The Betrayals

by Bridget Collins

  It’s as good a spot as any. He sits down. The desk has paper in one drawer, pen and ink in another. He wipes the leather with his sleeve until it gleams, sets the blank paper out and lays the pen neatly beside it. He rests his chin on his fist and looks down at the page. It’s very empty.

  The theme of the Bridges of Königsberg stutters into life. It’s so loud he looks round, ready to complain, before he understands that it’s inside his head. It has a reedy, whining timbre to it that makes his jaw hurt.

  He gets to his feet again. He rattles the change in his pocket. Enough for a train ticket to somewhere else. Anywhere else.

  But if the Party heard he’d escaped … Maybe they’re still watching him, somehow. Any one of the servants could be a spy – or an archivist, a scholar, a Magister … The back of his neck prickles. There have been too many accidents: a car crash, the Minister for Business and his mistress; another minister dragged from an icy river after rumours that he was going to defect; a journalist found in a ditch with a smashed skull. He remembers the man who was watching him, on the path to Montverre, the day he arrived; he shuts his eyes and tries to recall whether there was the tell-tale bulge of a weapon in his jacket. No. Yes. Perhaps it’s his imagination. But his mouth is dry. The Bridges of Königsberg mocks him in 7/4 time. He can’t leave.

  And since he’s here, he might as well do something. Read a game. Make notes. It doesn’t matter what. Blindly he strides to the card index, opens a drawer at random and stares at the rank of dog-eared cards, packed tight. He pulls one out and forces himself to focus. It’s handwritten, in a thin looping script that has faded almost to invisibility. CORNIER, Gaultier. M. Corporeum MV. (1816), sch. MV (mat. 1801) … He replaces it without reading any more. There must be centuries of names, here, most of them unknown; and every one has a file somewhere. He’d never realised the archive held so much material. He glances up, imagining the ceiling joists bowing under the weight. How much of it will ever be read? Then, before he admits to himself what he’s looking for, he slides out a different drawer. MAB-MAS.

  MARTIN, Léonard. Sch. MV. (mat.1926) Gold Medallist. Notable games: Reflections (GM, 1.1927. 2.17.1). Other games: 2.1926.17.1.1. (Danse Macabre, c. A.C. de Courcy), 2.1926.17.1.2 (Prelude, F.G. 2.I). Papers: 2.1926.17.2, 2.1926.17.3.

  It’s like looking at his own tombstone.

  He turns the card over, checking for a thumbprint or a bent corner where someone has jammed it carelessly back into its place. But it’s pristine, neat and white, every edge sharp. No one but the archivist has ever touched it. Ten years, and not one glance … Deliberately he twists the edge until a deep crease spreads like a root across the typed numbers. Then he slips it back between MARTIN, Lazare and MARSH, Philip, and shuts the drawer with a bang.

  He stands still for a long breath; surely he hasn’t come here to moon over his own games, like an old woman brooding on aged billets-doux … But it’s one way to distract himself. Section 2 is at the far end of the room, where the glass-fronted cabinets of Midsummer Games and Layman’s Prizes and Gold Medals give way to shelf after shelf of bare foolscap files, crammed so tightly he can’t read the labels. He turns left into a little windowless alcove, counting back the years. He pulls a folder out to see the whole number, but it’s 2.1926.11.1.3 (FALLON, Emile, The Mask of Tragedy), and the next one he chooses is 2.1926.16.3.3 (LANTZ, Friedrich, Final Exams). For a fleeting moment he’s tempted to see what idiocies earned Freddie his third – was it a third, or a lower second? – in his Finals, but even as he’s wondering he replaces it and moves on. And with a jolt, as if he never truly believed it would be there, he stares at his own name. MARTIN, Léonard, c. DE COURCY, Aimé Carfax, Danse Macabre.

  The Danse Macabre. His throat tightens. He has never reread it. He burnt his old games – and his notes, textbooks, everything – after his final exams; this must be the only copy in the world. Or, no, one of two; it’ll be filed under Carfax’s name as well. There are moves he can still remember: the chime of a bell, the swell of a melody, the algorithm dying while the breathless tune went on … But time has broken the threads which held it together. In his head it’s in fragments: the clicking of dancing bones, flowers and rigor mortis and worms. A feast in a catacomb. A poet being painted in his shroud.

