He says, ‘I’m sorry.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘No. Listen.’ He raises his hand to cut her off, a quick short movement like a reversed stramazon. That sense of the grand jeu comes and goes at the edge of her mind, like the sound of the sea. He bites his lower lip and steps towards the window. ‘You’re right. I was always jealous of you. Even when we were friends, I wanted to be better than you. I wanted to be more intelligent. I wanted the Gold Medal. When I submitted the Red game …’ He draws in a breath. ‘It was brilliant. But I knew they might hate it. If you’d won, then I would have been glad. Honestly. But … I took the risk, knowing that it might go wrong. I never admitted it to myself, that part of me wanted to beat you. Wanted to see you fail. Because I did love you. I still love you. But I can’t – get rid of …’ He clenches his fist over his breastbone, as if he’s dragging something out of his chest. ‘I’m sorry. I wanted to be the best. I did.’
There’s a silence. She wishes she didn’t understand, but she does. This is the game they have always played, full of desire and hostility, reflections and shadows. At least now he’s being honest.
‘I never even met your brother,’ he says, at last. ‘I’m sorry for your sake that he died. But to know you’re alive, you … Even if you leave like this, even if I never see you again. It wasn’t you that came back to life, it was me.’
He smiles at her. She smiles back. She can feel the walls of regret and loss closing in: but for now they’re in the space between them, still with room to breathe.
She says, ‘Be Magister Ludi.’
‘But – Claire.’
‘I’d rather it was you than anyone else,’ she says. ‘You’ll be good at it. Better than me. And who knows? Maybe one day you’ll be a better grand jeu player, too. As long as you stop trying to be so bloody clever.’
‘Thanks.’
‘I mean it, Léo. Stay here. Be a thorn in their sides. Write grands jeux that make people think you’re a lunatic. Have the life you should have had.’
‘The life I should have had has you in it.’
She reaches out for him and he comes to her arms so quickly it makes her stagger. He kisses her forehead and then without moving – so that she feels his voice vibrate in her skull – he says, ‘You don’t have to leave.’
She shakes her head. And he doesn’t insist; when he bends to kiss her mouth she can tell that he understands, even if he doesn’t want to. Of course she can’t stay here, now she’s been sacked. Even if the other Magisters agreed. There isn’t room for both of them and the grand jeu; maybe there never was. Maybe there never will be.
She doesn’t know how long they stay like that. The clock chimes. She pulls away, and he lets her go. ‘All right,’ he says.
‘Yes.’ She reaches into her pocket for the keys to the Biblioteca Ludi and drops them on to the bed. ‘You’d better have these.’ She hesitates. ‘There are some things in there that belong to you already. Some games from the archive. Your diary. A letter I wrote you and never sent. You’ll find them.’
Slowly he bends and picks up the keys. She nods and swings her bag on to her shoulder. He follows her down the stairs into her study, but when she walks out into the corridor his footsteps stop. She looks over her shoulder. He touches his forehead and his heart. It’s a gesture that’s half familiar and half strange, but she doesn’t stop to think about what it means. It’s only when she’s hurried unseen along the passageways, through a servant’s door and out on to the road, into the cover of the trees, that she gives herself time to pause; and then she wonders whether she’s seen that move before somewhere, in a diagram or an old-fashioned illustration. It might be the rendry, the old gesture of surrender in an adversarial game, when one player concedes untimely defeat, and truncates a game that might have gone on for ever.
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.’