That pause. If she could stay there for ever, caught in that moment like a fly in a bead of amber, she would. But it’s over almost before she has time to think; and then she’s kissing him, and then it isn’t a grand jeu, nothing like it, it’s a kiss, imprecise and urgent and perfectly itself. She has never felt so human. It’s like kissing him ten years ago, but it’s different, too, of course: he is cleverer, gentler, humbler. At least, he is at first, letting her take control; but as she goes on kissing him – hungry, thirsty, helpless with desire and euphoria – he shifts his position and catches his hands in her hair, pulling until it’s on the edge of pain. Yes, she remembers this. Equals, opponents, rivals, lovers. This is how it was, this is the only way it could be. This is how she has always wanted it. And when he hesitates, drawing back to look at her face, she can see him seeing her. Finally she is visible – herself, her himself, the boy she was and the woman she is now, both and neither and whole. And as Léo sees her she sees him, and she has never encountered anything so beautiful.
‘What is it?’
‘I can’t … I don’t know. I give up.’ What has she become, to be so unmanned by a kiss and a look? A few moments ago she was torn between laughing and crying; now she feels sober and still and joyous, trembling on the brink of something she doesn’t understand. ‘I’m mad. We’re mad.’
‘Obviously.’
‘I must be. I walked out of my own Midsummer Game.’
‘Ssh.’ For a split second she bridles; then he shakes his head at her and gestures towards the door. A knock. They wait, frozen.
‘Magister? Are you there?’
She doesn’t answer. Of course they’ve sent a servant to find her. Léo watches her. She holds her finger to her lips.
Finally she hears footsteps retreating. She breathes silently, once, twice, before she relaxes.
‘They’re looking for you,’ Léo says. ‘Don’t you want to go?’
‘No.’
‘You can’t hide for ever.’
‘I know that.’
He nods. That knock has changed the feeling in the air; he looks older, sadder, as if he’s about to tell her to leave. He says, ‘I’m sorry about your game, I shouldn’t have—’
She takes hold of his arms and kisses him, again. She takes pleasure in cutting him off, in biting his tongue when he tries to go on speaking. He winces and she pushes closer, feeling his bones against hers. She takes hold of his shirt and drags it out of his trousers. Her palms meet the skin of his back. The warmth of it makes her shiver. He catches his breath. But he doesn’t move to take off her gown; perhaps he’s remembering when she pushed him away, ten years ago. She pulls away long enough to tug it over her head. Then, as if she’s given him permission, he tears at her shirt, suddenly urgent.
She’s read about all this. She’s never done it. He pauses, as if he’s overheard her thought.
‘Are we mad enough to do this?’
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Yes.’
36: Léo
The door closes. On the other side of it he hears her footsteps clicking on the stone staircase, growing fainter. He puts his forearm over his eyes to block out the sun. He must look like a madman, flat on his back on the floor, his arm across his face. He can smell the perfume he bought her, the ghost of a burning incense-tree on his skin.
Before she left, she told him to wait half an hour before he followed so that no one would see them emerging together from the library. He didn’t reply, only smiled and checked his watch in an obedient gesture. She nodded – the Magister Ludi back in charge – and left him to it. Now that he comes to think of it, it’s funny she didn’t insist that he left first, instead of leaving him alone in the Biblioteca Ludi. Perhaps she trusts him. The thought brings another bubble of happiness into his throat. How absurd this all is. Someone he loved has come back from the dead. It’s crazy. Everything he thought he knew has turned out to be a practical joke; the world has exploded with sparks and stars and fleshy exuberant flowers as though it’s been touched by a god. Later he’ll be furious with her for her deception – he can feel it already, a cloud gathering on the horizon – but for now it’s all sunshine and springtime, sheer disbelief shot through with gold threads of happiness. Absolution. Ten years of guilt, gone. Now he can begin again. Forget politics, he’ll go back to the grand jeu.
