The Betrayals(40)

There’s nothing unusual about snow. She draws back from the window, rubbing her eyes. Every year it falls, and stays, and melts. It’s hardly an omen, even less a surprise. She’s being fanciful. Allowing the weather to play on her nerves – is this how the madness begins? One day she feels this vague dread, as if pressure is building on the mountain behind Montverre, waiting for a yell, a dropped plate, a single gunshot … and the next she will be creeping to the library, secreting barrels of oil. She laughs. She is so afraid of madness she will drive herself mad, thinking about it. She’s being self-indulgent. Hysterical. Deliberately she uses the word she hates the most. A womanly state, of no importance. Like the nightmares, or the times when she can’t sleep, the surges of grief that catch her off guard, the new agony of a wound she thought had healed. Neurosis. A feminine lack of detachment. She turns her attention back to her desk, and the real blank page. Maybe, after all, this is why she can’t look at the snow without a prickling sense of malaise.

At the top she’s written, Midsummer Game. There isn’t anything below, not even notes.

She’s always been able to compose. That is, in the worst days, ten years ago, the grand jeu was an irrelevance, like prayer or food, and no doubt if she had tried to play she would have failed; but it never occurred to her. And for a long time afterwards she was too dazed to think at all. Aunt Frances and Cousin Helen taught her girlish pursuits – embroidery, gardening, découpage – and she flung herself into them, soothed by the trivial prettiness of flowers and stitches. It was a relief to let her musician’s fingers lose their agility, and her brain atrophy until she struggled to remember what day of the week it was. She worked at becoming someone new. Helen helped her to buy new clothes, steering her tactfully towards muted colours instead of black; and she grew to like them, the looser cuts and softer fabrics, the dove grey and mauve and violet of a life in twilight. Everyone was very gentle with her, and she was grateful for that, too. It was as though she was the one who’d died.

But the grand jeu was in her blood – no, deeper than that, in her cells, in her nerve-endings – and it wooed her back, seducing her slowly with a whistled melody, a chance remark, a copy of the Gambit inadequately hidden in Helen’s stationery drawer. It must have taken a year, or two; but finally something inside her awoke and unfurled. At first it was sly, elusive as the smell of a thaw. Then, like spring, it took her over in a wild rush and left her gasping. She composed the Primavera in six weeks, and Twelve Variations on the Moon in two months. After that she caught her breath and forced herself to slow down, to study and broaden her knowledge; but that dim half-life had been left behind, and she knew she would never go back to it. There were moments, composing or playing or arguing (because although the Drydens weren’t grand jeu masters they were educated, at least, and so were their friends) when she felt an echo of the pure joy she’d felt before her brother died. It would never be the same, not ever, but it was all she had. It was always there. She could step into the clear air of the grand jeu as easily as opening a door. Even when she became Magister Ludi, she was never afraid that she’d fail; she’d as soon have doubted her ability to swallow.

Not until now. Not until this blank page.

Midsummer Game … She doesn’t have a title, or a theme. Before, inspiration has come like a wave, knocking her to her knees; or like a trail of sweetmeats, scattered along a forest path; or like a torch-beam that showed only the next step, and the next. She’s used to the differences between grands jeux, the way they have to be trapped or cajoled or even resisted. It makes her think of an old exam question: Make a case for ONE of the following as a metaphor for the grand jeu: a garden; an automobile; a banquet; a railway accident … But she has never had nothing. She has never wondered, with a clench of panic in her gut, whether she will ever compose another game again.

If she can’t write her Midsummer Game … She can’t imagine what would happen if she defaulted. Even if she were ill, another Magister would be asked to perform it in her place, from her score. She has no choice. She must produce a game – and not just any game, a game good enough to be worthy of the first female Magister Ludi – or else she will lose everything. In front of the other Magisters, the invited dignitaries, foreign professors, journalists …

This time is precious. Every second wasted is a second lost. Come on. Think. But her mind stays empty. She feels an unexpected surge of sympathy for yesterday’s class of scholars, gaping at their first page of Artemonian.

It’s no good. She tells herself that it will come. She flicks her notebook shut. The desk is piled so thickly with books and papers that barely any wood is visible. The top volumes have grown a sparse fur of dust. She picks up a few tomes and looks around for somewhere to put them, but the shelves closest to her are already chaotic and overloaded. After a moment she replaces the books in the clean square of dust-shadow. A few old envelopes have been propped half-hidden against the wall. She can’t tell exactly how long they’ve been there, but it’s too late to bother opening them. She recognises the franking mark on one; it’s from the Ministry for Culture, who’ve been pestering her about a grand jeu festival in the capital, in the Summer Vacation. For the common man, they said in their first letter, as if that was something she would approve of. She drops it straight into the bin, followed by the others. Recently the Council has been arguing about whether scholars should be allowed to receive post during term-time; she sometimes wishes that the Magisters weren’t. The outside world is a distraction, at best. At worst, it can destroy you. For a split second she remembers the sensation of a curl of flimsy paper between her fingers, a telegram, COME HOME PLEASE STOP AM AFRAID TO BE ALONE. Then she jams the lid on the thought and pushes it to the back of her mind. She resists a sudden urge to get up and check that Léo Martin’s diary is safely locked away. Of course it is.