‘You could go in my place.’
‘Don’t be stupid. Aimé, of course you’ll go.’
‘Did you hear what I said? I’m serious.’ He leapt up and bounced from foot to foot. ‘You could viva my game with your eyes closed. It’s half yours, after all.’
‘Except they might notice the fact that I’m female.’ She sat back, crossing her arms.
‘Oh, come on. You’re tall and scrawny enough. Cut your hair, wear my clothes – maybe squash those down a bit,’ he added, waving at her chest, ‘but it’s not like you’re very womanly to start with. And your voice – you can pass for a tenor, easily.’
She gave him a sour look; but the longer he held her gaze, and didn’t burst into giggles, the harder it was to keep that expression on her face. ‘You think I could?’
‘Why not?’
‘Because …’ She inhaled through her teeth: it was like trying to explain the concept of a locked door. ‘You know it’s not that simple.’
‘Worth a try, though, isn’t it?’ He paced towards the window and stopped, distracted, to scratch at a new patch of mould on the Chinese wallpaper. ‘I’m going to stay here and write my own games. I’m on the verge of a breakthrough, something really big; I don’t want to end up like those idiots in the Gambit. And I’ll be able to work all night and sleep all day …’
‘You’d be alone practically all the time. It wouldn’t be good for you. I can’t, Aimé,’ she said, ‘so stop harping on it. You should go to Montverre, and I’ll go to stay with Aunt Frances, like we agreed.’
‘Is that what you want?’
Silence. A rat scuttled somewhere. She shut her eyes. For a moment she imagined packing her trunk – Aimé’s trunk – and setting off. The train, the village, the mountain road – and then the buildings of Montverre, not in the intricate greys of an etching, but vivid against a real blue sky. Aimé might disdain the lessons, but she ached for them: maths, music, words, notation, history. A library ten times bigger than the mouldering, haphazard, pawnshop-decimated one here; the greatest grand jeu archive in the world. It was like being hungry and dreaming of food. ‘You know what I want,’ she said, her stomach twisting.
When she opened her eyes, he was standing over her. He took hold of her, pulled her out of her chair, and bowed. He was smiling; from that angle he looked like Papa. ‘You must be Aimé Carfax de Courcy,’ he said. ‘Pleased to meet you.’ And then, with a flourish, he made the gesture of ouverture.
That’s how she wants to remember him: not how he was later, when the de Courcy strain started to eat away at him. That moment: his grin as he spun away and reached for the wine he was drinking straight out of the bottle, the way her heart swelled as she understood what he was offering her. Or how he was later – after she and Léo got seventy in their joint game, the second year, when the word seventy became a war-cry and he sang it to her, chalked it on the terrace, scrawled it on her mirror in soap. My clever sister, he’d said. Or sometimes, clever Aimé. clever me. Had he ever been jealous? If he was, he hid it. They celebrated like children, that New Year, running amok in the château, playing drunken hide-and-seek. But then he began to slide. It started with little things. He’d forget to wash or eat, or talk to himself in long incessant monologues, or rip pages out of books because he couldn’t find what he was looking for. Then he began to stay up all night to play the piano, to scrawl incoherent grands jeux on the wall with burnt sticks, and shout at her when she tried to stagger to bed at four in the morning. But instead of helping him – what could she have done? If only she’d known what to do – she’d packed her trunk and the cello and spent the last days watching the clock, desperate to get away. And – oh, that last night, two days after she should have gone back to Montverre, when he begged her not to leave … She clenches her jaw. She’d have stayed, if she could have helped. But she was lost, worn thin by shame and helplessness; and she didn’t think he was in danger, not really. The housekeeper would come in every day to cook, wash the sheets, tell him to eat … She crept away the next morning, without saying goodbye. Later she’d written to him, a breezy, cheery letter that pretended to assume he was fine. He didn’t answer. When his telegram came – so naked, so direct – she should have known that he needed her. No. She had known. And she’d chosen to stay at Montverre, seduced by the glory of seeing her name – his name – on the top of the mark sheet. And by Léo. When Léo kissed her, she’d wanted more. More and more, until she was shocked by the heat building between her legs, the sweet shameless vertigo. The euphoria of having everything she wanted, all at once. When he went to take off her gown it took all the strength she had to push him away. And then that stupid thing she’d said. I love you, Léo …
It doesn’t matter now. Aimé is dead, long ago.
‘Oh no,’ Léo says. ‘Please, shh. Stop it. Don’t – please don’t.’
But it’s too late. She can’t help it. And there’s a kind of luxury in letting herself go. There’s no reason to pretend any more: for the first time, someone else knows exactly why she’s crying. She rests her forehead on her arms, and sobs judder through her.
‘Hush,’ he says, ‘it’s all right, shh …’ It isn’t all right, and it never will be; he knows that as well as she does. He crosses the room to her, and she senses him hesitating at arm’s length. Then he murmurs, ‘Shh, shh,’ and pats her head. It’s such a maladroit gesture that she could almost laugh. She raises her face to look at him, blinking away tears.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says, and then she can’t say anything more, because the grief rises again – this time at what she’s done to him, because ten years ago he could have become anyone, he could have been Magister Ludi, and now here he is, old and exiled and helpless, not even a politician.
‘Don’t cry,’ he says. ‘Please, Aimé – Magister – Claire …’
And then he puts his arms round her.
She stiffens. Even now her instincts cry out against letting him touch her, in case she gives herself away: but there’s nothing left. What will he discover? That she’s a woman? That she’s Aimé? She’s stripped of all her secrets already. She doesn’t have the force to push him away. He leans into her, warm against her shoulder, and his hand strokes her backbone – slowly, firmly – steadying her, comforting her. He goes on murmuring, the syllables blurring into one another, meaningless. Gradually her sobs grow smaller. It’s ridiculous, that he should be comforting her, when she’s the one who lied to him: and that she should let him, when only a few minutes ago he capsized her Midsummer Game. But in the solid heat of his body against hers, those things seem distant. She can’t remember the last time she was held.
Finally she can stop crying. But even when she pulls away, the space between them is softer, elastic, as though it would be the easiest thing in the world to fall back into his arms. She wipes her eyes on her gown, sniffing wetly. He makes a tiny sound of amusement, but when she looks at him he isn’t smiling. He says, ‘I love you.’