The Betrayals

by Bridget Collins

  41: Léo

  He can’t stay in the doorway, staring after her as though she’s left some trace of herself behind. His head is spinning, full of Emile’s death and Magister Ludi and Claire, her mouth and body and eyes. Claire, most of all. She loves him. She didn’t say so, but that’s what it meant: be Magister Ludi. Somehow she knows what he did and she loves him anyway; even though she’s left him here, he’s forgiven. But she’s gone. He let her go. He doesn’t know how he feels, except shaky and exhausted and adrenaline-drunk. He goes out into the corridor.

  He cups her keys in his hand, feeling their weight. The Biblioteca Ludi. The thought of it is tinged with gold. He can still see her in the sunlight, eyes narrowed against the glare, her hair shining; he can still smell the scent of books and dust and their mingled sweat. At the moment the memory is half pleasure and half pain: the further away it gets, the more the balance will tilt.

  Outside the window, servants are going to and fro. In the far corner of the courtyard, under the Square Tower, one of them is mopping the tiles, spraying bright droplets of water as he swings the mophead out of the bucket. The Magister Domus hurries across the court, accosted by other grey-clad figures as he goes. Through the glass Léo can hear, not words, but the tone of his voice as he tries to wave them away: harried and impatient, with an undertone of resignation. There is too much busyness, too much confusion; things are out of joint. After yesterday, the whole school is steeped in uncertainty. A broken Midsummer Game, and then Emile’s death. There have been deaths here before – Montverre is hundreds of years old – nonetheless he has the sense of something unravelling. Emile, dead. He can’t quite believe it. How did it happen? It looks as though he fell … It doesn’t matter, dead is dead. But what happens now? Something is happening, but it’s hard to tell what. The servants come and go, crossing from shadow to shadow. A few visiting academics are loitering in the doorway of the Scholars’ Tower, their heads together like pecking birds. Dettler emerges from the refectory, flanked by Vouter and Guez. They light cigarettes.

  Dettler looks round and raises his hand. Belatedly Léo realises that he’s beckoning. His heart sinks; he’s hardly slept, he can’t concentrate, he doesn’t want to speak to anyone but Claire. But he was a politician for too long to snub a colleague lightly. He shoulders open the door and crosses the court, wrapping his fingers tightly around the keys in his pocket. ‘Good morning,’ he says, and nods to Vouter and Guez.

  ‘Bad business,’ Dettler says, jerking his thumb at the wet mopped patch on the tiles. ‘You heard?’

  ‘About Emile? Yes. Was it—’ Belatedly he realises what Dettler means, and what it was that the servant must have been cleaning up. So Emile fell from the Square Tower. It makes an uneasy spark leap in his head as Emile’s voice comes back to him: at the time I felt to blame … It’s a strange coincidence. A coincidence, because anything else is absurd: Emile wasn’t the type to be overtaken by remorse. He says, ‘How did it happen?’

  ‘No one really knows. A servant found his body this morning.’ There’s a slight movement from Vouter – just a sideways glance, quickly quashed, but enough to make Dettler clear his throat and add, ‘The police have been and gone, but there’s no sign of foul play.’

  In spite of himself, Léo says, ‘Emile would hardly have—’

  Dettler says, ‘This place is a deathtrap. Old buildings, not properly maintained, no decent lighting. If anything I’m amazed there haven’t been more accidents.’

  Vouter’s eyes slide to Léo and away again.

  ‘It merely goes to show what I’ve always said,’ Dettler goes on, more loudly. ‘We need a fresh start. Not some outdated monastery of a school, but a bright new future.’

  ‘But …’ Léo looks up to the top of the Square Tower. The battlements aren’t low enough to stumble over. Are they? ‘Do they think Emile was drunk?’

  ‘The police were entirely in agreement that it was an accident.’ Dettler gives him a long look. ‘Best not to dwell on it. Which is not to say it’s not a tragedy for us all.’

  Vouter coughs and Guez flicks a spent match on to the tiles. Nobody is looking at anybody else. And abruptly Léo understands. Dettler wants it hushed up as quickly as possible. No awkward questions. Which means … was it convenient, or even deliberate? Léo’s been afraid of a shove in the dark, a poisoned fruit, a greased step, but perhaps after all it’s Emile who made too many enemies.

