Donna Tartt - The Secret History

Bun said briskly, rocking back on his heels, and the next instant half the staff was scrambling to clear a table.

And maybe it was these old associations which were clicking around in my mind or maybe it was that the only funerals I had ever seen were televised events, affairs of state: in any case, the funeral procession-long, black, rain-splashed cars, Mr Vanderfeller's Benrley among them – was linked for me in dreamlike fashion to another funeral and another, far more famous motorcade.

Slowly we rolled along. Open cars of flowers – like convertibles in some nightmare Rose Parade – crept behind the curtained hearse. Gladiola, dyed chrysanthemum, sprays of palm. The wind was blowing hard, and garish petals shook loose and tumbled back among the cars, sticking to the damp windshields like bits of confetti.

The cemetery was on a highway. We pulled over and got out of the Mustang (flat clack of car doors) and stood blinking on the littered shoulder. Cars whooshed past on the asphalt, not ten feet away.

It was a big cemetery, windy and flat and anonymous. The stones were laid out in rows like tract homes. The uniformed driver of the funeral-home Lincoln walked around to open the door for Mrs Corcoran. She was carrying – I didn't know why a small bouquet of rosebuds. Patrick offered her an arm and she slipped a gloved hand in the crook of his elbow, inscrutable behind her dark glasses, calm as a bride.

The back doors of the hearse were opened and the coffin slid out. Silently, the party drifted after it as it was borne aloft into the open field, bobbing across the sea of grass like a little boat.

Yellow ribbons fluttered gaily from the lid. The sky was hostile and enormous. We passed one grave, a child's, from which grinned a faded plastic jack-o'-lantern.

A green striped canopy, of the sort used for lawn parties, was set up over the grave. There was something vacuous and stupid about it, flapping out there in the middle of nowhere, something empty, banal, brutish. We stopped, stood, in awkward little groups. Somehow I had thought there would be more than this.

Bits of litter chewed up by the mowers lay scattered on the grass.

There were cigarette butts, a Twix wrapper, recognizable.

This is stupid, I thought, with a sudden rush of panic. How did this happen:'

Traffic washed past up on the expressway.

The grave was almost unspeakably horrible. I had never seen one before. It was a barbarous thing, a blind clayey hole with folding chairs for the family teetering on one side and raw dirt heaped on the other. My God, I thought. I was starting to see everything, all at once, with a blistering clarity. Why bother with the coffin, the awning or any of it if they were just going to dump him, shovel the dirt in, go home? Was this all there was to it? To get rid of him like a piece of garbage?

Bun, I thought, oh, Bun, I'm sorry.

The minister ran through the service fast, his bland face tinted green beneath the canopy. Julian was there – 1 saw him now, looking towards the four of us. First Francis, and then Charles and Camilla, moved to go stand with him but I didn't care, I was in a daze. The Corcorans sat very quietly, hands in laps: how can they just sit there? I thought, by that awful pit, do nothing? It was Wednesday. On Wednesdays at ten we had Greek Prose Composition and that was where we all ought to have been now.

The coffin lay dumbly by the grave. I knew they wouldn't open it, but I wished they would. It was just starting to dawn on me that I would never see him again.

The pallbearers stood in a dark row behind the coffin, like a chorus of elders in a tragedy. Henry was the youngest one. He stood there quietly, his hands folded before him – big, white, scholarly hands, capable and well-kept, the same hands that had dug in Bunny's neck for a pulse and rolled his head back and forth on its poor broken stem while the rest of us leaned over the edge, breathless, watching. Even from that distance we could see the terrible angle of his neck, the shoe turned the wrong way, the trickle of blood from nose and mouth. He pulled back the eyelids with his thumb, leaning close, careful not to touch the eyeglasses which were skewed on top of Bunny's head. One leg jerked in a solitary spasm which quieted gradually to a twitch and then stopped. Camilla's wristwatch had a second hand. We saw them silently conferring. Climbing up the hill after her, bracing his knee with his palm, he'd wiped his hands on his trousers and answered our clamorous whispers – dead? is he-? with the brief impersonal nod of a doctor…

– O Lord we beseech you, that while we lament the departure of our brother Edmund Grayden Corcoran your servant out of this life, we bear in mind that we are most certainly ready to follow him. Give us grace to make ready for that last hour, and protect us against a sudden and unprovided death…

He hadn't seen it coming at all. He hadn't even understood, there wasn't time. Teetering back as if on the edge of the swimming pool: comic yodel, windmilling arms. Then the surprised nightmare of falling. Someone who didn't know there was such a thing in the world as Death; who couldn't believe it even when he saw it; had never dreamed it would come to him.

Flapping crows. Shiny beetles crawling in the undergrowth. A patch of sky, frozen in a cloudy retina, reflected in a puddle on the ground. Yoo-hoo. Being and nothingness.

…,' am the Resurrection and the life; he who believeth in Me, even if he die, shall live; and whosoever liveth and believeth in Me shall never die…

The pallbearers lowered the coffin into the grave with long, creaking straps. Henry's muscles quivered with the effort; his jaw was clenched tight. Sweat had soaked through to the back of his jacket.

I felt in the pocket of my jacket to make sure the painkillers were still there. It was going to be a long ride home.

The straps were pulled up. The minister blessed the grave and then sprinkled it with holy water. Dirt and dark. Mr Corcoran, his face buried in his hands, sobbed monotonously. The awning rattled in the wind.

The first spadeful of earth. The thud of it on the hollow lid gave me a sick, black, empty feeling. Mrs Corcoran – Patrick on one side, sober Ted on the other stepped forward. With a gloved hand she tossed the little bouquet of roses into the grave.

Slowly, slowly, with a drugged, fathomless calm, Henry bent and picked up a handful of dirt. He held it over the grave and let it trickle from his fingers. Then, with terrible composure, he stepped back and absently dragged the hand across his chest, smearing mud upon his lapel, his tie, the starched immaculate white of his shirt.

I stared at him. So did Julian, and Francis, and the twins, with a kind of shocked horror. He seemed not to realize he had done anything out of the ordinary. He stood there perfectly still, the wind ruffling his hair and the dull light glinting from the rims of his glasses.

My memories of the Corcorans' post-funeral get-together are very foggy, due possibly to the handful of mixed painkillers I swallowed on the way there. But even morphia could not fully dull the horror of this event. Julian was there, which was something of a blessing; he drifted through the party like a good angel, making graceful small talk, knowing exactly the right thing to say to everyone, and behaving with such heavenly charm and diplomacy towards the Corcorans (whom he in fact disliked and vice versa) that even Mrs Corcoran was mollified. Besides – the pinnacle of glory as far as the Corcorans were concerned – it turned out that he was an old acquaintance of Paul Vanderfeller's, and Francis, who happened to be nearby, said he hoped he never forgot the expression on Mr Corcoran's face when Vanderfeller recognized Julian and greeted him ('European-style,' as Mrs Corcoran was heard explaining to a neighbor) with an embrace and a kiss on the cheek.