The Betrayals(58)

And he was. Wasn’t he? He’d been there, part of the Party, in those heady days when the Old Man marched the streets with the rest of them, and the grizzled old veterans looked at them with suspicion, and their soup kitchens were chaotic and full of roped-in sisters, idealistic young ladies who had never seen a rat-dropping or a black-beetle before. Back when there were brawls with the Communists that ended with everyone swabbing minor wounds in the lavatory of the same tavern, and the Party ‘uniform’ was a green armband, and the leaflets left cheap ink on your hands, mirror-imaged words like prosperity and hope. When rooting out the Christians was only a bee in the Old Man’s bonnet, easy to ignore, and you could see people’s faces light up when the parades passed. It made Léo feel alive. Perhaps he threw himself into the fighting a little too hard, or wooed the soup-kitchen-ladies a little too avidly, and broke their hearts with too little compunction. But he was useful. He wrote propaganda with a better turn of phrase than anyone else; he knew how to charm the industrialists and donors, because they were like Dad; he could speak to a meeting, orating with nuances and gestures that wouldn’t have disgraced the Magister Motuum himself. It didn’t matter if he was lying, because he had faith in the greater good. And then the Party was elected, and the world was theirs. Whatever they’d achieved, he was part of it.

So the clean station, the shiny tiles, the way he could walk all the way to platform 12 without treading in anything that stank … The rubbish bins shaped like architectural features, their gold crests gleaming. And best of all, the people. Not that they were oil paintings, most of them – Chryse?s would have huddled deeper into her furs if they got too close, wrinkling her nose – but they looked a good deal more affluent than they would have done ten years ago. They had coats and hats and gloves. They moved with more purpose. Fewer of them hacked and spat dark globs on to the railway tracks; fewer of the children had rickets. And no cigar-sellers clawing at your sleeve, no gypsy kids threatening the evil eye if you didn’t buy their lucky charms, no beggars. It was good, wasn’t it? Not to have to brush people off, or jump when a bluish human hand emerged from a grimy pile of rags. It was something to be proud of.

Except that the rumours … There was a faint chiming sound. Léo looked down. He was tapping his thumbnail unconsciously against the thick glass. Where did they go, all the beggars? In Dettler’s office this morning a leaflet had been sitting beside the secretary’s typewriter. No more cadgers! No more tramps! Now you can feel safe on the streets. It went on to quote glorious statistics about employment, the end of inflation, the Housing Projects. As if every vagrant had gone from blood-coughing despair to a new job and a new flat, to sunlight and fresh paint and full cupboards.

Nothing about policemen in vans. Nothing about where the vans might go, once they were loaded up with reeking old men and coughing consumptive whores. Maybe it was only in Léo’s imagination that they trundled off into the hinterland, with weak fists pounding the metal side-panels. Even the rumours didn’t go into detail. The streets were cleansed of riff-raff, the way the educated professions were cleansed of Christians. No one asked where the rubbish had gone …

And Chryse?s? Would she be in the same vans, if someone picked her up?

He got up and went to catch his train, even though he had twenty minutes before it left.

The next time he went back up to town, he didn’t go to his club, or to any of the Party haunts; neither did he go to the Ministry, or look up Pirène. He went to buy candied chestnuts.

Now they’re in his case, wrapped in sapphire-and-gold paper. As the train rattles over points he can imagine them bumping against his shoes, along with … Oh God. He’s glad he’s alone in the carriage, because he knows he’s grimacing involuntarily. He must have been mad, that afternoon, when he went up the spiral staircase at Maison Angelard, tilting his head up to see the winter daylight streaming through the Art Nouveau dome. He already had the box of marrons glacés under his arm; there was no need to buy anything else, and certainly no reason to go to the ladies’ department, among the cabinets of perfume, the miniature pagoda-roofs in ivory and pale green, the smells of jasmine and cold cream. He’d been here before with Chryse?s, trailing about after her in an agony of tedium, but this time it was different. He was a tourist, admiring this feminine world of silk and nail lacquer, filmy stockings and lace and little trifles. For a few minutes he could almost imagine being a woman: being entranced, frivolously absorbed in decisions of style and colour, poring over the relative merits of ashes-of-roses and eau-de-Nil. Years ago, Carfax had argued with him about whether girls should be admitted to Montverre. He’d been passionate almost to the point of incoherence, insisting that these days, now that women were doctors and lawyers, it was sheer prejudice that kept them out. Léo remembered putting the familiar counter-argument that if the grand jeu was an act of worship, it was tantamount to letting them be High Priests – and that it was foolish anyway, as everyone could see that there was no chance of the rules changing, not for another twenty or fifty years. They reached stalemate when Léo sighed and said, ‘All right, find me a woman who can play the grand jeu,’ and Carfax had rolled his eyes and said, ‘Because they’re not allowed to study it! If my sister were here she’d wipe the floor with you.’ Maybe that had been a sensible point, in a way; but seeing the women here, buying handkerchiefs and wax roses and gold compacts, Léo was reassured. He wouldn’t let any of them near Montverre, and what was more they wouldn’t want to be there anyway. The Magister Ludi was different – it made him smile, to think Carfax had been right – but she was an anomaly; she didn’t disprove the rule. Maybe being a de Courcy trumped being female.