  Tension grows between his shoulder blades. ‘Of course,’ he says. ‘It’s a great loss for the Party.’ The shiny patch of damp on the tiles is beginning to evaporate. In another life, Emile would already be on the telephone to his office, with a few well-chosen words about Léo’s future, or summoning the police to conduct a thorough search for Charpentier. Instead, Léo can stand here with the others, and no one heard him say fuck the Party. Two lives saved, then. But mixed with the relief there’s a tiny, treacherous hint of regret.

  ‘Actually, Martin,’ Dettler says, ‘there’s something I want to speak to you about.’ He holds out his arm to usher Léo away from the others. ‘The Old Man has always had a soft spot for you, you know, even though there was that hiccup last summer … What are your plans for the next few years?’

  ‘I hadn’t thought that far ahead,’ Léo says.

  ‘How would you feel about being our new Magister Ludi? We’re thinking an interim contract to start with – all these automatic jobs-for-life are a farce – but maybe longer, if it went well.’

  Here it is, his second chance; and now he has permission from Claire, he isn’t betraying her. Léo looks up. Above the Square Tower, a ragged cloud is being blown across the sky. It creates the illusion that the building is tipping over. Wisps peel away from the bulging white underbelly and dissolve. ‘That’s very unexpected. I’ve never considered …’

  ‘Fallon suggested you. Said you’d be ideal. New school, new blood, new start. We’ll be taking over the Cathedral buildings on the North Bank. Lovely place.’

  A beat. ‘I thought – that is, isn’t Montverre staying—’

  Dettler waves a dismissive hand. ‘I think after this we can make a very good case for new premises. Not to mention a new approach. There’s been some debate, but I think this will sway any dissenters. They’ve agreed a temporary closure, to let things calm down … Anyway, think about it. It would be good to have you back on board.’

  He imagines himself in a cannibalised church on the side of the river. Montverre, transplanted alongside the new polytechnics that line the boulevard: Geography, Engineering, Science, Grand Jeu. Scholars in smart suits with slicked-back hair, Magisters in short gowns and trousers. But Magister Ludi, after all. Maybe that would be enough. ‘I’ll certainly think about it,’ he says.

  ‘Let’s meet up in town, tomorrow or the day after.’

  ‘Of course.’ A movement – above, to the left – catches Léo’s eye. There’s an archivist leaning out of one of the tall library windows, reaching for the shutter. He swings it shut and latches it. A few moments later he moves to the next window. One by one he closes the shutters. Inside, the library must be growing darker as the sunlight is cut off. But then, there won’t be anyone at the desks; no scholars, no visiting professors. Even the archivists will have shelved their ledgers and catalogues, packed the unsorted bequests away, and emptied their inkwells. All that’s left for them to do is the final housekeeping: dustsheets, locking up the valuables. If Charpentier is still here, what will happen to him? A temporary closure, Dettler said. But no one will be fooled; Montverre has never been closed, not even during the flu epidemic.

  ‘Well … good,’ Dettler says; and then, with a little shrug, he moves away.

  Léo watches until the last window is shuttered. He has always assumed that the biggest danger to Montverre was fire. Someone splashing oil everywhere and setting it alight, cackling, like Carfax’s mad grandfather. One individual, one moment of crazy destruction. But it won’t be like that at all. Its breath will stop when the last person
leaves; after that it’ll be a slow death, so gradual that the moment of no return will come and go, unremarked and unobserved. A death by mould and mice and the passage of time. Not dramatic. There won’t be a story to tell at the end of it, except of bureaucracy and inertia. And the battle, somehow, is lost, when Léo barely knew it had started.

  He looks up. The tower is still tilting. A high note rings in his ears.

  ‘Are you all right, Martin?’ Guez is at his elbow.

  He nods. The Magister Domus crosses the courtyard again, a piece of paper flapping in his hand, a servant gesticulating at his elbow. There’s the sound of the old bus coughing up the hill; it’ll come and go all day to collect the visitors. How long will it take, for the school to empty itself? He doesn’t want to be here to see it.

