A Traitor to Memory

I lead him to the Peabody House, which is where the music is coming from. And then we're inside, where a lino floor has recently been washed and the air stings our eyes with the smell of bleach.

Up on the first floor, we find the source of the Paganini concerto. One of the bed-sitting rooms is the dwelling place of Miss Rosemary Orr, long retired from the London Philharmonic. She is standing in front of a large wall mirror, and she's got a violin under her chin and a bow in her hand. She isn't playing the Paganini, though. Instead, she's listening to a recording of it with her eyes closed and her bow hand lowered and tears coursing down her cheeks and onto the wood of her instrument.

“She's going to wreck it, Granddad,” I inform my grandfather. And this rouses Miss Orr, who starts and no doubt wonders how an arthritic old gentleman and a runny-nosed boy come to be standing at the door to her room.

But there is no time for her to voice any consternation, for I go to her and take the instrument from her hands. And I begin to play.

Not well, of course, for who would believe that an untrained three-year-old no matter his natural talent could possibly pick up a violin and play Paganini's Concerto in D Major the first time he's heard it? But the raw materials are there within me—the ear, the inherent balance, the passion—and Miss Orr sees this and insists that she be allowed to instruct the precocious child.

So she becomes my first instructor in the violin. And I remain with her until I am four and a half years old, at which time it is decided that a less conventional manner of instruction is required for my talent.

So that is the Gideon Legend, Dr. Rose. Do you know the violin well enough to see where it lapses into fantasy?

We've managed to promulgate the legend by actually calling it a legend, by laughing it off even as it is told. We say, Stuff and nonsense, all of it. But we say that with a suggestive smile. Miss Orr's long dead, so she can't refute the story. And after Miss Orr there was Raphael Robson, who has limited investments to make in the truth.

But here's the truth for you, Dr. Rose, because despite what you may think concerning my reaction to this exercise in which I've agreed to engage, I am interested in telling you the truth.

I am in the garden of Kensington Square that day with a summer play group sponsored by a nearby convent, populated by the infant inhabitants of the square, and directed by three of the college students who live in a hostel behind the convent. We are collected daily from our individual houses by one or another of our three keepers and we are led hand-in-hand into the central garden where, it is hoped and for a nominal fee, we will learn the social skills that are engendered through cooperative play. This will stand us in good stead when we take our places at primary school. Or so the plan is.

The college students occupy us with games, with crafts, and with exercise. And once we are set busily to whatever task they've chosen that day, they—unbeknownst to our parents—repair to that same Greek-temple affair where they chat amongst themselves and smoke cigarettes.

This particular day is earmarked for biking although what passes for biking is actually tricycle riding round the perimeter of the garden. And while I trundle round and round on my tricycle at the tail end of the small pack, a boy like myself—although I don't remember his name—takes out his willie and urinates openly upon the lawn. A crisis ensues, during which the malefactor is marched directly home amid a thorough telling-off.

This is when the music begins, and the two college students who remain after the child has been removed haven't the slightest idea what it is that we're listening to. But I want to go to that sound and I insist with a force so unusual in me that one of the students—it's an Italian girl, I think, because her English isn't good although her heart is big—says that she will help me track it down. And so we do, to the Peabody House where we meet Miss Orr.

She is neither playing, pretending to play, nor weeping when the college girl and I find her in her sitting room. Rather, she is giving a music lesson. She ends every lesson—I learn—by playing a piece of music on her stereo for her student. Today she is playing the Brahms concerto.

Do I like music? she wants to know.

I have no answer. I don't know if I like it, if what I feel is liking or something else. I only know that I want to be able to make those sounds. But I'm shy and say nothing of this, and I hide behind the Italian girl's legs until she clutches my hand and apologises in her broken English and shoos me back to the garden.

And that's the reality.