He sits up and starts to fasten his clothes. Twenty minutes to go. He’s lost a cufflink and has to kneel and peer under the desk for a glint of gold. Red-gold with tiny rubies: one of Chryseïs’ rare gifts, presented with such nonchalance he wondered if she’d stolen them from another man’s bedside table. He hooks it out with a ruler, cocooned in a roll of dust. When he gets to his feet his head spins, not unpleasantly; it’s as though he’s had a couple of cocktails. What wouldn’t he give for a Martini and a cigarette? But the craving isn’t unpleasant: it would make this moment perfect, that’s all. He shoves his hands into his pockets and sits on the desk, letting his gaze wander around the room. You could spend a fortnight here, reading continuously, and hardly scratch the surface. Right now he can’t imagine anything better. It’s as if the grand jeu – it was practically his birthright, his first love – has come back to him, at the same time as Carfax. He wants to write a game about resurrection. The phoenix. Fire. The ideas are flooding into his head. It makes him reach for the nearest sheet of paper and a pencil.
He pauses. The paper he’s picked up is scrawled with notes. He recognises the theme – an elaboration of the Tempest’s first motif – and the handwriting. It’s been ten years since he last saw that writing, but he’d know it anywhere. It gives him a jolt of wordless pain followed by sudden euphoria, as his brain says, dead, not dead. Carfax’s, Claire’s. Has he really never seen her writing before? It seems crazy, when she’s been helping him for months, but it’s true. As he racks his brains, he realises how careful she must have been not to let him see her own work, to let him make his own corrections. She wouldn’t even fill in his diacritics for him. And suddenly he realises why she took all those files from the archive. The handwriting, her handwriting – even on Léo’s own fair copy, because she wrote in his diacritics for him, didn’t she? She must have stolen them in case someone saw them and started to wonder … Surely she could have bluffed it out? But for a few seconds he has an inkling of what it must have been like for her, trying to erase every trace, constantly on guard. No wonder she wasn’t pleased to see him.
But it’s her own fault, isn’t it? Why is he pitying her? It’s not as if she cared that he thought Carfax was dead, or that he blamed himself. She must have realised that he’d be devastated, but she never bothered to disillusion him. She even blamed him. Ten years of thinking he’d killed someone he loved! And she didn’t even care …
He wants to shout at her. He wants to spend the rest of his life shouting at her. He wants to spend every moment marvelling at how she’s alive and can shout back at him. He wants them to argue until they kiss, embrace until they draw blood. He wants their bodies to get used to each other. What they did … It makes him tingle at the memory, but it was awkward, full of false starts and laughter, crossing back and forth between hesitation and desire. He wants to do it again, better. Again and again, better and better. He wants to lie beside her, letting the sweat cool on his skin, hearing her breathe. He can imagine her in his apartment: flicking a finger along the spines of his books, raising an eyebrow at the dust on the piano, narrowing her eyes at the voluptuous nude over the dinner table. In his mind’s eye she’s wearing boyish clothes, her hair cut short and curling on the back of her neck – but gamine, not masculine, the slight curves of her body made even more enticing by her direct gaze, her assumption of equality. He grins at a sudden memory: he’d said, You don’t have friends, only enemies and inferiors, and she’d retorted, dry as a bone, at least we’re not enemies, then.
She could stay Magister Ludi and be his lover in the holidays. Surely the other Magisters had mistresses. A few months a year wasn’t enough, but
it was better than nothing. Or … Could he stay here? What if, after all, he does want to devote the rest of his life to the grand jeu? He doesn’t care about anything else. He could be happy here, writing games and scholarly articles, planning research trips in the vacations that could take them anywhere in the world … Oh, yes, he’d be happy. Montverre is the only place he can be happy, now. The word is ridiculous, unfamiliar.
The clock strikes. He’s left it longer than he needed to.
He goes out into the corridor, adjusting his tie as he goes. He’s whistling as he goes down the stairs, through the library, and along the passage to the Magisters’ corridor, taking the long way around to avoid the crowd still milling outside the Great Hall. When he steps into the little cloister under the clock tower warmth hits him, full of the scent of earth and box. He tilts his face up to the sky, closing his eyes against the light. Dark circles spin in the orange glow behind his eyelids. Summer. He hasn’t felt like this for years. He breaks into a little shuffle-step, and for the first time he hears the melody he’s whistling. It’s the Bridges of Königsberg – but scumbled and jazzed. The repetitive tune has broken free of its foundations, like the bridges themselves rearing up off their arches and lumbering into a better position; so that now, perhaps, you could cross them all, and end up where you wanted to be.
