The Betrayals(127)

‘Has everyone gone? The library’s locked. I don’t know …’ He trails off. He sits on the bench opposite her. ‘I found some money,’ he says, after a long time. ‘Maybe we could …’

She stares at him.

‘Well, a lot of money. Maybe there’s a way to get you some papers.’ He draws his arms into his sides and shivers. ‘I don’t know what’s happening. It’s creepy.’

She spreads her toes and presses. The floor is always cold, even at Midsummer. Cold stone, cold bone.

‘You can’t stay here. There’s no one left. We could …’ He trails off again.

No one left. It’s true. Only the two of them. Two unpeople. Somehow they are here together. She can see a skewed red-hemmed body at the bottom of the Square Tower, a plait of red-gold hair. She can see Simon’s hand holding out chocolate, and although they are different pictures they are part of the same thing, the same mysterious ache. That which makes her human. In spite of herself she knows the word for it.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says, stumbling on the words as if he’s the one who hasn’t spoken for years.

She raises her eyes to his face.

‘You saved my life. Thank you.’

He waits. He doesn’t understand that she is a trap, that she is poison. He holds out his hand, and even though he is too far away to touch she can feel the warmth of his skin, the not-being-alone of his reaching. She has killed someone, and he is thanking her. He is wrong. He is stupid. A rat wouldn’t … but neither of them is a rat. Not any more. She opens her mouth, and she can feel more words nudging at her tongue and the back of her palate. Whatever you do, darling, you must not. She wants to reach back. She doesn’t know how.

‘What’s your name?’ he says.

She gets up. He shifts, but she’s not trying to leave. She lines up her toes with the runnel of silver between the flagstones. Then she steps into the terra. At the far corner of the space a single feather curls upwards, white tinged with grey. Somewhere at her feet is a smudge of blood, so worn and ingrained that no one would know it was there.

She swallows. There is a lump like clay in her throat. She says: ‘I don’t know.’

He makes a sudden, repressed movement. His eyes are wide; now he is staring at her as if he has never seen her before. It makes her want to scratch his cheeks and leave red tracks like tears.

‘You don’t know?’

A pause.

‘You spoke! I didn’t know you could speak.’

She laughs. It bubbles up, alien, her body betraying her. It makes her eyes run wet and her breath rasp. It’s like a scab coming away too soon; it hurts and hurts and hurts.

‘We can – will you—’

He stops, because she has turned away. She has turned back to the empty hall, and the bare benches. She is hungry and light-headed. Tomorrow, she thinks, and the word is so human it makes her eardrums tighten. Tomorrow she will go with him, or not. There will be time later to wonder what she is, and what he is. Rats don’t think about the future, but people do. There is plenty of time. She feels the rest of her life stretching out, bare and wide as the mountain.

She drops to her knees. Behind her, he draws in his breath. He doesn’t come to her. He stays outside the silver line, and that is as it should be. The space is hers now.

She leans forward until her forehead touches the ground. Then she draws an arc in the ash with her arm, twisting further and further so that when she gets to her feet again, she is standing in a circle. Her hand and knees are dark with soot.

‘What are you doing?’

Then he falls silent. His silence fills the whole hall, as though he is giving her a gift. He nods, once. At her feet, the crooked makeshift circle is nothing and everything, a mess and a perfect grand jeu. One move. Enough.

They stare at each other. Tomorrow there will be time for other things; but now there is only a circle in ash on the floor, two people, an unmade fermeture. The circle holds the grand jeu like a shallow cup. It trembles on the brim, incomplete, on the edge of spilling over.





Author’s Note


As many readers will already have guessed, The Betrayals was in part inspired by Hermann Hesse’s brilliant novel The Glass Bead Game (also known as Magister Ludi). What I call the grand jeu has a lot in common with the Glass Bead Game as Hesse conceived it: an elusive game that combines maths, music and ideas in an atmosphere of meditation, and is overseen by the Magister Ludi (Hesse’s pun on the Latin for ‘schoolmaster’). The Betrayals is set in a very different world – and is a very different kind of book – but nonetheless it owes a huge debt to Hesse’s masterpiece.





ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS


The Betrayals is my second book for adults, and I wrote it in a very different frame of mind from my first: I was at once exhilarated and slightly terrified by the amazing work that was being done to publish and promote The Binding, and I sometimes struggled with the pressure of feeling that this as-yet-unwritten book had to measure up. So the first person I want to thank is Sarah Ballard, my brilliant agent and the dedicatee of The Betrayals, who kept me sane, grounded and clear-headed (well, relatively) throughout the process, as well as helping me to nudge the novel towards what it wanted to be. Dedicating a book can seem a bit meretricious if you do it retrospectively, but as I wrote The Betrayals I was inspired by knowing that she would be my first reader.