Donna Tartt - The Secret History

We sat for a moment, shaken, at a full stop.

'What was that?' said Francis.

'I don't know. A deer maybe.'

'That wasn't a deer.'

'Then a dog.'

'It looked like some kind of a cat to me.'

Actually, that was what it had looked like to me too. 'But it was too big,' I said.

'Maybe it was a cougar or something,' 'They don't have those around here.'

'They used to. They called them catamounts. Cat-o-the Mountain. Like Catamount Street in town.'

The night breeze was chilly. A dog barked somewhere. There wasn't much traffic on that road at night.

I put the car in gear.

Francis had asked me not to tell anyone about our excursion to the emergency room but at the twins' apartment on Sunday night I had a little too much to drink and I found myself telling the story to Charles in the kitchen after dinner.

Charles was sympathetic. He'd had some drinks himself but not as many as me. He was wearing an old seersucker suit which hung very loosely on him – he, too, had lost some weight – and a frayed old Sulka tie.

'Poor Francois,' he said. 'He's such a fruitcake. Is he going to see that shrink?'

'I don't know.'

He shook a cigarette from a pack of Lucky Strikes that Henry had left on the counter. 'If I were you,' he said, tapping the cigarette on the inside of his wrist and craning to make sure that no one was in the hall, 'if I were you, I would advise him not to mention this to Henry.'

I waited for him to continue. He lit the cigarette and blew out a cloud of smoke.

'I mean, I've been drinking a bit more than I should,' he said quietly. 'I'm the first to admit that. But my God, I was the one who had to deal with the cops, not him. I'm the one who has to deal with Marion, for Christ sake. She calls me almost every night.

Let him try talking to her for a while and see how he feels… If I wanted to drink a bottle of whiskey a day I don't see what he could say about it. I told him it was none of his business, and none of his business what you did, either.'

The?'

He looked at me with a blank, childish expression. Then he laughed.

'Oh, you hadn't heard?' he said. 'Now it's you, too. Drinking too much. Wandering around drunk in the middle of the day.

Rolling down the road to ruin.'

I was startled. He laughed again at the look on my face but then we heard footsteps and the tinkle of ice in an advancing cocktail – Francis. He poked his head into the doorway and began to gabble good-naturedly about something or other, and after a few minutes we picked up our drinks and followed him back to the living room.

That was a cozy night, a happy night; lamps lit, sparkle of glasses, rain falling heavy on the roof. Outside, the treetops tumbled and tossed, with a foamy whoosh like club soda bubbling up in the glass. The windows were open and a damp cool breeze swirled through the curtains, bewitchingly wild and sweet.

Henry was in excellent spirits. Relaxed, sitting in an armchair with his legs stretched out in front of him, he was alert, well rested, quick with a laugh or a clever reply. Camilla looked enchanting.

She wore a narrow sleeveless dress, salmon-colored, which exposed a pair of pretty collarbones and the sweet frail vertebrae at the base of her neck – lovely kneecaps, lovely ankles, lovely bare, strong-muscled legs. The dress exaggerated her spareness of body, her unconscious and slightly masculine grace of posture; I loved her, loved the luscious, stuttering way she would blink while telling a story, or the way (faint echo of Charles) that she held a cigarette, caught in the knuckles of her bitten-nailed fingers.

She and Charles seemed to have made up. They didn't talk much, but the old silent thread of twinship seemed in place again. They perched on the arms of each other's chairs, and fetched drinks back and forth (a peculiar twin-ritual, complex and charged with meaning). Though I did not fully understand these observances, they were generally a sign that all was well. She, if anything, seemed the more conciliatory party, which seemed to disprove the hypothesis that he was at fault.

The mirror over the fireplace was the center of attention, a cloudy old mirror in a rosewood frame; nothing remarkable, they'd got it at a yard sale, but it was the first thing one saw when one stepped inside and now even more conspicuous because it was cracked – a dramatic splatter that radiated from the center like a spider's web. How that had happened was such a funny story that Charles had to tell it twice, though it was his reenactment of it that was funny, really – spring housecleaning, sneezing and miserable with dust, sneezing himself right off his stepladder and landing on the mirror, which had just been washed and was on the floor.

'What I don't understand,' said Henry, 'is how you got it back up again without the glass falling out.'

'It was a miracle. I wouldn't touch it now. Don't you think it looks kind of wonderful?'

Which it did, there was no denying it, the spotty dark glass shattered like a kaleidoscope and refracting the room into a hundred pieces.

Not until it was time to leave did I discover, quite by accident, how the mirror had actually been broken. I was standing on the hearth, my hand resting on the mantel, when I happened to look into the fireplace. The fireplace did not work. It had a screen and a pair of andirons, but the logs that lay across them were furry with dust. But now, glancing down, I saw something else: silver sparkles, bright-needled splinters from the broken mirror, mixed with large, unmistakable shards of a gold-rimmed highball glass, the twin of the one in my own hand. They were heavy old glasses, an inch thick at the bottom. Someone had thrown this one hard, with a pretty good arm, from across the room, hard enough to break it to pieces and to shatter the looking-glass behind my head.

Two nights later, I was woken again by a knock at my door.

Confused, in a foul temper, I switched on the lamp and reached blinking for my watch. It was three o'clock. 'Who's there?' I said.

'Henry,' came the surprising reply.

I let him in, somewhat reluctantly. He didn't sit down. 'Listen,' he said. 'I'm sorry to disturb you, but this is very important. I have a favor to ask of you.'

His tone was quick and businesslike. It alarmed me. I sat down on the edge of my bed.

'Are you listening to me?'

'What is it?' I said.

'About fifteen minutes ago I got a call from the police. Charles is in jail. He has been arrested for drunk driving. I want you to go down and get him out.'

A prickle rose on the nape of my neck. 'What?' I said.

'He was driving my car. They got my name from the registration sticker. I have no idea what kind of condition he's in.' He reached into his pocket and handed me an unsealed envelope. 'I expect it's going to cost something to get him out, I don't know what.'

I opened the envelope. Inside was a check, blank except for Henry's signature, and a twenty-dollar bill.

'I already told the police that I lent him the car,' said Henry.

'If there's any question about that, have them call me.' He was standing by the window, looking out. 'In the morning I'll get in touch with a lawyer. All I want you to do is get him out of there as soon as you can.'

It took a moment or two for this to sink in.

'What about the money?' I said at last.

'Pay them whatever it costs,' 'I mean this twenty dollars.'

'You'll have to take a taxi. I took one over here. It's waiting downstairs.'

There was a long silence. I still wasn't awake. I was sitting there in just an undershirt and a pair of boxer shorts.

While I dressed, he stood at the window looking out at the dark meadow, hands clasped behind his back, oblivious to the jangle of clothes-hangers and my clumsy, sleep-dazed fumbling through the bureau drawers – serene, preoccupied; lost, apparently, in his own abstract concerns.