37: the Magister Ludi
She rinses her face. For a while, after she got to her room, she couldn’t stop laughing: now she bends over the basin, breathing deeply, and washes the crusts of salt from under her eyes. Her skin is tight, and she doesn’t need a mirror to know that her lips and eyelids are swollen. She swills her mouth out. She waits until the water is still again and leans close. Would she see a difference, if her reflection were clearer? She feels different: raw and tender and afraid. There’s a heaviness inside her like menstrual cramps, but she doesn’t resent it. A deeper ache pulses in the same place, when she thinks about Léo. ‘I’m reliably informed that the first time generally leaves something to be desired,’ he said, afterwards, ‘not that I’m making excuses,’; and she said, smiling, ‘I hope there’ll always be something left to be desired.’
She splashes her forehead, undoes her hair and runs wet hands through it. She wants to cut it all off. Maybe she could. Why not? If Léo didn’t recognise her, then why would anyone else? He was the closest to her, after all; maybe she’s been too careful all along. Maybe she can turn into Carfax again, under their very noses, and no one will ever realise, because that would mean admitting they were blind or stupid. She feels freer than she’s ever been. Is this what happens, when you finally tell someone the truth? Or when you’re in love? She sweeps her arm through the air, scattering droplets in the sunlight like glass beads. It takes her by surprise and she does it again, wondering if she could use the movement in a grand jeu: what would that sense of abandon bring to a swell of melody, or a main theme? She could spend hours playing on her own, experimenting with the new feeling in her body, this shell-cracked-open intensity. Happiness.
But she doesn’t have time. She replaits her hair and pins it up again. It smells of Léo and the leather-salt scent of skin. She strips, wipes herself with a damp cloth, finds a clean shirt, and dresses again. No matter how she feels, she has to look respectable. Although … not too respectable. She moistens her collar and trickles some water down the front of her gown. With her flushed cheeks – and her hands, which are still trembling – she can convince them that she was taken ill. Temporarily, and not seriously.
She shuts her eyes. Her mind is whirling. She counts her heartbeats, trying to calm herself as if she’s about to begin a grand jeu. She has to stop thinking about Léo, at least for a little while. She is Magister Ludi, and she has walked out of her first Midsummer Game; right now she needs to concentrate. She has lied for years, but it’s never been as important as this.
Ninety-nine, a hundred. Her pulse is still much faster than it should be, but she doesn’t have time to wait until it slows. She dabs a last handful of water along her hairline, lets it run down her temples, and goes out into the corridor. Outside in the courtyard men are in scattered, uncertain groups, some smoking and chatting, others silent; she hurries past the windows, head down, her cheeks prickling with renewed heat. She came the long way from the Biblioteca Ludi to her room, through the servants’ corridors and empty classrooms; there’s no alternative route to the Magister Scholarium’s office, but no one looks round and as far as she knows none of the visitors have noticed her. A servant passes, clutching a note, and in spite of herself she imagines the chaos in the kitchens, the Magister Domus shouting as the cooks struggle to get lunch ready two hours earlier than planned. Her fault. She’s already walking fast, but she speeds up, almost running.
When she knocks, there’s a pause before the Magister Scholarium says, ‘Who is it?’
She straightens her shoulders and raises her chin. Then she pushes the door open.
He’s not alone. She stumbles, as though the shock of it is a solid block under her feet. She has to catch herself on the back of a chair, and then they’re all staring at her, the Magister Scholarium and Emile and another man, thin and moustached and faintly familiar. Was he in the audience, earlier?
The Magister Scholarium says, ‘Magister Dryden,’ and she can’t decide if it’s a warning or a question.
She says, ‘May I speak to you alone, Magister?’
