's death, in what led up to my sister's death, in the trial that followed it, and in what happened after that trial?

  I'm not accusing you of anything, Gideon, you say, clasping your hands in your lap. Are you, however, accusing yourself?

  Of what?

  Perhaps you can tell me.

  Oh, I see that game. And I know where you want me to head. It's where everyone wants me to head, everyone save Libby, that is. You want me to head to the music, Dr. Rose, to talk about the music, to delve into the music.

  Only if that's where you want to go, you say.

  And if I don't want to go there?

  We might talk about why.

  You see? You're trying to trick me. If you can get me to admit …

  What? you ask when I hesitate, and your voice is as soft as goose down. Stay within the fear, you tell me. Fear is only a feeling; it is not a fact.

  But the fact is that I cannot play. And the fear is of the music.

  All music?

  Oh, you know the answer to that, Dr. Rose. You know it's fear of one piece in particular. You know how The Archduke haunts my life. And you know that once Beth suggested it as our performance piece, I could not refuse. Because it was Beth who made the suggestion, not Sherrill. Had it been Sherrill, I could have tossed out a “Choose something else,” without a thought, because even though Sherrill has no jinx himself and consequently might have questioned my rejection of The Archduke, the fact is that Sherrill's talent is such that for him to make the shift from one piece to another is so simple that even questioning that shift would have taken more energy than he'd have wished to expend on the matter. But Beth is not like Sherrill, Dr. Rose, either in talent or in laissez-faire. Beth had already prepared The Archduke, so Beth would have questioned. And questioning, she may have connected my failure to play The Archduke with that other more significant failure of mine with which she was once all too familiar. So I didn't ask for a different choice of music. I decided to confront the jinx head-on. And put to the test of that confrontation, I failed.

  Before that? you ask.

  Before what?

  Before the performance at Wigmore Hall. You must have rehearsed.

  We did. Of course.

  And you played it then?

  We would hardly have mounted a public concert of three instruments had one of them—

  And you played it without difficulty then? During rehearsal?

  I've never played it without difficulty, Dr. Rose. Either in private or in rehearsal, I've never played it without a bout of nerves, of burning in the gut, of pounding in the head, of sickness that makes me cling to the toilet for an hour first, and all that and I'm not even performing it publicly.

  So what about the Wigmore night? you ask me. Did you have that same reaction to The Archduke before Wigmore Hall?

  And I hesitate.

  I see how your eyes spark with interest at my hesitation: evaluating, deciding, choosing whether to press forward now or to wait and let my realisations and admissions come when they will.

  Because I did not suffer before that performance.

  And I haven't considered that fact before now.

  26 October

  I've been to Cheltenham. Sarah-Jane Beckett is Sarah-Jane Hamilton now and has been Hamilton for the last twelve years. She's not much changed physically since she was my teacher: She's put on a bit of weight but she's still not developed breasts, and her hair is as red as it was when we lived in the same household. It's got a different style—she wears it held off her face with a hair band—but it's straight as a poker, as it always was.

  The first thing I noticed that's different about her now was her manner of dress. She's apparently moved away from the sorts of dresses she wore as my teacher—which were heavily given to floppy collars and lace, as I recall—and she's advanced to skirts, twinsets, and pearls. The second thing I noticed that's different was her fingernails, which are no longer bitten to the quick with chewed-up cuticles but are instead long and bright with polish, the better to show off a sapphire and diamond ring that's the size of a small African nation. I noticed her fingernails because whilst we were together, she made a great job of waving her hands when she spoke, as if she wanted me to see how far she'd advanced in good fortune.

  The means to her good fortune wasn't at home when I arrived in Cheltenham. Sarah-Jane was in the front garden of their house—which is in a very smart neighbourhood where Mercedes-Benzes and Range Rovers appear to be the vehicles of choice—and she was filling an enormous bird feeder with seed, standing on a three-step ladder and pouring from a weighty bag. I didn't want to startle her, so I said nothing till she was off the steps and rearranging her twinset as well as patting her chest to make sure the pearls were still in place. That was when I called her name, and after she greeted me with surprise and pleasure, she told me that Perry—husband and provider of largesse—was away on business in Manchester and would be disappointed to discover upon his return that he'd missed my visit.

  “He's heard enough about you over the years,” she said. “But I expect he's never believed that I actually know you.” And here she trilled a little laugh that made me distinctly uncomfortable, although I could not tell you why except to say that laughs like that never sound genuine to me. She said, “Come in. Come in. Will you have coffee? Tea? A drink?”

  She led the way into the house where everything was so tasteful that only an interior decorator could have managed it: just the right furniture, just the right colours, just the right objets d'art, subtle lighting designed to flatter, and a touch of homeliness in the careful selection of family photographs. She snatched up one on her way to make our coffee and she thrust it at me. “Perry,” she said. “His girls and ours. They're with their mother most of the time. We have them every other weekend. Alternate holidays and half terms. The modern British family, you know.” Again that laugh, and she disappeared behind a swinging door through which, I assumed, the kitchen lay.