  The thought of it fills him with contempt, and something else, an elusive unease that flickers away if he tries to identify it. It was clever, he can remember that – overflowing with ideas, baroque with excess, like a body teeming with rot. English revenge tragedy, Ars Mori, lullabies, superstitions. And Carfax’s melody, that brilliant jaunty allegro that made you consider the human body, the echoes and hollows of it. And the maths that Léo discussed without ever admitting that he didn’t entirely understand it. Words, images, abstractions. A dark tapestry. Yes, it was clever. But what did any of it have to do with death? Not a scythe and a skull, but – death?

  He raises his head and sees, not the library shelves, but Carfax at his desk, chewing his pen, oblivious to the black stain on his lower lip. Carfax lost in a problem, staring at nothing, muttering, ‘I like your variation but it’s not quite right …’ Or writing furiously, so absorbed he didn’t hear the clock strike; or adding diacritics to Léo’s notes with a flourish, as if every one was a plucked string. Carfax, whom he could happily have strangled, or thought he could.

  Carfax, who killed himself six months later.

  Léo sinks down until he’s crouching, his head bowed. He closes his eyes. He’s here, now. He’s not stumbling to a halt in the scholars’ corridor, to stare through the half-open door of Carfax’s cell at the empty desk and stripped bed; he’s not in the Great Hall, frozen in his seat while the Magister Scholarium clears his throat and says, ‘I’m afraid, gentlemen, I have some very bad news.’ He’s not even in his first government office, opening a police report with clumsy fingers while his private secretary murmurs mutinously about interdepartmental relations. The deceased, a young man of twenty-two … No foul play is suspected … It was a long time ago. It’s over.

  If Léo hadn’t … but he won’t let himself finish that sentence. It wasn’t his fault. It couldn’t have been. No one ever said it was his fault. Even if they’d known … if someone, anyone knew—

  He slaps his own face, hard. It shocks him; it’s the gesture of a madman, or one of the Party’s political prisoners who’ve been in solitary for too long. He’s a grown man; what is he doing, losing control like this, grovelling on the floor like a child? He drags himself to his feet, fumbling with his tie and his cuffs, as if he’s being watched. He wipes his face on his sleeve.

  Carfax killed himself. He chose to. His mind gave way. That’s what it said in the police report: while the balance of his mind was disturbed. It was nothing to do with anyone else – with any of it, with Léo or Montverre or even the grand jeu. Carfax was a de Courcy, what did they expect? His father drank himself to an early grave, his grandfather was the Lunatic of London Library … It was almost bound to happen, sooner or later. They were lucky he didn’t murder the rest of the class in their beds … But even to himself, he sounds like a politician under attack, with the shrill slippery tone of a minister caught embezzling public funds; and abruptly he’s filled with an enormous weariness. It doesn’t matter. Carfax is dead, long dead. There are no amends to be made.

  The clock strikes, muffled by distance. Faintly there’s the sound of voices crossing the courtyard, yelling and laughing as the scholars sprint through the rain to the doorway of the Square Tower.

  He slides the Danse Macabre off the shelf and flips the folder open. He is holding himself steady for the sight of Carfax’s handwriting alongside his own. He can remember pushing his half-complete fair copy across the desk, gesturing to the nodes of maths and music. ‘Fill in the Artemonian, will you? Since you’re so good at it.’ And Carfax giving that wry sideways nod, taking the paper without a word, as if it went without saying that Léo needed his help. But the folder is slimmer than he expects, and the sheet on top isn’t
the cover sheet of the Danse Macabre itself but the Magisters’ Remarks. While somewhat over-elaborate, Danse Macabre shows an unusual mastery of … exuberance which is paradoxical but fitting … in the future we suggest cultivating restraint … He slides the papers out and flips through. Behind the Remarks are his rough notes – yes, he remembers now, he sketched out new ones the night before the game had to be handed in, scribbling frantically, because his real roughs were covered in obscenities and stupid jokes, he can still feel his arm aching … And then he’s got to the end of the pile, and the folder is empty. There’s nothing else. The game itself is missing.

