Donna Tartt - The Secret History

Hampden, suddenly, was green as Heaven again. Most of the flowers had been killed by the snow except the late bloomers, honeysuckle and lilac and so forth, but the trees had come back bushier than ever, it seemed, deep and dark, foliage so dense that the way that ran through the woods to North Hampden was suddenly very narrow, green pushing in on both sides and shutting out the sunlight on the dank, buggy path.

On Monday I arrived at the Lyceum a little early and, in Julian's office, found the windows open and Henry arranging peonies in a white vase. He looked as if he'd lost ten or fifteen pounds, which was nothing to someone Henry's size but still I saw the thinness in his face and even in his wrists and hands; it wasn't that, though, but something else, indefinable, that somehow had changed since I had seen him last.

Julian and he were talking – in jocular, mocking, pedantic Latin – like a couple of priests tidying the vestry before a mass.

A dark smell of brewing tea hung strong in the air.

Henry glanced up. 'Salve, amice,' he said, and a subtle animation flickered in his rigid features, usually so locked up, and distant: 'Valesne? Quid est rei?'

'You look well,' I said to him, and he did.

He inclined his head slightly. His eyes, which had been murky and dilated while he was ill, were now the clearest of blues.

'Benigne diets,' he said. 'I feel much better.'

Julian was clearing away the last of the rolls and jam – he and Henry had had breakfast together, quite a large one from the looks of it – and he laughed and said something I didn't quite catch, some Horatian-sounding tag about meat being good for sorrow. I was glad to see that he seemed quite his bright, serene old self. He'd been almost inexplicably fond of Bunny, but strong emotion was distasteful to him, and a display of feeling normal by modern standards would to him have seemed exhibitionist and slightly shocking: I was fairly sure this death had affected him more than he let show. Then again, I suspect that Julian's cheery, Socratic indifference to matters of life and death kept him from feeling too sad about anything for very long.

Francis arrived, and then Camilla; no Charles, he was probably in bed with a hangover. We all sat down at the big round table.

'And now,' said Julian, when everything was quiet, 'I hope we are all ready to leave the phenomenal world and enter into the sublime?'

Those days, I took an enormous relish in my new-found freedom.

Now it appeared that we were safe, a huge darkness had lifted from my mind. The world was a fresh and wonderful place to me, green and bracing and entirely new, and I looked at it now with fresh new eyes.

I went on a lot of long walks by myself, through North Hampden, down to the Battenkill River. I liked especially going to the little country grocery in North Hampden (whose ancient proprietors, mother and son, were said to have been the inspiration for a famous and frequently anthologized horror story from the 19505) to buy a bottle of wine, and wandering down to the riverbank to drink it, then roaming around drunk all the rest of those glorious, golden, blazing afternoons – a waste of time, I was behind in school, there were papers to write and exams coming up but still I was young; the grass was green and the air was heavy with the sound of bees and I had just come back from the brink of Death itself, back to the sun and air. Now I was free; and my life, which I had thought was lost, stretched out indescribably precious and sweet before me.

On one of those afternoons I wandered by Henry's house and found him in his hack yard digging a flower bed. He had on his gardening clothes – old trousers, shirtsleeves rolled up past the elbow – and in the wheelbarrow were tomato plants and cucumber, flats of strawberry and sunflower and scarlet geranium.

Three or four rosebushes with their roots tied in burlap were propped against the fence.

I let myself in through the side gate. I was quite drunk. 'Hello,'

I said, 'hello, hello, hello.'

He stopped and leaned on his shovel. A pale flush of sunburn glowed on the bridge of his nose.

'What are you doing?' I said.

'Putting out some lettuces.'

There was a long silence, in which I noticed the ferns he'd dug up the afternoon we killed Bunny. Spleenwort, I remembered him calling them; Camilla had remarked on the witchiness of the name. He had planted them on the shady side of the house, near the cellar, where they grew dark and foamy in the cool.

I lurched back a bit, caught myself on the gatepost. 'Are you going to stay here this summer?' I said.

He looked at me closely, dusted his hands on his trousers. 'I think so,' he said. 'What about you?'

'I don't know,' I said. I hadn't mentioned it to anyone, but only the day before I had put in an application at the Student Services office for an apartment-sitting job, in Brooklyn, for a history professor who was studying in England over the summer.

It sounded ideal – a rent-free place to stay in, nice part of Brooklyn, and no duties except watering the plants and taking care of a pair of Boston terriers, who couldn't go to England because of the quarantine. My experience with Leo and the mandolins had made me wary, but the clerk had assured me that no, this was different, and she'd shown me a file of letters from happy students who had previously held the job. I had never been to Brooklyn and didn't know a thing about it but I liked the idea of living in a city – any city, especially a strange one liked the thought of traffic and crowds, of working in a bookstore, waiting tables in a coffee shop, who knew what kind of odd, solitary life I might slip into? Meals alone, walking the dogs in the evenings; and nobody knowing who I was.

Henry was still looking at me. He pushed his glasses up on his nose. 'You know,' he said, 'it's pretty early in the afternoon.'

I laughed. I knew what he was thinking: first Charles, now me.

'I'm okay,' I said.

'Are you?'

'Of course.'

He went back to his work, sticking the shovel into the ground, stepping down hard on one side of the blade with a khaki-gaitered foot. His suspenders made a black X across his back. 'Then you can give me a hand with these lettuces,' he said. 'There's another spade in the toolshed.'

Late that night – two a. m. – my house chairperson pounded on my door and yelled that I had a phone call. Dazed with sleep, I put on my bathrobe and stumbled downstairs.

It was Francis. 'What do you want?' I said.

'Richard, I'm having a heart attack,' I looked with one eye at my house chairperson – Veronica, Valerie, I forget her name – who was standing by the phone with her arms folded over her chest, head to one side in an attitude of concern. I turned my back. 'You're all right,' I said into the receiver. 'Go back to sleep.'

'Listen to me.' His voice was panicky. 'I'm having a heart attack. I think I'm going to die.'

'No you're not.'

'I have all the symptoms. Pain in the left arm. Tightness in chest. Difficulty breathing.'

'What do you want me to do?'

'I want you to come over here and drive me to the hospital.'

'Why don't you call the ambulance?' I was so sleepy my eyes kept closing.

'Because I'm scared of the ambulance,' said Francis, but I couldn't hear the rest because Veronica, whose ears had pricked up at the word ambulance, broke in excitedly.

'If you need a paramedic, the guys up at the security booth know CPR,' she said eagerly. They're on call from midnight to six. They also run a van service to the hospital. If you want me to I'll-'

'I don't need a paramedic,' I said. Francis was repeating my name frantically at the other end.

'Here I am,' I said.

'Richard?' His voice was weak and breathy. 'Who are you talking to? What's wrong?'