  Alone, I found myself looking at the family in a studio portrait. The absent but seated Perry was surrounded by five women: his wife sitting next to him, two older daughters behind him with one hand each upon his shoulders, one smaller girl leaning into Sarah-Jane, and the last—smaller still—upon Perry's knee. He had that look of satisfaction that I can only assume comes when a man successfully creates offspring. The older girls looked bored to tears, the younger girls looked winsome, and Sarah-Jane looked excessively pleased.

  She popped back out of the kitchen as I was replacing the picture on the table from which she'd fetched it. She said, “Step-mothering is rather like teaching: It's a case of constantly encouraging without ever being actually free to say what one really thinks. And always there are the parents to contend with, in this case their mother. She drinks, I'm afraid.”

  “Is that how it was with me?”

  “Good heavens, your mother didn't drink.”

  “I meant the rest: not being able to say what you think.”

  “One learns diplomacy,” she replied. “This is my Angelique.” She indicated the child on Perry's knee. “And this is Anastasia. She has something of a talent for music herself.”

  I waited for her to identify the older girls. When she did not, I asked the obligatory question about Anastasia's choice of instrument. Harp, I was told. Suitable, I thought. Sarah-Jane had always possessed an air of the Regency about her, as if she'd so
mehow been a displaced person from a Jane Austen novel, more fitted for a life of writing letters, doing lacework, and creating inoffensive water colours than for the scramble and dash of existence enjoyed by women today. I couldn't envisage Sarah-Jane Beckett Hamilton jogging through Regent's Park with a mobile phone pressed to her ear any more than I could see her fighting fires, mining coal, or crewing a yacht in the Fastnet Race. So steering her eldest natural daughter towards the harp rather than something like the electric guitar was a logical act of parental guidance on her part, and I had no doubt she'd employed it deftly once the girl had decided she wanted to play an instrument.

  “Of course, she's no match for you,” Sarah-Jane said, presenting me with another photograph, this one of Anastasia at her harp, arms raised gracefully so that her hands—stubby, unfortunately, like her mother's—could pluck the strings. “But she does well enough. I hope you'll hear her sometime. When you have the time, naturally.” And she trilled her gay little laugh again. “I do so wish Perry were here to meet you, Gideon. Are you in town for a concert?”

  I told her that I wasn't there for a concert but I didn't add the rest. She'd obviously not seen any accounts of the incident in Wigmore Hall, and the less I had to delve into that with Sarah-Jane, the better I would feel about it. Instead, I told her that I was hoping to talk to her about my sister's death and the trial that followed her death.

  She said, “Ah. Yes. I see.” And she sat on a plump sofa the colour of newly cut grass and motioned me over to an armchair whose fabric featured a muted autumn hunting scene with dogs and deer.

  I waited for the logical questions to come. Why? Why now? Why dig up all that is past, Gideon? But they did not come, which I found curious. Instead, Sarah-Jane composed herself, her legs crossed at the ankles, her hands lying one on top of the other—with the sapphired one on top—and her expression perfectly attentive and not the least guarded, as I'd come to expect.

  “What is it you'd like to know?” she asked.

  “Anything you can tell me. About Katja Wolff, mainly. About what she was like, what living in the same house with her was like.”

  “Yes. Of course.” Sarah-Jane sat quietly, gathering her thoughts. Finally, she began by saying, “Well, it was obvious from the first that she didn't belong in the position as your sister's nanny. It was a mistake for your parents to employ her, but they didn't see that before it was too late.”

  “I've been told she was fond of Sonia.”

  “Oh, fond of her, yes. It was very easy to be fond of Sonia. She was a fragile little thing and she was fractious—well, what child wouldn't be, in that condition?—but she was terribly sweet and quite precious after all, and who finds it impossible to be fond of a baby? But she had other things on her mind, did Katja, and they got in the way of her devotion to Sonia. And devotion is what's required with children, Gideon. Fondness won't get you through the first bout of willfulness or tears.”

  “What sort of things?”

  “She wasn't serious about childcare. It was a means to an end for her. She wanted to be a fashion designer—although God only knows why, considering the bizarre ensembles she put together for herself—and she intended to stay in your parents' employ only as long as it took her to save the money she needed for … for wherever it was that she intended to be trained. So there was that.”

  “What else?”

  “Celebrity.”

  “She wanted fame?”

  “She had fame already: The Girl Who Made It Over the Berlin Wall As Her Lover Died in Her Arms.”

  “In her arms?”

  “Hmm. Yes. That's how she told the tale. She had a scrapbook, mind you, of all the interviews she'd done with newspapers and magazines from round the world after that escape, and to hear her tell the story was to be made to believe that she'd designed and inflated the balloon on her own, which I seriously doubt was the case. I always said it was a lucky turn of events that made her the only survivor of that escape. Had the boy lived—and what was his name? Georg? Klaus?—I've little doubt he would have told an entirely different tale about whose idea it was and who did the work. So she came to England with her head enlarged, and it got larger during the year she spent at the Convent of the Immaculate Conception. More interviews, lunch with the Lord Mayor, a private audience at Buckingham Palace. She was ill-prepared psychologically to fade into the woodwork as your sister's nanny. And as for being physically and mentally prepared for what she was going to have to face—not to mention psychologically suited … She wasn't. Not in the least.”

