Donna Tartt - The Secret History

'In Flanders Fields,' a lot of strange old sentimental stuff whose authors and titles I never even knew.

The rest of us, who were snobs about such things, had thought this a shameful taste, akin to his taste for King Dons and Hostess Twinkies. Quite often I had heard Bunny say this Housman aloud – seriously when drunk, more mockingly when sober – so that the lines for me were set and hardened in the cadence of his voice; perhaps that is why hearing it then, in Henry's academic monotone (he was a terrible reader) there with the guttering candles and the draft shivering in the flowers and people crying all around, enkindled in me such a brief and yet so excruciating pain, like one of those weirdly scientific Japanese tortures calibrated to extract the greatest possible misery in the smallest space of time.

It was a very short poem.

With rue my heart is laden

For golden friends I had,

For many a rose-lipt maiden

And many a lightfoot lad.

By brooks too broad for leaping

The lightfoot boys are laid;

The rose-lipt girls are sleeping

In fields where roses fade.

During the closing prayer (overly long) I felt myself swaying, so much so that the sides of my new shoes dug in the tender spot beneath my anklebones. The air was close; people were crying; there was an insistent buzz which came in close to my ear and then receded. For a moment I was afraid I would black out. Then I realized the buzz actually came from a large wasp flying in erratic darts and circles over our heads. Francis, by flailing at it uselessly with the memorial service bulletin, had succeeded in enraging it; it dove towards the weeping Sophie's head but, finding her unresponsive, turned in midair and lit on the back of the pew to collect its wits. Stealthily Camilla leaned to one side and began to slip off" her shoe, but before she could, Charles had killed it with a resounding thwack from The Book of Common Prayer.

The pastor, at a key point in his prayer, started. He opened his eyes and his glance fell on Charles, still wielding the guilty prayerbook. 'That they may not languish in unavailing grief,'he said in a slightly amplified voice, 'nor sorrow as those who have no hope, but through their tears look always up to Thee Quickly I bowed my head. The wasp still clung with one black feeler to the edge of the pew. I stared down at it and thought of Bunny, poor old Bunny, expert killer of flying pests, stalking houseflies with a rolled-up copy of the Hampden Examiner.

Charles and Francis, who weren't speaking before the service, had managed somehow to make up during the course of it. After the final amen, in silent, perfect sympathy, they ducked into an empty corridor off the side aisle. I caught a glimpse of them speeding wordlessly down it before they turned into the men's room, Francis stopping for one last nervous glance behind and already reaching in his coat pocket for what I knew was there the flat pint bottle of something or other I'd seen him take from the glove compartment.

It was a muddy, black day in the churchyard. The rain had stopped but the sky was dark and the wind was blowing hard.

Someone was ringing the church bell and not doing a very good job of it; it clanged unevenly to and fro like a bell at a seance.

People straggled to their cars, dresses billowing, holding hats to head. A few paces in front of me Camilla struggled on tiptoe to pull down her umbrella, which dragged her along in little skipping steps – Mary Poppins in her black funeral dress. I stepped up to help her, but before I got there the umbrella blew inside out. For a moment it had a horrible life of its own, squawking and flapping its spines like a pterodactyl; with a sudden sharp cry she let it go and immediately it sailed ten feet in the air, somersaulting once or twice before it caught in the high branches of an ash tree.

'Damn,' she said, looking up at it and then down at her finger, from which a thin seam of blood sprang. 'Damn, damn, damn.'

'Are you okay?'

She stuck the injured finger in her mouth. 'It's not that,' she said peevishly, glancing up at the branches. 'This is my favorite umbrella.'

I fished around in my pocket, gave her my handkerchief. She shook it out and held it to her finger (flutter of white, blown hair, darkening sky) and as I watched time stopped and I was transfixed by a bright knife of memory: the sky was the same thundery gray as it had been then, new leaves, her hair had blown across her mouth just so…

(flutter of white)

(… at the ravine. She'd climbed down with Henry and was back at the top before him, the rest of us waiting at the edge, cold wind, jitters, springing to hoist her up; dead? is he…? She took a handkerchief,'Tom her pocket and wiped her muddy hands, not looking at any of us, really, her hair blowing back light against the sky and her face a blank for just about any emotion one might care to project…)

Behind us someone said, very loudly, 'Dad?'

I jumped, startled and guilty. It was Hugh. He was walking briskly, half-running, and in a moment had caught up with his father. 'Dad?' he said again, placing a hand on his father's slumping shoulder. There was no response. He shook him gently.

Up ahead, the pallbearers (Henry indistinct, somewhere among them) were sliding the casket into the open doors of the hearse.

'Dad,' said Hugh. He was tremendously agitated. 'Dad. You gotta listen to me for a sec.'

The doors slammed. Slowly, slowly, Mr Corcoran turned. He was carrying the baby they called Champ but today its presence seemed to offer him little comfort. The expression on his big slack face was haunted and lost. He stared at his son as if he had never seen him before.

'Dad,' said Hugh. 'Guess who I just saw. Guess who came. Mr Vanderfeller,' he said urgently, pressing his father's arm.

The syllables of this illustrious name – one which the Corcorans invoked with very nearly as much respect as that of God Almighty – had when uttered aloud a miraculous effect of healing on Mr Corcoran.'Vanderfeller's here?' he said, looking around. 'Where?'

This august personage, who loomed large in the collective unconscious of the Corcorans, was the head of a charitable foundation – endowed by his even more august grandpapa which happened to own a controlling interest in the stock of Mr Corcoran's bank. This entailed board meetings, and occasional social functions, and the Corcorans had an endless store of 'delightful' anecdotes about Paul Vanderfeller, of how European he was, what a celebrated 'wit,' and though the witticisms they found frequent occasion to repeat seemed poor things to me (the guards up at the security booth at Hampden were cleverer) they made the Corcorans rock with urbane and apparently quite sincere laughter. One of Bunny's favorite ways to start a sentence had been to let drop, quite casually: 'When Dad was lunching with Paul Vanderfeller the other day…"

And here he was, the great one himself, scorching us all with his rays of glory. I glanced in the direction Hugh indicated to his father and saw him – an ordinary-looking man with the good-natured expression of someone used to being constantly catered to; late forties; nicely dressed; nothing particularly 'European' about him except his ugly eyeglasses and the fact that he was considerably below the average height.

An expression of something very like tenderness spread itself across Mr Corcoran's face. Without a word he thrust the baby at Hugh and hurried off across the lawn.

Maybe it was because the Corcorans were Irish, maybe it was that Mr Corcoran was born in Boston, but the whole family seemed to feel, somehow, that it had a mysterious affinity with the Kennedys. It was a resemblance they tried to cultivate especially Mrs Corcoran, with her hairdo and faux-Jackie glasses – but it also had some slight physical basis: in Brady and Patrick's toothy, too-tanned gauntness there was a shadow of Bobby Kennedy while the other brothers, Bunny among them, were built on the Ted Kennedy model, much heavier, with little round features bunched in the middle of their faces. It would not have been difficult to mistake any of them for minor clan members, cousins perhaps. Francis had told me of walking into a fashionable, very crowded restaurant in Boston once, with Bunny. There was a long wait, and the waiter had asked for a name: 'Kennedy,'