  He flicks through again, to check. It’s gone. So much for the archives. He pulls out the next couple of folders (MARTIN, Léonard, Prelude, and MARTIN, Léonard, Final Exams) to see if it’s been put in one of those by mistake: but it isn’t there, either. He hesitates. When he burnt his notes he never wanted to see or play or remember the grand jeu again – any grand jeu, but especially his own. He can still remember the fierce pleasure of dumping the canvas suitcase of books into the brazier at his father’s scrapyard, and watching the fire devour it. It was late at night, the summer after he graduated, and the sparks floated up like flags and fireworks into the hot dark. Behind him, reclaimed statues bent their heads together as if they’d moved while he wasn’t looking; opposite, windows were stacked like blind eyes, reflecting the flames. He could taste soot and sweat – and yes, salt, perhaps he was crying, because he’d brought a bottle of brandy with him in the taxi and he was a mess, swearing and yelling into the fractured echoes. His voice bounced back from piles of bricks and broken fountains. That was the real world, where even houses died and were ripped apart; the grand jeu was a gigantic, empty charade. He’d got through his Finals, putting in a lustreless, competent performance that disappointed everyone except himself, and now he was free. Three weeks later the head of the office where he was working came to him and asked if he’d ever met the Old Man; a month later he’d joined the Party. And then … But the point is, the point is – that he burnt his notes. He didn’t hesitate when he threw them into the fire – not for his own games, and not even when he found the Tempest at the bottom of the pile, Carfax’s handwriting as familiar as the smell of his own sweat. He didn’t care if they were the last copies; he would have been glad to think they were. So to be bothered now – to flick back and forth through the file, as if he could conjure the Danse Macabre back into existence – is absurd. Why does he suddenly yearn to see it? What’s he going to do, check the diacritics?

  A second later he remembers, with the same sort of jerk as when he makes an idiotic mistake in a report, or trips drunkenly on a kerb, that it’s a joint game: so it will be filed under Carfax’s name, too, with Carfax’s rough notes and the Magisters’ Remarks. There’s no need to be histrionic. Some fool has probably put both copies into the same folder. He slides his finger back along the shelf. 2.1926.4, 2.1926.5 … Yes. DE COURCY, Aimé Carfax, c. MARTIN Léonard, Danse Macabre. His stomach twists a little. He tastes ersatz coffee on the back of his tongue.

  But this file is empty too. Or, rather, it has two sheets of Magisters’ Remarks, and nothing else. Not even Carfax’s roughs. They were beautiful in their way, strong-boned and intricate, as if all his ideas came out fully formed; Léo could swear he remembers Carfax handing them in with his fair copy, his ironic murmur as they left Magister Holt’s office together, ‘Alea iacta est …’ Now he stares at the Magisters’ Remarks, but although phrases rise to the surface he hardly sees them. A new freedom … departure from classical simplicity … energy, a sort of serious hilarity … But where on earth is the game itself? Automatically he reaches for the next folder along. It’s JANSEN, Pierre, Circles and Triangles. He flips through the files on either side: nothing.

  He goes back to the card index. There is nearly an entire drawer for DE COURCY; a couple of entries run on to five or six cards. But Carfax isn’t there.

  He shuts the drawer with a thud and stands staring into space, frowning.

  He didn’t come to the archives to look at his own games; still less, to pore over Carfax’s. But this … He should check again, or ask an archivist; but he already knows it wouldn’t be any good. Carfax is gone. Wiped out of the archive as if … He thinks, suddenly, of the Party photographs, the early ones, with rows of young men grinning, clustered around the Old Man outside beer houses. Or the picture that was taken after the first election, on the steps of the Capitol. The version that hangs in the Old Man’s office has fewer faces in it than it used to. But Carfax’s games? It doesn’t make sense. And it isn’t the same. It’s only the games, not Carfax himself; his name is still there, the empty files … And what is there in those games that anyone would want to erase? Only the Magisters have access to the archive, and which of them would care?

  He gnaws on a fingernail, tasting soap. Rain runs in columns down the window, splitting and rejoining like some arcane graph. He can’t bear to admit defeat, but what can he do? It’s as though he’s staring at a blank wall, waiting for a door to appear. It doesn’t. And finding Carfax’s games wouldn’t bring him back from the dead. It would make it worse, even. He shuts his eyes, imagining how it would feel to see that handwriting again. Pain, like breathing into a cracked ribcage. A scratched eyeball. Stupid to long for it.