  “So she was destined to fail,” I remarked quietly, and I must have sounded contemplative because Sarah-Jane appeared to reach a conclusion about what I was thinking, and she hastened to make an adjustment.

  “I don't mean to imply that your parents hired her because she was ill-prepared, Gideon. That wouldn't be an accurate assessment of the situation at all. And it might even go so far as to suggest that … Well, never mind. No.”

  “Yet it was obvious right off that she couldn't handle the responsibility?”

  “Only if you were looking was it obvious,” she replied. “And certainly, you and I were thrown together with Katja and the baby more than anyone else, so we could see and hear … And we were in the house—the four of us—far more than your parents, both of whom worked. So we saw more. Or at least I did.”

  “What about my grandparents? Where were they?”

  “It's true that your granddad hung about a lot. He rather fancied Katja, so he kept her under his eye. But he wasn't actually altogether there, was he, if you understand my meaning? So he could hardly be prepared to report on anything irregular that he saw.”

  “Irregular?”

  “Sonia's crying going unattended to. Katja's absences from the house when the baby was having a nap in the middle of the day. Telephone conversations during your sister's mealtimes. A general impatience with the baby when she was difficult. Those sorts of things that are questionable and disturbing while not being out-and-out grossly negligent.”

  “Did you tell anyone?”

  “Indeed. I told your mother.”

  “What about Dad?”

  Sarah-Jane gave a little bounce on the sofa. She said, “The coffee! I'd quite forgotten …” And she excused herself and hurried from the room.

  What about Dad? The room was so quiet, and the neighbourhood outside was so quiet, that my question seemed to bounce off the walls like an echo in a canyon. What about Dad?

  I got up from my chair and went to one of the two display cabinets that stood on either side of the fireplace. I examined its contents: four shelves filled with antique dolls of all shapes and sizes, representing everything from infants to adults, all of them dressed in period clothes, perhaps from the period during which the dolls themselves had been manufactured. I know nothing of dolls, so I had no idea what I was looking at, but I could tell that the collection was impressive: by the numbers, the quality of the dress, and the condition of the toys themselves, which was pristine. Some of them looked as if they'd never actually been handled by a child, and I wondered if Sarah-Jane's own daughters or step-daughters had ever stood before this case or the other, gazing inside wistfully at what they could never themselves possess.

  I then noted that the walls of the room displayed a collection of water colours that appeared to have been painted by the same artist. These depicted houses, bridges, castles, automobiles, and even buses, and when I peered at the name penciled into the right corner of two of them, I saw SJBeckett in a sloping script. I stood back and studied them. I hadn't recalled Sarah-Jane doing any painting when she'd been my teacher, and I could see from her work that she had a talent for detailed accuracy if not the confidence merely to let a stroke of paint read as an intended image.

  “Ah. You've discovered my secret.” She spoke from the doorway, where she had paused, bearing a large tray on which she'd assembled an ornate silver coffee pot with a matching sugar bowl and cream jug. She'd accompanied this with porcelai
n coffee cups, spoons, and a plate of ginger biscuits that were, she confided, “Homemade, just this morning.” Unaccountably, I found myself wondering how Libby would react to all this: to the dolls, to the water colours, to the coffee presentation, to Sarah-Jane Beckett Hamilton herself, and most of all to what she had said so far and what she had avoided saying.

  “I'm afraid I'm an utter failure with people,” she said. “With animals as well. With anything living, when it comes to that, except trees. I can do trees. Flowers, on the other hand, defeat me entirely.”

  For a moment, I wondered what she was talking about. But then I saw that she meant her paintings and I made a suitable remark about the fine quality of her work.

  “Flatterer,” she laughed.

  On a coffee table, she set down the tray and did the pouring. She said, “I was less than charitable about Katja's manner of dress just now. I do that sometimes. You must forgive me. I spend so much time alone—Perry travels, as I've said, and the girls are at school, of course—that I forget to monitor my tongue on the odd occasion when someone comes to call. What I should have said was that she had no experience with fashion or colour or design, having grown up in East Germany. And what would one actually expect from someone from an eastern bloc country, haute couture? So it was admirable, really, that she even had the ambition to go to college and learn fashion design. It was just unfortunate—it was tragic, really—that she brought both her dreams and her inexperience with children into your parents' home. That was a deadly combination. Sugar? Milk?”

  I took the cup from her. I was not about to be sidetracked into a discussion of Katja Wolff 's clothes. I said, “Did Dad know that she was derelict in her duties towards Sonia?”

  Sarah-Jane took up her own cup and stirred the coffee although she'd put nothing in it to require stirring. “Your mother would have told him, naturally.”

  “But you didn't.”

  “Having reported to one parent, I didn't think it would be necessary to report it to the other. And your mother was more often in the house, Gideon. Your father was rarely about, as he had more than one job, as you may recall. Have a biscuit. Do you still have a fondness for sweets? How funny. I've just recalled that Katja had a real passion for them. For chocolates, especially. Well, I suppose that comes of growing up in an eastern bloc country as well. Deprivation.”