The Betrayals(107)

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 chateau, 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.’

‘What?’

He has the grace to grin, but he holds her gaze; and with a twist of her gut, she realises that he means it. Or thinks he does. He says again, ‘I love you. I always did.’

She laughs. It doesn’t feel very different from crying.

‘It’s true.’

‘Is it? And what do you want me to do about it?’ She is still laughing as she says it. It’s as though he’s made an outrageous, barely-legal move in an adversarial game: she can’t take it seriously.

‘I don’t know. That is—’ he hesitates, and glances away.

‘Oh,’ she says. ‘That.’