  He turns and strides towards the library. Guez says something, but he doesn’t look back. The great oak door is still open, and he makes his way down the central aisle, past two librarians talking in low voices. There is enough light coming through the slats of the shutters for him to grope his way up the staircase and along the landing to the Biblioteca Ludi, but when he opens the door the room is dazzling, like noon after dusk.

  On Claire’s desk – is it his desk, now? – there’s a ledger, patterned like a riverbed, with an ink stain across its front. His old diary. So she had it, all this time. He flips it open. As he skims the page he can remember the feel of the pen, the ache in his neck from long hours of study, the burn of sleepless nights. What it was like to be young.

  A page falls out. Dear Léo. His heart thuds; but the paper is old, yellowing, the ink faded.

  Dear Léo, I’m dead. Dear Léo, I’m not dead …

  I think you never stopped hating me.

  He stands at the window. It’s blurred at the edges of the panes by cobwebs and dirt, but the sunlight makes the grime blaze like silver.

  Soon Montverre will be closed. He shuts his eyes and tries to imagine it without Magisters and librarians, archivists, visitors, servants. It gives him a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. Even when he hated the thought of Montverre, and Carfax, and the grand jeu, he would never have wanted it to end like this. So much stone, so much hollow space, standing empty. There’s so much of the school he’s never seen, kitchens and broom cupboards and pantries, the rarely visited alcoves in the archive. And all of it will crumble, slowly. With a jolt he thinks again of Charpentier. Is he still here, in hiding? What can Léo do, if he is?

  In his mind’s eye Léo sees all the Christians, the Communists and undesirables, the beggars and invalids: a long line, stretching into the distance, the last few turning to stare over their shoulders at him as they’re ushered away. Please let Chryseïs not be among them; please let Charpentier not. But that doesn’t mean that the others aren’t real. He can do something for Charpentier, even if it’s only leaving cash in his room, and hoping that it’ll be found – but there are too many to help, too many to fight for.

  He clenches his fists. Nothing is safe. Montverre isn’t a sanctuary any more; maybe it never was. Even the grand jeu itself … More than anything he wants to feel the joy of it, the exhilaration of making something from nothing. But with those grey faces watching him, with the walls of Montverre crumbling and the Party looking over his shoulder …

  He wants to be Magister Ludi: but here, not in the city. He wants to stand in the Great Hall with the ranks of watchers around him, playing his own Midsummer Game. He wants Claire to be there. He wants to pace the anteroom with her before he goes in, rehearsing the transitions, trying not to betray that he’s nervous. He wants to feel the moment of complete attention – like the stillness at the height of a parabola, the instant between up and down – when the game takes off, and everything is miraculous, needle-sharp and effortless.

  But the Great Hall may never witness another game. And Claire has gone. If he plays a Midsummer Game, it will be in front of the stripped altar of the converted Cathedral, and swollen ranks of Party members who don’t know the first thing about the grand jeu. Watched by betrayed stained-glass saints and the ghosts of the people who used to worship there. Complicit.

  He’s a politician. Has learnt to be a politician. The scruples are uncomfortable, like a stone in his shoe. He wants to shake them away. He could do some good as Magister Ludi. What did Claire say? Be a thorn in their sides. She gave him permission. She wouldn’t judge him for compromising. It’s only human.

  But. But, but, but.

  He remembers Carfax asking: ‘Shouldn’t the grand jeu make us better people?’ and then how he answered his own question. Her own question. Yes. What would it mean, to play a grand jeu with an atrocity at the heart of it?

  He glances down at the desk. Her letter is lying in the sun. Already the words are well-known, like a text he’s planning to use for a motif. Write to me, to Claire. Send me a letter telling me how sorry you are, how much you loved Aimé. Then I’ll reply. That’s all you need to do. One letter, and I’ll come back from the dead. He thought it was all over, then; but if he had sent that letter …

  He doesn’t make a conscious decision. It’s his body that takes over, swinging him into the middle of the room as though there is a tiny terra between the overloaded bookcases. He turns to face the sky. Then he lifts his arms, pauses and then dips them into a wide movement, the motion of farewell-and-welcome that forms the fermeture. And as if in response, the cloud that has dipped across the sun slides sideways and the light floods his eyes. It’s over. In a moment he’ll go to his room and collect overnight things; he’ll make his way down the road to the village, and the station. And Claire. If she’s still there, if an earlier train hasn’t swept her away, if … But some deep, irrational conviction tells him that he’ll find her, one way or another.