‘I’m afraid that Mr Dettler, Mr Fallon, and I are occupied.’
‘It won’t take a moment. I have to explain.’
‘No need,’ Emile says. He is leaning back in his chair, his hands crossed on his belly. There’s a pause. The Magister takes off his glasses and starts to clean them on his sleeve, while Dettler – is it? – coughs drily into his handkerchief.
She hesitates, taken aback. Of course she needs to explain. They ought to be insisting on it. ‘I was taken ill.’
‘I do hope you’re recovered,’ Emile says, ‘but we’re having a rather important meeting.’
‘But—’
The Magister Scholarium sighs. ‘It doesn’t matter, Claire.’
She stares at him. He’s still rubbing his glasses on his sleeve, without meeting her gaze.
‘Perhaps, since Miss Dryden is here, it might be as well to … er …’ Dettler gestures at the desk. There are papers piled there, a newspaper, letters. She catches a glimpse of familiar handwriting: Léo’s. ‘As it happens, we were discussing today’s unfortunate incident. In the context of … wider issues.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ She hardly notices that he’s called her Miss Dryden.
‘Well. Er.’
‘It shouldn’t come as a surprise,’ Emile says, ‘that the Ministry for Culture has concerns about the education of our finest minds. Today’s fiasco has merely confirmed that they were justified. We simply cannot have the school brought into disrepute.’ His voice is smooth. She can remember how he played the grand jeu: slippery, somehow unctuous and perfunctory at the same time. She remembers imitating it for Léo, until he cried with laughter; now she can’t imagine laughing.
She says, ‘Are you speaking for the school or the Ministry?’
‘I’m speaking for the Prime Minister,’ he says, and smiles at her.
The Magister Scholarium puts his glasses on, finally. ‘Magister Dryden,’ he says, ‘I’m afraid Mr Dettler has been explaining the government’s position. That is …’
Another silence. Her scalp is prickling. ‘I don’t understand,’ she says. ‘The government’s position?’
‘The grand jeu,’ Dettler says, ‘is our national game. We should be proud of it. We should make sure that it thrives, under our oversight. We can’t allow it to be stifled. Difficult decisions have to be made.’
She looks at the Magister, waiting for a translation; then, when he doesn’t answer, she looks at Emile. ‘The point is,’ Emile says, easily, ‘that Montverre is in an extremely fragile position. Its future is very uncertain. We don’t want to destroy the legacy of cent
uries of tradition, but we have to face facts. The school needs to be sustainable, to pull its weight economically, and to work together with the government to achieve our mutual goals.’
‘The school’s only goal is the grand jeu.’
‘Well, you see, that’s exactly the sort of unhelpful approach we need to reassess.’ He smiles at the far wall as if it’s an old master.
She says, ‘What’s going on? Magister?’
The Magister Scholarium coughs drily and shuffles the papers on his desk, but he doesn’t say anything. Emile’s eyes slide back to her, and the smile is gone, as though she imagined it. ‘We have explained to the Magister Scholarium,’ he says, ‘that if the school expects the government’s continued support, it must be prepared to work with, not against, us. That it must be prepared to make significant changes.’
‘Changes?’
The Magister Scholarium glances up at her, and then away; his fingers are twitching. ‘We have to ask you to leave, Claire.’
‘For how long? Where to?’
Emile sighs. ‘No. To resign.’
She waits for the world to become real again. Outside the window there are birds singing and the whisper of a breeze. Sunshine glints off the cap of the Magister’s fountain pen, off Emile’s rings, Dettler’s tie-pin. Her robe hangs heavy on her; a drop of sweat trickles between her breasts. She was expecting to be chastised – humiliated, even – but not this. This is impossible.
‘Claire, this is terribly difficult.’ The Magister Scholarium shifts in his seat, and then gets to his feet, wincing a little. ‘You know that I’ve always supported you. But you can’t deny that it hasn’t been easy for anyone. And now this … Perhaps it would be for the best.’
‘Magisters are elected for life,’ she says. She can’t get enough breath into her lungs. ‘I can’t resign.’
The Betrayals Page 34