Donna Tartt - The Secret History

Which I did not. Because – no matter what kindhearted strangers thought -1 was in need of neither company nor comfort.

All I wanted was to be alone. After the par. ty I didn't go to my room but to Dr Roland's office, where I knew no one would think to look for me. At night and on weekends it was wonderfully quiet, and once we got back from Connecticut I spent a great deal of time there – reading, napping on his couch, doing his work and my own.

At that time of night, even the janitors had left. The building was dark. I locked the office door behind me. The lamp on Dr Roland's desk cast a warm, buttery circle of light and, after turning the radio on low to the classical station in Boston, I settled on the couch with my French grammar. Later, when I got sleepy, there would be a mystery novel, a cup of tea if I felt like it. Dr Roland's bookshelves glowed warm and mysterious in the lamplight. Though I wasn't doing anything wrong, it seemed to me that I was sneaking around somehow, leading a secret life which, pleasant though it was, was bound to catch up with me sooner or later.

Between the twins, discord still reigned. At lunch they would sometimes arrive as much as an hour apart. I sensed that the fault lay with Charles, who was surly and uncommunicative and – as lately was par for the course – drinking a little more than was good for him. Francis claimed to know nothing about it, but I had an idea he knew more than he was saying.

I had not spoken to Henry since the funeral nor even seen him. He didn't show up at meals and wasn't answering the telephone. At lunch on Saturday, I said: 'Do you suppose Henry's all right?'

'Oh, he's fine,' said Camilla, busy with knife and fork.

'How do you know?'

She paused, the fork in mid-air; her glance was like a light turned suddenly into my face. 'Because I just saw him.'

'Where?'

'At his apartment. This morning,' she said, going back to her lunch.

'So how is he?'

'Okay. A little shaky still, but all right.'

Beside her, chin in hand, Charles glowered down at his untouched plate.

Neither of the twins was at dinner that night. Francis was talkative and in a good mood. Just back from Manchester and loaded with shopping bags, he showed me his purchases one by one: jackets, socks, suspenders, shirts in half a dozen different stripes, a fabulous array of neckties, one of which – a greeny-bronze silk with tangerine polka dots – was a present for me. (Francis was always generous with his clothes. He gave Charles and me his old suits by the armload; he was taller than Charles, and thinner than both of us, and we would have them altered by a tailor in town. I still wear a lot of those suits: Sulka, Aquascutum, Gieves and Hawkes.)

He had been to the bookstore, too. He had a biography of Cortes; a translation of Gregory of Tours; a study of Victorian murderesses, put out by the Harvard University Press. He had also bought a gift for Henry: a corpus of Mycenaean inscriptions from Knossos.

I looked through it. It was an enormous book. There was no text, only photograph after photograph of broken tablets with the inscriptions – in Linear B – reproduced in facsimile in the bottom. Some of the fragments had only a single character.

'He'll like this,' I said.

'Yes, I think he will,' said Francis. 'It was the most boring book I could find. I thought I might drop it off after dinner.'

'Maybe I'll come along,' I said.

Francis lit a cigarette. 'You can if you like. I'm not going in.

I'm just going to leave it on the porch.'

'Oh, well, then,' I said, oddly relieved.

I spent all day Sunday in Dr Roland's office, from ten in the morning on. Around eleven that night I realized I'd had nothing to eat all day, nothing but coffee and some crackers from the Student Services office, so I got my things, locked up, and walked down to see if the Rathskeller was still open.

It was. The Rat was an extension of the snack bar, with lousy food mostly but there were a couple of pinball machines, and a jukebox, and though you couldn't buy any kind of a real drink there they would give you a plastic cup of watered-down beer for only sixty cents.

That night it was loud and very crowded. The Rat made me nervous. To people like Jud and Frank, who were there every time the doors opened, it was the nexus of the universe. They were there now, at the center of an enthusiastic table of toadies and hangers-on, playing, with froth-mouthed relish, some game which apparently involved their trying to stab each other in the hand with a piece of broken glass.

I pushed my way to the front and ordered a slice of pizza and a beer. While I was waiting for the pizza to come out of the oven, I saw Charles, alone, at the end of the bar.

I said hello and he turned halfway. He was drunk; I could see it in the way he was sitting, not in an inebriated manner per se but as if a different person – a sluggish, sullen one – had occupied his body. 'Oh,' he said. 'Good. It's you.'

I wondered what he was doing in this obnoxious place, by himself, drinking bad beer when at home he had a cabinet full of the best liquor he could possibly want.

He was saying something I couldn't make out over the music and shouting. 'What?' I said, leaning closer.

'I said, could I borrow some money.'

'How much?'

He did some counting on his fingers. 'Five dollars.'

I gave it to him. He was not so drunk that he was able to accept it without repeated apologies and promises to repay it.

'I meant to go to the bank on Friday,' he said.

'It's okay.'

'No, really.' Carefully, he took a crumpled check from his pocket.

'My Nana sent me this. I can cash it on Monday no problem.'

'Don't worry,' I said. 'What are you doing here?'

'Felt like going out.'

'Where's Camilla?'

'Don't know.'

He was not so drunk, now, that he couldn't make it home on his own; but the Rat didn't close for another two hours, and I didn't much like the idea of his staying on by himself. Since Bunny's funeral several strangers – including the secretary in the Social Sciences office – had approached me and tried to pick me for information. I had frozen them out, a trick I'd learned from Henry (no expression, pitiless gaze, forcing intruder to retreat in embarrassment); it was a nearly infallible tactic but dealing with these people when you were sober was one thing, and quite another if you were drunk. I wasn't drunk, but I didn't feel like hanging around the Rat until Charles got ready to leave, either.

Any effort to draw him away would, I knew, serve only to entrench him further; when he was drunk he had a perverse way of always wanting to do exactly the opposite of what anyone suggested.

'Does Camilla know you're here?' I asked him.

He leaned over, palm on the bar to brace himself. 'What?'

I asked him again, louder this time. His face darkened. 'None of her business,' he said, and turned back to his beer.

My food came. I paid for it and told Charles, 'Excuse me, I'll be right back.'

The men's room was in a dank, smelly hallway that ran perpendicular to the bar. I turned down it, out of Charles's view, to the pay phone on the wall. Some girl was on it, though, talking in German. I waited for ages, and was just about to leave when finally she hung up, and I dug in my pocket for a quarter and dialed the twins' number.

The twins weren't like Henry; if they were home, they would generally answer the phone. But no one did answer. I dialed again and glanced at my watch. Eleven-twenty. I couldn't think where Camilla would be, that time of night, unless she was on her way over to get him.

I hung up the phone. The quarter tinkled into the slot. I pocketed it and headed back to Charles at the bar. For a moment I thought he had just moved somewhere into the crowd, but after standing there a moment or two I realized I wasn't seeing him because he wasn't there. He had drunk the rest of his beer and left.