  He reaches out to the cobweb that’s clinging to the windowpane, idly testing its elasticity. The threads are silver, trembling a little in the draught. Instinctively he starts to swipe it away, to get a clearer view of the trees and the slope below; but something makes him pause. It’s beautiful. His heart is beating as though he’s climbed a mountain.

  He turns on his heel and goes out into the dim passage and down the stairs, leaving behind the sun and the web and the fermeture.

  42: the Rat

  She isn’t sick. She knows what sickness is like, and it isn’t this. Sickness is waiting, drifting, blank as a grey sea, having nothing to do but surrender. Sickness is vivid pictures in her head, thirst, drenched blankets, a bitter smell. This is different. This is like shedding a skin, feeling the old world stretch and split around her, sore as a burn. She curls around her elbows and knees, conscious of her bones, and tries to breathe slowly. If she closes her eyes she sees a man falling, over and over. Sometimes the picture blurs, and it’s a woman, with a plait of hair. Then there is a red smash, and the Rat jerks upright, blinking until she is back, only seeing what’s visible. It takes a long time before she lies down again, shivering.

  The noise comes and goes. If she were paying attention, she might realise that there is something wrong. In the summer the school subsides to an easy murmur, a long exhalation of relief as the servants’ workload eases; but not now, not this year. Now there is more noise than usual, thumping and dragging of trunks, emptying of cupboards, a frantic and mutinous muttering. The bus roars and recedes, back and forth, for days. And then, slowly, a silence descends that isn’t the contented quiet of high summer but something thicker, unseasonal. But she isn’t listening.

  Until one day she wakes and there is no sound at all, from anywhere. She sits up, and the shuffle of her limbs reassures her for a moment that she hasn’t gone deaf. She gets to her feet. She is shaky; patterns swirl in the dim corners of the room as she walks past. She steps out into the passage and it’s like being underwater. She ventures further out, looking round, until there seems not to be any reason to be afraid. Just this muffled, dead quietness. Rats do not notice the passage of time: but some wary part of her knows it has been longer than an hour since
the clock struck. The clock has always been there, the same way her pulse has always been there.

  The main corridor is dark. She steps out into the middle of it and looks around, the back of her neck crawling. The windows are shuttered. Thin slats of silver daylight show between the louvres. The corridor is a long stone tunnel, the entrance to a labyrinth. She can’t make out the stairs at the far end, only a doorway and more darkness. Carefully she makes her way towards them. Silence. Such silence, not a footstep or voice or the scrape of a broom. She could be the last moving thing left on the face of the earth. She goes down the staircase.

  The door at the foot of the staircase is closed. It is never closed in the day. Her heart jolts into panic, her mouth opening to gasp for air – a trap, a trap – but a second later her fingers are scrabbling at the latch and it yields. She throws the door open. The sky is flat and as pale as a pearl. She breathes deeply; but when she steps into the courtyard the terror is still there, only dulled. Closed doors, shuttered windows, silence. Solitude. A punishment. Whatever you do, darling, you must not. But it’s too late. She looks across to the part of the courtyard where the man was splashed on the tiles in the moonlight. Where Mam … But nothing is there, not even a shadow. The tiles are jet and nacre under this fish-belly sky.

  She crosses the court, keeping close to the walls. In spite of the blinded windows she feels watched. The smooth cloud above her is like a pupil-less eye. She unlatches the far door and slips through it into another dark corridor. In front of her is an archway: and beyond it is the Great Hall, full of daylight from the high windows. Another observer might wonder why the servants left these windows unshuttered – laziness, rebellion, or some strange instinct of reverence? – but the Rat only moves forward, searching for something she can’t name. The floor, the benches, the walls, everything is in shades of grey and trompe l’oeil. There is no game board. The silver line demarcating the terra is dormant. Invisible.