The Betrayals(33)

He picks up his pen and unscrews the cap. He’s trying not to think; trying not to despise himself for his own cowardice. He finds a piece of paper.

My dear Emile, he writes. Thank you so much for your letter.





10


Fourth week of Serotine Term

(lost count of the days)

I know, I haven’t written for ages. I skipped Factorum this afternoon to catch up on sleep, which is why I have the energy to write this. I shouldn’t, really, I have a past paper to do for tomorrow (‘To what extent did the Pythagorean School of the sixth century BCE prefigure the modern study of the grand jeu?’) but the thought of it makes me want to bash my head against the wall. It’ll only get harder and harder the later I leave it, so obviously I’m procrastinating.

The joint game, though, is coming along. At least I think it is. Don’t get me wrong, I still think Carfax is an arrogant toad. We spent a whole evening last week bickering about our theme: he wanted something mathematical that we could use to explore other ideas (i.e. classical structure, utterly static and boring – imagine the offspring of an encyclopaedia and an abacus) and I wanted something bigger, more ambitious, which made him screw up his face like I’d proposed jumping off the roof of the Square Tower. I pushed my ideas about dreams and storms, but he refused point-blank. He kept saying, ‘We have to start with something true, something real,’ and I kept saying, ‘Don’t be so bloody difficult, Carfax, it’s all real, reality is real.’ We got stuck like that for ages, as if the wind had changed mid-conversation, until suddenly for no reason he raised his hand to shut me up. I nearly lost my temper then. He scribbled something on a bit of paper and pushed it towards me. I swear if it had been in Artemonian I would’ve punched him, and risked being expelled for it, but it was maths.

‘De Moivre,’ he said. ‘Heard of him?’

‘Didn’t he write something to do with complex numbers?’

‘De Moivre’s Law is a hypothetical model which can be used to predict how long people are going to live. For calculating annuities and so on. De Moivre was commonly held to have predicted the date of his own death.’

‘Maths as magic,’ I said. ‘Nice.’

He smiled. It must be the first time he’d ever smiled at me as if he agreed, and not as if he was smirking at my stupidity. It was surprising how it nearly made me forget to despise him. ‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘Since you want to work on something risibly difficult … How about death?’

‘Death?’ I repeated, like an idiot.

‘There’s a lot of material. I mean, it’s huge. Enormous. I think we’d be mad—’ He caught himself and looked away, tensing, as he waited for me to make the inevitable comment about his family. There was a second’s pause, and then he went on in a kind of rush. ‘We’d be mad to do it. But … there’s a musical precedent. The Danse Macabre – Saint-Sa?ns, Liszt.’

‘Shakespeare, Dante,’ I said. ‘“I had not thought death had undone so many …”’

He grinned. ‘The structure of the Requiem Mass, the tension between an individual and infinity – asymptotes …’

‘Yes! The rituals of mortality, decomposition and belief in the eternal.’

‘The impossibility of comprehending the magnitude of our own demise – our own insignificance.’ He was teasing me, but he was excited, too, I think.

‘The undiscovered country – the deepest mystery of existence itself!’ It tipped me over the edge, and I started to giggle like a little kid. And suddenly he joined in, in a sort of high-pitched splutter, his shoulders shaking. I’d never heard him laugh like that. I didn’t know he could laugh. I thought anything more than a contemptuous snort would make him rupture something. ‘All right,’ I said, when I could speak again. ‘You’re on.’

‘If we fail—’

‘We fail?’ I said, in my best Lady Macbeth voice. As soon as I said it I was sure he’d raise an eyebrow and say something snobbish about the theatre, but to my surprise it made him catch at another gulp of laughter. Then that set us both off again. It was – I’ve only thought of this now, but it’s true – it was as if he’d never laughed before, and didn’t know how to deal with it. Or like someone who’s been holding back tears, until finally something snaps … But the strangest part of it was the way he got hold of himself – in a split second, from hysterical to sober, swallowing it all down. One moment he was giggling, like me, and I swear he meant it; but the next he was on his feet, his face set, almost angry. I drew back – maybe I’d touched his sleeve or something, I can’t remember, but nothing important, nothing that might have made him react like that, surely – and said, ‘What? What’s the matter?’

‘That’s settled, then,’ he said, without meeting my eyes. ‘The theme for our game is – death.’

‘We who are about to die, etc.,’ I said. ‘Yes.’

He still wouldn’t look at me. I suppose he was furious at himself for getting chummy with someone so thoroughly beneath him. He’d let me glimpse something real about him, and he couldn’t stand it … I felt all the dislike flood back. As if I’d thought one bout of fou rire could make him into a decent human being.