Donna Tartt - The Secret History

Camilla said. 'It was good of him, but he shouldn't have done it.'

Francis shrugged and drank off the rest of his glass. It was clear the subject made him uncomfortable. 'I wanted to,' he said.

'You'll never see it again.'

'That's all right.'

I was consumed with curiosity. 'Where is Charles?'

'Oh, he's getting by,' said Camilla. It was clear the topic made her uncomfortable, too. 'He worked for my uncle for a little while. Then he had a job playing piano in a bar – which, as you can imagine, didn't work out so well. Our Nana was distraught.

Finally she had to have my uncle tell him that if he didn't shape up, he was going to have to move out of the house. So he did.

He got himself a room in town and went on working at the bar.

But they finally fired him and he had to come home again. That was when he started coming up here. It was good of you,' she said to Francis, 'to put up with him the way you did.'

He was staring down into his drink. 'Oh,' he said, 'it's all right.'

'You were very kind to him.'

'He was my friend.'

'Francis,' said Camilla, 'lent Charles the money to put himself into a treatment place. A hospital. But he only stayed about a week. He ran off with some thirty-year-old woman he met in the detox ward. Nobody heard from them for about two months.

Finally the woman's husband '

'She was married?'

'Yes. Had a baby, too. A little boy. Anyway, the woman's husband finally hired a private detective, and he tracked them down in San Antonio. They were living in this horrible place, a dump. Charles was washing dishes in a diner, and she – well, I don't know what she was doing. They were both in kind of bad shape. But neither of them wanted to come home. They were very happy, they said.'

She paused to take a sip of her drink.

'And?' I said.

'And they're still down there,' she said. 'In Texas. Though they're not in San Antonio anymore. They were in Corpus Christi for a while. The last we heard they'd moved to Galveston.'

'Doesn't he ever call?'

There was a long pause. Finally, she said: 'Charles and I don't really talk anymore.'

'Not at all?'

'Not really, no.' She took another drink of her whiskey. 'It's broken my Nana's heart,' she said.

In the rainy twilight, we walked back to Francis's through the Public Gardens. The lamps were lit.

Very suddenly, Francis said: 'You know, I keep expecting Henry to show up.'

I was a bit unnerved by this. Though I hadn't mentioned it, I'd been thinking the same thing. What was more, ever since arriving in Boston I'd kept catching glimpses of people I thought were him: dark figures dashing by in taxicabs, disappearing into office buildings.

'You know, I thought I saw him when I was lying in the bathtub,' said Francis. 'Faucet dripping, blood all over the goddamned place. I thought I saw him standing there in his bathrobe – you know, that one with all the pockets that he kept his cigarettes and stuff in – over by the window, with his back half-turned, and he said to me, in this really disgusted voice: "Well, Francis, I hope you're happy now."'

We kept walking. Nobody said anything.

'It's funny,' said Francis. 'I have a hard time believing he's really dead. I mean -1 know there's no way he could have faked dying – but, you know, if anybody could figure out how to come back, it's him. It's kind of like Sherlock Holmes. Going over the Reichenbach Falls. I keep expecting to find that it was all a trick, that he'll turn up any day now with some kind of elaborate explanation.'

We were crossing a bridge. Yellow streamers of lamplight shimmered bright in the inky water.

'Maybe it really was him that you saw,' I said.

'What do you mean?'

'I thought I saw him too,' I said, after a long, thoughtful pause.

'In my room. While I was in the hospital.'

'Well, you know what Julian would say,' said Francis. 'There are such things as ghosts. People everywhere have always known that. And we believe in them every bit as much as Homer did.

Only now, we call them by different names. Memory. The unconscious.'

'Do you mind if we change the subject?' Camilla said, quite suddenly. 'Please?'

Camilla had to leave on Friday morning. Her grandmother wasn't well, she said, she had to get back. I didn't have to be back in California until the following week.

As I stood with her on the platform – she impatient, tapping her foot, leaning forward to look down the tracks – it seemed more than I could bear to see her go. Francis was around the corner, buying her a book to read on the train.

'I don't want you to leave,' I said.

'I don't want to, either.'

Then don't.'

'I have to.'

We stood looking at each other. It was raining. She looked at me with her rain-colored eyes.

'Camilla, I love you,' I said. 'Let's get married.'

She didn't answer for the longest time. Finally she said: 'Richard, you know I can't do that.'

'Why not?'

'I can't. I can't just pick up and go to California. My grandmother is old. She can't get around by herself anymore. She needs someone to look after her.'

'So forget California. I'll move back East.'

'Richard, you can't. What about your dissertation? School?'

'I don't care about school.'

We looked at each other for a long time. Finally, she looked away.

'You should see the way I live now, Richard,' she said. 'My Nana's in bad shape. It's all I can do to take care of her, and that big house, too. I don't have a single friend my own age. I can't even remember the last time I read a book.'

'I could help you.'

'I don't want you to help me.' She raised her head and looked at me: her gaze hit me hard and sweet as a shot of morphine.

Till get down on my knees if you want me to,' I said. 'Really, I will.'

She closed her eyes, dark-lidded, dark shadows beneath them; she really was older, not the glancing-eyed girl I had fallen in love with but no less beautiful for that; beautiful now in a way that less excited my senses than tore at my very heart.

'I can't marry you,' she said.

'Why not?'

I thought she was going to say, Because I don't love you, which probably would have been more or less the truth, but instead, to my surprise, she said: 'Because I love Henry.'

'Henry's dead.'

'I can't help it. I still love him.'

'I loved him, too,' I said.

For just a moment, I thought I felt her waver. But then she looked away.

'I know you did,' she said. 'But it's not enough.'

The rain stayed with me all the way back to California. An abrupt departure, I knew, would be too much; if I was to leave the East at all, I could do so only gradually and so I rented a car, and drove and drove until finally the landscape changed, and I was in the Midwest, and the rain was all I had left of Camilla's goodbye kiss. Raindrops on the windshield, radio stations fading in and out. Cornfields bleak in all those gray, wide-open reaches. I had said goodbye to her once before, but it took everything I had to say goodbye to her then, again, for the last time, like poor Orpheus turning for a last backwards glance at the ghost of his only love and in the same heartbeat losing her forever: hinc iliac lacrimae, hence those tears.

I suppose nothing remains now but to tell you what happened, as far as I know, to the rest of the players in our story.

Cloke Rayburn, amazingly, ended up going to law school. He is now an associate in mergers and acquisitions at Milbank Tweed in New York, where, interestingly, Hugh Corcoran was just made partner. Word is Hugh got him the job. This might or might not be true, but I tend to think it is, as Cloke almost certainly did not distinguish himself wherever it was that he happened to matriculate. He lives not far from Francis and Priscilla, on Lexington and Eighty-first (Francis, by the way, is supposed to have an incredible apartment; Priscilla's dad, who's in real estate, gave it to them for a wedding present) and Francis, who still has trouble sleeping, says he runs into him every now and then in the wee hours of the morning at the Korean deli where they both buy their cigarettes.