The Betrayals(86)

‘I haven’t laid a finger on Carfax,’ I said, ‘and I don’t intend to.’

He raised his eyebrows. I held his look.

‘You’re so na?ve,’ he said, finally. ‘You really think it makes a difference?’

I feel sick. Who does he think he is?

But they’re wrong. They’re wrong. It isn’t like that. Carfax and I aren’t … We haven’t broken a single rule. There is nothing, nothing we’ve done which brings the school into disrepute. Emile is being bloody-minded. All he wants is to stir up trouble. There’s no danger.

Second day, tenth week

Sometimes I could strangle him. Honestly. Carfax, I mean.

I spent all the time between lessons and dinner trying to sort out my game. Writing the first draft of a grand jeu is like mining, chipping away for days and days, sometimes hitting a rich vein and sometimes a flat wall of adamant. Editing is more like staring at a bit of machinery and wondering why it won’t work. Finally I collapsed forward onto the desk with a sort of groan.

Carfax said, ‘Want me to have a look?’

‘No.’

‘I don’t mind. I’m not working on anything important.’

I raised my head. ‘Are you saying the Tempest’s not important? Could’ve fooled me, you were begging me to look at it the other day—’

‘That’s not what I’m working on.’

‘Don’t tell me you’re doing the essay for Magister Holt. It’s not due in until …’ But he shook his head. I grabbed his notebook and wrenched it away from him. ‘What, then?’

It was hard to read. Or hard to take in, anyway. I had to blink at it.

It was a game. A grand jeu. But … not. It was utterly sparse, utterly austere. Hardly anything on the page, only the one principal mark. Like a single slash across a canvas. Red.

He swallowed. ‘I’m just playing with it, really,’ he said, after a pause. ‘I want to know how much space I can leave. Can one move be a game? Can you compose a grand jeu without maths or music or words?’

I said, keeping my voice very flat, ‘Well, clearly you know the answer to that.’

He frowned, trying to work out whether I meant yes or no. But I didn’t help him out.

‘Writing one game to submit for the Gold Medal isn’t enough for you,’ I said, in that same expressionless voice. ‘You have to write an extra one. To show me how easy it all is. Right?’

‘I won’t submit this.’

‘Why are you writing it, then?’

He shook his head. ‘For fun. Don’t be stupid. You know how it is, you get an idea and … anyway, what’s wrong with that? I’ve finished the Tempest, more or less. That’s the one I’m going to submit.’

‘You’ve finished it? For God’s sake, Carfax.’ I stood up. All that time he’d been watching me sweat over my Reflections. He must have been giggling merrily away to himself.

‘What’s the matter? It’s no skin off your nose, is it?’

I pushed his notebook at him. I didn’t mean to hit him but he jerked away and put his hand over his eye. I should have apologised, but I didn’t. ‘You make me sick,’ I said, and left him to it.

Sixth day, tenth week

He didn’t mention it again, and neither did I, and we’ve been mostly polite to each other since Tuesday. But over the last few days I couldn’t stop thinking about it. So yesterday night I asked him if I could borrow his notebook. He said yes, but I could see from the way he hesitated first that he didn’t quite trust me. So I said, ‘I won’t take it out of your sight. Just let me have a look, OK?’

Later he brought it to my room. He lay on my bed and read a textbook while I studied the game. I don’t know, ‘studied’ isn’t the right word, really. I contemplated it. It’s like one of those religious icons: utterly simple in some ways, but you can stare and stare.

It’s so good. It’s gone beyond our competent, clever games. It’s something else. It’s as if everyone is writing symphonies and suddenly he’s played a single note – one note that holds other notes inside it, like one strike of a standing bell. Echoes and resonances but astoundingly simple, a challenge to the whole question of what makes a grand jeu – and yet it’s skilful, it isn’t empty because he can’t cope with complexity, it’s technically dazzling, it’s whole … One well-chosen move that alludes to the whole of perception and culture and humanity … I don’t know whether I admire him or resent him. Well, both. But I don’t know which one is winning.

Red. I suppose, in a way, he’s engaging with semiology on the most fundamental level. No one can ever know that ‘red’ is universal, that what I mean by it is the same as what you see. We take it on trust – that’s what language does – but we can never know … Which is obvious when you’re talking about a colour, but in the context of the grand jeu it becomes a metaphor for communication, understanding, pain, love, worship – our attempt to express something, anything, and hope that it’s common to all of us. His game is about redness, but there’s nothing red on the page. It’s all there in black and white. That contradiction: language means absence. The grand jeu is about God, but it means God isn’t there, because otherwise there’d be no need for it … Red. One single move. It’s crazy, but it’s perfect. It makes me angry that it’s so weirdly powerful. It ought to be facile, easily dismissable, some undergraduatish joke. (Essay question: What is courage? Answer: This is.) But somehow he’s got power into it. So much space, one move sitting in the middle of silence, and it sticks in your head. Like the Magister Musicae talking about the margins of music, about how sometimes the most interesting things happen in the rests or the gaps between notes.