He was alone. Cadaverous portraits of statesmen watched him impassively from the walls. The dark carpet muffled every sound; he might have gone deaf. He leant against the wall; then he slid down into a crouch, his blood singing in his ears, nausea wringing sweat from every pore. His chest hurt. The air made a faint rasping sound as it went in and out of his lungs. He shut his eyes.
Slowly the sickness eased. He pushed himself back to his feet and placed one hand on the wall, fighting for balance. If anyone saw him like this, if the Chancellor emerged or Emile came back … He stood up straight, wiped his face on his sleeve and smoothed his hair. Now only his damp collar could give him away, and it was a warm day; he would walk past the girl in the lobby downstairs and she wouldn’t look twice. He could pretend that nothing had happened – that, in fact, he had sent in his resignation, explained himself to the Chancellor, and been set free. He almost believed it himself.
But when he got to the half-landing, something made him look back. There on the wallpaper, almost black on the green pattern, was a dark smear: the mark his sweaty hand had left, as he tried not to throw up.
He shaves and puts on his jacket and tie, and orders more coffee. The maid offers him breakfast, but he can’t bring himself to accept. By the time he’s drunk the coffee the sun has cleared the houses and is shining into the street. Warmth creeps along the floor, reaching out for him. He can’t sit here all morning. He walks to the railway station and buys a paperback novel from the bookstall. There’s a line of porters waiting for the first train; the third- and second-years must have gone up last week, a few days apart, and today it’s the first-years’ turn to flood the town for a night. The train arrives as the bookseller gives Léo his change. He pauses, squeezing the coins in his hand, watching the young men pile excitedly on to the platform. There are a few families, too – bluestocking sisters, proud mamas, mulish younger brothers – who’ve come along to give their clever boys a good send-off, and get a few days of mountain air while they’re at it. They’re not allowed up to the school, of course, and they probably won’t even be awake to wave goodbye tomorrow when the new scholars slog up the path at dawn. ‘Oh – how lovely,’ a woman calls to her son, staring across the valley towards Montverre-les-Bains. She points at the Roman bath-house in the distance. ‘That must be it …’
Léo shoves his change into his pocket. He bends his head as he joins the stream of people surging through the ticket office, afraid that someone will recognise him; but they’re all too intent on themselves. They have to summon taxis, get trunks loaded, find the grandly named hotels before the sun gets too fierce. No one looks twice at Léo. He ducks into a grimy little café and watches until the square in front of the station is empty again, waiting in the quiet sunshine for the next train. There’s a newspaper on the bar, and he catches sight of the headline: Minister for Culture’s Shock Resignation. But he doesn’t reach for it. Dettler showed him a draft a couple of days ago. ‘If there are any suggestions you would like to make, Minister?’ he said, offering Léo a blue pencil with a funeral director’s delicacy. ‘It’ll be in Monday’s paper; that way you’ll be safely— that is, you won’t be too troubled by the attention.’ But Léo waved the pencil away. He didn’t care any more what they said about him; and he still doesn’t. He drags his eyes away from the paper, sits down at a table in the window and opens the cheap novel he’s bought. It’s a translation from the English, a detective story: the sort of thing Chryseïs devours in one go, curled on the chaise longue with a box of chocolate creams. He doesn’t know what made him buy it, except that he can’t think of any other way to pass the time. But after he’s read the first page three times he puts it aside. When the National Heritage Bill goes through, fiction will be taxed to the hilt and foreign fiction will be virtually unaffordable, even for people like him. What was it the Old Man said? We must find ways to cherish and protect our national game, which – as you know, Léo – is so much more than a game … At the time Léo thought he was right; or, at least, not wrong enough to warrant disagreement. He never disagreed with the Old Man, that was how he rose so high, so quickly. Not until the Culture and Integrity Bill.
He gets up. The waiter, who has been slouching in the shadows doing a crossword, jumps to his feet and says, ‘What can I get you, sir?’ but Léo is already slipping out of the door. The station clock chimes ten. Only ten! Maybe he’ll get the car sent early. He walks up the hill towards the Palais Hotel, but when he gets there the foyer is full of people. A portly woman in a plumed hat is gesturing fiercely at the proprietor. ‘His father stayed in the Arnauld Suite thirty years ago,’ she says. ‘I requested it especially – yes, but why hasn’t the maid been able to …?’ Léo turns aside without bothering to listen to the rest. He walks up the street until he reaches the end, a little run-down church and a few ramshackle houses. A path leads up into the forest, climbing steeply, but there’s no signpost. It might be a shortcut to the school, or it might be merely a goatherd’s track up to the high pastures or Montverre-les-Bains. It’s not the road he slogged up on foot as a scholar, at the beginning of every term – the road he’ll be driven up this afternoon, while the gradient pushes him back in his seat and the chauffeur winces at every pothole. He can pause here, leaning on a tumbledown wall, without being reminded of anything.
He shuts his eyes. The sun is bright through his eyelids. He wonders whether the Palais does a decent lunch, or whether it’ll be the same indigestible mixture of cheese and stodge that they gave him for dinner. ‘The best hotel in Montverre, sir,’ Dettler’s new secretary had said, as she held out his tickets and itinerary the day before yesterday, without meeting his eyes. ‘I do hope it will be suitable.’ Part of him wants to write a terse note to her, suggesting that if she wants to ingratiate herself with Party officials, he doesn’t recommend exposing them to bedbugs and heartburn; but it’s not worth it, now he’s not a Party official. Anyway, he’s spoilt. The first time he stayed in Montverre he didn’t even have a hotel room, just a bed in a smelly lean-to that was clearly a scullery for the rest of the year, in a house where the family looked at him without warmth and asked him for extra money for the soap he’d used. Yes, now he remembers – it had been one of his father’s clerks who had booked it for him, which meant his father must have given instructions not to spend more than necessary. But he hadn’t minded much, even though he had to walk for ten minutes in the pre-dawn chill before he got to the signpost, that first time; he can still remember looking up at it, Schola Ludi 5½, and the electric jolt of realising that at last he was really here. He’d got up hours earlier than he needed to, determined to be the first at the school gates, and the stars were still out. The sweep of the galaxy above him was richer and clearer than he’d ever seen. He stood and breathed, glad to be alone, his head full of ambition and the grand jeu. He’d left his trunk at the Town Hall the day before to be picked up by the porters, so all he had to carry was a knapsack. He knocked on the signpost for luck, took a deep breath, and set off as if he had a whole range of mountains to climb before dawn.