  When he shifts his weight something crackles in his pocket. He pulls out his letters, uncrumples Chryseïs’ bill and folds it neatly into four before throwing it into the nearest wastepaper basket. He opens Mim’s letter and skims it. The usual. He forgets it as soon as he drops it on top of the bill. He opens the Party circular, watching the patterns of water on the windowpane, and glances at it as he leans over to put it in the rubbish too.

  It isn’t a circular. It’s handwritten, and the writing is … Perhaps it is familiar, after all; it sets off an elusive tingle of recognition. Perhaps it’s only because he was thinking about Carfax, and ten years ago – but no. He knows it. Dear Léo … He flips it over to the signature. Yours affectionately, Emile Fallon. He hasn’t seen Emile’s handwriting since – for years. It leaves a strange taste in his mouth. Why is Emile writing to him?

  … In a way I envy you. The Ministry has never been so dull. I’m contemplating a change, maybe to the Ministry for Culture – but don’t worry, I have no intention of stepping into your old job. You’re too much to live up to, as Dettler is fast finding out. Think he must have been blinded by the office and the pretty secretary (she really is, isn’t she?) and didn’t realise there was any responsibility attached. Only a matter of time before he goes, I imagine.

  Funny how your name still comes up in conversation. I do my best to mention you when I can, of course; otherwise people forget so quickly. Out of sight, out of mind. How are you getting on at Montverre? I’d be fascinated to hear what you make of the place now. I’ve been told the atmosphere has changed a lot. Do be careful, won’t you? Since the Arts budget was cut, I expect the place will be starting to crumble. You don’t want to slip on the stairs.

  Oh, and if you need anything, let me know. Books, music, magazines, and so on. Anything I can do to help. You can pay me back when you’re out of exile …

  Léo clenches his jaw, folds the letter and puts his hand over it. He can almost feel the words crawling under his palm like ants. It seems chatty, but it isn’t, of course.

  The doctored photograph in the Old Man’s office flashes again into his head, but this time the absences are sharper, more glaring. Will his own face disappear from the front row? Has it already? First his face from a picture, then his name from the records, his body … He looks down and sees that he’s gripping the edge of the desk, fingers splayed. He’s getting morbid; it’s the solitude, the boredom, this bloody place … The Bridges of Königsberg rings in his ears like tinnitus.

  He picks up his pen and unscrews the cap. He’s trying not to think; trying not to despise himself for his own cowardice. He finds a piece of paper.

  My dear Emile, he writes. Thank
you so much for your letter.

  10

  Fourth week of Serotine Term

  (lost count of the days)

  I know, I haven’t written for ages. I skipped Factorum this afternoon to catch up on sleep, which is why I have the energy to write this. I shouldn’t, really, I have a past paper to do for tomorrow (‘To what extent did the Pythagorean School of the sixth century BCE prefigure the modern study of the grand jeu?’) but the thought of it makes me want to bash my head against the wall. It’ll only get harder and harder the later I leave it, so obviously I’m procrastinating.

  The joint game, though, is coming along. At least I think it is. Don’t get me wrong, I still think Carfax is an arrogant toad. We spent a whole evening last week bickering about our theme: he wanted something mathematical that we could use to explore other ideas (i.e. classical structure, utterly static and boring – imagine the offspring of an encyclopaedia and an abacus) and I wanted something bigger, more ambitious, which made him screw up his face like I’d proposed jumping off the roof of the Square Tower. I pushed my ideas about dreams and storms, but he refused point-blank. He kept saying, ‘We have to start with something true, something real,’ and I kept saying, ‘Don’t be so bloody difficult, Carfax, it’s all real, reality is real.’ We got stuck like that for ages, as if the wind had changed mid-conversation, until suddenly for no reason he raised his hand to shut me up. I nearly lost my temper then. He scribbled something on a bit of paper and pushed it towards me. I swear if it had been in Artemonian I would’ve punched him, and risked being expelled for it, but it was maths.